prompt_front: Now, answer the following question based on the text below, only give me the answer and do not output any other words.

Question: What is the rationality coefficient used in the observation model?

Read the following text and answer briefly.

Context 1: Paper Info

Title: Incorporating Human Path Preferences in Robot Navigation with Minimal Interventions
Publish Date: 16 Mar 2023
Author List: Oriana Peltzer, Dylan Asmar, Mac Schwager, Mykel Kochenderfer

Figure

Hyperplane arrangement of a twodimensional space containing two obstacles (colored in gray) The robot is located inside the pink polytope, surrounded by three adjacent obstacle-free polytopes Each hyperplane on the boundary of the robot's polytope corresponds to one of the nonredundant constraints in eq (4) (b)Graph derived from the hyperplane arrangement The nodes on the graph designate polytopes, and edges designate transitions to adjacent polytopes To estimate the human's preference, the robot updates a posterior over the goal and over which of the graph transitions φ 1 , φ 2 and φ 3 is preferred by the human (c)Example preference defined over the graph The location of the goal is indicated in yellow in the lower right polytope For each node, the outgoing pink arrow designates the edge on the graph corresponding to the preferred transition between polytopes 
Simple, 10 × 10, 8 polytopes (b) Map 2: Office, 10 × 10, 56 polytopes (c) Map 3: Classroom, 20 × 20, 73 polytopes (d) Sampled observations and robot's executed trajectories 
Fig 5: Maps used for simulating the robot navigation problem with path preferences In (d), the heading angles observed are indicated with arrows The goal is indicated with a pink circle, and the orange robot corresponds to the starting location The blue robot follows a policy that accounts for path preference, while the green robot does not The opacity of the robots increases with time 
Map 1 problem setup and example realizations for goal-only (green) and path preference (blue) solution methods The robot starts at the lower left corner of the environment, and the goal of the task (pink circle) is in the upper left area The robot does not know which goal, among 10 options (shown in light blue squares), is the correct goal The human provides noisy observations, indicated by arrows, at each iteration The green robot selects actions according to the goal-only baseline, and the blue robot uses our proposed method to infer path preferences The polytopes composing G are drawn in blue Probability of correct goal WLPHVWHS +J (c) Entropy of goal distribution g 
Fig  6: Probability of the correct goal, fig 6b, and entropy of the goal belief distribution P (g), fig 6c, for the same problem setup, fig 6a In this problem instance, the human's preference is to go to the goal by passing on the right side of the obstacle Results are averaged over 50 runs and the area filled represents one standard deviation above and below the mean value The goal-only baseline shows an over-confident prediction (shown by the strong reduction in belief entropy) that the correct goal is less likely, making it more difficult to reach the correct goal compared to a method that accounts for path preference 
Success rates in the simple environment (Map 1) The results are averaged over 6 randomly sampled problem instances (start location, goal location, and goal possibilities), and over 50 runs per problem instance ∆T is the number of time steps separating two consecutive human inputs The robot's mission time is Tmax = 30 time steps We selected γ h = 1 5, corresponding to relatively noisy human inputs and making the problem more difficult to solve for the robot 
Computation times for Goal Only and Path Preference methods on Map 1 (fig 5a),Map 2 (fig 5b), and Map 3 (fig 5c),averaged over 100 runs with randomly sampled problem instances The 95 % confidence interval is provided with the mean We evaluate computation time at the first iteration of each run (where the search depth takes on its highest value Tmax) 

abstract

Robots that can effectively understand human intentions from actions are crucial for successful human-robot collaboration  In this work, we address the challenge of a robot navigating towards an unknown goal while also accounting for a human's preference for a particular path in the presence of obstacles 
This problem is particularly challenging when both the goal and path preference are unknown a priori  To overcome this challenge, we propose a method for encoding and inferring path preference online using a partitioning of the space into polytopes  Our approach enables joint inference over the goal and path preference using a stochastic observation model for the human 
We evaluate our method on an unknown-goal navigation problem with sparse human interventions, and find that it outperforms baseline approaches as the human's inputs become increasingly sparse  We find that the time required to update the robot's belief does not increase with the complexity of the environment, which makes our method suitable for online applications 

