Use of hierarchical cluster analysis to assess the representativeness of a baseline groundwater quality monitoring network: comparison of New Zealand’s national and regional groundwater monitoring programs

Baseline monitoring of groundwater quality aims to characterize the ambient condition of the resource and identify spatial or temporal trends. Sites comprising any baseline monitoring network must be selected to provide a representative perspective of groundwater quality across the aquifer(s) of interest. Hierarchical cluster analysis (HCA) has been used as a means of assessing the representativeness of a groundwater quality monitoring network, using example datasets from New Zealand. HCA allows New Zealand's national and regional monitoring networks to be compared in terms of the number of water-quality categories identified in each network, the hydrochemistry at the centroids of these water-quality categories, the proportions of monitoring sites assigned to each water-quality category, and the range of concentrations for each analyte within each water-quality category. Through the HCA approach, the National Groundwater Monitoring Programme (117 sites) is shown to provide a highly representative perspective of groundwater quality across New Zealand, relative to the amalgamated regional monitoring networks operated by 15 different regional authorities (680 sites have sufficient data for inclusion in HCA). This methodology can be applied to evaluate the representativeness of any subset of monitoring sites taken from a larger network.

Assessing the representativeness of a groundwater quality monitoring network

The monitoring sites comprising a state of the environment (SOE) network must be carefully selected to ensure that they will be representative of the broader resource. Hierarchical cluster analysis (HCA) is a data-driven technique that can potentially be employed to assess the representativeness of a SOE monitoring network. The objective of this paper is to explore the use of HCA as an approach for assessing the representativeness of the New Zealand National Groundwater Monitoring Programme (NGMP), which is comprised of 110 monitoring sites across the country.

Invasive plants: representativeness of research from tropical countries in the global context

Biological invasions threaten the native biota of several countries and this threat is even greater in the tropical regions that have the greatest biodiversity. In order to evaluate the representativeness of studies on invasive plants in tropical countries compared to the world, as well as the region of origin and habits of the most reported invasive plants in research, we analyzed the publications from eight of the most important international journals that address the theme, from January 1995 to December 2004. The articles on biological invasions were classified as theoretical or as case studies, and according to their approach, main question, where the study was conducted, region of origin and habit of the invasive plant. Case studies predominated, as did questions about the environment`s susceptibility to the invasion, the species` invasive power and the impacts it had. The most reported invasive species were herbaceous plants from Asia and Europe. Few articles address tropical environments and only one referred to Brazil. Most referred to North America and Europe. This small number of publications in the tropics indicates the need for a global projection on this subject and underscores the lack of consistent and organized data to understand the phenomenon and propose effective strategies to combat biological invasion.

Rainfall representativeness at TRMM & GPM PR resolution

Precipitation radar on board the TRMM satellite was a milestone in the rainfall observation capability in the large scale. Stemming from TRMM the new mission GPM (Global Precipitation Measurement) is to overcome some TRMM shortcomings like the high level of the PR MDZ. However, for major problems like the PR horizontal resolution, significant improvements are not foreseeable. This papers investigates the impact of TRMM PR resolution on the structure of tropical rainfall. The issue is approached by both gradient analysis and texture verification. Results indicate that the impact maybe significant, affecting important applications like in NWP. © 2005 IEEE.

Methods and representativeness of a European survey in children and adolescents: the KIDSCREEN study

BACKGROUND: The objective of the present study was to compare three different sampling and questionnaire administration methods used in the international KIDSCREEN study in terms of participation, response rates, and external validity. METHODS: Children and adolescents aged 8-18 years were surveyed in 13 European countries using either telephone sampling and mail administration, random sampling of school listings followed by classroom or mail administration, or multistage random sampling of communities and households with self-administration of the survey materials at home. Cooperation, completion, and response rates were compared across countries and survey methods. Data on non-respondents was collected in 8 countries. The population fraction (PF, respondents in each sex-age, or educational level category, divided by the population in the same category from Eurostat census data) and population fraction ratio (PFR, ratio of PF) and their corresponding 95% confidence intervals were used to analyze differences by country between the KIDSCREEN samples and a reference Eurostat population. RESULTS: Response rates by country ranged from 18.9% to 91.2%. Response rates were highest in the school-based surveys (69.0%-91.2%). Sample proportions by age and gender were similar to the reference Eurostat population in most countries, although boys and adolescents were slightly underrepresented (PFR <1). Parents in lower educational categories were less likely to participate (PFR <1 in 5 countries). Parents in higher educational categories were overrepresented when the school and household sampling strategies were used (PFR = 1.78-2.97). CONCLUSION: School-based sampling achieved the highest overall response rates but also produced slightly more biased samples than the other methods. The results suggest that the samples were sufficiently representative to provide reference population values for the KIDSCREEN instrument.

