Integrating Research and Education with Public Outreach at Coastal Laboratories

Coastal marine and Great Lakes laboratories increasingly are asked to provide both advisory and educational outreach to the general (and often specific) public. To facilitate this interchange, basic and applied research must be more integrated with advisory services, with care taken to present facts and concepts, not opinions or advocacy. Moreover, outreach efforts should be proactive, not reactive. With the rapid expansion of telecommunications, such as electronic mail and teleconferencing, outreach can optimize the links between education and research. Public outreach also gives graduate students an opportunity to utilize practical applications and interpretations of marine science, thus providing valuable experience that can help in obtaining future jobs. More problematic is how outreach activities can be evaluated in an annual or promotion review of a faculty member; particular care must be taken not confuse outreach with scholarship, or sacrifice intellectual rigor, in such evaluations

A Cost Comparison of Alternative Planting Methods: Twin-Row vs. Single 30 Row Corn and 7 1/2 or 15 Row Soybeans

New technology continues to be developed to help farmers use their resources more efficiently. This research focuses on a method of planting crops in a twin-row configuration versus conventional planting. Farmers need to analyze many factors when considering switching from planting corn in thirty-inch rows and soybeans in seven and one-half or fifteen-inch rows, to planting in twin-rows. The objectives of this research are: (1) Analyze the cost of alternative implements and how the differences in investment affect planting cost per acre. (2) Determine added cost per acre at planting higher corn populations in twin-rows compared to conventional thirty-inch rows. (3) Determine how much of a yield increase is needed to make higher corn populations with twin-row planting profitable. (4) Compare breakeven corn yield increase from objective three with results of recent field trials. A higher initial investment results in a higher cost per acre for each implement due to the fact that the cost is based on the list price. There is an added seed and fertilizer cost of twenty-two dollars for planting at higher plant populations in twin-rows. An increase of 5.45 bushels per acre is needed for twin-rows to be profitable on a corn-soybean operation and a 6.68 bushel per acre increase for twin-rows to be profitable for a continuous corn operation. It was also concluded that in recent trials the required breakeven bushel per acre increase is obtainable to make twin-rows profitable for farmers

Intercomparison of phenological transition dates derived from the PhenoCam Dataset V1.0 and MODIS satellite remote sensing

Phenology is a valuable diagnostic of ecosystem health, and has applications to environmental monitoring and management. Here, we conduct an intercomparison analysis using phenological transition dates derived from near-surface PhenoCam imagery and MODIS satellite remote sensing. We used approximately 600 site-years of data, from 128 camera sites covering a wide range of vegetation types and climate zones. During both “greenness rising” and “greenness falling” transition phases, we found generally good agreement between PhenoCam and MODIS transition dates for agricultural, deciduous forest, and grassland sites, provided that the vegetation in the camera field of view was representative of the broader landscape. The correlation between PhenoCam and MODIS transition dates was poor for evergreen forest sites. We discuss potential reasons (including sub-pixel spatial heterogeneity, flexibility of the transition date extraction method, vegetation index sensitivity in evergreen systems, and PhenoCam geolocation uncertainty) for varying agreement between time series of vegetation indices derived from PhenoCam and MODIS imagery. This analysis increases our confidence in the ability of satellite remote sensing to accurately characterize seasonal dynamics in a range of ecosystems, and provides a basis for interpreting those dynamics in the context of tangible phenological changes occurring on the ground

Geological and Geophysical Character of the East China and Yellow Seas

The East China and Yellow seas represent one of the broadest shallow seas in the global ocean, with water depths generally less than 80 m and stretching nearly 750 km from the Shandong Peninsula to the Okinawa Trough (Fig. 1). This area is also unique in terms of the vast amount of sediment it receives from the Huanghe (Yellow River; presently discharging in the adjacent Gulf of Bohai) and the Changjigang (Yangtze River, which flows into the East China Sea). Together, this region receives about ten percent of the river-derived sediment reaching the ocean, and as such, the region has unique geological and oceanographic conditions that reflect both the present highstand of sea level as well as previous lowstands. The purpose of this report is to present and discuss the nature of the seafloor as well as the shallow structure of the surficial (Neogene) strata in the YS-ECS. The maps accompanying this report are the products of the analysis and interpretation of many types of seismic reflection data as well as many previously published papers dealing with this area. Specifically, we have utilized 3.5 kHz echo-soundings, various types of shallow-towed boomer profiles, sparker, air-gun and water-gun data as well as multichannel deep seismic data obtained by the former Gulf Oil Company. Moreover, we have integrated seismic refraction data gathered in the 1960\u27s and 1970\u27s (Fig. 2) in an attempt to gain better knowledge about the acoustic and (thereby) geological character of the deeper Neogene strata