INTRODUCTION

Collaboration between humans and robots has become increasingly important and one key aspect of this collaboration is the ability for robots to adapt to human decisions  In many scenarios, such as a robot navigating through a busy room to deliver an item, it is important for the robot to take into account human preferences 
For instance, humans may prefer a specific path that would allow their colleagues to notice the item being delivered, but this preference may change dynamically based on various factors such as changes in the environment or unforeseen circumstances  While some preferences can be incorporated into the path-planning process, accommodating dynamic user preferences in real-time remains challenging 
In this paper, we propose a way to enable robots to adapt to human preferences dynamically by leveraging real-time feedback to inform decision-making  In this work, we tackle the problem of robot navigation in which the robot cannot observe the goal or the preferred path to the goal, but must make navigation decisions that are influenced by humans through recommended actions 
Prior work has explored how to adapt to a human's preference through feedback, but such approaches often require a high level of intervention, which can be time-consuming and impractical in real-world scenarios  To optimize the use of human input and quickly infer the human's preference, Fig  : An autonomous robot navigates in a simulated classroom towards a goal location (pink circle) 
At the start of its mission, it receives direction indications (arrows) from a human that indicate which path it should take to get to the goal  In this scenario, the human wants the robot to go around the desks on the right side of the classroom  A robot that does not reason over path preferences (green) will take the shortest path to the goal regardless of the human's input 
Our method (blue) infers the human's path preference from these indications and adapts to their recommendations  we propose an approach that leverages probabilistic representations of human preference and incorporates real-time feedback  Previous research by Bajcsy et al  considered an online adaptation problem in a manipulation task, where the person can apply forces to the robot to indicate their preferences 
By allowing the robot to continue its task while taking into account a probabilistic representation of human preference, their approach does not require frequent inputs  Building on this idea, we adopt a similar approach to adapt to a human's preference in the context of a robot autonomously navigating through a known environment, such as a cluttered office space 
Specifically, we focus on allowing the human to influence the robot's trajectory with respect to obstacles, by providing guidance on preferred routes or paths, while the robot continues to execute its task  Paths can be represented using homotopy classes   However, homotopies can pose computational challenges when used to encode and infer human preferences 
When the robot maintains a belief over homotopy classes, the inference problem can become exponentially complex with the number of obstacles in the space  Additionally, when the goal is unknown, the number of variables increases with the number of candidate destinations  This complexity can render the decision-making problem intractable 
Our solution is to encode path preference based on a partitioning of the environment into polytopes   This representation allows path preferences to be expressed as sets of preferred transitions between adjacent polytopes  Paths belonging to different homotopy classes correspond to different sequences of transitions 
By leveraging conditional independence assumptions, we can make the Bayesian inference problem tractable  These assumptions exploit the fact that human actions provide information about the path in a piece-wise manner  For example, indicating a preference for navigating around a particular obstacle only provides information about the local area and not the entire path 
Finally, after updating its belief representation over the human's preference, the robot can adapt to indications by replanning online  Our contributions are as follows  • We formulate the human-robot collaboration problem as a Partially Observable Markov Decision Process (POMDP) where both the goal of the task and the human's path preference are unknown random variables 
• We propose an encoding of a human's path preference using a partitioning of the environment into polytopes, along with conditional independence assumptions that make the Bayesian inference problem tractable to infer the task goal and path preference online  • Through simulations in two environments of different sizes and complexity, we show that our method is effective for solving problems where the robot must reach a goal that is unknown a-priori while simultaneously adapting to a human's indications 
Our method shows higher success rates compared to baseline approaches when the human inputs are sparse  Our approach enables a robot to make effective navigation decisions in collaboration with a human, even when the goal and path preference are not known in advance, and with minimal human input  In recent years, there has been a growing interest in shared autonomy and interactive systems, where humans and robots work together to accomplish tasks 
Several approaches have been proposed to address the challenge of enabling effective collaboration between human and robot agents while still achieving high task performance  Losey et al  and Jeon, Losey, and Sadigh propose a framework where a human operator is given control of a task-relevant latent action space while an autonomous system handles the rest 
Dragan and Srinivasa present a formalism for arbitrating between a user's input and a robot's policy when both human and robot share control of the same action space  Cognetti et al  [7] provide a method for real-time modifications of a path,       Fig  : We model the intent inference problem with the above diagram 
At each step in time, the robot receives an observation ot from the human conditioned on its current location st, the intended goal g, and the human's path preference θ  The robot updates its belief over g and θ and transitions to a next location st+1  while Hagenow et al  present a method that allows an outside agent to modify key robot state variables and blends the changes with the original control 
However, a common challenge of these approaches is the high level of intervention required from humans  Best and Fitch propose a method for predicting an agent's intended trajectory from observations  Rather than maintaining a belief over the agent's future path, they infer the agent's intended goal among a set of candidate locations at the boundary of the space 
This approach provides information on where the agent is heading and generates a distribution of candidate future trajectories for the agent  Inferring the goal of the task among a discrete set of candidates is also relevant to the area of shared autonomy  Javdani, Srinivasa, and Bagnell propose a formalism for shared control of a robotic arm, where the robot must assist the human in picking up an object but needs to infer which object the human has chosen from joystick inputs 
Planning with homotopy class constraints is useful in problems where the robot's requirements are given with respect to obstacles, and Yi, Goodrich, and Seppi consider topological constraints provided by human operators  Bhattacharya propose an efficient algorithm for solving pathplanning problems under homotopic constraints 
However, the number of homotopy classes for a given problem can be infinite, and as the robot changes location and updates its representation of the world, carrying out inference over homotopy classes in a dynamic environment requires recomputing the set of homotopies at every iteration, making the belief update challenging 
Prior work has addressed the challenge of shared autonomy by considering how robots can infer a human's intended goal, or how they can infer the preferred path to a goal  However, we argue that inferring the goal and the path as separate problems can lead to over-confidence in incorrect beliefs about the user's preferences 
To illustrate this point, consider the following scenario: a robot and a human are collaborating to move an object from one end of a room to Fig  : Using the hyperplanes composing the H-representation of each obstacle, we construct a hyperplane arrangement of the obstacle-free space (a)  We define the human's preference for the robot's one step action choices as the posterior distribution (given all human input up to that point) over transitions from the current to the neighboring polytopes, i e  edges on the graph 
Each time the robot transitions to a new polytope, the set of neighbor polytopes and the distribution over human preferences are updated  another, but there is an obstacle in the way  The human would like the robot to take a path around the obstacle on the left, even though the goal is on the right  If the robot only infers the goal from the human's inputs, it may incorrectly assume that the goal is on the right, and become over-confident in this belief 
On the other hand, if the robot only infers the preferred path, it may mistakenly assume that the goal is on the left, leading to a failure in completing the task  To overcome these challenges, our work proposes a joint inference approach that considers both the human's intended goal and their preferred path to that goal 
Specifically, we model the human's preference over different homotopy classes and leverage a conditional independence assumption to provide a tractable solution  In our approach, we assume that the human's inputs are noisily rational conditioned on both the goal and the preference  By jointly inferring the goal and path preference, we can avoid over-confidence in incorrect beliefs about the user's preferences, leading to improved system performance 
We consider the problem of robot navigation in a known environment to an unknown destination, where a human can intervene and provide a heading direction to the robot using a joystick or force cues  The human also has a preference on which path the robot should take with respect to obstacles, and our objective is for the robot to understand the human's intentions and execute the task with minimal interventions 
Let g be a discrete random variable denoting the goal of the task, belonging to a set of candidates Ω g , and let θ be a discrete-valued random variable representing the human's path preference, belonging to a set of possible preferences Θ  The physical location of the robot at time index t is denoted by s t ∈ R 2 , and the robot's action at time index t, belonging to some action space A, is denoted by a t  
The transition model T (s t+1 | s t , a t ) is deterministic, meaning the robot has full control over its future location  At any time step, the human may provide an observation to the robot  When the human intervenes, the robot receives a direction (heading angle) that can be mapped to a future location in space 
More specifically, we map the direction to an intended location, which is the resulting robot location after advancing in the indicated direction for one time step  For simplicity, we consider that the robot directly makes an observation o t of the location indicated by the human  We assume that the robot has a stochastic observation model for the human P (o t | s t , g, θ) that is conditioned on both the goal of the task g and the human's preferred path θ 
We further assume that having chosen a goal and path preference, the human takes actions to noisily minimize a cost function C g,θ that measures the cost of moving from the robot's current location to the goal along the preferred path  For example, C g,θ (s t , o t ) can be the length of the shortest path from location s t to the goal g after taking a first step to o t , and constrained by path preference θ 
We use C g,θ to induce a probability distribution over observations, given by: where γ h is a hyperparameter that designates the rationality coefficient  This model assumes the human will pick the lowest cost action with the highest probability and the likelihood of an action decreases exponentially with the increase in cost  
Our inclusion of the path preference θ sets our approach apart from   The model is shown in fig  represented as a Bayesian Network 

