Best Practices in Healthy Homes and Rural Rehab

Recognizing the importance of rehab work for housing preservation, and the difficulty of running a sustainable rehab line of business, in 2015 the Rural Initiative prioritized an inquiry into the rural rehab line of business. A cross section of experts were gathered from the NeighborWorks network to form a year-long Rural Rehab Task Force to provide recommendations on how NeighborWorks can better support rehab in training, technical assistance, and resource allocation, and to share best practices by producing model business plans demonstrating different ways to structure sustainable rehab programs

Restaurants of Arkadelphia

This assigned Special Studies project was to make a survey of the restaurants and eating establishments of Arkadelphia. This survey and report are to be compiled with other surveys and reports of various areas in a business directory of Arkadelphia. The purpose of this business directory, it was my understanding, was not only to give its readers ready reference to these organizations but also to give the student making the survey a first hand knowledge of these organizations. This survey has well served its purpose of giving the student, in this case, me, a working knowledge of the restaurants or eating establishments. I learned not only the construction of these restaurants as to management but also I learned just how difficult some people can be. I had learned this fact the previous semester while doing my research on corporations, but I had forgotten to some extent. However, my memory was vividly refreshed while conducting this survey. In summary, you can easily boil the purpose of this paper down to four items: 1. To compile a business directory of Arkadelphia, Arkansas. 2. To give the readers of this directory a quick guide to the organizations listed in it. 3. To give the student doing the research a fundamental knowledge of the construction and form of these organizations. 4. To learn to cope with people in business--all types of people

Rangia as Potential Indicators of Bay Health

Galveston Bay is an economically and ecologically important estuarine system on the Texas Coast sourced by freshwater inflows from an increasingly urbanized watershed. To regulate these flows, a baseline of ecological demands is established by monitoring biological response of estuarine organisms to changes in flows. Rangia clams have been identified as potential bioindicators for bay health. Historic rangia abundance and distribution data collected by TPWD and TCEQ showed that rangia were found in the greatest numbers in Trinity Bay and a decline in the overall population of Galveston Bay rangia throughout the past three decades. Though t-tests conducted on historical data showed that gear-related size exclusion significantly biased rangia CPUE and shell length data, smaller CPUE numbers in recent years compared to the rest of the historical record were supportive a genuine decline in rangia. After three years of present-day study (2012-2014), there was an observed increase in mean rangia shell length and decreases in mean meat index and areal density with a mean clam density of 25.3 (± 16.1) m^-2 in the Trinity River Delta and 22.5 (± 16.8) m^-2 in the Bay. Low mean monthly river discharges from the Trinity River during the study period complicated by drought and land use changes likely altered conditions which rangia require to for the survival of larvae and the initiation of spawning. These results also support the hypothesis that the low rangia densities found during the present-day study in Galveston Bay may be tied to the effects of drought conditions. PERMANOVA Main tests validated the comparability of the small-scale experimental design to long-term monitoring of bay wide sites by identifying significant variation in rangia abundance and health at different spatiotemporal levels. Multivariate analyses of clam health metrics and environmental parameters support a link between rangia health and variables influenced by freshwater inflow (salinity, DO, river discharge, dissolved nutrients) and explained one third of the variance in clam health metrics. Variables independent of FWI influence (temperature, water depth) were also related to clam health which further suggests that stressors unrelated to flows are compounding the effects of limited FWI on rangia