Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
Watershed-Scale Hybrid Stochastic-Deterministic Modeling Framework and Diffused Sources Superpositioning

WATERSHED-SCALE HYBRID STOCHASTIC-DETERMINISTIC MODELING FRAMEWORK AND DIFFUSED SOURCES SUPERPOSITIONING Ruby Juvah Damalie Old Dominion University, 2013 Director: Dr. Jaewan Yoon Predicting hydrologic system behavior is imperative to planning and management of water resources. The study developed an integrated hybrid stochastic and deterministic framework to improve prediction accuracy for overland flow and diffused sources in a watershed. The methodology includes sampling input parameters at system level and contribution of nonpoint source from hydrologically disconnected areas (heretofore referred to as system-level approach and superpositioning respectively). System-level approach includes the integration of a topography-based sampling grid generalized linear model developed by the study and Monte Carlo methods. The superpositioning method adopts in-stream water quality equation for overland flow pollution estimation. The system-level approach was applied to the Patuxent watershed to determine runoff, phosphorus and total suspended solids using continuous rainfall. For overland flow, system-level approach (p-value of 0.68) was 0.51% off the observed flow compared with -21.9% for existing method (p-value of 0.11). Similarly for phosphorus, the model prediction deviated from the observed by 7% compared to that of the existing method which deviated by -32%. The results indicate that the system-level method is a better predictor for overland flow and nonpoint sources. In the superpositioning approach, phosphorus contributions were added to the system-level approach using an event rainfall. The prediction error reduced from 4.82% to -0.29% when the system-level method was superpositioned with nonpoint source. Data from superpositioning analysis showed that including diffused sources contribution from hydrologically disconnected areas further improves the level of accuracy. The study demonstrates that the framework reduces prediction error and has a high accuracy in reproducing watershed response. The hybrid methodology framework is superior to existing deterministic methods. Ultimately, this dissertation shows the potential of improving prediction accuracy of hydrologic systems by incorporating the strengths of both stochastic and deterministic models. The framework serves as a background for detailed applications for the developed models.
Lithospheric Structure and Evolution of Southern Africa: Constraints From Joint Inversion of Rayleigh Wave Dispersion and Receiver Functions

We conduct a joint inversion of teleseismic receiver functions and Rayleigh wave phase velocity dispersion from both ambient noise and earthquakes using data from 79 seismic stations in southern Africa, which is home to some of the world's oldest cratons and orogenic belts. The area has experienced two of the largest igneous activities in the world (the Okavango dyke swarm and Bushveld mafic intrusion) and thus is an ideal locale for investigating continental formation and evolution. The resulting 3‐D shear wave velocities for the depth range of 0–100 km and crustal thickness measurements show a clear spatial correspondence with known geological features observed on the surface. Higher than normal mantle velocities found beneath the southern part of the Kaapvaal craton are consistent with the basalt removal model for the formation of cratonic lithosphere. In contrast, the Bushveld complex situated within the northern part of the craton is characterized by a thicker crust and higher crustal Vp/Vs but lower mantle velocities, which are indicative of crustal underplating of mafic materials and lithospheric refertilization by the world's largest layered mafic igneous intrusion. The thickened crust and relatively low elevation observed in the Limpopo belt, which is a late Archean collisional zone between the Kaapvaal and Zimbabwe cratons, can be explained by eclogitization of the basaltic lower crust. The study also finds evidence for the presence of a stalled segment of oceanic lithosphere beneath the southern margin of the Proterozoic Namaqua‐Natal mobile belt.
Flora of Singapore precursors, 14. Notes on Apocynaceae

Lectotypes are designated for 28 names of Apocynaceae, seven of which are second-step lectotypifications. Two names are neotypified, Leptostemma hirsutum Blume is designated as the type of the genus Leptostemma Blume, and a new combination in Secamone R.Br. is coined for Genianthus maingayi Hook.f.
Geographical Distribution of Thermometers Gives the Appearance of Lower Historical Global Warming

Gaps with missing data in the observational temperature record are responsible for an underestimation of the global warming between 1881–1910 and 1986–2015 by 0.1 °C. We found that missing data in the historical observations introduce a warm bias in the early part of the record and a cold bias toward the end. The effect of the nonuniform sampling was explored by comparing the global mean temperature estimated from gridded observations, climate model simulations, and reanalysis. Output from global simulations was subsampled by masking the grid boxes corresponding to those with missing data in the observations to mimic the geographical availability of temperature measurements. A combination of variance depending on region and a varying geographical data sampling over time explains the bias in the global mean. We propose a methodology for estimating the global mean temperature that reduces the effect of the nonuniform variance.
Relationship of Vegetation Indices from Drone-Based Passive Optical Sensors with Corn Grain Yield and Sugar Beet Root Yield and Quality