Representativeness and seasonality of major ion records derived from NEEM firn cores

The seasonal and annual representativeness of ionic aerosol proxies (among others, calcium, sodium, ammonium and nitrate) in various firn cores in the vicinity of the NEEM drill site in northwest Greenland have been assessed. Seasonal representativeness is very high as one core explains more than 60 % of the variability within the area. The inter-annual representativeness, however, can be substantially lower (depending on the species) making replicate coring indispensable to derive the atmospheric variability of aerosol species. A single core at the NEEM site records only 30 % of the inter-annual atmospheric variability in some species, while five replicate cores are already needed to cover approximately 70 % of the inter-annual atmospheric variability in all species. The spatial representativeness is very high within 60 cm, rapidly decorrelates within 10 m but does not diminish further within 3 km. We attribute this to wind reworking of the snow pack leading to sastrugi formation. Due to the high resolution and seasonal representativeness of the records we can derive accurate seasonalities of the measured species for modern (AD 1990–2010) times as well as for pre-industrial (AD 1623–1750) times. Sodium and calcium show similar seasonality (peaking in February and March respectively) for modern and pre-industrial times, whereas ammonium and nitrate are influenced by anthro pogenic activities. Nitrate and ammonium both peak in May during modern times, whereas during pre-industrial times ammonium peaked during July–August and nitrate during June–July.

Representativeness assessment of research natural areas on national forest system lands in Idaho /

"March 2000."

"Ordinary people only": knowledge, representativeness and the publics of public participation in healthcare

Public involvement in healthcare is a prominent policy in countries across the economically developed world. A growing body of academic literature has focused on public participation, often presenting dichotomies between good and bad practice: between initiatives that offer empowerment and those constrained by consumerism, or between those which rely for recruitment on self-selecting members of the public, and those including a more broad-based, statistically representative group. In this paper I discuss the apparent tensions between differing rationales for participation, relating recent discussions about the nature of representation in public involvement to parallel writings about the contribution of laypeople’s expertise and experience. In the academic literature, there is, I suggest, a thin line between democratic justifications for involvement, suggesting a representative role for involved publics, and technocratic ideas about the potential ‘expert’ contributions of particular subgroups of the public. Analysing recent policy documents on participation in healthcare in England, I seek moreover to show how contemporary policy transcends both categories, demanding complex roles of involved publics which invoke various qualities seen as important in governing the interface between state and society. I relate this to social-theoretical perspectives on the relationship between governmental authority and citizens in late-modern society.

Representativeness, legitimacy and power in public involvement in health-care management

Public participation in health-service management is an increasingly prominent policy internationally. Frequently, though, academic studies have found it marginalized by health professionals who, keen to retain control over decision-making, undermine the legitimacy of involved members of the public, in particular by questioning their representativeness. This paper examines this negotiation of representative legitimacy between staff and involved users by drawing on a qualitative study of service-user involvement in pilot cancer-genetics services recently introduced in England, using interviews, participant observation and documentary analysis. In contrast to the findings of much of the literature, health professionals identified some degree of representative legitimacy in the contributions made by users. However, the ways in which staff and users constructed representativeness diverged significantly. Where staff valued the identities of users as biomedical and lay subjects, users themselves described the legitimacy of their contribution in more expansive terms of knowledge and citizenship. My analysis seeks to show how disputes over representativeness relate not just to a struggle for power according to contrasting group interests, but also to a substantive divergence in understanding of the nature of representativeness in the context of state-orchestrated efforts to increase public participation. This divergence might suggest problems with the enactment of such aspirations in practice; alternatively, however, contestation of representative legitimacy might be understood as reflecting ambiguities in policy-level objectives for participation, which secure implementation by accommodating the divergent constructions of those charged with putting initiatives into practice.