Inference

At each time step where the human provides an observation, the posterior P (g, θ) is given through the Bayesian update We note that the number of Bayesian updates required at each iteration to update the belief is equal to the cardinality of Ω g × Θ  In addition, each Bayesian update involves computing C g,θ (  
,   ) in eq  ( ), which involves solving an optimization problem (such as a shortest path problem)  In section IV, we propose a specific encoding of preference θ for resolving eq  ( ), while ensuring the number of computations of the cost C g,θ ( ,  ) per update does not grow exponentially with the number of obstacles 

Decision Making

We consider a navigation problem where the robot receives reward according to the model R(s t , g, θ, a t )  We wish to find the optimal policy π that maximizes the expected discounted sum of future rewards, with discount factor γ  The above problem is a Partially Observable Markov Decision Process (POMDP)  
In this section, we propose an encoding of human's path preference θ for computing the posterior in eq  ( )  Devifrom the concept of homotopy classes, we define the preference according to a partitioning of the environment into polytopes, as shown in fig  , creating a hyperplane arrangement of the space 
Hyperplane arrangements have been used by Vincent and Schwager in the context of Neural Network verification  In our setting, we leverage this representation to define path preferences as preferred transitions between adjacent regions of the space 

Hyperplane Arrangement

We assume a two-dimensional environment composed of m polytopic obstacles, each defined by their half-space representation (H-representation) where A i ∈ R di×2 and b i ∈ R di , and where d i is the number of edges (hyperplanes) composing polytope i  Let n = i d i be the total number of hyperplanes  We leverage each obstacle's H-representation to construct a hyperplane arrangement of the environment as shown in fig 
 e  a partitioning of the space into polytopes  More specifically, each location in space belongs to a polytope j for which we can write an H-representation of the form where α j i ∈ {−1, 1} di is a vector specific to polytope j and obstacle i corresponding to the relative position of any point in the set with respect to each hyperplane in O i  
Fig  : Intent inference model in a hyperplane arrangement of the obstacle free space  We spatially decompose the preference θ into a set of preferred neighboring polytopes per region of the space  Within each polytope j, the human preference pj is a discrete distribution over the preferred neighbor in N (j) 
We assume that for a location st belonging to polytope j, and given goal g and preference pj, the observation ot and any other preference p i,i =j are conditionally independent  Concatenating elements from each obstacle's Hrepresentation, we can write polytope j's H-representation as where Some of the constraints in eq  ( ) (corresponding to rows of A, b and α j ) are redundant, i e  the set P j does not change upon their removal 
We can further reduce the Hrepresentation of a polytope to include only non-redundant constraints  By removing the rows corresponding to redundant constraints, we obtain new matrices A j e , b j e and α j e such that we can write the polytope's reduced H-representation as The non-redundant constraints correspond to edges of the polytope 
In other words, as the robot continually moves in space, the first hyperplane that it will cross upon exiting the polytope will correspond to one of the polytope's nonredundant constraints  Vincent and Schwager outline an iterative method for removing redundant constraints by solving n linear programs 
We use this method in practice for computing α j e for each polytope  We can now characterize each polytope by a vector α j e ∈ {−1, 1} n j e , where n j e ≤ n is the number of essential constraints of the polytope  The polytopes P j partition the environment into a hyperplane arrangement 

