A cognitive approach to the post-Soviet Central Asian pasture puzzle: new data from Kyrgyzstan

Regional Environmental Change - Despite internationally recognized definitions, there remains debate over what constitutes ‘actual’ degradation in various agro-pastoral contexts. This...     

ASSESSMENT USING GIS AND SEDIMENT ROUTING OF THE PROPOSED REMOVAL OF BALLVILLE DAM,SANDUSKY RIVER,OHIO1

ABSTRACT: The proposed removal of Ballville Dam was assessed by (1) using a new Geographic Information Systems (GIS) based method for calculating reservoir sediment storage, (2) evaluating sediment properties and contamination from core data, and (3) assessing downstream impacts from sediment routing calculations. A 1903 (pre‐dam) map was manipulated using GIS to recreate the reservoir bathymetry at time of dam construction and used in combination with a detailed 1993 bathymetric survey to calculate sediment volumes and thickness. Reservoir sediment properties and geochemistry were determined from 14 sediment vibracores. Annual sedimentation rates varied from 1.7 to 4.3 g/cm²/yr based on Cesium‐137 (¹³⁷Cs) and Lead‐210 (²¹⁰Pb) geochronology and dated flood layers. The pore fluid geochemistry (Ba, Co, Cu, Mn) of four cores showed surficial enrichments in Cu, while Co and Mn show secondary peaks within the sediments. GIS calculations showed that a designed channel through the former reservoir able to accommodate the 10 percent Probable Maximum Flood (PMF) would require removing approximately 0.35 million m³ of sediment (27 percent of the reservoir fill), either by dredging at a cost of up to $6.3 million or by releasing fine grained sediment downstream. A sediment routing model was applied for the critical 6 km downstream using four cross sections. The sediment routing model predicts that, for flows exceeding minimum Mean Daily Flow (1924 to 1998 data), greater than 90 percent of this sediment would be transported through downstream reaches into Lake Erie (Sandusky Bay).     

Adaptive response criteria in road hazard detection among older drivers

Objectives: The majority of existing investigations on attention, aging, and driving have focused on the negative impacts of age-related declines in attention on hazard detection and driver performance. However, driving skills and behavioral compensation may accommodate for the negative effects that age-related attentional decline places on driving performance. In this study, we examined an important question that had been largely neglected in the literature linking attention, aging, and driving: can top-down factors such as behavioral compensation, specifically adaptive response criteria, accommodate the negative impacts from age-related attention declines on hazard detection during driving?

Methods: In the experiment, we used the Drive Aware Task, a task combining the driving context with well-controlled laboratory procedures measuring attention. We compared younger (n = 16, age 21–30) and older (n = 21, age 65–79) drivers on their attentional processing of hazards in driving scenes, indexed by percentage of correct responses and reaction time of hazard detection, as well as sensitivity and response criteria using signal detection analysis.

Results: Older drivers, in general, were less accurate and slower on the task than younger drivers. However, results from this experiment revealed that older, but not younger, drivers adapted their response criteria when the traffic condition changed in the driving scenes. When there was more traffic in the driving scene, older drivers became more liberal in their responses, meaning that they were more likely to report that a driving hazard was detected.

Conclusions: Older drivers adopt compensatory strategies for hazard detection during driving. Our findings showed that, in the driving context, even at an older age our attentional functions are still adaptive according to environmental conditions. This leads to considerations on potential training methods to promote adaptive strategies that may help older drivers maintain performance in road hazard detection.     

Generating sustainable towns from Chinese villages: a system modeling approach

The great majority of China's developing towns will be extensions of already existing villages. With the prospect of hundreds of millions of Chinese farmers projected to leave their villages to become industrial workers in new and expanded towns within the next few years, new challenges will be faced. As expansion and modernization progress, this development moves from the traditional village model that operates not far from resource sustainability to increasingly unsustainable patterns of commerce, urban development, and modern life. With such an unprecedented mass migration and transformation, how can Chinese culture survive? What is to become of the existing million plus agricultural villages? How can these massively unsustainable new industrial towns survive? In the European Commission sponsored research program SUCCESS, researchers worked from the scale of the Chinese village to find viable answers to these questions.     

