Quantifying fisher responses to environmental and regulatory dynamics in marine systems

Thesis (Ph.D.) University of Alaska Fairbanks, 2017Commercial fisheries are part of an inherently complicated cycle. As fishers have adopted new technologies and larger vessels to compete for resources, fisheries managers have adapted regulatory structures to sustain stocks and to mitigate unintended impacts of fishing (e.g., bycatch). Meanwhile, the ecosystems that are targeted by fishers are affected by a changing climate, which in turn forces fishers to further adapt, and subsequently, will require regulations to be updated. From the management side, one of the great limitations for understanding how changes in fishery environments or regulations impact fishers has been a lack of sufficient data for resolving their behaviors. In some fisheries, observer programs have provided sufficient data for monitoring the dynamics of fishing fleets, but these programs are expensive and often do not cover every trip or vessel. In the last two decades however, vessel monitoring systems (VMS) have begun to provide vessel location data at regular intervals such that fishing effort and behavioral decisions can be resolved across time and space for many fisheries. I demonstrate the utility of such data by examining the responses of two disparate fishing fleets to environmental and regulatory changes. This study was one of "big data" and required the development of nuanced approaches to process and model millions of records from multiple datasets. I thus present the work in three components: (1) How can we extract the information that we need? I present a detailed characterization of the types of data and an algorithm used to derive relevant behavioral aspects of fishing, like the duration and distances traveled during fishing trips; (2) How do fishers' spatial behaviors in the Bering Sea pollock fishery change in response to environmental variability; and (3) How were fisher behaviors and economic performances affected by a series of regulatory changes in the Gulf of Mexico grouper-tilefish longline fishery? I found a high degree of heterogeneity among vessel behaviors within the pollock fishery, underscoring the role that markets and processor-level decisions play in facilitating fisher responses to environmental change. In the Gulf of Mexico, my VMS-based approach estimated unobserved fishing effort with a high degree of accuracy and confirmed that the regulatory shift (e.g., the longline endorsement program and catch share program) yielded the intended impacts of reducing effort and improving both the economic performance and the overall harvest efficiency for the fleet. Overall, this work provides broadly applicable approaches for testing hypotheses regarding the dynamics of spatial behaviors in response to regulatory and environmental changes in a diversity of fisheries around the world.General introduction -- Chapter 1 Using vessel monitoring system data to identify and characterize trips made by fishing vessels in the United States North Pacific -- Chapter 2 Paths to resilience: Alaska pollock fleet uses multiple fishing strategies to buffer against environmental change in the Bering Sea -- Chapter 3 Vessel monitoring systems (VMS) reveal increased fishing efficiency following regulatory change in a bottom longline fishery -- General Conclusions

High temperature storage characteristics of lithium sulfur dioxide cells

Hermetically sealed SO2 cells were developed to eliminate SO2 diffusion and its adverse effects on shelf life. A two part barrier coating material was applied to the internal surface of the glass seal and cured under a predetermined thermal profile in order to prevent the self discharge associated with glass seal corrosion

The Expected Fitness Cost of a Mutation Fixation under the One-dimensional Fisher Model

This paper employs Fisher’s model of adaptation to understand the expected fitness effect of fixing a mutation in a natural population. Fisher’s model in one dimension admits a closed form solution for this expected fitness effect. A combination of different parameters, including the distribution of mutation lengths, population sizes, and the initial state that the population is in, are examined to see how they affect the expected fitness effect of state transitions. The results show that the expected fitness change due to the fixation of a mutation is always positive, regardless of the distributional shapes of mutation lengths, effective population sizes, and the initial state that the population is in. The further away the initial state of a population is from the optimal state, the slower the population returns to the optimal state. Effective population size (except when very small) has little effect on the expected fitness change due to mutation fixation. The always positive expected fitness change suggests that small populations may not necessarily be doomed due to the runaway process of fixation of deleterious mutations