Path Preference

In this section, we provide a definition of preference θ according to a graphical representation of the environment based on the hyperplane arrangement  Under this representation, a path preference corresponds to a set of preferred transitions  In other words, for each polytope in the space, the human will have a preference to which neighboring polytope they wish to transition 
Let G := (V, E) be an undirected graph, where vertices are obstacle-free polytopes, and edges connect two adjacent polytopes  Each polytope is described by a unique vector α j as defined in eq  ( )  Two polytopes are adjacent if they share non-redundant constraints (rows in eq  ( )) corresponding to the same hyperplane (i e  they are on opposite sides of the hyperplane) 
Let N (v) be the set of neighbors of a vertex v  For each vertex, we denote p v the discrete-valued random variable describing which edge in N (v) the human intends to transition to  Using this formalism, we define a path preference as the set of preferred transitions over all nodes in the graph, Let m θ = v∈V |N (v)| be the cardinality of Θ, and m g = |Ω g | the number of possible goals 
A priori, the number of Bayesian updates required to update the belief at every iteration should be m θ × m g   Now, let us assume the conditional independence relationships described by the new problem diagram in fig    More specifically, we introduce the assumption that conditioned on a robot location s t , the goal g, and the preference for the corresponding vertex p v in the graph, the observation o t and the preference for any other vertex are conditionally independent 
In other words, the observations the human provides can be defined conditioned only on the robot location, the goal, and the human's preference for its current vertex p v   By introducing this assumption, each update step only requires updating the joint (p v , g), reducing the number of cost computations to |N (v)| × m g  
We can notice that by introducing this assumption, we removed the direct relationship between the number of polytopes in the environment and the complexity of the Bayesian update in eq  ( )  In practice, components of θ are not mutually independent  For example, if the human preference at a vertex v 1 is
, it is unlikely that the human will also prefer p v2 = (v 2 , v 1 ) (turning back)  We can improve our model by assuming a dependent relationship between preferences for adjacent edges, which does not significantly increase the complexity of the inference problem  An interesting property of our encoding is that any two paths that belong to different homotopy classes will cross different sequences of polytopes, i e  they correspond to a different sequence of edges on G 
This can be proved by contradiction  Let us suppose that two continuous trajectories ξ 1 and ξ 2 , with the same start and end points and that do not intersect any obstacle, traverse the same regions in G in the same order  From the construction of the hyperplane arrangement, each polytope that the paths traverse through is obstacle-free 
Therefore, within each polytope, there is no obstacle in the area located in between the portions of ξ 1 and ξ 2 that belong to the region  A smooth transformation of ξ 1 into ξ 2 can be obtained by transforming each portion of ξ 1 belonging to the polytopes it intersects into the corresponding portion of ξ 2 for the same polytopes, where the extremities of the trajectory portions are connected to one another along the polytope's edges (where the same edge is crossed by both paths) 
Along this transformation, the paths do not intersect any obstacle, and therefore ξ 1 and ξ 2 belong to the same homotopy class 

EXPERIMENTS

We evaluate our model on a simulated navigation task where the robot must reach a goal that is unknown a priori while respecting the path preferences indicated by a human  The robot navigates in a grid world containing obstacles  The transition model is deterministic: the robot selects an adjacent location on the grid to reach at the next time step 
The robot is also allowed to take diagonal actions  Each location s t in the map can be mapped to a vertex v t ∈ G  Therefore, the actions leading to locations mapped to different vertices correspond to edges on the graph  We note f (s t , a t ) the edge crossed by taking action a t from location s t  
The robot is given a mission time limit T max for reaching the goal  In this problem, we assume that the human selects actions to noisily minimize a cost function C g,θ , where θ is defined as per eq  ( ), corresponding to the length of the shortest path to the goal constrained by the preference (where the robot is only allowed to make transitions on G along preferred edges) 
More specifically, where δ(s t , g | o t , p vt ) designates the length of the shortest path from s t to g passing by o t and constrained by preference p vt   This is a slight variant of the cost function proposed by Best and Fitch , where we add in a conditioning on the path preference  We compute costs by running the A path planning algorithm on the environment maps (grid worlds with diagonal actions) and impose preference constraints by pruning invalid transitions from the search tree 
Reward model  At each step in time, the robot receives a reward which is a sum of three components: a goal-specific reward a preference-specific reward or penalty We compute solutions to the POMDP defined in section III-B with the online solver POMCP , and with the particularity that within the rollouts, the robot does not expect to collect human inputs 
Each time a solution is computed, the robot takes an action and may receive an observation  If it does, it updates its belief distribution over the unknown problem variables and resolves the POMDP over a receding horizon 

Baselines

• Goal only  The robot solves the POMDP while ignoring the effects of path preference  Similarly to , we assume the human is taking action to minimize a goaldependent cost C g (s t , o t ) = δ(s t , g | o t ), where the conditioning on the preference is removed  We also omit the path preference's contribution to the reward R pref  
• Compliant  The robot complies with the human input, but does not take an initiative  If the user stops providing information, the robot continues in the last direction indicated for 5 time steps (conserving its momentum), then stops  • Blended  We designed an arbitration function to decide between our proposed policy (accounting for path preferences) and the user's recommendation when the robot receives inputs 
Our metric to evaluate confidence in the robot's prediction for the purpose of arbitration is the entropy of the intention distribution H(g, p i ), where p i denotes the preferred neighbor for the current region  Because our representation of the world is discrete, the arbitration is given by a step function 
Denoted by U , the action corresponding to the human's input, and P , the robot's prediction for the optimal action, we write the policy where we chose h = 1 6 as the confidence threshold 