Water and Sediment Discharge from Small Mountainous Rivers, Taiwan: The Roles of Lithology, Episodic Events, and Human Activities

Taiwan’s natural setting creates highly vulnerable watersheds whose rivers discharge disproportionately large quantities of sediment to the coastal ocean. The 16 Taiwanese rivers analyzed in this article discharge ∼180 Mt yr-1 of sediment to the coastal ocean, although totals over the past 20 years have varied between 16 and 440 Mt yr-1. The mean annual sediment yield of 9500 t km-2 yr-1 for the 16 rivers is 60-fold greater than the global yield of 150 t km-2 yr-1, but mean yields for the individual rivers vary by more than 2 orders of magnitude, from 500 to 71,000 t km-2 yr-1. Most sediment erosion and delivery occur in response to typhoon-generated floods, as evidenced by the fact that \u3e75% of the long-term flux occurs in \u3c 1% of the time, about one-third of which reaches hyperpycnal concentrations. Detailed analysis of the 16 watersheds reveals little evidence of any single environmental factor that controls sediment load. The Erren, the highest-yield river on Taiwan, drains an erodible but low-gradient watershed with relatively low runoff. In contrast, three east coast rivers, the Hoping, the Hualien, and the Beinan, have high sediment yields that may be explained by relatively frequent earthquakes coupled with high runoff. Farming and urbanization also have elevated sediment yields in eastern watersheds, whereas Holocene sediments buried in the Taiwan Strait suggest that present-day sediment loads of the western rivers may be no higher than prehuman levels

Calcium Carbonate Sedimentation in the Global Ocean: Linkages Between the Neritic and Pelagic Environments

Other than fluvial sediment, calcium carbonate (CaCO3) is the greatest source of sediment in the present-day ocean. Interest in carbonate sedimentation extends beyond geologists because the carbonate system involves biologic and geochemicalprocesses. Carbonate production, for example, releases CO2 but its accumulation becomes a major sink for inorganic carbon. Unlike fluvial sediments, modern carbonates accumulate more or less equally in the neritic and pelagic environments. Neritic carbonates (benthic) are characterized by rapid production of (mostly) metastable aragonite and magnesian calcite:pelagic production of (primarily) calcite in the open ocean occurs at much slower rates but overmuch larger areas than does neritic production (Table 1). A global understanding of the production, preservation, and accumulation of calcium carbonate thus necessitates understanding both theneritic and pelagic systems, even though communication between researchers in the two subdisciplines often has been minimal

Geology, Geography, and Humans Battle for Dominance over the Delivery of Fluvial Sediment to the Coastal Ocean

Sediment flux to the coastal zone is conditioned by geomorphic and tectonic influences (basin area and relief), geography (temperature, runoff), geology (lithology, ice cover), and human activities (reservoir trapping, soil erosion). A new model, termed “BQART” in recognition of those factors, accounts for these varied influences. When applied to a database of 488 rivers, the BQART model showed no ensemble over‐ or underprediction, had a bias of just 3% across six orders of magnitude in observational values, and accounted for 96% of the between‐river variation in the long‐term (±30 years) sediment load or yield of these rivers. The geographical range of the 488 rivers covers 63% of the global land surface and is highly representative of global geology, climate, and socioeconomic conditions. Based strictly on geological parameters (basin area, relief, lithology, ice erosion), 65% of the between‐river sediment load is explained. Climatic factors (precipitation and temperature) account for an additional 14% of the variability in global patterns in load. Anthropogenic factors account for an additional 16% of the between‐river loads, although with ever more dams being constructed or decommissioned and socioeconomic conditions and infrastructure in flux, this contribution is temporally variable. The glacial factor currently contributes only 1% of the signal represented by our globally distributed database, but it would be much more important during and just after major glaciations. The BQART model makes possible the quantification of the influencing factors (e.g., climate, basin area, ice cover) within individual basins, to better interpret the terrestrial signal in marine sedimentary records. The BQART model predicts the long‐term flux of sediment delivered by rivers; it does not predict the episodicity (e.g., typhoons, earthquakes) of this delivery