Encouraging sustainable development in a coastal community: New Hanover County, North Carolina's exceptional design zoning district

While New Hanover County is the second smallest county in North Carolina, it is also the second most densely populated with approximately 850 people per square mile. Nestled between the Cape Fear River and Atlantic Ocean with surrounding barrier island beach communities, the County’s geographic location provides a prime vacation destination, as well as an ideal location for residents who wish to live at the water’s edge. Wilmington is the largest city in the County with a population just under 200,000. Most of the Wilmington metropolitan area is developed, creating intense development pressures for the remaining undeveloped land in the unincorporated County. In order to provide development opportunities for mixed use or high density projects within unincorporated New Hanover County where appropriate urban features are in place to support such projects without the negative effects of urban sprawl, County Planning Staff recently developed an Exceptional Design Zoning District (EDZD). Largely based on the LEED for Neighborhood Development program, the EDZD standards were scaled to fit the unique conditions of the County with the goal of encouraging sustainable development while providing density incentives to entice the use of the voluntary district. The incentive for the voluntary zoning district is increased density in areas where the density may not be allowed under normal circumstances. The rationale behind allowing for higher density projects is that development can be concentrated in areas where appropriate urban features are in place to support such projects, and the tendency toward urban sprawl can be minimized. With water quality being of high importance, it is perceived that higher density development will better protect water quality then lower density projects. (PDF contains 4 pages)

The development of the South Carolina Coastal Information Network and portal site: Bringing training opportunities and educational resources to coastal community officials and the public

The South Carolina Coastal Information Network (SCCIN) emerged as a result of a number of coastal outreach institutions working in partnership to enhance coordination of the coastal community outreach efforts in South Carolina. This organized effort, led by the S.C. Sea Grant Consortium and its Extension Program, includes partners from federal and state agencies, regional government agencies, and private organizations seeking to coordinate and/or jointly deliver outreach programs that target coastal community constituents. The Network was officially formed in 2006 with the original intention of fostering intra-and inter- agency communication, coordination, and cooperation. Network partners include the S.C. Sea Grant Consortium, S.C. Department of Health and Environmental Control – Office of Ocean and Coastal Resource Management and Bureau of Water, S.C. Department of Natural Resources – ACE Basin National Estuarine Research Reserve, North Inlet-Winyah Bay National Estuarine Research Reserve, Clemson University Cooperative Extension Service and Carolina Clear, Berkeley-Charleston-Dorchester Council of Governments, Waccamaw Regional Council of Governments, Urban Land Institute of South Carolina, S.C. Department of Archives and History, the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration – Coastal Services Center and Hollings Marine Laboratory, Michaux Conservancy, Ashley-Cooper Stormwater Education Consortium, the Coastal Waccamaw Stormwater Education Consortium, the S.C. Chapter of the U.S. Green Building Council, and the Lowcountry Council of Governments. (PDF contains 3 pages)

Legal dimensions of the Chinese experience in Los Angeles, 1860-1880

On October 24, 1871, a massacre of eighteen Chinese in Los Angeles brought the small southern California settlement into the national spotlight. Within a few days, news of this “night of horrors” was reported in newspapers across the country. This massacre has been cited in Asian American narratives as the first documented outbreak of ethnic violence against a Chinese community in the United States. This is ironic because Los Angeles’ small population has generally placed it on the periphery in historical studies of the California anti-Chinese movement. Because the massacre predated Los Angeles’ organized Chinese exclusion movements of the late 1870s, it has often been erroneously dismissed as an aberration in the history of the city.

The violence of 1871 was an outburst highlighting existing community tensions that would become part of public debate by decade’s close. The purpose of this study is to insert the massacre into a broader context of anti-Chinese sentiments, legal discrimination, and dehumanization in nineteenth century Los Angeles. While a second incident of widespread anti-Chinese violence never occurred, brutal attacks directed at Chinese small businessmen and others highlighted continued community conflict. Similarly, economic rivalries and concerns over Chinese prostitution that underlay the 1871 massacre were manifest in later campaigns of economic discrimination and vice suppression that sought to minimize Chinese influence within municipal limits. An analysis of the massacre in terms of anti-Chinese legal, social and economic strategies in nineteenth-century Los Angeles will elucidate these important continuities.