iii ACKNOWLEDGMENTS . iv LIST OF TABLES . viii LIST OF FIGURES . xi LIST OF ABBREVIATIONS . xiii LIST OF APPENDIX TABLES . xiv LIST OF APPENDIX FIGURES.xv INTRODUCTION . 1 LITERATURE REVIEW . 4 Nitrogen fertilizer use in industrial agriculture . 4 Precision agriculture and the use of remote sensing . 5 Electromagnetic spectrum and vegetation indices . 8 Quantitative and qualitative prediction using optical sensors.13 Small unmanned aerial systems for precision agriculture . 15 Effect of nitrogen on corn yield and quality . 17 Effect of nitrogen on sugar beet yield and quality . 21 MATERIALS AND METHODS . 25 Site description and experimental design . 25 General plot information . 29 Corn experiments . 30 Sugar beet experiments . 31 Sugar beet harvest date experiments . 32
Thermal Weakening, Convergent Flow, and Vertical Heat Transport in the Northeast Greenland Ice Stream Shear Margins

Ice streams are bounded by abrupt transitions in speed called shear margins. Some shear margins are fixed by subglacial topography, but others are thought to be self‐organizing, evolving by thermal feedback to ice viscosity and basal drag which govern the stress balance of ice sheets. Resistive stresses (and properties governing shear‐margin formation) manifest nonuniquely at the surface, motivating the use of subsurface observations to constrain ice sheet models. In this study, we use ice‐penetrating radar data to evaluate three 3‐D thermomechanical models of the Northeast Greenland Ice Stream, focusing on model reproductions of ice temperature (a primary control on viscosity) and subsurface velocity. Data/model agreement indicates elevated temperatures in the Northeast Greenland Ice Stream margins, with depth‐averaged temperatures between 2 °C and 6 °C warmer in the southeast margin compared to ice in streaming flow, driven by vertical heat transport rather than shear heating. This work highlights complexity in ice divergence across stagnant/streaming transitions.
Prosodic conditioning: An instrumental production study of Tagalog o/u variation

1 Overview ❖ o and u alternate in the native Tagalog lexicon ❖ However, there is free variation in reduplicants * , e.g., /puno-puno/ 'overflowing' [puno-puno] ~ [punu-puno] ❖ This study instrumentally investigates this free variation and probes for an effect of prosody.
Domestic Wastewater Contribution to Water Quality of Brantas River at Dinoyo Urban Village, Malang City

Domestic wastewater from human activities in densely populated settlements could affect the quality of streamflow because its organic matter could affect the amount of oxygen in aquatic ecosystems as an impact from biological and chemical degradation processes. The main aim of this research was to analyze the contribution of domestic wastewater from Dinoyo Urban Village settlement to the water quality of Brantas River on BOD and COD concentrations. The sampling of water and respondents were taken by purposive sampling method. The water sampling using grab sample method was performed at upstream, middle, and downstream stations of the river segment. The Estimation Method by regulation was employed to calculate BOD and COD emissions. The results showed that BOD concentrations were between 12.7 to 13.627 mgl- 1 and COD concentrations were between 26.677 to 28.197 mgl -1 . The amount of BOD emission was 539 kg/day and COD emission was 1032 kg/day which were dominated by human activities in bathing, washing, and lavatory. It concluded that domestic wastewater from settlement contributed to the streamflow quality by the increase on BOD and COD concentrations at each sampling points and it could not be used to its utility because it exceeded the class II of water quality standards. Keywords: BOD, COD, emission, human activities, water quality.
Delineating wetland areas from the cut-and-fill method using a Digital Elevation Model (DEM)

ABSTRACT Satellite imagery has been widely used to delineate, map and monitor different wetland types. However, the influence of clouds and spectral confusion between wetlands and other land cover types has a negative effect on classification accuracies across nearly all methods. Most wetlands are topographic lowlands surrounded by uplands, and this study explores the possibilities of delineating wetlands from Digital Elevation Models (DEMs) using the cut-and-fill method. The objectives were: (1) to examine the possible use of the cut-and-fill method, which is commonly used in construction, to delineate different types of large floodplain wetlands, and (2) to compare the accuracy of the cut-and-fill method with wetness indices commonly used for delineating wetlands from satellite images. Comparison between the cut-and-fill method, the Normalised Difference Water Index (NDWI) and the Modified Normalised Water Difference Index (MNDWI) showed that the cut-and-fill method was superior in terms of overall accuracy and kappa statistics while the NDWI was the poorest of the three methods. The study concluded that the cut-and-fill method can be useful in delineating wetland areas, especially for wetlands in confined valley settings and where cloud-free images are not available.
Systems for Improving Internet Availability and Performance

