Introduction to Tapestries Volume 7: Breaking the Shackles of Silence: Knowledge Production as Activism and Resistance

Introduction to volume 7 of Macalester College\u27s journal Tapestries: Interwoven voices of local and global identities

SNAPSHOT USA 2019 : a coordinated national camera trap survey of the United States

This article is protected by copyright. All rights reserved.With the accelerating pace of global change, it is imperative that we obtain rapid inventories of the status and distribution of wildlife for ecological inferences and conservation planning. To address this challenge, we launched the SNAPSHOT USA project, a collaborative survey of terrestrial wildlife populations using camera traps across the United States. For our first annual survey, we compiled data across all 50 states during a 14-week period (17 August - 24 November of 2019). We sampled wildlife at 1509 camera trap sites from 110 camera trap arrays covering 12 different ecoregions across four development zones. This effort resulted in 166,036 unique detections of 83 species of mammals and 17 species of birds. All images were processed through the Smithsonian's eMammal camera trap data repository and included an expert review phase to ensure taxonomic accuracy of data, resulting in each picture being reviewed at least twice. The results represent a timely and standardized camera trap survey of the USA. All of the 2019 survey data are made available herein. We are currently repeating surveys in fall 2020, opening up the opportunity to other institutions and cooperators to expand coverage of all the urban-wild gradients and ecophysiographic regions of the country. Future data will be available as the database is updated at eMammal.si.edu/snapshot-usa, as well as future data paper submissions. These data will be useful for local and macroecological research including the examination of community assembly, effects of environmental and anthropogenic landscape variables, effects of fragmentation and extinction debt dynamics, as well as species-specific population dynamics and conservation action plans. There are no copyright restrictions; please cite this paper when using the data for publication.Publisher PDFPeer reviewe

Fundamentals of wildlife dosimetry and lessons learned from a decade of measuring external dose rates in the field

International audienceMethods for determining the radiation dose received by exposed biota require major improvements to reduceuncertainties and increase precision. We share our experiences in attempting to quantify external dose rates tofree-ranging wildlife using GPS-coupled dosimetry methods. The manuscript is a primer on fundamental conceptsin wildlife dosimetry in which the complexities of quantifying dose rates are highlighted, and lessons learned arepresented based on research with wild boar and snakes at Fukushima, wolves at Chornobyl, and reindeer inNorway. GPS-coupled dosimeters produced empirical data to which numerical simulations of external dose usingcomputer software were compared. Our data did not support a standing paradigm in risk analyses: Usingaveraged soil contaminant levels to model external dose rates conservatively overestimate the dose to individualswithin a population. Following this paradigm will likely lead to misguided recommendations for risk management.The GPS-dosimetry data also demonstrated the critical importance of how modeled external dose rates areimpacted by the scale at which contaminants are mapped. When contaminant mapping scales are coarse evendetailed knowledge about each animal’s home range was inadequate to accurately predict external dose rates.Importantly, modeled external dose rates based on a single measurement at a trap site did not correlate to actualdose rates measured on free ranging animals. These findings provide empirical data to support published concernsabout inadequate dosimetry in much of the published Chernobyl and Fukushima dose-effects research. Ourdata indicate that a huge portion of that literature should be challenged, and that improper dosimetry remains asignificant source of controversy in radiation dose-effect research

SNAPSHOT USA 2019:a coordinated national camera trap survey of the United States

With the accelerating pace of global change, it is imperative that we obtain rapid inventories of the status and distribution of wildlife for ecological inferences and conservation planning. To address this challenge, we launched the SNAPSHOT USA project, a collaborative survey of terrestrial wildlife populations using camera traps across the United States. For our first annual survey, we compiled data across all 50 states during a 14-week period (17 August - 24 November of 2019). We sampled wildlife at 1509 camera trap sites from 110 camera trap arrays covering 12 different ecoregions across four development zones. This effort resulted in 166,036 unique detections of 83 species of mammals and 17 species of birds. All images were processed through the Smithsonian's eMammal camera trap data repository and included an expert review phase to ensure taxonomic accuracy of data, resulting in each picture being reviewed at least twice. The results represent a timely and standardized camera trap survey of the USA. All of the 2019 survey data are made available herein. We are currently repeating surveys in fall 2020, opening up the opportunity to other institutions and cooperators to expand coverage of all the urban-wild gradients and ecophysiographic regions of the country. Future data will be available as the database is updated at eMammal.si.edu/snapshot-usa, as well as future data paper submissions. These data will be useful for local and macroecological research including the examination of community assembly, effects of environmental and anthropogenic landscape variables, effects of fragmentation and extinction debt dynamics, as well as species-specific population dynamics and conservation action plans. There are no copyright restrictions; please cite this paper when using the data for publication.</p