Local capacity for integrated forest and wildfire management

28 pagesThe purpose of this document is to examine how some organizations have developed local, cross-trained workforces to address wildfire risks alongside intensifying wildfire management needs. We conducted case studies of four organizations in the western United States that have found ways to successfully navigate the challenges of developing and maintaining local capacity for forest restoration and fuels work.This document is supported by Promoting Ecosystem Resilience and Fire Adapted Communities Together, a cooperative agreement between The Nature Conservancy, USDA Forest Service and agencies of the Department of the Interior—Bureau of Indian Affairs, Bureau of Land Management, National Park Service and U.S. Fish & Wildlife Service—through a subaward to the Watershed Research and Training Center. This document is also supported by the Joint Fire Science Program through the Northwest Fire Science Consortium

The State of the Dry Forest Zone and its Communities

94 p.The Dry Forest Zone is a region of eastern Oregon and northern California with challenging market conditions and high levels of poverty and unemployment. However, local entrepreneurship, collaboration, and commitment to integrated economic development and natural resource management in the zone are strong. In the past decade, the scope of community-based nonprofits, integrated biomass utilization businesses, and new networks has increased, fostering sustainable forest stewardship at an increasingly regional scale. The geography and climate of the zone support dry forests of pine and mixed conifer with fire regimes that are departed from their historical range of variability. These forests are prone to wildfire hazards and in need of active management to restore more diverse and variable-aged structures. As 68 percent of the land in the zone is public, the communities of this region rely on the economic and ecological productivity of these federal forests. The number of sawmills that once provided high levels of primary processing capacity and employment has shrunk to nine mills in the zone. More forest-related employment is now forestry support work, including activities such as firefighting, pest control, and thinning. Poverty and unemployment have increased, with estimated poverty levels in 2007 of over 15 percent in ten of the fifteen counties. Through the Dry Forest Zone project, we have an opportunity to build on the local strengths of this region and overcome these ecological and socioeconomic challenges.Financial support was provided the U.S. Endowment for Forestry and Communities, USDA Rural Development, and the Ford Foundation

Search for Scalar Diphoton Resonances in the Mass Range 65−60065-600 GeV with the ATLAS Detector in pppp Collision Data at s\sqrt{s} = 8 TeVTeV

A search for scalar particles decaying via narrow resonances into two photons in the mass range 65–600 GeV is performed using $20.3\text{}\text{}{\mathrm{fb}}^{-1}$ of $\sqrt{s}=8\text{}\text{}\mathrm{TeV}$ $pp$ collision data collected with the ATLAS detector at the Large Hadron Collider. The recently discovered Higgs boson is treated as a background. No significant evidence for an additional signal is observed. The results are presented as limits at the 95% confidence level on the production cross section of a scalar boson times branching ratio into two photons, in a fiducial volume where the reconstruction efficiency is approximately independent of the event topology. The upper limits set extend over a considerably wider mass range than previous searches

Finska tingsdomares bedömningar av partsutlåtanden givna på plats i rätten eller via videokonferens

Professionals within the judicial system sometimes believe they can assess whether someone is lying or not based on cues such as body language and emotional expression. Research has, however, shown that this is impossible. The Finnish Supreme Court has also given rulings in accordance with this demonstrated fact. There has also been previous research on whether party or witness statements are assessed differently in court depending on whether they are given live, via videoconference, or via prerecorded video. In the present study, we investigated how a Finnish sample of district judges (N=47) assigned probative value to different variables concerning the statement or the statement giver, such as body language and emotional expression. We also investigated the connection between the judges’ beliefs about the relevance of body language and emotional expression and their preference for live statements or statements via videoconference. The judges reported assigning equal amounts of probative value to statements given live and statements given via videoconference. However, judges found it easier to detect deception live, and this preference correlated with how relevant they thought body language is when assessing the probative value of the statement. In other words, a slight bias to assess live statements more favorably than statements given via videoconference might still exist. More effort needs to be put into making judges and Supreme Courts aware of robust scientific results that have been the subject of decades of research, such as the fact that one cannot assess whether someone is lying or not based on cues such as body language

Measurement of differential J/ψJ/\psi production cross-sections and forward-backward ratio in p+Pb collisions with the ATLAS detector

Measurements of differential cross-sections for $J/\psi$ production in p+Pb collisions at $\sqrt{s_{NN}}$ = 5.02 TeV at the LHC with the ATLAS detector are presented. The data set used corresponds to an integrated luminosity of 28.1 nb$^{-1}$. The $J/\psi$ mesons are reconstructed in the dimuon decay channel over the transverse momentum range $8<p_{\mathrm{T}}<30$ GeV and over the center-of-mass rapidity range $-2.87<y^{*}<1.94$. Prompt $J/\psi$ are separated from $J/\psi$ resulting from $b$-hadron decays through an analysis of the distance between the $J/\psi$ decay vertex and the event primary vertex. The differential cross-section for production of nonprompt $J/\psi$ is compared to a FONLL calculation that does not include nuclear effects. Forward-backward production ratios are presented and compared to theoretical predictions. These results constrain the kinematic dependence of nuclear modifications of charmonium and $b$-quark production in p+Pb collisions