Tracking acid mine-drainage in Southeast Arizona using GIS and sediment delivery models

This study investigates the application of models traditionally used to estimate erosion and sediment deposition to assess the potential risk of water quality impairment resulting from metal-bearing materials related to mining and mineralization. An integrated watershed analysis using Geographic Information Systems (GIS) based tools was undertaken to examine erosion and sediment transport characteristics within the watersheds. Estimates of stream deposits of sediment from mine tailings were related to the chemistry of surface water to assess the effectiveness of the methodology to assess the risk of acid mine-drainage being dispersed downstream of abandoned tailings and waste rock piles. A watershed analysis was preformed in the Patagonia Mountains in southeastern Arizona which has seen substantial mining and where recent water quality samples have reported acidic surface waters. This research demonstrates an improvement of the ability to predict streams that are likely to have severely degraded water quality as a result of past mining activities.     

Conservation Biology Trailblazers: George Wright, Ben Thompson, and Joseph Dixon

Abstract: Modern conservation biologists may reap great insight from neglected documents prepared by field biologists of the past. Three U.S. National Park Service field biologists of the 1920s and 1930s, George Wright, Ben Thompson, and Joseph Dixon, collaborated on the first field faunal survey of U.S. national parks. The results, Fauna 1 and Fauna 2 , were published in 1933 and 1935, respectively. In addition to information about the status of park vertebrates, these monographs produced the first comprehensive list of ecologically based policies for the U.S. National Park System. They also contained precursors of many of the ideas now considered basic to conservation biology. Today's conservation biologists seem unaware of the work of these three researchers. Contemporary biologists tend to think of the key concepts in conservation biology as having developed after the 1970s, but Wright, Thompson, and Dixon expressed in rough form many of these concepts half a century before. They combined their ideas with those of their predecessors and mentors to produce an unprecedented, easy-to-understand guide on managing the biotic resources of the national parks. Despite the efforts of these pioneers, their guidance did not contribute to a significant reshaping of park management practice for at least three decades.     

The Application of IUCN Red List Criteria at Regional Levels

This paper represents a work in progress by the World Conservation Union (IUCN). Earlier drafts of the work have appeared in IUCN publications, but the "International Issues" section of Conservation Biology seems an appropriate and important place to publish the penultimate version of the document. Comments on this issue in general or on the approach taken by the IUCN should be sent to the authors directly.
Joshua Ginsburg     

Multi-decadal Changes in Tundra Environments and Ecosystems: The International Polar Year-Back to the Future Project (IPY-BTF)

Polar and alpine environments are changing rapidly due to increases in temperature, which are amplified in the Arctic, as well as changes in many local factors. The impacts on ecosystems and their function have potential consequences for local residents and the global community. Tundra areas are vast and diverse, and the knowledge of geographical variation in environmental and ecosystem change is limited to relatively few locations, or to remote sensing approaches that are limited mostly to the past few decades. The International Polar Year, IPY, provided a context, stimulus and timely opportunities for re-visiting old research sites and data sets to collate data on past changes, to pass knowledge from old to new generations of researchers and to document environmental characteristics of sites to facilitate detection and attribution of future changes. Consequently, the project “Retrospective and Prospective Vegetation Change in the Polar Regions: Back to the Future,” BTF, was proposed and endorsed as an IPY activity (project #512). With national funding support, teams of researchers re-visited former sites and data sets throughout the Arctic and some alpine regions. These efforts have amounted to a gamut of “BTF” studies that are collectively geographically expansive and disciplinary diverse. A selection of these studies are introduced and presented in the current issue together with a brief synthesis of their findings.     

Carbonic anhydrase-facilitated CO2 absorption with polyacrylamide buffering bead capture

