Factors Affecting Regeneration of Western Montana Clearcuts

Paper published as Bulletin 33 in the UM Bulletin Forestry Series.https://scholarworks.umt.edu/umforestrybulletin/1017/thumbnail.jp

Biology and management of American woodcock in Missouri (2017)

GuideThe American woodcock (Scolopax minor) is a migratory game bird that inhabits much of the central and eastern United States. It belongs to the shorebird family, but unlike other species such as the sandpiper and common snipe, woodcock have adapted to a mixture of habitats in upland locations, including woodlands and young forests with early stages of plant regrowth, also referred to as early successional vegetation. Although few woodcock nest in Missouri, the state is an important migration corridor, providing habitat for birds traveling between wintering and breeding areas farther north. Understanding woodcock migration is a conservation priority, as mortality can be high during this time. Therefore, habitats that provide food and cover along the migratory route are crucial to their survival. This guide provides information on woodcock biology, their life cycle and habitat needs, as well as an overview of management techniques that landowners and managers can use to improve habitats for woodcock on their property

Solving wildlife damage problems in Missouri (2011)

Wildlife are valuable natural resources and important components of a healthy ecosystem. They also provide many economic, recreational and aesthetic benefits. However, given the wrong set of circumstances, almost any species of wildlife can become a nuisance. This guide provides basic information on how to prevent and solve wildlife damage problems and includes a list of technical and educational resources

Use of Trees by the Texas Ratsnake (Elaphe obsoleta) in Eastern Texas

We present information on the use of trees by Elaphe obsoleta (Texas Ratsnake) in a mesic pine-hardwood forest in eastern Texas. Using radiotelemetry, seven snakes (3 females, 4 males) were relocated a total of 363 times from April 2004 to May 2005, resulting in 201 unique locations. Snakes selected trees containing cavities and used hardwoods and snags for a combined 95% of arboreal locations. Texas Ratsnake arboreal activity peaked during July and August, well after the peak of avian breeding activity, suggesting arboreal activity involves factors other than avian predation

SOLVENT EXTRACTION FOR URANIUM MOLYBDENUM ALLOY DISSOLUTION FLOWSHEET

H-Canyon Engineering requested the Savannah River National Laboratory (SRNL) to perform two solvent extraction experiments using dissolved Super Kukla (SK) material. The SK material is an uranium (U)-molybdenum (Mo) alloy material of 90% U/10% Mo by weight with 20% 235U enrichment. The first series of solvent extraction tests involved a series of batch distribution coefficient measurements with 7.5 vol % tributylphosphate (TBP)/n-paraffin for extraction from 4-5 M nitric acid (HNO{sub 3}), using 4 M HNO{sub 3}-0.02 M ferrous sulfamate (Fe(SO3NH2)2) scrub, 0.01 M HNO3 strip steps with particular emphasis on the distribution of U and Mo in each step. The second set of solvent extraction tests determined whether the 2.5 wt % sodium carbonate (Na2CO3) solvent wash change frequency would need to be modified for the processing of the SK material. The batch distribution coefficient measurements were performed using dissolved SK material diluted to 20 g/L (U + Mo) in 4 M HNO{sub 3} and 5 M HNO{sub 3}. In these experiments, U had a distribution coefficient greater than 2.5 while at least 99% of the nickel (Ni) and greater than 99.9% of the Mo remained in the aqueous phase. After extraction, scrub, and strip steps, the aqueous U product from the strip contains nominally 7.48 {micro}g Mo/g U, significantly less than the maximum allowable limit of 800 {micro}g Mo/g U. Solvent washing experiments were performed to expose a 2.5 wt % Na2CO3 solvent wash solution to the equivalent of 37 solvent wash cycles. The low Mo batch distribution coefficient in this solvent extraction system yields only 0.001-0.005 g/L Mo extracted to the organic. During the solvent washing experiments, the Mo appears to wash from the organic

Use of Trees by the Texas Ratsnake (\u3cem\u3eElaphe obsoleta\u3c/em\u3e) in Eastern Texas

We present information on the use of trees by Elaphe obsoleta (Texas Ratsnake) in a mesic pine-hardwood forest in eastern Texas. Using radiotelemetry, seven snakes (3 females, 4 males) were relocated a total of 363 times from April 2004 to May 2005, resulting in 201 unique locations. Snakes selected trees containing cavities and used hardwoods and snags for a combined 95% of arboreal locations. Texas Ratsnake arboreal activity peaked during July and August, well after the peak of avian breeding activity, suggesting arboreal activity involves factors other than avian predation

Constrained Multistate Sequence Design for Nucleic Acid Reaction Pathway Engineering