Coulomb gauge confinement in the heavy quark limit

The relationship between the nonperturbative Green's functions of Yang-Mills theory and the confinement potential is investigated. By rewriting the generating functional of quantum chromodynamics in terms of a heavy quark mass expansion in Coulomb gauge, restricting to leading order in this expansion and considering only the two-point functions of the Yang-Mills sector, the rainbow-ladder approximation to the gap and Bethe-Salpeter equations is shown to be exact in this case and an analytic, nonperturbative solution is presented. It is found that there is a direct connection between the string tension and the temporal gluon propagator. Further, it is shown that for the 4-point quark correlation functions, only confined bound states of color-singlet quark-antiquark (meson) and quark-quark (baryon) pairs exist.Comment: 22 pages, 6 figure

Physiotherapists’ perceptions of problematic musculoskeletal soft tissue disorders

Original article can be found at: http://www.ijtr.co.uk/ Copyright MA Healthcare Limited.Aims: Many common musculoskeletal disorders are resistant to existing management strategies,causing long-term pain and disability. While arthritic and spinal problems have been prioritized for research, several soft tissue disorders may be equally burdensome for individuals and difficult to treat successfully. dentifying those that are least responsive to reatment may help focus the limited resources available for research and treatment provision. This study aimed to rank the most problematic disorders, and identify contributory factors, to inform the debate on research and service priorities in the management of musculoskeletal disorders. Methods: The views of practising physiotherapists on the most problematic soft tissue disorders were sought using a postal questionnaire survey and telephone interviews. The questionnaire was sent to 193 experienced musculoskeletal physiotherapists working in National Health Service and private clinics in south-east England. Findings: The response rate was 48%. The top three problematic disorders were identifi ed as frozen shoulder, plantar fasciitis and tennis elbow. Subsequent interviews with 20 respondents indicated that inadequate differential diagnosis, triaging and differences in therapeutic practice may account for some of the observed variation in outcomes. Conclusions: A greater focus on these particular disorders and issues by both clinicians and the research community is warranted.Peer reviewe

Moduli Stabilization with the String Higgs Effect

We review the notion of the Higgs effect in the context of string theory. We find that by including this effect in time dependent backgrounds, one is led to a natural mechanism for stabilizing moduli at points of enhanced gauge symmetry. We consider this mechanism for the case of the radion (size of the extra dimensions) and find that as decompactification of the large spatial dimensions takes place the radion will remain stabilized at the self dual radius. We discuss how this mechanism can be incorporated into models of string cosmology and brane inflation to resolve some outstanding problems. We also address some issues regarding which string states should be included when constructing low energy actions in string cosmology.Comment: 20 pages, references added, typos correcte

Preparing Tomorrow\u27s Classroom Leaders: Challenges for Christian Higher Education

Christian college teacher education program faculties face the challenge of employing a Christian epistemology that includes a pedagogy that embraces today’s learners. The authors seek to communicate the foundations of modernism and postmodernism and their impact on the epistemology and pedagogies employed in university classrooms. How the postmodern thinking claims have influenced the lives of Christian students will also be examined. The paper concludes with a discussion of the challenges for Christian teacher education faculties

How to Measure Group Selection in Real-world Populations

Multilevel selection and the evolution of cooperation are fundamental to the formation of higher-level organisation and the evolution of biocomplexity, but such notions are controversial and poorly understood in natural populations. The theoretic principles of group selection are well developed in idealised models where a population is neatly divided into multiple semi-isolated sub-populations. But since such models can be explained by individual selection given the localised frequency-dependent effects involved, some argue that the group selection concepts offered are, even in the idealised case, redundant and that in natural conditions where groups are not well-defined that a group selection framework is entirely inapplicable. This does not necessarily mean, however, that a natural population is not subject to some interesting localised frequency-dependent effects – but how could we formally quantify this under realistic conditions? Here we focus on the presence of a Simpson’s Paradox where, although the local proportion of cooperators decreases at all locations, the global proportion of cooperators increases. We illustrate this principle in a simple individual-based model of bacterial biofilm growth and discuss various complicating factors in moving from theory to practice of measuring group selection

Geologic application of thermal-inertia mapping from satellite

The author has identified the following significant results. Two night-time thermal images of the Powder River Basin, Wyoming distinctly show a major thermal feature. This feature is substantially coincident with a drainage divide and the southward facing slope appears cooler, suggesting a lower thermal inertia. An initial examination of regional geologic maps provides no clear evidence to suggest what type of geologic feature or structure may be present, although it can be noted that its northeastern end passes directly through Lead, South Dakota where the Homestake Gold Mine is located