NAGPRA’s Broader Impacts: Assessing the Variety of Procedures followed by Medical Examiner and Coroner Offices for the Analysis and Disposition of Human Skeletal Remains

The Native American Graves Protection and Repatriation Act, passed in 1990, was enacted in order to provide Native Americans with the legal means to reclaim the remains of their ancestors. Although it has been almost 30 years since the law was passed, it has not been successful in ensuring Native American remains are repatriated in the proper manner. This thesis examines the implementation of NAGPRA within medical examiner and coroner offices, a venue that has yet to be explored in this context.Through the distribution of a nationwide survey, data was collected on medicolegal practitioner’s familiarity with NAGPRA as well as the presence of disposition protocol for non-forensically significant Native American remains. The results indicate that there is a disconnect present between the medicolegal profession and the implementation of NAGPRA. This research will discuss what has led to this disconnect as well as what can be done to bridge it

Water-quality data for the Missouri River and Missouri River alluvium near Weldon Spring, St. Charles County, Missouri, 1991--92

This report contains the water-quality data collected at two cross sections across the Missouri River and from monitoring wells in the Missouri River alluvium near Defiance, Missouri. The sampling results indicate the general water composition from the Missouri River changes with different flow conditions. During low-base flow conditions, the water generally contained about equal quantities of calcium and sodium plus potassium and similar quantities of bicarbonate and sulfate. During high-base flow conditions, water from the river predominantly was a calcium bicarbonate type. During runoff conditions, the water from the river was a calcium bicarbonate type, and sulfate concentrations were larger than during high-base flow conditions but smaller than during low-base flow conditions. The total and dissolved uranium concentrations at both the upstream and downstream cross sections, as well as from the different vertical samples across the river, were similar during each sampling event. However, sodium, sulfate, nitrate, and total and dissolved uranium concentrations varied with different flow conditions. Sodium and sulfate concentrations were larger during low-base flow conditions than during high-base flow or runoff conditions, while nitrate concentrations decreased during low-base flow conditions. Both total and dissolved uranium concentrations were slightly larger during runoff events than during low-base or high-base flow conditions

Task 2: Analysis of the MS replies to the EEA request for inventorying existing LU information in the countries : D2 - Report containing an assessment of the LU inventory by MS, including an assessment on the impact of existing / missing LU parameters for the creation of CLC+ LULUCF and Legacy instances

Implementation of CLC+ based on the EAGLE concept –additional support for further development of CLC+ databases (CLC+ and CLC+ instances, namely CLC+ LULUCF instance and CLC+ Legacy instance) <br/

Earth Observation in Support of the City Biodiversity Index

Today, we are living in an urban world. For the first time in history, there are now more people living in cities than in rural areas. In Europe their share has reached almost three quarters. Urban areas supposedly will absorb almost all the population growth expected over the next decades. This will pose a range of challenges for cities and their surroundings, not only on resource availability and the quality of urban environments, but also on biodiversity in cities. Capturing the status and trends of biodiversity and ecosystem services in urban landscapes represents an important part of understanding whether a metropolitan area is developing along a sustainable trajectory or not. Actions to conserve biodiversity should start with stock-taking and identifying baselines, followed by regular monitoring of conservation initiatives. The City Biodiversity Index (CBI), also known as the Singapore Index on Cities‘ Biodiversity (or Singapore Index) because of Singapore‘s leadership in its development, has been adopted during COP-9 of the CBD in 2008. It is conceived as a self-assessment tool to evaluate the state of biodiversity in cities and to provide insights for improving conservation efforts. This includes an initial baseline measurement, the identification of policy priorities based on their measurements and then a monitoring at periodic intervals. Today, the CBI includes 23 indicators from three categories such as the proportion of natural areas in the city or the budget allocated to conservation projects. The CBI is designed to be applied by many cities in the world to monitor their progress in conservation efforts and their success in halting the rate of biodiversity loss. The project provides support to 4 of the 23 indicators. The results illustrated below are based on satellite earth observation data combined with local in-situ information. The output of the data analysis (i.e. percentage or an area value) can be directly used to determine the relevant CBI score

