Teaching Students to Evaluate E-Reference Sources with Moodle Forums

This presentation will describe the use of online forums in Moodle, a course management system, to teach students to evaluate both print and electronic reference sources. For two semesters I have created an online forum called the Fishing Hole Scouting Report for an in-class exercise. Students are given 2-3 background questions and told to find the answers using both a library-approved reference source and Wikipedia. Students then evaluate the reference source for effectiveness and ease of use, compared to Wikipedia, and post their comments in the forum to share with the class. I will highlight the educational benefits of using Moodle forums for this purpose and discuss best practices for selecting the most effective sources and questions

MARINE ECOSYSTEMS THROUGH THE LENS OF SOUNDSCAPE ECOLOGY: HOW BIOLOGICAL PROCESSES, LANDSCAPE STRUCTURE, AND ANTHROPOGENIC ACTIVITY AFFECT SPATIOTEMPORAL SOUNDSCAPE PATTERNS

Marine soundscapes, or the collection of all sounds across a landscape, consist of dynamic patterns resulting from natural and anthropogenic sound-producing processes. Soundscape ecology is focused on understanding how these processes interact with environmental variables and landscape structure to create dynamic soundscape patterns across space and time. As the field develops, there has been rising interest in using soundscapes as a tool to assess biodiversity and inform conservation and management decisions. However, understanding spatiotemporal soundscape patterns and their associations with ecological and environmental covariates is needed for passive acoustic monitoring to be informative. My dissertation addresses this need through two focal questions: (1) how do soundscapes vary across marine landscapes and is this variation explained by ecological metrics; and (2) how can soundscapes, or passive acoustic monitoring, be used to inform conservation and management priorities? To understand soundscape variation, I first compared the soundscapes of natural and artificial offshore reefs, finding that their temporal patterns were similar but spectral content differed. Following these results, I evaluated soundscape spatial variation across a range of estuarine habitat mosaics to explore whether soundscape differences between habitat types were associated with environmental metrics. I observed four distinct soundscape types that were associated with patch- and landscape-scale habitat metrics. Variation in all soundscape metrics summarized was explained by landscape-scale habitat metrics, while patch-scale metrics also explained sound levels, and abiotic metrics explained species-specific call rates. To evaluate how passive acoustic monitoring can be applied to conservation and management questions, I assessed whether soundscape monitoring was a useful complement to traditional video monitoring for tracking community development following deployment of an artificial reef. Comparing the soundscape of a newly deployed artificial reef to that of a nearby established reef revealed the colonization of multiple cryptic species that were not available from video monitoring. Lastly, I used multiple passive acoustic monitoring technologies to assess the spawning-associated grunt dynamics of Atlantic cod in a region with imminent offshore wind energy development. Elucidating the peak spawning period and aggregation site revealed that interactions between Atlantic cod spawning and offshore wind energy construction are likely. This dissertation advances understanding of soundscape variability in multiple ecosystems and demonstrates the benefit of passive acoustic monitoring for addressing applied ecological questions. By focusing on periods of peak acoustic activity and exploring variation across marine landscapes, my research explained previously undescribed soundscape variation and identified the relevance of landscape context in understanding marine soundscape variability. In applied contexts, my findings demonstrate that species-specific results are the most ecologically informative, but the current application of passive acoustic monitoring is limited by a lack of reliable identification of species-specific call types and associated call detectors. Advances in call detection will facilitate more nuanced ecological questions to be asked of marine soundscape and expand its relevance for addressing conservation and management priorities.Doctor of Philosoph

Results on the Colombeau products of the distribution x_+^−r−1/2 with the distributions x_-^−k−1/2 and x_-^k−1/2

Results on the products of the distribution x_+^−r−1/2 with the distributions x_-^−k−1/2 and x_-^k−1/2 are obtained in the differential algebra G(R) of Colombeau generalized functions, which contains the space D'(R) of Schwartz distributions as a subspace; in this algebra the notion of association is defined, which is a faithful generalization of weak equality in G(R). This enables treating the results in terms of distributions again

Use of Tenax® films to demonstrate the migration of chemical contaminants from cardboard into dry food

Contaminants in food packaging are a challenge of our time since the packaging material itself has been found to represent a source of food contamination through the migration of substances from it. Before first use, packaging materials destined for the packaging of dry foods can be evaluated by performing migration experiments with the simulant for dry foods, Tenax (R). This simulant is commercially available as a powder that is more difficult to handle during the migration experiments. This paper reports the development of a Tenax film. The film can be applied to the cardboard surface to conduct the migration test. After the migration is completed, the film can be easily extracted to determine the concentration of the contaminants in the film. Finally, the performance of the Tenax film was compared with the conventional Tenax powder for the evaluation of 15 model migrants