Results

When evaluating the algorithm, we consider that a run is successful if the robot reached the goal within its allocated mission time T max and only made transitions between graph vertices corresponding to the human's preferences  We vary the time delay between human inputs, from constant guidance (∆ T = 1) to only a single observation (∆ T ≥ T max ) 
Success rates  Table I reports the success rates for experiments conducted over six randomly sampled problem instances and 50 runs per instance in Map 1 (fig  )  When the human provides inputs at every iteration, the compliant policy shows the highest success rates  However, as ∆ T increases, the compliant robot is not able to accomplish the task within the allotted time as it does not receive sufficient inputs to do so, and performance decreases compared to the autonomous baselines 
We find that in these runs, accounting for path preference consistently improves performance compared with the goal-only baseline  Results also show that blending the user's input with the robot's policy (Path Preference + Blend) when the human provides information leads to improved performance  Belief entropy 
Figure shows a challenging problem instance where the directions the human provides do not align directly with the shortest path to the goal  By ignoring the effects of preferences in the problem model (goal only), the robot quickly infers from observations that the upper left goal is less likely than others (P (g) drops) 
The strong decrease in entropy shows that the robot becomes overconfident in this prediction  Overconfidence in an incorrect goal will prevent the agent from finding the correct goal once the human's indications directly align with it, as it needs to correct for the wrong predictions, as shown in the path realization (fig 
)  In this realization, the goal-only method (green robot) fails to search the upper left area within the allotted time  By accounting for path preferences in its model, the blue robot's entropy over the goal distribution decreases more steadily, allowing for it to leverage the human's latest observations and reach the goal successfully 
shows an over-confident prediction (shown by the strong reduction in belief entropy) that the correct goal is less likely, making it more difficult to reach the correct goal compared to a method that accounts for path preference  Computation time  In table II we provide the time required to solve the POMDP, and the time required to update the robot's belief as it receives new observations 
We compute solutions on three maps: a simple 10 × 10 grid world with 8 polytopes (fig  ), a 10 × 10 grid world with 56 polytopes (fig  ), and a 20×20 grid world with 73 polytopes (fig  )  The latter environment being larger, we increase the mission time and the depth of the search tree in POMCP from T max = 30 (Map 1 and Map 2) to T max = 60 (Map 3) 
We do not notice an increase in the time required to update the robot's belief with an increase in problem complexity, which is consistent with our observation that the complexity of the Bayesian update should not increase with the number of obstacles or polytopes  On the contrary, the belief update time on Map 2 and Map 3, containing more obstacles, is reduced compared to the first map 
More obstacles result in fewer iterations when solving the constrained shortest path problem with A   Adding constraints due to the obstacles and polytopes reduces the size of the A search tree  C  Limitations Simulation environments  In our simulations, we hardcoded the preference policy over the maps (e g  in Map 1, go around the table counter-clockwise) 
We randomly sampled problem instances (start and goal locations, and goal options) to reduce the bias introduced by these preference choices  To best evaluate and compare the different approaches, it would be best to sample preferences among a distribution of preferences chosen by a human (for example, from benchmarks resulting from a collection of data) 
Creating such a benchmark is an interesting direction for future work  Hyperplane arrangement construction  The main limitation of our approach is that the size and geometry of each polytope depends strongly on the geometry of the obstacles, as seen in fig    Because of this, the robot can make predictions over preferences that are too refined compared with the topology of the environment 
A direct consequence is that when the size of the polytopes is small, the information provided by the human can be incorrectly interpreted as a preference on the robot's immediate action  Our method can be improved by changing the structure of the hyperplane arrangement so that it relies on the topology of the environment, but does not vary strongly with the geometry of the features in the environment 
For this purpose, topometric maps and region construction algorithms are promising directions  We presented an approach for encoding and inferring a human's path preference in an environment with obstacles  By leveraging a partitioning of the space into polytopes and a stochastic observation model, our method allows for joint inference over the goal and path preference even when both are unknown a-priori 
Our experiments on an unknown-goal navigation problem with sparse human interventions demonstrate the effectiveness of our approach and its suitability for online applications  The time required to update the robot's belief does not increase with the complexity of the environment, which further highlights the practicality of our method 
Context 2: Outdoors	February 19, 2017
You are here: Home / Archives for Departments / OutdoorsActor Sam Waterson Hosts PBS Documentary on Lyme Land Trust January 14, 2017 by admin Leave a Comment Jack Tiffany, owner of Tiffany Farms on Rte  156 and an earlier pioneer in Lyme land preservation, is interviewed by PBS “Visionaries” documentary producers 
Filed Under: Lyme, Outdoors Application Deadline for Environmental Leadership Scholarship is Feb  1 January 8, 2017 by admin Leave a Comment Applications are now being accepted for the Virginia R  Rollefson Environmental Leadership Scholarship, a $1,000 award to recognize a high school student who has demonstrated leadership and initiative in promoting conservation, preservation, restoration, or environmental education 