Selective data gathering in community sensor networks

Smartphones and other powerful sensor-equipped consumer devices make it possible to sense the physical world at an unprecedented scale. Nearly 2 million Android and iOS devices are activated every day, each carrying numerous sensors and a high-speed internet connection. Whereas traditional sensor networks have typically deployed a fixed number of devices to sense a particular phenomena, community networks can grow as additional participants choose to install apps and join the network. In principle, this allows networks of thousands or millions of sensors to be created quickly and at low cost. However, making reliable inferences about the world using so many community sensors involves several challenges, including scalability, data quality, mobility, and user privacy.

This thesis focuses on how learning at both the sensor- and network-level can provide scalable techniques for data collection and event detection. First, this thesis considers the abstract problem of distributed algorithms for data collection, and proposes a distributed, online approach to selecting which set of sensors should be queried. In addition to providing theoretical guarantees for submodular objective functions, the approach is also compatible with local rules or heuristics for detecting and transmitting potentially valuable observations. Next, the thesis presents a decentralized algorithm for spatial event detection, and describes its use detecting strong earthquakes within the Caltech Community Seismic Network. Despite the fact that strong earthquakes are rare and complex events, and that community sensors can be very noisy, our decentralized anomaly detection approach obtains theoretical guarantees for event detection performance while simultaneously limiting the rate of false alarms.

Community sense and response systems

The proliferation of smartphones and other internet-enabled, sensor-equipped consumer devices enables us to sense and act upon the physical environment in unprecedented ways. This thesis considers Community Sense-and-Response (CSR) systems, a new class of web application for acting on sensory data gathered from participants' personal smart devices. The thesis describes how rare events can be reliably detected using a decentralized anomaly detection architecture that performs client-side anomaly detection and server-side event detection. After analyzing this decentralized anomaly detection approach, the thesis describes how weak but spatially structured events can be detected, despite significant noise, when the events have a sparse representation in an alternative basis. Finally, the thesis describes how the statistical models needed for client-side anomaly detection may be learned efficiently, using limited space, via coresets.

The Caltech Community Seismic Network (CSN) is a prototypical example of a CSR system that harnesses accelerometers in volunteers' smartphones and consumer electronics. Using CSN, this thesis presents the systems and algorithmic techniques to design, build and evaluate a scalable network for real-time awareness of spatial phenomena such as dangerous earthquakes.

Littoral vegetation of Lake Tohopekaliga: community descriptions prior to a large-scale fisheries habitat-enhancement project

An extreme dry-down and muck-removal project was conducted at Lake Tohopekaliga, Florida, in 2003-2004, to remove dense vegetation from inshore areas and improve habitat degraded by stabilized water levels. Vegetation was monitored from June 2002 to December 2003, to describe the pre-existing communities in terms of composition and distribution along the environmental gradients. Three study areas (Treatment-Selection Sites) were designed to test the efficacy of different treatments in enhancing inshore habitat, and five other study areas (Whole-Lake Monitoring Sites) were designed to monitor the responses of the emergent littoral vegetation as a whole. Five general community types were identified within the study areas by recording aboveground biomasses and stem densities of each species. These communities were distributed along water and soils gradients, with water depth and bulk density explaining most of the variation. The shallowest depths were dominated by a combination of Eleocharis spp., Luziola fluitans, and Panicum repens; while the deeper areas had communities of Nymphaea odorata and Nuphar luteum; Typha spp.; or Paspalidium geminatum and Hydrilla verticillata. Mineralized soils were common in both the shallow and deep-water communities, while the intermediate depths had high percentages of organic material in the soil. These intermediate depths (occurring just above and just below low pool stage) were dominated by Pontederia cordata, the main species targeted by the habitat enhancement project. This emergent community occurred in nearly monocultural bands around the lake (from roughly 60–120 cm in depth at high pool stage) often having more diverse floating mats along the deep-water edge. The organic barrier these mats create is believed to impede access of sport fish to shallow-water spawning areas, while the overall low diversity of the community is evidence of its competitive nature in stabilized waters. With continued monitoring of these study areas long-term effects of the restoration project can be assessed and predictive models may be created to determine the efficacy and legitimacy of such projects in the future.

Abstention, null and blank votes in the Basque Autonomous Community

The objectives of this essay are twofold. First it reviews the reason for abstaining (or casting a null or blank vote) in elections. It also provides the data of abstention in the elections to the European Parliament. Fewer data are available on blank and null votes. These are provided for some countries. The second objective is to analyze the data of the elections in the Basque Autonomous Community since 1977. The evolution through time is commented. The main features are the low participation in the European elections on the one hand and the importance of the null vote in the 2003-2009 period.

