Mapping prairie remnants on the Hempstead Plains,Long Island,New York

The Hempstead Plains, located in Nassau County, New York, contains remnants of the only naturally occurring prairie east of the Appalachian Mountains. It originally encompassed approximately 12,500 ha. Although the area receives higher amounts of rainfall for a typical tall-grass prairie ecosystem, approximately 114 cm of precipitation per year, its well-drained, dark-colored soil sited above glacial outwash, available natural seed bank, and history of fires enabled development of a tall-grass prairie. This study identified prairie remnants within the historical extent of the Hempstead Plains delineated by the 1928 soil survey from the United States Department of Agriculture. Image analysis of infrared color 8-bit orthophotographs was used for an unsupervised classification on a 156-ha primary study area containing a known prairie remnant, centered on the Red Golf Course at Eisenhower Park in East Meadow. The resulting 16 classes were combined into six more general classes before undergoing an error assessment based on field and orthoimagery ground-truthing of 1,000 random points. As confirmed by site visits, analysis was generally able to distinguish prairie grass from non-native grasses using remote sensing, as native warm-season prairie grasses are dormant from late fall to early spring. Overall accuracy for the six classes was 89 %. Accuracy of the warm-season grass class was 81 % for producer’s accuracy and 83 % for user’s accuracy. This study identified additional sites containing warm-season grasses and potential prairie remnants in Nassau County.     

Population,environment, and development

The strategies for reducing population growth include social development and improvement in the educational attainment of women. The decline in Kenya's growth rate was attributed to high female literacy and reduced infant mortality. Another strategy for enhancing fertility decline is to reduce child mortality, particularly from preventable causes such as diarrhea. The entire cost of such a strategy to reduce preventable disease would be about $1.33 per 300 million taxpayers in developed countries. Family planning services must be expanded. Prevention of maternal mortality and AIDS would bring major benefits. Strategies for environmental protection emphasized the already existing plan of action set out in the UNCED document Agenda 21 in Rio de Janeiro. The plan has suffered from inaction. The estimated cost of $625 million was considered to be several times smaller than the costs of inaction. The elimination of subsidies in tropical forests would have an immediate impact. Natural resource accounting at the national level would include the value of natural resources. Pricing would change radically for gasoline if the costs of urban smog, acid rain, low-level ozone pollution, and global warming were taken into account. Strategies for sustainable development pertained to the preceding strategies and others indicated in the Agenda 21 Action Plan. If funding were better targeted to the poorest 20% of global population with high fertility rates, the accomplishments would be heralded. 1.2 million are living in absolute poverty, and aid for nutrition, primary health care, water and sanitation, basic education, and family planning amounts to only 10% of expenditures. An increase to 20% would mean a contribution from Americans of $7.50 per person or 33% of $25 thousand million from all developed countries. Developing countries need to lower their military expenditures, privatize public enterprises, change inappropriate development policies, eliminate corruption, and improve national governance. The debt burden should be reduced.     

Early reproductive success of western bluebirds and ash-throated flycatchers: a landscape-contaminant perspective

Eggshell quality, clutch size, sex ratio, and hatching success of western bluebirds (Sialia mexicana) and ash-throated flycatchers (Myiarchus cinerascens) were studied on a landscape-soil contaminant gradient at Los Alamos National Laboratory (LANL) in New Mexico from 1997 to 1999. A variety of contaminants (heavy metals, chemicals, insecticides, polychlorinated biphenyls (PCBs), organochlorines, and radioactive isotopes) range across different spatial scales and concentrations on LANL land. This study is an example of a monitoring program over a large area with varying degree of contamination that is used to highlight locations of concern for future research. There were two locations where the flycatcher had a lower hatching success. The bluebirds at Sandia wetland, a location of concern for PCBs. had a thinner eggshell thickness index (RATCLIFFE) and the eggs were smaller than at other locations. The flycatcher had thinner eggshells than bluebirds, which could add to sensitivity to exposure to contaminants. There was no variation in clutch size or sex ratio between locations or areas closer to contaminant release sites for both species. Percent females in the clutch ranged from 0 to 100% in the WEBL and from 33 to 67% for ATFL.     

Improving Objectives for Cleanup Sites

In 1976, the discovery of the Love Canal Superfund Site in New York thrust environmental cleanups into the forefront of the national conscience and essentially launched the remediation industry. Since then, vast efforts have been devoted to improving site remediation. Despite the attention given to key subject areas, such as site characterization, risk assessment, and remediation technologies, relatively little attention has been given to the objectives set forth for conducting cleanups, and they have generally not been rigorously evaluated in the literature. Several of the more common objectives for remediation projects are discussed. © 2014 Wiley Periodicals, Inc.     

The reuse of reclaimed water for irrigation around the Mediterranean Rim: a step towards a more virtuous cycle?

Regional Environmental Change - Climate change and a growing population around the Mediterranean Rim are increasing the need for water and, consequently, the pressure on resources in terms of both...     

Organisational socialisation in a crisis context

The objective of this paper is to highlight the dimensions characterising the socialisation process in a crisis context. Based on the definition of organisational socialisation advanced by Van Maanen and Schein (1979) and employed later by Jones (1986), a crisis is presented as a passage from a ‘normal’ situation to an ‘exceptional’ situation. A crisis represents a socialisation context in the sense that it is a novel state in which actors must develop a different way of mobilising their knowledge, utilising their skills, and practicing their trade or profession. The paper discusses certain findings that have emerged from the literature on organisational socialisation, as well as from the testimony of actors who participated in efforts to manage the Quebec ice‐storm crisis of early 1998. It is hoped that this exploratory study's data will give rise to fruitful interaction between the field of organisational socialisation and that of crisis management.     

Modelling pesticide volatilization after soil application using the mechanistic model Volt'Air

Volatilization of pesticides participates in atmospheric contamination and affects environmental ecosystems including human welfare. Modelling at relevant time and spatial scales is needed to better understand the complex processes involved in pesticide volatilization. Volt'Air-Pesticides has been developed following a two-step procedure to study pesticide volatilization at the field scale and at a quarter time step. Firstly, Volt'Air-NH₃ was adapted by extending the initial transfer of solutes to pesticides and by adding specific calculations for physico-chemical equilibriums as well as for the degradation of pesticides in soil. Secondly, the model was evaluated in terms of 3 pesticides applied on bare soil (atrazine, alachlor, and trifluralin) which display a wide range of volatilization rates. A sensitivity analysis confirmed the relevance of tuning to K_h. Then, using Volt'Air-Pesticides, environmental conditions and emission fluxes of the pesticides were compared to fluxes measured under 2 environmental conditions. The model fairly well described water temporal dynamics, soil surface temperature, and energy budget. Overall, Volt'Air-Pesticides estimates of the order of magnitude of the volatilization flux of all three compounds were in good agreement with the field measurements. The model also satisfactorily simulated the decrease in the volatilization rate of the three pesticides during night-time as well as the decrease in the soil surface residue of trifluralin before and after incorporation. However, the timing of the maximum flux rate during the day was not correctly described, thought to be linked to an increased adsorption under dry soil conditions. Thanks to Volt'Air's capacity to deal with pedo-climatic conditions, several existing parameterizations describing adsorption as a function of soil water content could be tested. However, this point requires further investigation. Practically speaking, Volt'Air-Pesticides can be a useful tool to make decision about agricultural practices such as incorporation or for the estimation of overall pesticide volatilization rates, and it holds promise for time specific dynamics.