High levels of site fidelity in movement patterns of Southern Rock Lobster (Jasus edwardsii) in Victoria,Australia

ABSTRACT

Movement patterns of the Southern Rock Lobster Jasus edwardsii in Victoria, Australia were investigated from 8,533 tag-recapture events across a 20-year period (1992–2012). In total, 83% of lobsters were recaptured within 1?km of their tagging site and 93% within 5?km. While largely resident, elevated movements were observed within specific regions, with the overall direction of movement being from inshore to offshore areas. Movement was not impacted by lobster sex, size, or reproductive stage. The fishery for Southern Rock Lobster within Victoria is currently managed into two zones with separate total allowable commercial catches in each area. Given the high levels of site fidelity, our findings suggest that management of the resource at this spatial scale is appropriate and that consideration of significant movement between zones is not warranted in fishery stock assessment models.     

Porewater pressure increases in soil and rock from underground chemical and nuclear explosions

A review and analysis of chemical and nuclear explosive-induced porewater pressure increases and induced rise in groundwater table elevations (groundwater mounding) is presented. Our analysis indicates that residual pore pressure increases and groundwater mounding can be induced by underground chemical and nuclear explosions to scaled distances of 879 m/(kt)^1/3. This relationship is linear over seven orders of magnitude of explosive energy ranging from a 0.01 kg chemical explosion to a 100 kt nuclear explosion and is valid for a wide variety of saturated geological profiles. Underground chemical explosions, and probably underground nuclear explosions have the potential to induce liquefaction of water-saturated soils to scaled distances of about 260 m/(kt)^1/3.     

The Ultimate CCD for Laser Guide Star Wavefront Sensing on Extremely Large Telescopes

All of the extremely large telescopes (ELTs) will utilize sodium laser guide star (LGS) adaptive optics (AO) systems. Most of these telescopes plan to use the Shack-Hartmann approach for wavefront sensing. In these AO systems, the laser spots in subapertures at the edge of the pupil will suffer from spot elongation due to the 10 km extent of the sodium layer and the large separation from the projection laser. This spot elongation will severely degrade the performance of standard geometry wavefront sensing systems. In this paper, we present a CCD with custom pixel morphology that aligns the pixels of each subaperture with the radial extension of the LGS spot. This CCD design will give better performance than a standard geometry CCDs for continuous wave lasers. In addition, this CCD design is optimal for a pulsed sodium laser. The pixel geometry enables each subaperture to follow a laser pulse traversing the sodium layer, providing optimal sampling of a limited number of detected photons. In addition to novel pixel layout, this CCD will also incorporate experimental JFET sense amplifiers and use CMOS design approaches to simplify the routing of biases, clocks and video output. This CCD will attain photon-noise limited performance at high frame rates, and is being incorporated in the plans for the Thirty Meter Telescope (TMT).     

64层锥束CT扫描的优化系统

近年来X射线断层成像(CT)技术获得了突飞猛进的发展,自1998年推出4层螺旋CT后,CT扫描设备在容积覆盖,空间分辨率,扫描速度,切片数方面取得了长足进展.这不仅给医学应用带来了深远的影响,同时也给CT系统设计提出了巨大的挑战.容积CT(VCT)的设计过程引入了各种策略来战胜其复杂性.这些方法学包括:理论分析,系统性能预测的图像分析工具,各种基于专家背对背评价的参数优化.本文论述了64层CT系统设计中的一些考虑因素及优化过程.这些设计过程保证了锥束CT的优化性能.首批客户的应用反馈显示了我们设计实践的有效率性.     

The Fuelwood Crisis in Southern Africa — Relating Fuelwood Use to Livelihoods in a Rural Village

The aim of the paper is to examine wood as a source of fuel energy in rural South Africa and factors influencing its usage. The analysis is based on household profiles and characteristics (e.g., gender, caste, population and income) in a livelihood framework. Fuelwood consumption was estimated to be 692 kg/capita, and 4343 kg/user household per annum, valued at $311 per household. Consumption was modelled in relation to informal and formal cash incomes, and population of children, female and male adults. However, only the population of female adults could significantly influence consumption of fuelwood. This implied that where there were more women in a household, consumption was likely to be high. This might be due to the majority of women doing the cooking and heating in the household. Any change in the value of cash income of households had no significant impacts on fuelwood consumed. Cash incomes might therefore not be strong determinants of the types of energy used by rural households. The average quantity of wood consumed for fuel energy in summer was not significantly different from consumption in winter. Some households perpetually used more wood than others. The study further showed that harvesting of wood for fuel energy is not opportunistic, but requires reallocation of time for other livelihood activities in times of shortage. The fuelwood crisis is not simple and not only about shortage of fuelwood and/or population growth but linked to household profiles and other livelihood strategies and subsequently vulnerability of households. These would require thorough investigation and understanding in relation to precise demand and supply data for fuelwood before the fuelwood problem can be sufficiently managed. This revised version was published online in August 2006 with corrections to the Cover Date.     

Temporal Changes in Seawater Carbonate Chemistry and Carbon Export from a Southern California Estuary

Estuaries are important subcomponents of the coastal ocean, but knowledge about the temporal and spatial variability of their carbonate chemistry, as well as their contribution to coastal and global carbon fluxes, are limited. In the present study, we measured the temporal and spatial variability of biogeochemical parameters in a saltmarsh estuary in Southern California, the San Dieguito Lagoon (SDL). We also estimated the flux of dissolved inorganic carbon (DIC) and total organic carbon (TOC) to the adjacent coastal ocean over diel and seasonal timescales. The combined net flux of DIC and TOC (F_DIC?+?TOC) to the ocean during outgoing tides ranged from ??1.8±0.5?×?10³ to 9.5±0.7?×?10³?mol C h^?1 during baseline conditions. Based on these fluxes, a rough estimate of the net annual export of DIC and TOC totaled 10±4?×?10⁶?mol C year^?1. Following a major rain event (36 mm rain in 3 days), F_DIC?+?TOC increased and reached values as high as 29.0 ±?0.7?×?10³?mol C h^?1. Assuming a hypothetical scenario of three similar storm events in a year, our annual net flux estimate more than doubled to 25 ±?4?×?10⁶?mol C year^?1. These findings highlight the importance of assessing coastal carbon fluxes on different timescales and incorporating event scale variations in these assessments. Furthermore, for most of the observations elevated levels of total alkalinity (TA) and pH were observed at the estuary mouth relative to the coastal ocean. This suggests that SDL partly buffers against acidification of adjacent coastal surface waters, although the spatial extent of this buffering is likely small.