A mechanism of injury to the forefoot in car crashes

OBJECTIVE: The purpose of this study was to determine a mechanism of injury of the forefoot due to impact loads and accelerations as noted in some frontal offset car crashes. METHODS: The impact tests conducted simulated knee-leg-foot entrapment, floor pan intrusions, whole-body deceleration, muscle tension, and foot/pedal interaction. Specimens were impacted at speeds of up to 16 m/s. To verify this injury mechanism research was conducted in an effort to produce Lisfranc type injuries and metatarsal fractures. A total of 54 lower legs of post-mortem human subjects were tested. Two possible mechanisms of injury were investigated. For the first mechanism the driver was assumed to be braking hard with the foot on the brake pedal and at 0 deg plantar flexion (Plantar Nominal Configuration) and the brake pedal was in contact with the foot behind the ball of the foot. The second mechanism was studied by having the ball of the foot either on the brake pedal or on the floorboard with the foot plantar-flexed 35 to 50 deg (Plantar Flexed Configuration). RESULTS: The Plantar Nominal injury mechanism yielded few injuries of the type the study set out to produce. Out of 13 specimens tested at speeds of 16 m/s, three had injuries of the metatarsal (MT) and tarsometatarsal joints. The Plantar Flexed Configuration injury mechanism yielded 65% injuries at high (12.5-16 m/s) and moderate (6-12 m/s) speeds. CONCLUSION: It is concluded that Lisfranc type foot injuries are the result of impacting the forefoot in the Plantar Flexed Configuration. The injuries were consistent with those reported by physicians treating accident victims and were verified by an orthopedic surgeon during post impact x-ray and autopsy. They included Lisfranc fractures, ligamentous disruptions, and metatarsal fractures.     

Sea otters,social justice,and ecosystem‐service perceptions in Clayoquot Sound,Canada

We sought to take a first step toward better integration of social concerns into empirical ecosystem service (ES) work. We did this by adapting cognitive anthropological techniques to study the Clayoquot Sound social‐ecological system on the Pacific coast of Canada's Vancouver Island. We used freelisting and ranking exercises to elicit how locals perceive ESs and to determine locals’ preferred food species. We analyzed these data with the freelist‐analysis software package ANTHROPAC. We considered the results in light of an ongoing trophic cascade caused by the government reintroduction of sea otters (Enhydra lutris) and their spread along the island's Pacific coast. We interviewed 67 local residents (n = 29 females, n = 38 males; n = 26 self‐identified First Nation individuals, and n = 41 non‐First Nation individuals) and 4 government managers responsible for conservation policy in the region. We found that the mental categories participants—including trained ecologists—used to think about ESs, did not match the standard academic ES typology. With reference to the latest ecological model projections for the region, we found that First Nations individuals and women were most likely to perceive the most immediate ES losses from the trophic cascade, with the most certainty. The inverse was found for men and non‐First Nations individuals, generally. This suggests that 2 historically disadvantaged groups (i.e., First Nations and women) are poised to experience the immediate impacts of the government‐initiated trophic cascade as yet another social injustice in a long line of perceived inequities. Left unaddressed, this could complicate efforts at multistakeholder ecosystem management in the region.     

The development and unraveling of marine resource co-management in the Pemba Channel,Zanzibar: institutions,governance, and the politics of scale

Marine resource management programs face conflicting mandates: to scale-up marine conservation efforts to cover larger areas and meet national and international conservation targets, while simultaneously to downscale and decentralize management authority to resource users and local communities. These conflicting goals create tensions in marine resource management. This paper explores these tensions by presenting and evaluating the outcomes of a fisheries co-management program on the island of Pemba, Tanzania, where institutions and scale were configured and reconfigured under externally funded programs to improve marine conservation through co-management. The initial institutional arrangements for co-management supported a functioning system to protect marine resources, ensure fishermen’s access, and distribute tourism revenues. However, a subsequent push to scale-up marine management reconfigured institutional arrangements and power in a more hierarchical and potentially weaker system. With the expansion of the co-management program, protected area coverage, financial resources, and the number of community organizations created for fisheries co-management expanded tremendously; however, community participation in marine management decreased, and the fishermen’s association previously involved in co-management dissolved. Several factors contributed to this outcome: inadequate time to solidify co-management institutions and arrangements, diverse resource users inexperienced with local management, a sudden and substantial new source of funding, and political pressures to restructure marine management. Rather than focusing primarily on expanding coverage and devolving authority, it is important to adapt co-management arrangements to the local contexts in which they operate.