118 research outputs found
Additional Mammal Notes
In the proceedings of the Iowa Academy of Sciences for 1910 appears \u27\u27a preliminary annotated catalogue of the recent mammals of Iowa,\u27\u27 by T. VanHyning and Frank C. Pellett. The design in publishing that catalogue was for the purpose of obtaining more complete data for a monograph. It is now very gratifying to add the following notes as the results: The following species were given in that catalogue as only probably occurring in the state
An Annotated Catalogue of the Recent Mammals of Iowa
In forming a collection of the fauna of Iowa for the museum of the Historical Department of Iowa, it was early seen that there was no published lists, and but very meager and scattered records of the mammals of the state. It is this condition of affairs which has prompted the compiling of such at this time
Building a Museum
The up-to-date museum is the highest possible type of an educational institution; it supplies the text accompanied by the object. (Object teaching.) All museums should be, in a manner, provincial, i.e., organized to cover a certain territory as a specialty, whether this territory be a single state, several states, the United States, or the whole world. In this connection it should be remembered that almost any single state will produce a much more varied and larger amount of museum material than is commonly supposed. The geology, flora, fauna, prehistoric and civil history of a state, will, in many instances, nearly duplicate its border states, and very well represent the United States
Panopticism and Complicity: The State of Surveillance and Everyday Oppression in Libraries, Archives, and Museums
Historically, libraries, archives, and museums—or LAM institutions—have been complicit in enacting state power by surveilling and policing communities. This article broadens previous scholars’ critiques about individual institutions to LAM institutions writ large, drawing connections between these sites and ongoing racist, classist, and oppressive designs. We do so by dialing in on the ethical premise that justifies panoptic systems, utilitarianism, and how the glorification of pragmatism reifies systems of control and oppression. First, we revisit LIS applications of Benthamian and Foucauldian ideas of panoptic power to examine the role of LAM institutions as sites of social enmity. We then describe examples of surveillance and state power as they manifest in contemporary data infrastructure and information practices, showing how LAM institutional fixations with utilitarianism reify the U.S. carceral state through norms such as the aggregation and weaponization of user data and the overreliance on metrics. We argue that such practices are akin to widespread systems of surveillance and criminalization. Finally, we reflect on how LAM workers can combat structures that rely on oppressive assumptions and claims to information authority.
Pre-print first published online February 10, 202
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Factors affecting the abundance of fall chinook salmon in the Columbia River
A study of the population ecology of Columbia River fall chinook
salmon, Oncorhynchus tshawytscha (Walbaum), was made in an attempt
to determine the cause of a serious decline in this run which occurred
in the early 1950's. Fluctuations in abundance of major salmon runs
the North Pacific were examined to detect any coastwide pattern.
Only chinook salmon in Cook Inlet, Alaska, and chum salmon from
Oregon to southwestern Alaska showed a similar trend. The following
life history stages broken down into pre- and post-decline years
were examined: (1) marine life including distribution and migration,
growth and maturity, survival rate, oceanography, and commercial
and sport fisheries; (2) upstream migration including river fisheries,
gear selectivity, size and age composition of the run, escapement,
and influence of dams, diseases, and water quality; (3)
reproduction and incubation including spawning areas and spawning
and incubation conditions; and (4) downstream migration which included
predation, dams and reservoirs, diseases, flow, turbidity and temperature, and estuary life. Salient points of the analysis were:
(1) a change in the maturity and survival pattern based on tagged
and fin-clipped fish recovered before and after 1950; (2) a significant
negative correlation between sea-water temperature during a
year class' first year at sea and subsequent survival; (3) a large
increase in the ocean fisheries coincident with the decline in the
run; (4) catch-effort statistics of the ocean fishery show a near
classic example of the effect of overexploitation; (5) estimates of
the contribution of Columbia River chinook to the ocean fisheries
based on tag recoveries could be underestimates rather than overestimates;
(6) a significant inverse correlation between estimated
ocean catch of Columbia River fall chinook and numbers entering the
river; (7) size and age composition of the ocean and river catches
decreased coincident with the decline in the run; (8) the gill-net
fishery shows little size selectivity by age, size, or sex in the
dominant group; (9) fluctuations in abundance of hatchery stocks
are related to differences in survival between fingerling and adult;
(10) hatchery, lower river, and upriver populations fluctuate in
abundance in much the same pattern; (11) optimum escapement is between
90,000 and 100,000 adults, a value that was exceeded during
most years; (12) a highly significant negative correlation between
numbers of spawners and return per spawner; (13) most of the early
dams had no direct effect on fall chinook and the decline in productivity
occurred when river conditions were relatively stable;
(14) temperatures at time of migration and spawning for fall
chinook have not increased enough to be a serious mortality factor; (15) little relationship between flow, turbidity, and temperature at
time of downstream migration and subsequent return was evident except
that high temperatures and high flows (and turbidities) tended
to produce poorer runs during certain time periods; and (16) predation
and delay of smolts in reservoirs are largely unknown factors, but circumstantial
evidence suggests that they were not important in regulating
fall chinook numbers during the period of the study.