Systems for Improving Internet Availability and Performance Ethan B. Katz-Bassett Co-Chairs of the Supervisory Committee: Professor Thomas E. Anderson Department of Computer Science and Engineering Associate Professor Arvind Krishnamurthy Department of Computer Science and Engineering The Internet’s role in our lives continues to grow, but it often fails to provide the availability and performance demanded by our increasing reliance on it. The problems largely stem from the fact that network operators at an Internet service provider (ISP) have little visibility into and even less control over the routing of other ISPs on which they depend to deliver global connectivity. In this dissertation, I design, build, and evaluate practical distributed systems that ISPs can use today to understand availability and performance problems. I develop reverse traceroute, a system to measure reverse paths back to the local host from arbitrary destinations. While tools have long existed to measure the forward direction, the reverse path has been largely opaque, hindering troubleshooting efforts. I show how content providers such as Google could use reverse traceroute to troubleshoot their clients’ performance problems. The rest of the dissertation focuses on long-lasting routing outages. My measurements show that they occur frequently and contribute significantly to overall unavailability. To address these long-term problems, I develop a system, LIFEGUARD, for automatic failure localization and remediation. First, the system builds on reverse traceroute to locate faults, even in the presence of asymmetric paths and failures. Second, I develop a technique that enables edge ISPs to steer traffic to them around failures, without requiring the involvement of the network causing the failure. Deploying LIFEGUARD on the live Internet, I find that it can effectively route traffic around particular ISPs without causing widespread disruption.
Eye tracking with EEG life-style

Innovative human-computer interaction paradigms with minimum motor control provide realistic interactions and have potential for use in assistive technologies. Among the human modalities, the eyes and the brain are the two modalities with minimum motor requirements. Most of the existing assistive technologies based on tracking the eyes (such as electrooculography and videooculography) are intrusive, limited to the laboratory environment and restrictive or are not accurate enough for real-life applications. The same limitations apply to brain activity monitoring systems such as electroencephalography (EEG). In this research, the objective is to employ a less-intrusive, consumer-grade EEG headset designed for mobile applications to track the user’s eyes and reliably estimate focus of foveal attention (FoA). To this end, signal processing approaches are proposed in order to classify different types of eye movements and estimate FoA. The FoA estimation is then improved using the brain responses to flickering stimuli recorded in EEG data. Afterwards, the FoA estimation is again improved by proposing an automated method to remove eye-related artefacts from brain responses to the stimuli. Finally, the FoA estimation is best improved by extracting eye-movement classification and brain-response detection features from EEG data projected into independent sources.
Soil health and root-influenced biochemical dynamics in conventional and integrated livestock systems in central Iowa

Conventional agricultural cropping systems in the United States Midwest consist of short corn (Zea mays L.)-soybean (Glycine max L.) rotations that depend heavily on external inputs like chemical fertilizer and pesticides to maintain high yields. These simplified systems are associated with environmental externalities like soil degradation and water quality impairment. Agricultural systems that increase crop rotation diversity are known to increase yields compared to more simplified rotations, a phenomenon called the ‘rotation effect’. Mechanisms for this effect are not known, but could be linked to soil health changes. This study evaluates soil health in a conventional cropping system and an economically comparable alternative that previously demonstrated significantly greater corn and soybean yields than the conventional system. Using a long-term cropping system, 15 years after its establishment, soils in the corn phase were compared in the following cropping systems: 1) a conventional corn-soybean cropping system receiving mineral nitrogen fertilizer, and 2) a diversified corn-soybean-small grain+alfalfa (Medicago sativa L.)-alfalfa rotation receiving composted cattle manure and reduced mineral nitrogen fertilizer. A total of 37 soil health parameters were analyzed throughout the 2017 growing season, including 5 physical, 21 chemical, and 11 biological soil health parameters. Soils were sampled at depths of 0-15 cm and 15-30 cm, and some parameters were collected at three proximities to the corn root (interrow, row, and rhizosphere soil). Specific soil health parameters analyzed were: bulk density, soil hardness, water stable aggregates, plant available water, gravimetric water content, nine plant available nutrients (Al, Ca, Cu, Fe, K, P, Mg, Mn, and Zn), pH, cation exchange capacity, soil organic C (SOC), total soil N (TN), the ratio of SOC to TN, dissolved organic C, dissolved organic N (DON), dissolved inorganic N as soil nitrate and ammonium, total dissolved N (TDN), soil water nitrate, earthworm and mesofauna abundance, microbial biomass C, microbial biomass N, the ratio of microbial biomass C:N, soil CO2 respiration, and five hydrolytic enzyme activities (β-glucosidase, cellobiohydrolase, β-N-acetylglucosaminidase,
Converting snow depth to snow water equivalent using climatological variables

