50 Years of the Clean Water Act: Can We Sustain Its Success?

The effectiveness of the Clean Water Act in mandating the abatement of gross pollution by setting technology standards for categories of municipal and industrial point sources is well documented. Still, the CWA has not been modernized to update water quality standards, it has not readily employed the latest science, and the benefits have not been documented nearly well enough. Increasingly insidious attempts to undermine its continued effectiveness have arisen over the past 10–15 years mostly at the state level

The Occurrence and Distribution of River Redhorse, Moxostoma carinatum and Greater Redhorse, Moxostoma valenciennesi in the Sandusky River, Ohio

Author Institution: Ohio Environmental Protection Agency, Division of Water Quality Monitoring and AssessmentElectrofishing collections at 10 locations in the middle Sandusky River mainstem between Tiffin and Fremont revealed the presence of previously unknown populations of river redhorse (Moxostoma carinatum) and greater redhorse (Moxostoma valenciennesi). The discovery of these populations expands the Lake Erie drainage distribution of both species which have been either declining in abundance or extirpated in many areas. It is doubtful that these species have recently invaded the middle Sandusky River since barriers to upstream fish movements have been in place in the vicinity of Fremont since the early 1800s. Both species snowed a preference for locations with a moderate to swift current, pool-run-riffle habitat, and a convoluted bedrock channel with a boulder, rubble, and gravel substrate. Sampling locations that were impounded or where the river was predominantly pooled contained comparatively few or no individuals

Fish Assemblage and Habitat Assessment of the Presumpscot River, MBI Technical Report

The Midwest Biodiversity Institute received a grant from the Casco Bay Estuary Partnership in 2006 to conduct an assessment of the fish assemblage of the Presumpscot River between the outlet of Sebago Lake and Casco Bay. The overall goal of this project is to assess the current status of the fish assemblages as it is related to both historical and contemporary biological, chemical, and physical characteristics and stressors. With the exception of a prior study focused on anadromous fishes in the lower mainstem in 2003 (Normandeau Associates 2004), comparatively little is known about the relative abundance, distribution, and composition of the fish assemblage beyond species of historical and immediate management interest. Of particular interest is the documentation of introduced species that occur in the same habitats required by fish species that are the focus of these high profile management and restoration interests. The interim Maine Rivers IBI (Yoder et al. 2008) was used herein as one of the key analytical methodologies to assess the present condition of the resident fish assemblages and reveal how it relates to historical and contemporary stressors and prospects for future restoration

The Maine Rivers Fish Assemblage Assessment: Application to the Presumpscot River in 2006 (2010 State of the Bay Presentation)

https://digitalcommons.usm.maine.edu/cbep-presentations/1051/thumbnail.jp

Realization of high-fidelity CZ and ZZ-free iSWAP gates with a tunable coupler

High-fidelity two-qubit gates at scale are a key requirement to realize the full promise of quantum computation and simulation. The advent and use of coupler elements to tunably control two-qubit interactions has improved operational fidelity in many-qubit systems by reducing parasitic coupling and frequency crowding issues. Nonetheless, two-qubit gate errors still limit the capability of near-term quantum applications. The reason, in part, is the existing framework for tunable couplers based on the dispersive approximation does not fully incorporate three-body multi-level dynamics, which is essential for addressing coherent leakage to the coupler and parasitic longitudinal ($ZZ$) interactions during two-qubit gates. Here, we present a systematic approach that goes beyond the dispersive approximation to exploit the engineered level structure of the coupler and optimize its control. Using this approach, we experimentally demonstrate CZ and $ZZ$-free iSWAP gates with two-qubit interaction fidelities of $99.76 \pm 0.10$% and $99.87 \pm 0.32$%, respectively, which are close to their $T_1$ limits.Comment: 28 pages, 32 figure

The spotted gar genome illuminates vertebrate evolution and facilitates human-teleost comparisons

