Identification and assessment of important wetlands within the North Platte River Watershed 2009-2010

Prepared for: North Platte Basin Roundtable, Wm. Kent Crowder, Chair North Platte Basin Round Table, Barbara Vasquez, Chair Non-consumptive Needs Committee; Colorado Water Conservation Board.January 2010.Includes bibliographical references

The development of a program analysis environment for Ada

A unit level, Ada software module testing system, called Query Utility Environment for Software Testing of Ada (QUEST/Ada), is described. The project calls for the design and development of a prototype system. QUEST/Ada design began with a definition of the overall system structure and a description of component dependencies. The project team was divided into three groups to resolve the preliminary designs of the parser/scanner: the test data generator, and the test coverage analyzer. The Phase 1 report is a working document from which the system documentation will evolve. It provides history, a guide to report sections, a literature review, the definition of the system structure and high level interfaces, descriptions of the prototype scope, the three major components, and the plan for the remainder of the project. The appendices include specifications, statistics, two papers derived from the current research, a preliminary users' manual, and the proposal and work plan for Phase 2

Agro-Ecological Class Stability Decreases in Response to Climate Change Projections for the Pacific Northwest, USA

Climate change will impact bioclimatic drivers that regulate the geospatial distribution of dryland agro-ecological classes (AECs). Characterizing the geospatial relationship between present AECs and their bioclimatic controls will provide insights into potential future shifts in AECs as climate changes. The major objectives of this study are to quantify empirical relationships between bioclimatic variables and the current geospatial distribution of six dryland AECs of the inland Pacific Northwest (iPNW) of the United States; and apply bioclimatic projections from downscaled climate models to assess geospatial shifts of AECs under current production practices. Two Random Forest variable selection algorithms, VarSelRF and Boruta, were used to identify relevant bioclimatic variables. Three bioclimatic variables were identified by VarSelRF as useful for predictive Random Forest modeling of six AECs: (1) Holdridge evapotranspiration index; (2) spring precipitation (March, April, and May); and (3) precipitation of the warmest 4-month season (June, July, August, and September). Super-imposing future climate scenarios onto current agricultural production systems resulted in significant geospatial shifts in AECs. The Random Forest model projected a 58 and 63% increase in area under dynamic annual crop-fallow-transition (AC-T) and dynamic grain-fallow (GF) AECs, respectively. By contrast, a 46% decrease in area was projected for stable AC-T and dynamic annual crop (AC) AECs across all future time periods for Representative Concentration Pathway (RCP) 8.5. For the same scenarios, the stable AC and GF AECs showed the least declines in area (8 and 13%, respectively), compared to other AECs. Future spatial shifts from stable to dynamic AECs, particularly to dynamic AC-T and dynamic GF AECs would result in more use of fallow, a greater hazard for soil erosion, greater cropping system uncertainty, and potentially less cropping system flexibility. These projections are counter to cropping system goals of increasing intensification, diversification, and productivity

Human behaviour and economic growth: a psychocultural perspective on local and regional development

A renewed emphasis on behavioural traits has emerged as a means of explaining regional and local differences in economic performance and development. Given this, the aim of this study is to identify distinct local psychocultural behavioural profiles and to examine the extent to which these are associated with economic growth. Combining theories of community culture and personality psychology into a holistic spatially-oriented perspective, the paper argues that the types of human behaviour found across local places emerges from the co-evolution of cultural and personality factors. An empirical analysis of localities in Great Britain identifies and explores three underlying psychocultural profiles: Diverse Extraversion; Inclusive Amenability and Individual Commitment. It is found that inclusive amenable and individually committed psychocultural behaviour generally appear to hold back local economic growth, with the exception of recessionary periods. The reverse relationship is somewhat the case for diverse extravert behaviour. It is concluded that a better understanding of the holistic relationship and co-evolution of the cultural and psychological behavioural make-up of localities and regions has the potential to provide new insights into expected development outcomes as well as the forms of policy intervention that are required within regions and localities, each of which has its own individual psychocultural character

Communication Research

Contains reports on five research projects.Rand Corporatio

Personalisation in MOOCs: a critical literature review

The advent and rise of Massive Open Online Courses (MOOCs) have brought many issues to the area of educational technology. Researchers in the field have been addressing these issues such as pedagogical quality of MOOCs, high attrition rates, and sustainability of MOOCs. However, MOOCs personalisation has not been subject of the wide discussions around MOOCs. This paper presents a critical literature survey and analysis of the available literature on personalisation in MOOCs to identify the needs, the current states and efforts to personalise learning in MOOCs. The findings illustrate that there is a growing attention to personalisation to improve learners’ individual learning experiences in MOOCs. In order to implement personalised services, personalised learning path, personalised assessment and feedback, personalised forum thread and recommendation service for related learning materials or learning tasks are commonly applied