Spatio-temporal Movement Patterns of Sub-adult Adfluvial Bull Trout

Bull Trout in the Yakima River basin of Washington are primarily adfluvial, often using managed lakes as habitat. Kachess Lake, composed of Big and Little Kachess Lakes, is managed by the Bureau of Reclamation (BOR) for water storage. BOR plans to build a structure that can withdraw an additional 200,000 acre-feet of water in drought years, which would disconnect the two basins for multiple years. This study examined the spatio-temporal movement of sub-adult Bull Trout in Kachess Lake to understand distribution patterns and the effects of environmental variables. We sought to answer 1) does time (week of the year), diel period, water surface elevation, precipitation, or surface temperature explain fish depth? and 2) Where are the home ranges and core use areas of individual fish? Yakama Nation biologists rescued Bull Trout fry from Kachess River, a tributary of Little Kachess that dewaters yearly, and reared them in captivity for about twelve months. Once fish attained a suitable weight, a subset were surgically implanted with Vemco V9 temperature pressure sensor tags. Then fish were transported and released into Kachess Lake, where a passive array of thirteen acoustic receivers were set. Eight fish had at least 500 detections and were detected 30+ days in the lake, fitting the criteria for analysis. A generalized linear mixed-model was used to model depth distribution and home ranges were calculated using Autocorrelated Kernel Density Estimation (AKDE). Results showed depth increases with higher surface temperature, and during the day. Fish depth was greatest during weeks in late Summer and Fall. Home range estimates were variable among individuals with a maximum 95% AKDE of 18.4 km² and a minimum of 1.69 km². Understanding the distribution of different life stages of Bull Trout allows managers to make conservation-driven decisions in the face of climate change and over-obligated water resources

Sequence Mining and Pattern Analysis in Drilling Reports with Deep Natural Language Processing

Drilling activities in the oil and gas industry have been reported over decades for thousands of wells on a daily basis, yet the analysis of this text at large-scale for information retrieval, sequence mining, and pattern analysis is very challenging. Drilling reports contain interpretations written by drillers from noting measurements in downhole sensors and surface equipment, and can be used for operation optimization and accident mitigation. In this initial work, a methodology is proposed for automatic classification of sentences written in drilling reports into three relevant labels (EVENT, SYMPTOM and ACTION) for hundreds of wells in an actual field. Some of the main challenges in the text corpus were overcome, which include the high frequency of technical symbols, mistyping/abbreviation of technical terms, and the presence of incomplete sentences in the drilling reports. We obtain state-of-the-art classification accuracy within this technical language and illustrate advanced queries enabled by the tool.Comment: 7 pages, 14 figures, technical repor

Service as a Strategy: Post Conflict Reconstruction

Youth service is a strategy whose promise is demonstrated in programs throughout the world, addressing unemployment, promoting democracy, or strengthening bonds within and between communities. In post-conflict settings, where many youth and their communities face a loss of social and human capital, sporadic violence, inter-group hostility, and shattered infrastructure, well-designed and context-sensitive youth service programs have enormous potential to mitigate these impacts. Service as a Strategy presents the latest research on post-conflict youth programs alongside case studies from around the world and from a variety of different kinds of conflicts. These case studies present different ways civic service programs help to deal with the results of conflict, as well as to prevent future conflicts, from re-integrating child soldiers in Sierra Leone to meeting educational needs in rural Cambodia to fighting unemployment in Bosnia. Youth are often disproportionately affected by conflict, losing opportunities in education and vocational training, suffering high levels of unemployment, and being disenfranchised from civil and political life. Service as a Strategy proposes that actively involving youth does more than just meet the needs of young adults -- it can strengthen the whole community

The effects of insects, nutrients, and plant invasion on community structure and function above- and belowground

Soil nutrient availability, invasive plants, and insect presence can directly alter ecosystem structure and function, but less is known about how these factors may interact. In this 6-year study in an old-field ecosystem, we manipulated insect abundance (reduced and control), the propagule pressure of an invasive nitrogen-fixing plant (propagules added and control), and soil nutrient availability (nitrogen added, nitrogen reduced and control) in a fully crossed, completely randomized plot design. We found that nutrient amendment and, occasionally, insect abundance interacted with the propagule pressure of an invasive plant to alter above-and belowground structure and function at our site. Not surprisingly, nutrient amendment had a direct effect on aboveground biomass and soil nutrient mineralization. The introduction of invasive nitrogen-fixing plant propagules interacted with nutrient amendment and insect presence to alter soil bacterial abundance and the activity of the microbial community. While the larger-scale, longer-term bulk measurements such as biomass production and nutrient mineralization responded to the direct effects of our treatments, the shorter-term and dynamic microbial communities tended to respond to interactions among our treatments. Our results indicate that soil nutrients, invasive plants, and insect herbivores determine both above-and belowground responses, but whether such effects are independent versus interdependent varies with scale

Decomposition by ectomycorrhizal fungi alters soil carbon storage in a simulation model

Carbon cycle models often lack explicit belowground organism activity, yet belowground organisms regulate carbon storage and release in soil. Ectomycorrhizal fungi are important players in the carbon cycle because they are a conduit into soil for carbon assimilated by the plant. It is hypothesized that ectomycorrhizal fungi can also be active decomposers when plant carbon allocation to fungi is low. Here, we reviewed the literature on ectomycorrhizal decomposition and we developed a simulation model of the plant-mycorrhizae interaction where a reduction in plant productivity stimulates ectomycorrhizal fungi to decompose soil organic matter. Our review highlights evidence demonstrating the potential for ectomycorrhizal fungi to decompose soil organic matter. Our model output suggests that ectomycorrhizal activity accounts for a portion of carbon decomposed in soil, but this portion varied with plant productivity and the mycorrhizal carbon uptake strategy simulated. Lower organic matter inputs to soil were largely responsible for reduced soil carbon storage. Using mathematical theory, we demonstrated that biotic interactions affect predictions of ecosystem functions. Specifically, we developed a simple function to model the mycorrhizal switch in function from plant symbiont to decomposer. We show that including mycorrhizal fungi with the flexibility of mutualistic and saprotrophic lifestyles alters predictions of ecosystem function