Filed Under: Lyme, News, Old Lyme, Outdoors, Top Story Preserves in Lyme Now Closed for Hunting During Weekdays November 17, 2016 by admin Leave a Comment Starting yesterday, Wednesday, Nov  16, the following Preserves in Lyme will be closed Monday through Friday until Tuesday, Dec  20, 2016, except to licensed hunters with valid consent forms from the Town of Lyme Open Space Coordinator:
Banningwood Preserve
Beebe Preserve
Chestnut Hill Preserve
Eno Preserve
Hand Smith
Honey Hill Preserve
Jewett Preserve
Mount Archer Woods
Pickwick’s Preserve
Plimpton Preserve
Slawson Preserve
These preserves, owned by the Town of Lyme or the Lyme Land Conservation Trust, will be open on Saturdays and Sundays during this hunting period as no hunting is allowed on weekends 
The hunting program is fully subscribed 
For more information on the hunting program in Lyme, visit http://www lymelandtrust org/stewardship/hunting-program/
Filed Under: Lyme, Outdoors, Top Story Town of Old Lyme Offers Part-time Land Steward Opportunity October 11, 2016 by admin Leave a Comment The Town of Old Lyme is seeking a part-time individual to maintain and manage the trail systems on its major preserves  Keeping trails cleared, maintaining markers, kiosks, entrances, parking areas, and managing for wildlife and other natural resources are the priorities 
For more information, visit the job posting on the home page of the Town’s web page at http://www oldlyme-ct gov/Pages/index 
To learn about the Open Space Commission and the properties it manages, visit http://www oldlyme-ct gov/Pages/OldLymeCT_Bcomm/open_space
Filed Under: Old Lyme, Outdoors, Top Story CT Fund for the Environment Annual Meeting to be Held Sunday in Hartford September 22, 2016 by admin Leave a Comment Engaging and educating communities for preservation of the Long Island Sound tidal estuary
Save the Sound is celebrating National Estuaries Week Sept  17 – 24 with a series of interactive and educational events throughout the Long Island Sound region  This annual celebration of estuaries—the vital coastal zones where freshwater rivers meet salty seas—is sponsored by Restore America’s Estuaries and its member organizations including Save the Sound  This year’s events call attention to the many benefits of thriving coastal ecosystems, including how estuary conservation efforts support our quality of life and economic well-being 
“The Long Island Sound estuary is not only where freshwater rivers meet the saltwater Atlantic, but where wildlife habitat meets beaches and boating, and where modern industry meets traditional oystering,” said Curt Johnson, executive director of Save the Sound, which is a bi-state program of Connecticut Fund for the Environment (CFE) 
Johnson continued, “All over the country, estuaries are the lifeblood of coastal economies  From serving as natural buffers to protect our coastlines from storms to providing unique habitat for countless birds, fish, and wildlife, estuaries deserve our protection and our thanks ”
Save the Sound is celebrating estuaries with a number of events this week, including the release of a new video, a presentation on Plum Island at the Old Lyme-Phoebe Griffin Noyes Library and the CFE/Save the Sound annual meeting:
Aerial view of Plum Island lighthouse  (From Preserve Plum Island website)
Chris Cryder, Special Projects Coordinator for Save the Sound and Outreach Coordinator for the Preserve Plum Island Coalition, will host Preserving Plum Island for Future Generations, a special presentation on the importance of conserving the wildlife habitats and historic buildings of Plum Island, New York 
Plum Island flanks Plum Gut in the Long Island Sound estuary’s eastern end, where fast-moving tides create highly productive fishing grounds  The talk is part of a multi-week series featuring photographs and paintings of Plum Island, and lectures on its ecology, geology, and history 
Old Lyme-Phoebe Griffin Noyes Library, 2 Library Lane, Old Lyme, Connecticut
Register by calling the library at 860-434-1684 
The Annual Meeting of Connecticut Fund for the Environment and its bi-state program Save the Sound will take place in the Planet Earth exhibit at the Connecticut Science Center  The event is open to the public with registration, and will feature a keynote address from Curt Spalding, administrator of EPA’s New England Region  Spalding is a leader in combatting nitrogen pollution and in climate change resilience planning efforts for New England 
Connecticut Science Center, 250 Columbus Blvd, Hartford, Connecticut
4 – 7 p m
RSVP to mlemere@ctenvironment org
To celebrate the contributions of volunteers to restoring the Long Island Sound estuary, Save the Sound has released a new video of a habitat restoration planting at Hyde Pond in Mystic  Following removal of the old Hyde Pond dam and opening 4 1 miles of stream habitat for migratory fish last winter (see time lapse video here), in May about 30 volunteers planted native vegetation along the Whitford Brook stream bank, under the direction of U S  Fish and Wildlife Service, CT DEEP’s Fisheries division, and Save the Sound staff 
Find more information on the project’s benefits and funders here 
Look for the planting video on Save the Sound’s website, YouTube, Facebook, and Twitter accounts 
Filed Under: Old Lyme, Outdoors 750+ Volunteers Clean Beaches from Norwalk to New London Including Griswold Point in Old Lyme September 17, 2016 by admin Leave a Comment Kendall Perkins displays a skull she found during Save The Sound‘s Coastal Clean-up Day held yesterday at White Sand Beach 
Save the Sound, a bi-state program of Connecticut Fund for the environment, organized 31 cleanups across Connecticut’s shoreline this weekend  The efforts are part of International Coastal Cleanup, which brings together hundreds of thousands of people each year to remove plastic bags, broken glass, cigarette butts, and other trash from the world’s shores and waterways  One of the areas included in the cleanup effort was from White Sand Beach to the tip of Griswold Point in Old Lyme 
The event was founded by Ocean Conservancy in 1985, and Save the Sound has served as the official Connecticut coordinator for the last 14 years 
