Influence of Vegetation On The Distribution of Small Mammals On A Waterfowl Production Area

. A study was conducted on a Waterfowl Production Area in Brookings County, South Dakota in 1972-73 to determine the distribution and abundance of small mammals. Three cover types, reseeded native grassed, brome-alfalfa, and bluegrass, were studied. Meadow voles (Microtus pennsylvanious), and deer mice (Peronyscus maniculatus) were captured most frequently. Jumping ice (Zapus hudsonius), masked shrews (Sorex cinerius), short tailed shrews (Blarins brevicauda), grasshopper mice (Omychomys leucogaster) and house mice (Mis musculus) were also taken. The bluegrass association had the highest number of small mammal captures and the reseeded native grass association has the least. There was no significant difference (P\u3e0.05) between the number of meadow voles captured and the type of vegetation. Deer mice occurred most often in the reseeded native grass association. Four vegetative parameters; height of duff, height of vegetation, percent duff cover and percent life cover were measured in each cover type. No differences were found between these measurements and the number of meadow voles captured. Although there are most than 57,000 acres of Waterfowl Production Areas in South Dakota, little information is known about the small mammal population on them. These small mammals form a prey base for many furbearing carnivores which not only prey on nests of bird but are important economically. My study indicates that species of grass used for cover does not affect the number of small mammals as much as the regulation of density of cover. Habitat manipulation could be an important management tool when more information is gained on the role small mammal’s play in determining predation and population of carnivores

Linking genes to literature: text mining, information extraction, and retrieval applications for biology

Efficient access to information contained in online scientific literature collections is essential for life science research, playing a crucial role from the initial stage of experiment planning to the final interpretation and communication of the results. The biological literature also constitutes the main information source for manual literature curation used by expert-curated databases. Following the increasing popularity of web-based applications for analyzing biological data, new text-mining and information extraction strategies are being implemented. These systems exploit existing regularities in natural language to extract biologically relevant information from electronic texts automatically. The aim of the BioCreative challenge is to promote the development of such tools and to provide insight into their performance. This review presents a general introduction to the main characteristics and applications of currently available text-mining systems for life sciences in terms of the following: the type of biological information demands being addressed; the level of information granularity of both user queries and results; and the features and methods commonly exploited by these applications. The current trend in biomedical text mining points toward an increasing diversification in terms of application types and techniques, together with integration of domain-specific resources such as ontologies. Additional descriptions of some of the systems discussed here are available on the internet

Performance Assessment of the Lead User Idea-Generation Process for New Product Development

Traditional idea generation techniques based on customer input usually collect information on new product needs from a random or typical set of customers. The "lead user process" takes a different approach. It collects information about both needs and solutions from users at the leading edges of the target market, as well as from users in other markets that face similar problems in a more extreme form. This paper reports on a natural experiment conducted within the 3M Company on the effect of the lead user (LU) idea-generation process relative to more traditional methods. 3M is known for its innovation capabilities--- and we find that the LU process appears to improve upon those capabilities. Annual sales of LU product ideas generated by the average LU project at 3M are conservatively projected to be $146 million after five years---more than eight times higher than forecast sales for the average contemporaneously conducted "traditional" project. Each funded LU project is projected to create a new major product line for a 3M division. As a direct result, divisions funding LU project ideas are projecting their highest rate of major product line generation in the past 50 years.new product development, lead users, idea generation

Timing of oceans on Mars from shoreline deformation.

Widespread evidence points to the existence of an ancient Martian ocean. Most compelling are the putative ancient shorelines in the northern plains. However, these shorelines fail to follow an equipotential surface, and this has been used to challenge the notion that they formed via an early ocean and hence to question the existence of such an ocean. The shorelines' deviation from a constant elevation can be explained by true polar wander occurring after the formation of Tharsis, a volcanic province that dominates the gravity and topography of Mars. However, surface loading from the oceans can drive polar wander only if Tharsis formed far from the equator, and most evidence indicates that Tharsis formed near the equator, meaning that there is no current explanation for the shorelines' deviation from an equipotential that is consistent with our geophysical understanding of Mars. Here we show that variations in shoreline topography can be explained by deformation caused by the emplacement of Tharsis. We find that the shorelines must have formed before and during the emplacement of Tharsis, instead of afterwards, as previously assumed. Our results imply that oceans on Mars formed early, concurrent with the valley networks, and point to a close relationship between the evolution of oceans on Mars and the initiation and decline of Tharsis volcanism, with broad implications for the geology, hydrological cycle and climate of early Mars