Abstract. We present a simple method that allows snow depth measurements to be converted to snow water equivalent (SWE) estimates. These estimates are useful to individuals interested in water resources, ecological function, and avalanche forecasting. They can also be assimilated into models to help improve predictions of total water volumes over large regions. The conversion of depth to SWE is particularly valuable since snow depth measurements are far more numerous than costlier and more complex SWE measurements. Our model regresses SWE against snow depth (h), day of water year (DOY) and climatological (30-year normal) values for winter (December, January, February) precipitation (PPTWT), and the difference (TD) between mean temperature of the warmest month and mean temperature of the coldest month, producing a power-law relationship. Relying on climatological normals rather than weather data for a given year allows our model to be applied at measurement sites lacking a weather station. Separate equations are obtained for the accumulation and the ablation phases of the snowpack. The model is validated against a large database of snow pillow measurements and yields a bias in SWE of less than 2 mm and a root-mean-squared error (RMSE) in SWE of less than 60 mm. The model is additionally validated against two completely independent sets of data: one from western North America and one from the northeastern United States. Finally, the results are compared with three other models for bulk density that have varying degrees of complexity and that were built in multiple geographic regions. The results show that the model described in this paper has the best performance for the validation data sets.
Chitinozoan biostratigraphy of the Rheidol Gorge Section, Central Wales, UK: a GSSP replacement candidate for the Rhuddanian–Aeronian boundary

As part of an international effort to evaluate potential replacement sections for the current Aeronian GSSP, the stratigraphy of the Rheidol Gorge section (central Wales, UK) is being restudied. A total of 28 samples from the Rhuddanian–Aeronian boundary interval at Rheidol Gorge were studied for chitinozoans. This famous Welsh Basin section, its stratigraphy rooted in the work of O.T. Jones and M. Sudbury, comprises a series of laminated black shales with abundant graptolites, alternating with grey mudstone intervals, deposited in anoxic to dysoxic/oxic seafloor conditions, respectively. The exposed section of c. 20 m spans the middle part of the upper Rhuddanian Pernerograptus revolutus Biozone through the lower Aeronian Neodiplograptus magnus Biozone of the lower to mid‐Llandovery Series (Cwmere and Derwenlas formations). Our chitinozoan analysis yielded an assemblage of over 2300 specimens distributed approximately uniformly throughout the entire succession. A total of 16 different taxa are identified, of which 12 remain in open nomenclature, reflecting the poor to moderately intact preservation of the specimens. Based on the presence of key species such as Spinachitina maennili and Conochitina iklaensis, the Rheidol Gorge section is referred to the Spinachitina maennili Biozone. This observation is in perfect alignment with the typical signature of other Rhuddanian–Aeronian boundary successions in the Welsh Basin and in other parts of the world.
Habitat changes and population dynamics of fishes in a stream with forest floor degradation due to deer overconsumption in its catchment area

Forest degradation caused by deer overabundance has become a worldwide problem in recent decades. Overgrazing by deer not only affects terrestrial ecosystems but also spreads to aquatic ecosystems. Mass consumption of forest floor vegetation by deer creates denuded slopes and increases sediment inputs into adjacent rivers. In addition, rivers have upstream–downstream continuum structures, whereby the effects of degradation events in forests at upstream sites may spread to larger ecosystems downstream. However, few studies have examined the indirect effects of deer overabundance on downstream ecosystems. I examined the relationships between population dynamics of 13 fish species and habitat characteristics at a downstream site over the course of 11 years after forest floor degradation by deer overconsumption in a 36.5‐km2 catchment area of the Yura River in the Ashiu Research Forest, Japan, which is well‐protected from anthropogenic influences. During my 11 years of observation, characteristics of stream habitats changed from a predominantly coarse substrate to a fine substrate. I observed a remarkable decrease in one species (Tribolodon hakonensis) and increase in another species (Pseudogobio esocinus), and these changes were reasonably consistent with the increase or decrease in their preferred habitat types in the sampling site. This study showed long‐term habitat changes in a stream after forest floor degradation due to deer overconsumption in its catchment area and demonstrated that fish populations reacted to these changes. This study suggests that catchment‐level management, including forest ecosystem conservation, is necessary to solve fundamental problems in stream ecosystems.
Climatic effects on ice phenology and ice-jam flooding of the Athabasca River in western Canada

ABSTRACT In cold region environments, any alteration in the hydro-climatic regime can have profound impacts on river ice processes. This paper studies the implications of hydro-climatic trends on river ice processes, particularly on the freeze-up and ice-cover breakup along the Athabasca River in Fort McMurray in western Canada, which is an area very prone to ice-jam flooding. Using a stochastic approach in a one-dimensional hydrodynamic river ice model, a relationship between overbank flow and breakup discharge is established. Furthermore, the likelihood of ice-jam flooding in the future (2041–2070 period) is assessed by forcing a hydrological model with meteorological inputs from the Canadian regional climate model driven by two atmospheric–ocean general circulation climate models. Our results show that the probability of ice-jam flooding for the town of Fort McMurray in the future will be lower, but extreme ice-jam flood events are still probable.