We describe a framework for designing the sequences of multiple nucleic acid strands intended to hybridize in solution via a prescribed reaction pathway. Sequence design is formulated as a multistate optimization problem using a set of target test tubes to represent reactant, intermediate, and product states of the system, as well as to model crosstalk between components. Each target test tube contains a set of desired “on-target” complexes, each with a target secondary structure and target concentration, and a set of undesired “off-target” complexes, each with vanishing target concentration. Optimization of the equilibrium ensemble properties of the target test tubes implements both a positive design paradigm, explicitly designing for on-pathway elementary steps, and a negative design paradigm, explicitly designing against off-pathway crosstalk. Sequence design is performed subject to diverse user-specified sequence constraints including composition constraints, complementarity constraints, pattern prevention constraints, and biological constraints. Constrained multistate sequence design facilitates nucleic acid reaction pathway engineering for diverse applications in molecular programming and synthetic biology. Design jobs can be run online via the NUPACK web application

Retrieving Aerosol in a Cloudy Environment: Aerosol Availability as a Function of Spatial and Temporal Resolution

The challenge of using satellite observations to retrieve aerosol properties in a cloudy environment is to prevent contamination of the aerosol signal from clouds, while maintaining sufficient aerosol product yield to satisfy specific applications. We investigate aerosol retrieval availability at different instrument pixel resolutions, using the standard MODIS aerosol cloud mask applied to MODIS data and a new GOES-R cloud mask applied to GOES data for a domain covering North America and surrounding oceans. Aerosol availability is not the same as the cloud free fraction and takes into account the technqiues used in the MODIS algorithm to avoid clouds, reduce noise and maintain sufficient numbers of aerosol retrievals. The inherent spatial resolution of each instrument, 0.5x0.5 km for MODIS and 1x1 km for GOES, is systematically degraded to 1x1 km, 2x2 km, 4x4 km and 8x8 km resolutions and then analyzed as to how that degradation would affect the availability of an aerosol retrieval, assuming an aerosol product resolution at 8x8 km. The results show that as pixel size increases, availability decreases until at 8x8 km 70% to 85% of the retrievals available at 0.5 km have been lost. The diurnal pattern of aerosol retrieval availability examined for one day in the summer suggests that coarse resolution sensors (i.e., 4x4 km or 8x8 km) may be able to retrieve aerosol early in the morning that would otherwise be missed at the time of current polar orbiting satellites, but not the diurnal aerosol properties due to cloud cover developed during the day. In contrast finer resolution sensors (i.e., 1x1 km or 2x2 km) have much better opportunity to retrieve aerosols in the partly cloudy scenes and better chance of returning the diurnal aerosol properties. Large differences in the results of the two cloud masks designed for MODIS aerosol and GOES cloud products strongly reinforce that cloud masks must be developed with specific purposes in mind and that a generic cloud mask applied to an independent aerosol retrieval will likely fail

Generating Bijections between HOAS and the Natural Numbers

A provably correct bijection between higher-order abstract syntax (HOAS) and the natural numbers enables one to define a "not equals" relationship between terms and also to have an adequate encoding of sets of terms, and maps from one term family to another. Sets and maps are useful in many situations and are preferably provided in a library of some sort. I have released a map and set library for use with Twelf which can be used with any type for which a bijection to the natural numbers exists. Since creating such bijections is tedious and error-prone, I have created a "bijection generator" that generates such bijections automatically together with proofs of correctness, all in the context of Twelf.Comment: In Proceedings LFMTP 2010, arXiv:1009.218

Supreme Court Brief Amicus Curiae of Administrative Law Scholars in Support of Neither Party

This brief on behalf of 29 administrative law scholars takes no position on whether Administrative Law Judges (ALJs) are employees or inferior officers. It urges the Court to issue an opinion that respects the decision that Congress made unanimously in 1946 to enact numerous statutory safeguards that assure that ALJs have decisional independence from the agencies where they work while assuring that agencies retain control over the policy content and legal basis for any decision made in an adjudication in which an ALJ presides. The brief describes the fifteen years of study and deliberation that led to the unanimous decision of Congress to enact the Administrative Procedure Act (APA) in 1946. It describes the particular attention that Congress devoted to the critical task of providing ALJs with the combination of statutory safeguards that minimize the risk that they will favor the agencies for whom they adjudicate cases while assuring that the agencies retain control of the policy content of any decision made in such an adjudication. It then describes the series of opinions the Supreme Court issued during the 1950s in which the Justices unanimously praised the provisions of the APA that assure that ALJs conduct adjudicatory hearings in an unbiased manner, explained the importance of those statutory provisions in protecting the values reflected in the Due Process Clause, and urged Congress to make those safeguards applicable to all agency adjudications. It concludes by urging the Court to issue an opinion that respects the decision that Congress made in 1946 to insulate ALJs from potential sources of pro-agency bias by including in the APA a combination of provisions that confer decisional independence on ALJs