A novel CO₂ separation concept is described wherein the enzyme carbonic anhydrase (CA) is used to increase the overall rate of CO₂ absorption after which hydrated CO₂ reacts with regenerable amine-bearing polyacrylamide buffering beads (PABB). Following saturation of the material's immobilized tertiary amines, CA-bearing carrier water is separated and recycled to the absorption stage while CO₂-loaded material is thermally regenerated. Process application of this concept would involve operation of two or more columns in parallel with thermal regeneration with low-pressure steam taking place after the capacity of a column of amine-bearing polymeric material was exceeded. PABB CO₂-bearing capacity was evaluated by thermogravimetric analysis (TGA) for beads of three acrylamido buffering monomer ingredient concentrations: 0 mol/kg bead, 0.857 mol/kg bead, and 2 mol/kg bead. TGA results demonstrate that CO₂-bearing capacity increases with increasing PABB buffering concentration and that up to 78% of the theoretical CO₂-bearing capacity was realized in prepared PABB samples (0.857 mol/kg recipe). The highest observed CO₂-bearing capacity of PABB was 1.37 mol of CO₂ per kg dry bead. TGA was also used to assess the regenerability of CO₂-loaded PABB. Preliminary results suggest that CO₂ is partially driven from PABB samples at temperatures as low as 55 °C, with complete regeneration occurring at 100 °C. Other physical characteristics of PABB are discussed. In addition, the effectiveness of bovine carbonic anhydrase for the catalysis of CO₂ dissolution is evaluated. Potential benefits and drawbacks of the proposed process are discussed.     

An examination of the factorial,construct, and predictive validity and utility of the regulatory focus at work scale

Although interest in regulatory focus research continues to grow, there has been very little work to date on the assessment and usefulness of regulatory focus in the workplace. The present research effort reports the results of a series of studies designed to assess the validity and utility of the Regulatory Focus at Work Scale (RWS). The results indicate that the RWS is reliable, valid, and showed incremental validity beyond general and trait‐like measures of regulatory focus in predicting relevant work outcomes of task performance, citizenship performance, safety performance, and productivity performance. The overall results of these studies support our claims that the RWS shows utility in predicting workplace outcomes and should prove useful for future research on regulatory focus in the workplace. Copyright © 2008 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.     

Metal ion and other key water quality constituent attenuation in soil columns

A set of soil columns was constructed to simulate discharge of disinfected tertiary treated wastewater to a river via nearby land application or indirect discharge. The system was primarily designed to observe the fate of metal ions and nutrients. The following three experiments were conducted: (1) flow through saturated soils only, which simulates indirect discharge where water is directly applied to groundwater; (2) flow through unsaturated soil followed by saturated flow, which simulates vadose then saturated zone transport; and (3) saturated flow only using ethylene diamine tetraacetic acid-metal chelates, which determined effects of metal organic complexes on metal mobility through the soil. Metal ion attenuation was substantial but not complete in experiments 1 and 2 (removal: 68% Cu2+, 43% Ni2+, 98% Pb2+, and 96% Hg2+), which was somewhat contrary to modeling results. Cyanide attenuation was also monitored (92% removal). In experiment 3, lead attenuation was somewhat reduced (92% removal) and delayed (requiring additional residence time); copper attenuation was significantly reduced (38% removal) and delayed; and nickel concentrations were higher in the 28-day sample (> 80 microg/L) than in the column feed water (58 microg/L). Near-complete denitrification and total phosphorus attenuation were observed. For the water quality constituents studied, unsaturated (vadose zone) transport did not appear to add additional benefit.     

Chronology of Awareness About US National Park External Threats

The objective of this paper is to raise understanding of the history of protected area external threat awareness in the United States and at World Protected Area Congresses. The earliest concerns about external threats to US national parks began in the late nineteenth century: a potential railroad transgression of Yellowstone National Park in the 1880s. During the early and mid 1930s, George Wright and colleagues focused on outside boundary concerns like of hunting and trapping of furbearers, grazing, logging, disease and hybridization between species. In the 1960s, a worldwide recognition began about the role of outside habitat fragmentation/isolation on nature reserves and human generated stressors crossing their boundaries. The State of the Park Report 1980 added a plethora of threats: oil/gas and geothermal exploration and development, hydropower and reclamation projects, urban encroachment, roads, resorts, and recreational facilities. The early 1980s ushered in political interference with NPS threats abatement efforts as well as Congressional legislative initiatives to support the abatement challenges of the agency. By 1987, the Government Accounting Office issued its first report on National Park Service (NPS) progress in dealing with external threats. Climate change impacts on parks, especially in terms of animals adjusting their temperature and moisture requirements by latitude and altitude, surfaced in the technical literature by the mid-1980s. By 1992, the world parks community stressed the need to integrate protected areas into the surrounding landscape and human community. The importance of the matrix has gradually gained appreciation in the scientific community. This chronology represents one example of national park and protected areas’ institutional history contributing to the breath of modern conservation science.