“We didn’t plan it this way, but I can’t imagine a better way to celebrate the 31st anniversary of International Coastal Cleanup Day than with 31 cleanups!” said Chris Cryder, special projects coordinator for Save the Sound  “The cleanup just keeps growing, in Connecticut and worldwide  We have some terrific new and returning partners this year, including the SECONN Divers, folks from the U S  District Court, multiple National Charity League chapters, and many more ”
Cryder continued, “The diversity of the groups involved really reflects the truth that ocean health affects all of us  Clean beaches and oceans are safer for beachgoers and boaters, they’re healthier for wildlife that aren’t eating plastic or getting tangled up in trash, and they’re economic powerhouses for the fishing and tourism industries ”
The cleanups are co-hosted by a wide array of local partners including high schools, youth groups, and scout troops; churches; boaters and divers; watershed associations, park stewards, and land trusts  Twenty-eight cleanups will be held Saturday, with three more on Sunday and others through mid-October, for a total of 70 cleanups statewide 
Based on the estimates of cleanup captains, between 750 and 900 volunteers were expected to pitch in on Saturday alone  Last year, a total of 1,512 volunteers participated in Save the Sound cleanups throughout the fall  They collected more than three tons of litter and debris from 58 sites on Connecticut beaches, marshes, and riverbanks 
Over the event’s three-decade history, 11 5 million volunteers have collected 210 million pounds of trash worldwide  Every piece of trash volunteers find is tracked, reported to Save the Sound, and included in Ocean Conservancy’s annual index of global marine debris  The data is used to track trends in litter and devise policies to stop it at its source 
Filed Under: Old Lyme, Outdoors, Top Story Stonewell Farm Hosts Two-Day Workshop on Dry Stone Wall Building, Sept  24, 25 September 13, 2016 by admin Leave a Comment Andrew Pighill’s work includes outdoor kitchens, wine cellars, fire-pits, fireplaces and garden features that include follies and other whimsical structures in stone 
KILLINGWORTH — On Sept  24 and 25, from 9 a m  to 4 p m  daily, Andrew Pighills, master stone mason, will teach a two-day, weekend long workshop on the art of dry stone wall building at Stonewell Farm in Killingworth, CT 
Participants will learn the basic principles of wall building, from establishing foundations, to the methods of dry laid (sometimes called dry-stacked) construction and ‘hearting’ the wall  This hands-on workshop will address not only the structure and principles behind wall building but also the aesthetic considerations of balance and proportion 
This workshop expresses Pighill’s commitment to preserve New England’s heritage and promote and cultivate the dry stone wall building skills that will ensure the preservation of our vernacular landscape 
This workshop is open to participants, 18 years of age or older, of all levels of experience  Note the workshop is limited to 16 participants, and spaces fill up quickly 
You must pre-register to attend the workshop  The price for the workshop is $350 per person  Stonewell Farm is located at 39 Beckwith Rd , Killingworth CT 06419
If you have any questions or to register for the workshop, contact the Workshop Administrator Michelle Becker at 860-322-0060 or mb@mbeckerco com
At the end of the day on Saturday you’ll be hungry, tired and ready for some rest and relaxation, so the wood-fired Stone pizza oven will be fired up and beer, wine and Pizza Rustica will be served 
About the instructor: Born in Yorkshire, England, Andrew Pighills is an accomplished stone artisan, gardener and horticulturist  He received his formal horticulture training with The Royal Horticultural Society and has spent 40+ years creating gardens and building dry stone walls in his native England in and around the spectacular Yorkshire Dales and the English Lake District  Today, Pighills is one of a small, but dedicated group of US-based, certified, professional members of The Dry Stone Walling Association (DSWA) of Great Britain  Having moved to the United States more than 10 years ago, he now continues this venerable craft here in the US, building dry stone walls, stone structures and creating gardens throughout New England and beyond 
His particular technique of building walls adheres to the ancient methods of generations of dry stone wallers in his native Yorkshire Dales  Pighills’ commitment to preserving the integrity and endurance of this traditional building art has earned him a devoted list of private and public clients here and abroad including the English National Trust, the English National Parks, and the Duke of Devonshire estates  His stone work has been featured on British and American television, in Charles McCraven’s book The Stone Primer, and Jeffrey Matz’s Midcentury Houses Today, A study of residential modernism in New Canaan Connecticut  He has featured in the N Y Times, on Martha Stewart Living radio, and in the Graham Deneen film short “Dry Stone”, as well as various media outlets both here and in the UK, including an article in the Jan/Feb 2015 issue of Yankee Magazine 
Pighills is a DSWA fully qualified dry stone walling instructor  In addition to building in stone and creating gardens, Pighills teaches dry stone wall building workshops in and around New England  He is a frequent lecturer on the art of dry stone walling, and how traditional UK walling styles compare to those found in New England  His blog, Heave and Hoe; A Day in the Life of a Dry Stone Waller and Gardener, provides more information about Pighills 
For more information, visit www englishgardensandlandscaping com
Filed Under: Outdoors CT Port Authority Chair Tells Lower CT River Local Officials, “We’re All on One Team” August 27, 2016 by Olwen Logan 2 Comments Enjoying a boat ride on the Connecticut River, but still finding time for discussions, are (from left to right) Chester First Selectwoman Lauren Gister, Old Lyme First Selectwoman and Connecticut Port Authority (CPA) board member Bonnie Reemsnyder, Essex First Selectman Norm Needleman, CPA Chairman Scott Bates and Deep River First Selectman Angus McDonald, Jr 