To connect human biology to fish biomedical models, we sequenced the genome of spotted gar (Lepisosteus oculatus), whose lineage diverged from teleosts before teleost genome duplication (TGD). The slowly evolving gar genome has conserved in content and size many entire chromosomes from bony vertebrate ancestors. Gar bridges teleosts to tetrapods by illuminating the evolution of immunity, mineralization and development (mediated, for example, by Hox, ParaHox and microRNA genes). Numerous conserved noncoding elements (CNEs; often cis regulatory) undetectable in direct human-teleost comparisons become apparent using gar: functional studies uncovered conserved roles for such cryptic CNEs, facilitating annotation of sequences identified in human genome-wide association studies. Transcriptomic analyses showed that the sums of expression domains and expression levels for duplicated teleost genes often approximate the patterns and levels of expression for gar genes, consistent with subfunctionalization. The gar genome provides a resource for understanding evolution after genome duplication, the origin of vertebrate genomes and the function of human regulatory sequences

Evaluation of individual and ensemble probabilistic forecasts of COVID-19 mortality in the United States

Short-term probabilistic forecasts of the trajectory of the COVID-19 pandemic in the United States have served as a visible and important communication channel between the scientific modeling community and both the general public and decision-makers. Forecasting models provide specific, quantitative, and evaluable predictions that inform short-term decisions such as healthcare staffing needs, school closures, and allocation of medical supplies. Starting in April 2020, the US COVID-19 Forecast Hub (https://covid19forecasthub.org/) collected, disseminated, and synthesized tens of millions of specific predictions from more than 90 different academic, industry, and independent research groups. A multimodel ensemble forecast that combined predictions from dozens of groups every week provided the most consistently accurate probabilistic forecasts of incident deaths due to COVID-19 at the state and national level from April 2020 through October 2021. The performance of 27 individual models that submitted complete forecasts of COVID-19 deaths consistently throughout this year showed high variability in forecast skill across time, geospatial units, and forecast horizons. Two-thirds of the models evaluated showed better accuracy than a naïve baseline model. Forecast accuracy degraded as models made predictions further into the future, with probabilistic error at a 20-wk horizon three to five times larger than when predicting at a 1-wk horizon. This project underscores the role that collaboration and active coordination between governmental public-health agencies, academic modeling teams, and industry partners can play in developing modern modeling capabilities to support local, state, and federal response to outbreaks

The United States COVID-19 Forecast Hub dataset

Academic researchers, government agencies, industry groups, and individuals have produced forecasts at an unprecedented scale during the COVID-19 pandemic. To leverage these forecasts, the United States Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) partnered with an academic research lab at the University of Massachusetts Amherst to create the US COVID-19 Forecast Hub. Launched in April 2020, the Forecast Hub is a dataset with point and probabilistic forecasts of incident cases, incident hospitalizations, incident deaths, and cumulative deaths due to COVID-19 at county, state, and national, levels in the United States. Included forecasts represent a variety of modeling approaches, data sources, and assumptions regarding the spread of COVID-19. The goal of this dataset is to establish a standardized and comparable set of short-term forecasts from modeling teams. These data can be used to develop ensemble models, communicate forecasts to the public, create visualizations, compare models, and inform policies regarding COVID-19 mitigation. These open-source data are available via download from GitHub, through an online API, and through R packages

First Records of Freckled Madtom (Noturus nocturnus) in Ohio, USA

Two new Ohio localities for the Freckled Madtom (Noturus nocturnus Jordan and Gilbert, 1886) were recently discovered. These are the first, and currently only, Freckled Madtom collected in Ohio waters. A single individual was collected in the Scioto River in Scioto County by the Midwest Biodiversity Institute (MBI) and a previously misidentified specimen was collected in the Ohio River at the Hannibal Locks and Dam by the Ohio River Valley Water Sanitation Commission (ORSANCO). The closest historical records are from the Little Sandy River and Big Sandy River drainages in eastern Kentucky. Other Ohio River collections have been made near the border of Kentucky and Indiana. The origins of the recent Ohio specimens are unknown; whether they emanate from other known populations or have been overlooked altogether is unclear