Master Conservationist Presentations - 2003

We begin our Master Conservationist recognition in Production Agriculture with the Buskirk Family of Hemingford in the Panhandle. Will David and Toni Buskirk, Dean and Sonya Buskirk, Chad Buskirk, and Dustin and Shelly McConville, please come forward? They started with a half-section which has grown to 2,855 acres, as well as a tree-planting business. The family formed a partnership in 1995 and named it “Trees are Us” in 1998. They have used no-till farming on 1,000 acres of cropland since 1980 and planted over 165,000 trees. A low-pressure irrigation system saves about 400 acre inches of water every growing season. They built their own no-till tree planter for differing soil conditions and a machine to install biodegradable weed barriers. Their enthusiasm for trees is contagious as they visit with others and perform volunteer work in the area. Their unique tree planting equipment is made available nationwide, which results in the planting of more than 2 million trees in over 10 states annually. Congrats to the Buskirks.

Dynamic Traffic Grooming Algorithms for Reconfigurable SONET Over WDM Networks

The emergence of wavelength-division multiplexing (WDM) technology provides the capability for increasing the bandwidth of synchronous optical network (SONET) rings by grooming low-speed traffic streams onto different high-speed wavelength channels. Since the cost of SONET add–drop multiplexers (SADM) at each node dominates the total cost of these networks, how to assign the wavelength, groom the traffic, and bypass the traffic through the intermediate nodes has received a lot of attention from researchers recently. Moreover, the traffic pattern of the optical network changes from time to time. How to develop dynamic reconfiguration algorithms for traffic grooming is an important issue. In this paper, two cases (best fit and full fit) for handling reconfigurable SONET over WDM networks are proposed. For each approach, an integer linear programming model and heuristic algorithms (TS-1 and TS-2, based on the tabu search method) are given. The results demonstrate that the TS-1 algorithm can yield better solutions but has a greater running time than the greedy algorithm for the best fit case. For the full fit case, the tabu search heuristic yields competitive results compared with an earlier simulated annealing based method and it is more stable for the dynamic case.

Opening Remarks for Master Conservationist Presentations

It is a distinct honor for me to help recognize the 2003 Master Conservationists tonight. Tonight's event marks the 20th anniversary of the program sponsored by the Omaha World-Herald and the Institute of Agriculture and Natural Resources at the University of Nebraska-Lincoln.