Using a watershed approach to identify protection and restoration actions in the Blackjack Creek watershed, Kitsap County, Washington

The Blackjack Creek watershed, 12.3 square miles in eastern Kitsap County, is among the largest and most productive salmon watersheds in the south Kitsap subregion. The watershed supports genetically-distinct summer and late fall runs of chum salmon, and coho and Chinook, as well as steelhead and cutthroat trout. Historic and current land uses in many parts of the Blackjack Creek watershed have substantially altered processes that drive ecosystem functions. The Suquamish Tribe conducted a watershed assessment to identify critical ecosystem components and key ecological attributes (KEAs), their current status, and human-caused pressures on KEAs. The goal was to build a plan, including strategies and actions, to protect and restore watershed, riparian, floodplain and stream processes and habitat functions for salmonids. The assessment includes a review of existing research, local studies, spatial data (GIS), and field data on freshwater and estuarine habitats and salmonid populations. Hydrologic patterns are identified and analyzed using “down-scaled” spatial data from Ecology’s Puget Sound Watershed Characterization Project to understand water flow processes in the subbasins of the watershed. These data are consolidated in a comprehensive assessment of human induced pressures and ecosystem stressors. The 13 strategies and 45 recommended actions in the plan address these specific pressures and are intended to protect and restore watershed processes and habitats. Strategies and actions are evaluated using a prioritization framework based on the principles of process-based restoration and climate change considerations. The plan will be used by the Tribe and project partners including the City of Port Orchard, Kitsap County, Kitsap Conservation District, Great Peninsula Conservancy and others to implement future protection and restoration in the Blackjack Creek watershed

alpha-Synuclein promotes dilation of the exocytotic fusion pore

The protein α-synuclein has a central role in the pathogenesis of Parkinson's disease. Like that of other proteins that accumulate in neurodegenerative disease, however, the function of α-synuclein remains unknown. Localization to the nerve terminal suggests a role in neurotransmitter release, and overexpression inhibits regulated exocytosis, but previous work has failed to identify a clear physiological defect in mice lacking all three synuclein isoforms. Using adrenal chromaffin cells and neurons, we now find that both overexpressed and endogenous synuclein accelerate the kinetics of individual exocytotic events, promoting cargo discharge and reducing pore closure ('kiss-and-run'). Thus, synuclein exerts dose-dependent effects on dilation of the exocytotic fusion pore. Remarkably, mutations that cause Parkinson's disease abrogate this property of α-synuclein without impairing its ability to inhibit exocytosis when overexpressed, indicating a selective defect in normal function

Sui Lutris: A Blockchain Combining Broadcast and Consensus

Sui Lutris is the first smart-contract platform to sustainably achieve sub-second finality. It achieves this significant decrease in latency by employing consensusless agreement not only for simple payments but for a large variety of transactions. Unlike prior work, Sui Lutris neither compromises expressiveness nor throughput and can run perpetually without restarts. Sui Lutris achieves this by safely integrating consensuless agreement with a high-throughput consensus protocol that is invoked out of the critical finality path but makes sure that when a transaction is at risk of inconsistent concurrent accesses its settlement is delayed until the total ordering is resolved. Building such a hybrid architecture is especially delicate during reconfiguration events, where the system needs to preserve the safety of the consensusless path without compromising the long-term liveness of potentially misconfigured clients. We thus develop a novel reconfiguration protocol, the first to show the safe and efficient reconfiguration of a consensusless blockchain. Sui Lutris is currently running in production as part of a major smart-contract platform. Combined with the Move Programming language it enables the safe execution of smart contracts that expose objects as a first-class resource. In our experiments Sui Lutris achieves latency lower than 0.5 seconds for throughput up to 5,000 certificates per second (150k ops/s with bundling), compared to the state-of-the-art real-world consensus latencies of 3 seconds. Furthermore, it gracefully handles validators crash-recovery and does not suffer visible performance degradation during reconfiguration

Constraints on the Late Holocene Anthropogenic Contribution to the Atmospheric Methane Budget

The origin of the late pre-industrial Holocene (LPIH) increase in atmospheric methane concentrations has been much debated. Hypotheses invoking changes in solely anthropogenic sources or solely natural sources have been proposed to explain the increase in concentrations. Here two high-resolution, high-precision ice core methane concentration records from Greenland and Antarctica are presented and are used to construct a high-resolution record of the methane inter-polar difference (IPD). The IPD record constrains the latitudinal distribution of emissions and shows that LPIH emissions increased primarily in the tropics with secondary increases in the subtropical northern hemisphere. Anthropogenic and natural sources have different latitudinal characteristics, which are exploited to demonstrate that both anthropogenic and natural sources are needed to explain LPIH methane concentration changes.This is the author’s version of the work. It is posted here by permission of the AAAS for personal use, not for redistribution. The definitive version was published in Science on Volume 342 Issue 6161, November 22, 2013, DOI: 10.1126/science.1238920

Multidecadal variability of atmospheric methane, 1000–1800 C.E.

We present a new high-precision, high-resolution record of atmospheric methane from the West Antarctic Ice Sheet (WAIS) Divide ice core covering 1000–1800 C.E., a time period known as the late preindustrial Holocene (LPIH). The results are consistent with previous measurements from the Law Dome ice core, the only other high-resolution record of methane for this time period, and confirm most of the observed variability. Multidecadal variability in methane concentrations throughout the LPIH is weakly correlated or uncorrelated with reconstructions of temperature and precipitation from a variety of geographic regions. Correlations with temperature are dominated by changes in Northern Hemisphere high latitude temperatures between 1400 and 1600 C.E. during the onset of the Little Ice Age. Times of war and plague when large population losses could have reduced anthropogenic emissions are coincident with short periods of decreasing global methane concentrations.Keywords: biogeochemistry, ice core, methane, trace ga