A Soil Parameters Geodatabase for the Modeling Assessment of Agricultural Conservation Practices Effects in the United States

Soil parameters for hydrology modeling in cropland dominated areas, from the regional to local scale, are part of critical biophysical information whose deficiency may increase the uncertainty of simulated conservation effects and predicting potential. Despite this importance, soil physical and hydraulic parameters lack common, wide-coverage repositories combined to digital maps as required by various hydrology-based agricultural water quality models. This paper describes the construction of a geoprocessing workflow and the resultant hydrology-structured soil hydraulic, physical, and chemical parameters geographic database for the entire United States, named US-SOILM-CEAP. This database is designed to store a-priori values for a suit of models, such as SWAT (Soil and Water Assessment Tool), APEX (Agricultural Policy Environmental EXtender) and ALMANAC (Agricultural Land Management Alternatives with Numerical Assessment Criteria), which are commonly used for the across scale assessment of agricultural hydrology and conservation practice scenarios. The Soil Survey Geographic (SSURGO) database developed by the U.S. Department of Agriculture provided the main source data for this development. Additional spatial information, a geographic information system platform and Python computer programming language code were used to create hydrology-based tile coverage of the areal soil units linked to the specific and detailed attributes required by each model. The created repository adds value to the source soil survey data, while maintaining and extending the detailed information necessary for the across scale and combined application of the models. Ultimately, our multi-model database provides a comprehensive product achieving joined informational-mapping-geoprocessing functionality with the explicit maintenance of the original conceptual links between soil series and composing soil layers, allowing for efficient data retrieval, analysis and service as input for modeling conservation effects

1982-09-04 Unfinished Business: Forum on Higher Education

On this episode of Unfinished Business John Wolfe introduces Ashland radio host Vic Martin, who then introduces the members of this community forum on higher education in the areas surrounding Ashland, Morehead State University president Morris Norfleet, Ashland Community College of the University of Kentucky (ACC) President Robert Goodpaster, and Marshall University President Robert Hayes, all of these men respond in their own ways to various questions about the services their respective institutions give to the Ashland area and elsewhere in their service region, with Don Reese moderating, recorded on September 4, 1982

Measurement of Suture Pullout Forces of the Pancreatic Duct and Capsule

A thorough biomechanical understanding of human organs is of increasing importance for designing and improving a wide range of medical technologies from simulators to medical devices. Despite the crucial need for data, little procedure-specific biomechanical testing on human tissue has been published. Specifically, pancreatic duct anastomosis, which has high rates of complications related to pancreatic duct leakage and patency, could benefit from improved assistive technologies. This study aims to help characterize the biomechanics of this critical step of the procedure by measuring the suture pullout force (SPOF) of the pancreatic duct and capsule. 216 tests were performed on 33 fresh, unfixed donated human pancreases. A previously reported uniaxial testing frame, was used to measure the SPOF of the pancreases. The mean pancreatic duct SPOF was 2.62 ± 1.11 N and the mean pancreatic capsule SPOF was 1.99 ± 1.33 N. To our knowledge, this is the first reported human pancreatic duct and capsule suture pullout measurement. These data can be used to inform a wide variety of biomedical technologies with primary interest in high-fidelity training simulators