Archaeological investigations at the Cruz Bay public cemetery in St. John, US Virgin Islands

The Jeffrey L. Brown Institute of Archaeology (JBIA) of the University of Tennessee at Chattanooga (UTC) in partnership with the Forensic Anthropology Center (FAC) of the University of Tennessee Knox-ville (UTK) performed archaeological monitoring and data recovery to remove and relocate burial features near the Cruz Bay Public Cemetery within the Cruz Bay Historic District in Cruz Bay, St. John, US Virgin Islands. The current Area of Potential Effect (APE) for the cemetery excavations targets the portion of the historic Cruz Bay Public Cemetery impacted by the Cruz Bay Underground project, encompassing 132 m (433 ft) of conduit excavations within Strande Gade (Bay Street) and 30 m (98 ft) of conduit excavations within the Gallows Point Resort driveway.https://scholar.utc.edu/archaeology-reports/1089/thumbnail.jp

Strategic Green Infrastructure and Ecosystem Restoration

This report draws on a range of European-wide datasets, geospatial methods, and tools available for green infrastructure (GI) mapping. It shows how two complementary mapping approaches (physical and ecosystem based) and the three key GI principles of connectivity, multifunctionality and spatial planning are used in case studies selected in urban and rural landscapes; it provides guidance for the strategic design of a well-connected, multi-functional, and cross-border GI, and identifies knowledge gaps. GI mapping has been demonstrated to enhance nature protection and biodiversity beyond protected areas, to deliver ecosystem services such as climate change mitigation and recreation, to prioritise measures for defragmentation and restoration in the agri-environment and regional development context, and to find land allocation trade-offs and possible scenarios involving all sectors.JRC.D.6-Knowledge for Sustainable Development and Food Securit

Mapping forest condition in Europe: Methodological developments in support to forest biodiversity assessments

Forest condition, biodiversity, and ecosystem services are strongly interlinked. The biodiversity levels depend to a large extent on the integrity, health, and vitality of forests at the same time as losses of forest biodiversity lead to decreased forest productivity and sustainability. Under this conceptual framework, this study presents a methodology for mapping forest condition at European scale supporting the attainment of the 2020 Aichi Biodiversity Target 5 “the rate of loss of all natural habitats, including forests, is at least halved and where feasible brought close to zero, and degradation and fragmentation is significantly reduced” and the implementation of Sustainable Development Goals (SDG), as well as the EU forest strategy since the sustainable forest management is oriented to support the provision of forest services and to enhance the condition of biodiversity forests’ host. The work presents the developments of an operational indicator at European scale. This spatially explicit information on forest condition can be the baseline map with a 1 km resolution to monitor the state and changes of condition by exposition to pressures and threats. This condition indicator considers structural, functional, and compositional aspects of forest with relevance for health and vitality of species and habitats hosted by forest ecosystems. The methodology implemented used harmonized, published and open datasets. It provided confident results for the assessment of the condition within hemiboreal, temperate and alpine forests, showing the Carpathian, Dinaric Alps and Alps, among others, as hotspots with pre-dominantly good condition. The results were validated with data derived from the reporting for the EU Habitat Directive and explicit dataset on known primary forests in Europe. However, this method underestimated the forest condition in the Mediterranean and Boreal forest types due to data gaps, regional specific characteristics, and design limitations. (...)This work is part of the support provided by the European Topic Centre on Urban Land and Soil Systems (ETC/ULS) to European Environment Agency. The authors thank JI Barredo and M Erhard for the discussions and FM Sabatini and the Forest and CO project that facilitated the access to the datasets and provide support during the methodology development. Finally, we want to acknowledge the anonymous reviewers for their constructive comments, which contributed to improving the manuscript. Funding for open access charge: Universidad de Málaga / CBUA