Modeling Nonprofit Resilience in Long-Term Recovery in Christchurch,New Zealand

Following the 2010–2011 earthquakes in Christchurch, New Zealand, many nonprofit organizations changed or expanded services to address emergent or compounded risks. This research is based on interviews with thirty local community nonprofit managers and discussions with five staff focus groups conducted in 2014. Preexisting nonprofits with flexible organizational structures and emergent nonprofits succeeded in providing services during the emergency response and early recovery phases; nonprofits contracted with the government were better suited for long-term recovery. Shared resources among nonprofit agency connections contributed to successful transitions from response to recovery. Similar organizational resilience factors might occur in other major cities following disasters.     

Effects of Recent Instability on Cultivated Area Along the Euphrates River in Iraq

We used MODIS NDVI data to determine whether there was a significant change in cultivated area along the Euphrates River in Iraq after the Iraq War compared to before and during the war. Results revealed that mean cultivated area was largest during the pre–Iraq War period (2000–2003) with 99,115 Mha, reduced some during the early Iraq War period (2003–2006) to 83,480 Mha, reduced even further during the late Iraq War period (2007–2011) to 53,813 Mha due to drought, and increased slightly during the post–Iraq War period (2012–2015) to 69,161 Mha, although not returning to previous highs of the pre–Iraq War or early Iraq War periods. Statistical analysis with the Kruskal–Wallis test revealed that the small cultivated area during the post–Iraq War period was more closely related to the late Iraq War and drought period than previous periods, indicating that recent instability, such as political turmoil following the departure of U.S. troops, violent militant extremism, lack of economic investment, and environmental degradation, has had a similar effect on cultivated area as a devastating drought.     

Mud volcanoes and gas vents in the Okhotsk Sea area

Gas emissions from mud volcanoes on Sakhalin Island and water-column gas flares arising from cold seeps in the Okhotsk Sea appear to be related. They are likely activated by tectonic movements along the transform plate boundary separating the Okhotsk Sea Plate from the Eurasian and Amur plates. Gas vents (flares) and methane anomalies occur in the waters offshore Sakhalin Island, along with NE-SW-trending mounds and fluid escape structures on the seafloor. The intersection of the NE-striking transverse faults on land with the Central Sakhalin and Hokkaido-Sakhalin shear zones apparently determines the sites of mud volcanoes, a pattern that continues offshore where the intersection with the East Sakhalin and West Derugin shear zones determines the sites of the submarine gas vents.     

A simple derivation of capture probabilities for the J+1:J and J+2:J orbit-orbit resonance problems

We present a simplified analytic derivation of the capture probabilities for the j+1j and j+2j orbital resonances. We apply Henrard's method which is based on an extension of the theory of adiabatic invariants and recover the results originally obtained by Yoder.Contribution number 3874 from the Division of Geological and Planetary Sciences, California Institute of Technology, Pasadena, CA 91125, U.S.A.     

Accessing Australian geodynamic information: The AGCRC website

The Australian Geodynamics Cooperative Research Centre (AGCRC) website <http://www.agcrc. csiro.au/> provides the main integrated presentation of the results of AGCRC research. It hosts a systematic presentation of project summaries, publication abstracts, regionally organised geodynamic syntheses and a GIS database containing a large number of broad‐scale earth science datasets from the Australian region, which are presented through an interactive map viewer. Effective interfaces are required to make the variety of content accessible to users. In particular, maintaining effective hyperlinking for a large and growing set of pages was a significant challenge. We found that by developing effective indexing tools we were able to apply a uniform technology to attack these problems. The index included both the full text of the pages from the website and also specific index terms of metadata. The metadata schema was designed to support both generalised discovery through a search interface and also to allow hyperlinks to be included automatically in pages by the server, so that the user could browse in a richly cross‐linked framework. It was necessary to manage textual and numeric data within the same framework because even the textual documents were generally tied to geospatial locations identified by their geographical coordinates. This required extensions to standard index and search tools, including the development of complete new indexing software. To assist the user in accessing the index, we provided a variety of user interfaces specialised for different themes in the website. For example, publication lists are generated in a conventional layout, and geospatial datasets are presented through an interactive map viewer and query system. The latter also demonstrated how visualisation tools for geospatial data can be provided in the web‐browser interface.     

A phytoplankton class-specific primary production model applied to the Kerguelen Islands region (Southern Ocean)

As part of the KErguelen: compared study of the Ocean and the Plateau in Surface water (KEOPS) project in late summer 2005, we examine the phytoplankton community composition and associated primary production in the waters surrounding the Kerguelen Archipelago, with the emphasis on two contrasted environments: (i) the Kerguelen Plateau, where a large bloom occurs annually, and (ii) the high-nutrient low-chlorophyll (HNLC) offshore waters. A biomarker pigment approach was used to assess the community composition in terms of chlorophyll biomass of three phytoplankton size classes, namely micro-, nano-, and picophytoplankton. The second objective was to evaluate a global class-specific approach for estimating the contribution of the three pigment-based size classes to the primary production in the study area. To do so, primary production rates associated with each phytoplankton class were computed from the class-specific chlorophyll biomass coupled to a class-specific primary production model, and compared with in situ measurements of size-fractionated ¹³C-based primary production. The iron-enriched bloom region was dominated by microphytoplankton (diatoms), which contributed 80–90% to the total primary production (of ≈1 g C m^?2 d^?1). In the HNLC area, the primary production was about 0.30 g C m^?2 d^?1, mainly (65%) achieved by small diatoms and nanoflagellates. The model results show a good overall agreement between predicted and measured total primary production rates. In terms of size classes, agreements were higher for the bloom region than for the HNLC waters. Discrepancies in this complex iron-limited area may be explained essentially by the smaller size of diatoms, or a different set of photophysiological properties.     

The relationship between rainfall inputs and flood generation in south–east Spain

Rainfall and flood data are relatively sparse in semi‐arid areas; hence there have been relatively few investigations into the relationships between rainfall inputs and flood generation in these environments. Previous work has shown that flood properties are influenced by a combination of precipitation characteristics including amount, intensity, duration and spatial distribution. Therefore floods may be produced by high intensity, short duration storms, or longer duration, low intensity rainfall. Most of this research has been undertaken in small catchments in either hyper‐arid or relatively high rainfall Mediterranean climates. This paper presents results from a 6 year data record in south‐east Spain from research conducted in two basins, the Rambla Nogalte (171 km²) and the Rambla de Torrealvilla (200 km²). Data cover an area of approximately 500 km² and an annual average rainfall of 300 mm. At coarse temporal resolutions gauges spread over large areas record similar patterns of rainfall, although spells of rain show much more complexity; pulses of rain within storms can vary considerably in total rainfall, intensity and duration over the same area. The analysis for south‐east Spain shows that most storms occur over a period of less than 24 h, but that the number of rainfall events declines as the duration exceeds 8 h. This is at odds with data on floods for the study area suggesting that they are produced by storms lasting longer than 18 h. However, one flood event was produced by a very short (15 min) storm with high intensity rainfall. Most floods tended to occur in May/June or September, which coincides with wetter months of the year (September, October, December and May). Floods are also more highly related to the total rainfall occurring in a spell of rain, than to intensity. The complexity of storm rainfall increases with the storm total, which makes it difficult to generalize on the importance of rainfall intensity for flood generation. Copyright © 2007 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.