Regulatory Coordination and Cooperation with the United States Fish and Wildlife Service at the State Level

We use Canada geese (Branta canadensis) as an example of the new federal permitting process to legally control the nests of these birds. The U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service has regulatory authority to enforce the provisions of the Migratory Bird Treaty Act (MBTA). Under MBTA, depredation permits are needed to destroy nuisance nests of resident Canada geese. We outline the new permitting process and its welcomed benefits

Supporting public availability and accessibility with Elvin: experiences and reflections.

We provide a retrospective account of how a generic event notification service called Elvin and a suite of simple client applications: CoffeeBiff, Tickertape and Tickerchat, came to be used within our organisation to support awareness and interaction. After overviewing Elvin and its clients, we outline various experiences from data collated across two studies where Elvin and its clients have been used to augment the workaday world to support interaction, to make digital actions visible, to make physical actions available beyond the location of action, and to support content and socially based information filtering. We suggest there are both functional and technical reasons for why Elvin works for enabling awareness and interaction. Functionally, it provides a way to produce, gather and redistribute information from everyday activities (via Elvin) and to give that information a perceptible form (via the various clients) that can be publicly available and accessible as a resource for awareness. The integration of lightweight chat facilities with these information sources enables awareness to easily flow into interaction, starting to re-connect bodies to actions, and starting to approximate the easy flow of interaction that happens when we are co-located. Technically, the conceptual simplicity of the Elvin notification, the wide availability of its APIs, and the generic functionality of its clients, especially Tickertape, have made the use of the service appealing to developers and users for a wide range of uses

Organizational Stressors, Social Support, and Implications for Subjective Performance in High-Level Sport

Objectives: Although much is now known about the role of social support in the competitive stress process, scholars have yet to examine this moderator in relation to organizational stress. The purpose of this study was to examine the relationship between perceived organizational stressors and subjective performance in sport, with particular focus on the potential moderating role of social support. Design and Methods: Talented athletes (N = 122; 60 male; Mage = 20.50) completed questionnaires of perceived organizational stressors, social support, and subjective athletic performance. Results: In addition to evidence of main effects, analyses revealed four significant interactions which demonstrated that social support did act as a significant moderator of the relationship between organizational stressors and subjective performance. Contrary to the extant literature, however, the findings illustrated reverse buffering. Associations suggest that some dimensions of social support exacerbated rather than mitigated athletes’ stress reactions (i.e. impaired performance) when encountering greater frequencies of organizational stressors. Conclusion: These findings not only advance theoretical understanding of the organizational stress process, but also present a number of significant implications for athletes, coaches, and applied practitioners aiming to enhance performance in pressurized and demanding situations. Specifically, recommendations are forwarded for practitioners to address coaching stressors and provide effective social support that is matched to the stressors that he or she encounters

Introduction

This introductory chapter presents a book outline and the work of the European project SCORE! (Sustainable Consumption Research Exchange). Also covered is the process of the SCORE! project and the role of the contributors and their responsibilities

Extending the record of lacustrine phases beyond the last interglacial for Lake Eyre in central Australia using luminescence dating

We show with multiple luminescence dating techniques that the sedimentary record for Lake Eyre, Australia\u27s largest lake, extends beyond 200 thousand years (ka) to Marine Isotope Stage (MIS) 7. Transgressive clayey sand and finely laminated clays overlying the Miocene Etadunna Formation in Lake Eyre North document the deep-lake phases of central South Australia in the past. Until now, unresolved chronology has hampered our ability to interpret these sedimentary records, which are important for understanding the timing of the wettest phase of central Australia\u27s late Quaternary climate. In this study, we apply quartz optically stimulated luminescence (OSL) dating, thermally-transferred OSL (TT-OSL) dating and K-feldspar post infrared infrared stimulated luminescence (pIRIR) dating to lake-floor sediments near Williams Point in Madigan Gulf to provide new age constraint for the lacustrine sediments of Lake Eyre. Methodological studies on quartz and K-feldspar demonstrate that these luminescence dating procedures are suitable for the Lake Eyre lacustrine samples and produce consistent replicate ages. A Bayesian model applied to the new dating results provides a chronological model of lacustrine deposition and shows that the transgressive clayey sand were deposited 221 ± 19 ka to 201 ± 10 ka and that the deep-water sediments were laid down in early MIS 6 (191 ± 9 ka to 181 ± 9 ka). We also find evidence for a potential depositional hiatus in mid MIS 6 and the likely formation of a palaeo-playa later in MIS 6 from 158 ± 11 ka to 143 ± 15 ka. In contrast, the MIS 5 sediments are characterised by oscillating deep- and shallow-water lacustrine units deposited 130 ± 16 ka to 113 ± 20 ka. This study is the first of its kind to provide evidence for a wet desert interior in Australia beyond the last glacial cycle using comprehensive numerical dating. Our results show that past deep-lake episodes of central South Australia, which were previously thought to represent peak interglacial conditions, are actually associated with both warm interglacial and cold glacial periods, with all the wettest episodes generally coinciding with the intervening periods between the glacial and interglacial maximums. We assume from these results that orbital forcing is not a first order control for the long-term dynamics of the Lake Eyre basin and the Indo-Australian monsoon. The high lake-level events of Lake Eyre are well correlated with millennial-scale cooling events and stadials of the North Atlantic, and coincide with weakened episodes/events for the East Asia summer monsoon. This may imply an important role for the northern high latitudes in influencing the Indo-Australian monsoon, which may be associated with a southward migration of the Intertropical Convergence Zone (ITCZ) during cooling periods in the North Atlantic