Stephen A. Forbes, Antecedent Wetland Ecologist?

Stephen A. Forbes (1844-1930) was an American ento- mologist/zoologist who was born, raised and largely educated in northern Illinois. He spent most of his profes- sional career as the director of the Illinois Natural History Survey and as a faculty member and administrator at the University of 1llinois. Early in his scientific career, he stud- ied fish and bird diets by examining the stomach contents of these animals. In 1887, he published his most famous and influential paper, The lake as a microcosm, which contains one of the earliest formulations of what came to be called the ecosystem. In this paper, Forbes describes a hy- pothetical isolated, small lake as being a microcosm that is in equilibrium. This equilibrium is the result of trophic in- teractions among the organisms in the microcosm that limit the sizes of both predator and prey populations. Forbes believed that natural selection was responsible for limiting the reproductive capacities of predators and prey. Although energy transfer among trophic levels is not the main focus of his paper, Forbes postulated that food (energy) is one of the main factors structuring ecosystems, but he did not explicitly discuss the energetics of his lake microcosm. Forbes\u27 microcosm is based on his studies of the shallow portions of small, glacial lakes in northern Illinois that were dominated by aquatic plants. Today his microcosm would be classified as a palustrine or lacustrine wetland

Succession in Wetlands: A Gleasonian Appraoch

A qualitative model of succession in freshwater wetlands is proposed, based on the life history features of the species involved. Three key life history traits can be used to characterize wetland species: life—span, propagule longevity, and propagule establishment requirements. By combining these three life history traits, 12 basic wetland life history types are recognized. For each life history type, the future state (presence only in the form of propagules in the seed bank, presence as adult plants, or complete absence) of each species type in a wetland can be predicted if environmental conditions change. Most of the information needed to apply this model to a particular wetland can be obtained by an examination of a wetland\u27s seed bank. Several examples of succesion in North American and African wetlands are presented to illustrate the application of the model

Garuda 5 (khyung lnga): Ecologies of Potency and the Poison-Medicine Spectrum of Sowa Rigpa’s Renowned ‘Black Aconite’ Formula

This article focuses on ethnographic work conducted at the Men-Tsee-Khang (Dharamsala, India) on Garuda 5 (khyung lnga), a commonly prescribed Tibetan medical formula. This medicine’s efficacy as a painkiller and activity against infection and inflammation is largely due to a particularly powerful plant, known as ‘virulent poison’ (btsan dug) as well as ‘the great medicine’ (sman chen), and identified as a subset of Aconitum species. Its effects, however, are potentially dangerous or even deadly. How can these poisonous plants be used in medicine and, conversely, when does a medicine become a poison? How can ostensibly the same substance be both harmful and helpful? The explanation requires a more nuanced picture than mere dose dependency. Attending to the broader ‘ecologies of potency’ in which these substances are locally enmeshed, in line with Sienna Craig’s Efficacy and the Social Ecologies of Tibetan Medicine (2012), provides fertile ground to better understand the effects of Garuda 5 and how potency is developed and directed in practice. I aim to unpack the spectrum between sman (medicine) and dug (poison) in Sowa Rigpa by elucidating some of the multiple dimensions which determine the activity of Garuda 5 as it is formulated and prescribed in India. I thus embrace the full spectrum of potency— the ‘good’ and the ‘bad,’ the ‘wanted’ and the ‘unwanted’—without presuming the universal validity of biomedical notions of toxicity and side effects

Integrating Naming and Addressing of Persistent data in Programming Language and Operating System Contexts

There exist a number of desirable transparencies in distributed computing, viz., name transparency: having a uniform way of naming entities in the system, regardless of their type or physical make up; location transparency: having a uniform way of addressing entities, regardless of their physical location; representation transparency: having a uniform way of representing data, which simplifies sharing data between applications written in different highlevel languages and running on different hardware architectures (interoperability) and finally invocation transparency: having a uniform way of invoking operations on entities. The advent of persistency in programming language contexts has created a need for the integration of these four important concepts, viz., naming, addressing, representation and manipulation of data in programming language and operating system contexts. This paper attempts to address the first three transparencies, postponing the fourth to a later paper. First, we make up a list of things that are needed to construct a persistent programming environment and relate this list to existing persistent object models, revealing their inadequacies. We then describe a new model which merges programming language and operating system naming contexts into a global name space which, while enforcing uniformity through the use of globally unique names, still allows the application of personal nicknames. Furthermore, we explain how persistent data is stored and retrieved using a client/server model of interaction, and how it could be acted upon correctly, through the concept of typed data. We conclude by checking how well our model scores on the wish list, listing the current status and future directions for research