Abstention, null and blank votes in the Basque Autonomous Community

The objectives of this essay are twofold. First it reviews the reason for abstaining (or casting a null or blank vote) in elections. It also provides the data of abstention in the elections to the European Parliament. Fewer data are available on blank and null votes. These are provided for some countries. The second objective is to analyze the data of the elections in the Basque Autonomous Community since 1977. The evolution through time is commented. The main features are the low participation in the European elections on the one hand and the importance of the null vote in the 2003-2009 period.

Different patterns of uptake and depuration of cadmium by periphyton community and a grazer species (Physa sp.): A mesocosm evalution

Widespread pollution by heavy metals generated by various industries has serious adverse effects on human health and the environment. Cadmium is a heavy metal recognised as one of the most hazardous environmental pollutants. It is a non-essential and non-beneficial element to organisms, causing toxicity and other deleterious effects on various components of the aquatic environment. The ability of algal periphyton to concentrate cadmium from fresh water is well known. Moreover, periphyton communities are able to accumulate large amounts of cadmium despite its low concentration in fresh water. Many researchers use algal periphyton as an indicator of water quality in aquatic environments. In the present study, the authors ask two basic questions: Does cadmium accumulate along a food chain consisting of the periphyton community and a grazer species (Physa sp.) under semi-natural conditions provided by artificial streams? If not, which one can better indicate the water quality?

Studies on the submerged plant community in Lake Biwa. I. Distribution and productivity of Egeria densa. A submerged plant invader in the south basin [Translation from: Physiol.Ecol.Japan 17, 283-290, 1976]

Egeria densa (PLANCH.) ST. JOHN, a submerged plant invader, forms a wide submerged plant zone, particularly along the west coast of the south basin, Lake Biwa. The macrophyte occupies over 82% of the plant zone in the basin and its biomass reaches 93% of the total. The estimated annual net production was approximately 1 kg dry wt./m2 in a dense area, which is about 4.5 times as much as the net production by phytoplankton in an offshore area of the basin. Although the area covered by the macrophyte is only 5.8% of the total of the basin, it produced about one-tenth of the total annual primary production. In the most productive season Egeria produced 46% of the total primary productivity. Thus, the macrophyte never be neglected when one considers the energy flow or material circulation in the basin. This study was initiated in order to clarify the role of submerged macrophytes, particularly E. densa, in Lake Biwa. The following points are reported in this paper: the distribution of macrophytes in the south basin; seasonal change in standing crop of E. densa; seasonal change in values related to production, utilizing a model proposed by Ikushima with its parameters experimentally determined.

From the individual to the community and beyond: water quality, stress indicators and key species in coastal waters

This review examines water quality and stress indicators at levels of organisation from the individual to the community and beyond by means of three case studies concentrating on rocky shores within the north-east Atlantic. Responses of dogwhelks (Nucella) to tributyltin pollution from antifouling paints is examined as the main case study. There are effects at the individual level (development of male sexual characteristics in the female leading to effective sterility) and population level (reduction in juveniles, few females and eventual population disappearance of dogwhelks in badly contaminated areas) but information on community level effects of dogwhelk demise is sparse. Such effects were simulated by dogwhelk removal experiments on well studied, moderately exposed ledges on shores on the Isle of Man. The removal of dogwhelks reduced the size and longevity of newly established Fucus clumps that had escaped grazing. Removal of dogwhelks also increased the likelihood of algal escapes. In a factorial experiment dogwhelks were shown to be less important than limpets \{Patella) in structuring communities but still had a significant modifying effect by increasing the probability of algal escapes. Community level responses to stress on rocky shores are then explored by reference to catastrophic impacts such as oil spills, using the Torrey Canyon as a case study. Recovery of the system in response to this major perturbation took between 10-15 years through a series of damped oscillations. The final case study is that of indicators of ecosystem level change in response to climate fluctuations, using ratios of northern \{Semibalanus balanoides) and southern (Chthamalus spp.) barnacles. Indices derived from counts on the shore show good correlations with inshore sea-water temperatures after a 2-year lag phase. The use of barnacles to measure offshore changes is reviewed. The discussion considers the use of bioindicators at various levels of organisation.