Discrimination capacity in species distribution models depends on the representativeness of the environmental domain

Aim When faced with dichotomous events, such as the presence or absence of a species, discrimination capacity (the ability to separate the instances of presence from the instances of absence) is usually the only characteristic that is assessed in the evaluation of the performance of predictive models. Although neglected, calibration or reliability (how well the estimated probability of presence represents the observed proportion of presences) is another aspect of the performance of predictive models that provides important information. In this study, we explore how changes in the distribution of the probability of presence make discrimination capacity a context-dependent characteristic of models. For the first time,we explain the implications that ignoring the context dependence of discrimination can have in the interpretation of species distribution models.

The roles and importance of formal and informal sources of business support in young firms : evidence from the UK’s 2008 Federation of Small Business Survey

Objectives This research explores the relationship between young firms, their growth orientation-intention and a range of relationships which can be seen to provide business support. Prior-work Research indicates that networks impact the firm’s ability to secure resources (Sirmon and Hitt 2003; Liao and Welsch. 2004; Hanlon and Saunders 2007). Networks have been evaluated in a number of ways ranging from simple counts to characteristics of their composition (Davidsson and Honig 2003), strength of relationships (Granovetter 1973) and network diversity (Carter et al 2003). By providing access to resources and knowledge (from start-up assistance and raising capital, (e.g. Smallbone et al, 2003), networks may assist in enabling continued persistence during those times where firms may experience resource constraints owing to firm growth (Baker and Nelson 2005). Approach The data used in this research was generated in the 2008 UK Federation of Small Businesses (FSB) survey. Over 1,000 of the firms responding were found to fall into the category of “young”, ((defined as firms under 4 years old). Firms were considered the unit of analysis with the entrepreneur being the chief spokesperson for the firm. Preliminary data analysis considered key demographic characteristics and industry classifications, comparing the FSB data with that of the UK government’s own (BERR) Small Business Surveys of 2007 and 2008, to establish some degree of representativeness of the respondents. The analysis then examined networks with varying potential ability to provide support for young firms, the networks measured in terms of number, diversity, characteristic and strength in its relationship to young firm growth orientation. The diversity of business-support-related relationships ranged from friends and family, through professional services, customers and suppliers, and government business services, to trade associations and informal business networks. The characteristics of these formal and informal sources of support for new businesses are examined across a range of business support-type activities for new firms. The number of relationships and types of business support are also explored. Finally, the strength of these relationships is examined by analysis of the source of business support, type of business support, and links to the growth orientation-intention of the firm, after controlling for a number of key variables related to firm and industry status and owner characteristics. Results Preliminary analysis of the data by means of univariate analysis showed that average number of sources of advice was around 2.5 (from a potential total of 6). In terms of the diversity of relationships, universities had by far the smallest percentage of firms receiving beneficial advice from them. Government business services were beneficially used by 40% of young firms, the other relationship types being around the 50-55% mark. In terms of characteristics of the advice, the average number of areas in which benefit was achieved was around 5.5 of a maximum of 15. Start-up advice has by far the highest percentage of firms obtaining beneficial advice, with increasing sales, improving contacts and improving confidence being the other categories at or around the 50% mark. Other market-focused areas where benefits were also received were in the areas of new markets, existing product improvements and new product improvements, where around 40% of the young responding firms obtained benefit. Regression techniques evaluating the strength of these relationships in terms of the links between business support (by source of support, type of support, and range of support) and firm growth orientation-intention focus highlighted a number of significant relationships, even after controlling for a range of other explanatory variables identified in the literature. Specifically, there was found to be a positive relationship between receiving business advice generally (regardless of type or source) and growth orientation. This relationship was seen to be stronger, however, when looking at the number of types of beneficial advice received, and stronger again for the number of sources of this advice. In terms of individual sources of advice, customers and suppliers had the strongest relationship with growth, with Government business services also found to be significant. Combining these two sources was also seen to increase the strength of the relationship between these two sources of advice and growth orientation. In considering areas of support, growth was most strongly positively related to advice that benefited the development of new products and services, and also business confidence, but was negatively related to advice linked to business recovery. Finally, amalgamating the 4 key types and sources of advice to examine the impact of combinations of these types and sources of advice also improved the strength of the relationship. Implications The findings will assist in the understanding of young firms in general and growth more specifically, particularly the role and importance of specific sources, types and combinations of business support used more extensively by new young growth-oriented firms. Value This research may assist in processes designed to allow entrepreneurs to make better decisions; educators and support organizations to develop better advice and assistance, and Governments design better conditions for the creation of new growth-oriented businesses.