Assisting Nature: Ducks, “Ding” and DU

Jay Ding Darling (1876-1962) was a newspaper editorial cartoonist and duck hunter. Because of his pro-conservation cartoons, he had become one America’s most prominent conservationists by the early 1930s. Joseph P. Knapp (1864-1951) was a prominent businessman, philanthropist, conservationist, and duck hunter who, like Darling, had become concerned about the decline of waterfowl populations. Both worked to reverse this duck decline. Darling was appointed chief of the Bureau of Biological Survey in 1934 by President Franklin Roosevelt. During his short tenure as its chief (1934-1935), he focused the Bureau’s mission more on wildlife conservation and he oversaw the expansion of the national wildlife refuge system. In 1930, Knapp founded the More Game Birds in America Foundation. This Foundation through its waterfowl surveys documented that western Canada was the major breeding ground of ducks in North America. This resulted in the Foundation establishing Ducks Unlimited, Inc. in the US and Ducks Unlimited (Canada) in 1937. DU, Inc. would raise money, and DU (Canada) would spend this money in western Canada on wetland conservation and restoration projects. Both men helped to slow down the loss of wetlands by stressing the need for the public and private sectors to conserve and restore them as waterfowl habitat. They also shaped future wetland science by creating opportunities for the employment of wetland scientists

Antecedent Wetland Ecologists - German and Austrian in the Ninetieth Century

Please note that this is the first of a series in WSP. Many of the people, and even institutions, who influenced the development of the wetland science as a field have recently died or closed, and many other pioneering wetland scientists have retired or will soon retire. Given this, we would like to capture the early history of our science by getting the people who created it to write about their reasons for becoming wetland scientists and their contributions to the field. This series of articles will focus on two major topics: (1) the contributions of major scientists working in wetlands to the development of wetland science, and (2) the roles of major wetland institutions and organizations in the development of wetland science. Each article will highlight major advances, organizational and/or intellectual, that have shaped wetland science in the United States and around the world

Evaluating the effectiveness of restored wetlands for reducing nutrient losses from agricultural watersheds

Scientists examined the effectiveness of recent wetland restorations and land use conversions (set-asides) for reducing nutrients in agricultural runoff into the Iowa Great Lakes

The development of zonation in freshwater wetlands: an experimental approach

The development of a new emergent coenocline in an experimental wetland complex located in the Delta Marsh, Manitoba, Canada, was monitored for four years. The previous emergent coenocline, which consisted of bands of Scirpus lacustris, Typha glauca, Scolochloa festucacea and Phragmites austra/is, had been eliminated by flooding the complex for two years to 1 m above normal. Water level in the experimental complex then was drawndown for two years during which recruitment from the seed bank of all four emergents occurred along the elevation gradient. The complex was then reflooded for two years. Because of secondary dispersal of emergent seed by water currents, all four species had seed distributions that were more similar than would be predicted from their position along the previous coenocline. Most species had a maximum seed density at about 247. 5 m AMSL, the elevation at which water levels had been held for the previous 25 years, but one species (Phragmites) also had a second density peak at higher elevations. Differential germination of seeds along the elevation gradient then shifted the distribution of two species (Scirpus and Phragmites) downslope and of one (Scolochloa) upslope and did not affect that of the fourth (Typha). Mortality during the drawdown then shifted the distribution of three species (Scirpus, Typha, and Phragmites) downslope. In two cells in the complex that were reflooded to the normal water level, the distribution of two species (Scolochloa and Phragmites) was shifted upslope; that of the other two was unaffected. After having been reflooded for two years, the position of each species along the new coenocline was a result of a unique combination of factors (dispersal, germination, seedling mortality, adult mortality). Three of the species (Scirpus, Typha and Scolochloa) after two years of reflooding were found at elevations similar to where they had been found in the previous coenocline, but they did not yet form monodominant stands as they had previously. Phragmites was found at much lower elevations than previously, and a Phragmites dominated zone had not redeveloped

Simulating Wde-area Replication

We describe our experiences with simulating replication algorithms for use in far flung distributed systems. The algorithms under scrutiny mimic epidemics. Epidemic algorithms seem to scale and adapt to change (such as varying replica sets) well. The loose consistency guarantees they make seem more useful in applications where availability strongly outweighs correctness; e.g., distributed name service