Finally, variables that appeared to bear some relationship to
fluctuations in abundance of fall chinook were submitted to multiple
regression analysis. For the predecline period (1938-46 brood years),
sea-water temperature and ocean troll fishing effort were significant
variables (R² = 0.74). For post decline years (1947-59 broods), troll
had the most influence on total return with ocean temperature and escapement
having lesser effects. For the combined years, troll intensity
and ocean temperature were the significant variables (R² =
0.572). Entering interaction of river flow at downstream migration
with the other variables brought R² to 0.754 which means that 75% of
the variability in the returning run could be accounted for by these
three factors. Return per spawner was so heavily influenced by
numbers of spawners that the other factors assumed negligible importance.
Equations were derived that predicted the returning run
in close agreement with the actual run size. Substituting a low
and constant troll fishing effort in the equation resulted in the
predicted run maintaining the average predecline level.
The increase in ocean fishing was the main contributor to
the decline of the Columbia River fall chinook run as shown by
correlation, by analogy, and by the process of elimination. To demonstrate
why other chinook runs have not shown similar declines, it was
shown that due to several unique features in Columbia River fall
chinook life history they are exposed to much more ocean fishing than
other populations. It was emphasized that these conclusions should
not be extrapolated to the future or to other species or runs of
salmon
Moving Beyond Text Digitization in Archives Using Both Human and Technological Resources
In the past, the digitization of archival collections has focused on capture of and access to plain images of textual material. In the current cultural heritage environment, particularly with the shift of many archives workers and patrons to telework during the COVID-19 pandemic, an image of the archival object alone is not enough. Today archival collections need to be searchable and transcribable. This session discusses the power of both technological developments and more traditional humanistic "people power" to enhance digitized archival collections at scale. Come and hear how archives are crowdsourcing transcriptions of digitized texts, both through "volunpeers" from the public and teleworking staff, and using informatics tools for new methods of seeing and understanding collections such as OCR and artificial intelligence (AI)
Evolutionary consequences of habitat loss for Pacific anadromous salmonids
Large portions of anadromous salmonid habitat in the western United States has been lost because of dams and other blockages. This loss has the potential to affect salmonid evolution through natural selection if the loss is biased, affecting certain types of habitat differentially, and if phenotypic traits correlated with those habitat types are heritable. Habitat loss can also affect salmonid evolution indirectly, by reducing genetic variation and changing its distribution within and among populations. In this paper, we compare the characteristics of lost habitats with currently accessible habitats and review the heritability of traits which show correlations with habitat/environmental gradients. We find that although there is some regional variation, inaccessible habitats tend to be higher in elevation, wetter and both warmer in the summer and colder in the winter than habitats currently available to anadromous salmonids. We present several case studies that demonstrate either a change in phenotypic or life history expression or an apparent reduction in genetic variation associated with habitat blockages. These results suggest that loss of habitat will alter evolutionary trajectories in salmonid populations and Evolutionarily Significant Units. Changes in both selective regime and standing genetic diversity might affect the ability of these taxa to respond to subsequent environmental perturbations. Both natural and anthropogenic and should be considered seriously in developing management and conservation strategies
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