Filed Under: Chester, Deep River, Essex, News, Old Lyme, Outdoors, Politics, Top Story House Approves Courtney-Sponsored Amendment Restricting Sale of Plum Island July 10, 2016 by admin 2 Comments Representative Joe Courtney
Local Congressional Representative Joe Courtney (CT-02) announced Thursday (July 7) that a bipartisan amendment he had led, along with Representatives Rosa DeLauro (CT-03), Lee Zeldin (R-NY) and Peter King (R-NY), to prohibit the sale of Plum Island was passed by the House of Representatives 
The amendment, which will prohibit the General Services Administration (GSA) from using any of its operational funding to process or complete a sale of Plum Island, was made to the Financial Services and General Government Appropriations Act of 2017  
In a joint statement, the Representatives said, “Our amendment passed today is a big step toward permanently protecting Plum Island as a natural area  Plum Island is a scenic and biological treasure located right in the middle of Long Island Sound  It is home to a rich assortment of rare plant and animal species that need to be walled off from human interference ”
The statement continued, “Nearly everyone involved in this issue agrees that it should be preserved as a natural sanctuary – not sold off to the highest bidder for development ” Presumptive Republican Presidential nominee Donald Trump had shown interest in the property at one time 
In 2008, the federal government announced plans to close the research facility on Plum Island and relocate to Manhattan, Kansas  Current law states that Plum Island must be sold publicly to help finance the new research facility 
Aerial view of Plum Island 
The lawmakers joint statement explained, “The amendment will prevent the federal agency in charge of the island from moving forward with a sale by prohibiting it from using any of its operational funding provided by Congress for that purpose,” concluding, ” This will not be the end of the fight to preserve Plum Island, but this will provide us with more time to find a permanent solution for protecting the Island for generations to come ”
For several years, members from both sides of Long Island Sound have been working in a bipartisan manner to delay and, ultimately, repeal the mandated sale of this ecological treasure  Earlier this year, the representatives, along with the whole Connecticut delegation, cosponsored legislation that passed the House unanimously to delay the sale of Plum Island 
Filed Under: Outdoors July 1 Update: Aquatic Treatment Planned for Rogers Lake, July 5 July 1, 2016 by admin Leave a Comment We received this updated information from the Old Lyme Selectman’s office at 11:05 a m  this morning:
Filed Under: Lyme, Old Lyme, Outdoors, Town Hall They’re Everywhere! All About Gypsy Moth Caterpillars — Advice from CT Agricultural Experiment Station June 2, 2016 by Adina Ripin Leave a Comment Gypsy moth caterpillars – photo by Peter Trenchard, CAES 
The potential for gypsy moth outbreak exists every year in our community 
Dr  Kirby Stafford III, head of the Department of Entomology at the Connecticut Agricultural Experiment Station, has written a fact sheet on the gypsy moth available on the CAES website  The following information is from this fact sheet 
The gypsy moth, Lymantria dispar, was introduced into the US (Massachusetts) by Etienne Leopold Trouvelot in about 1860  The escaped larvae led to small outbreaks in the area in 1882, increasing rapidly  It was first detected in Connecticut in 1905  By 1952, it had spread to 169 towns  In 1981, 1 5 million acres were defoliated in Connecticut  During the outbreak of 1989, CAES scientists discovered that an entomopathogenic fungus, Entomophaga maimaiga, was killing the caterpillars  Since then the fungus has been the most important agent suppressing gypsy moth activity 
The fungus, however, cannot prevent all outbreaks and hotspots have been reported in some areas, in 2005-06 and again in 2015 
The life cycle of the gypsy moth is one generation a year  Caterpillars hatch from buff-colored egg masses in late April to early May  An egg mass may contain 100 to more than 1000 eggs and are laid in several layers  The caterpillars (larvae) hatch a few days later and ascend the host trees and begin to feed on new leaves  The young caterpillars, buff to black-colored, lay down silk safety lines as they crawl and, as they drop from branches on these threads, they may be picked up on the wind and spread 
There are four or five larval stages (instars) each lasting 4-10 days  Instars 1-3 remain in the trees  The fourth instar caterpillars, with distinctive double rows of blue and red spots, crawl up and down the tree trunks feeding mainly at night  They seek cool, shaded protective sites during the day, often on the ground  If the outbreak is dense, caterpillars may feed continuously and crawl at any time 
With the feeding completed late June to early July, caterpillars seek a protected place to pupate and transform into a moth in about 10-14 days  Male moths are brown and fly  Female moths are white and cannot fly despite having wings  They do not feed and live for only 6-10 days  After mating, the female will lay a single egg mass and die  The egg masses can be laid anywhere: trees, fence posts, brick/rock walls, outdoor furniture, cars, recreational vehicles, firewood  The egg masses are hard  The eggs will survive the winter and larvae hatch the following spring during late April through early May 
The impact of the gypsy moth can be extensive since the caterpillar will feed on a wide diversity of trees and shrubs  Oak trees are their preferred food  Other favored tree species include apple, birch, poplar and willow  If the infestation is heavy, they will also attack certain conifers and other less favored species  The feeding causes extensive defoliation 
Healthy trees can generally withstand one or two partial to one complete defoliation  Trees will regrow leaves before the end of the summer  Nonetheless, there can be die-back of branches  Older trees may become more vulnerable to stress after defoliation  Weakened trees can also be attacked by other organisms or lack energy reserves for winter dormancy and growth during the following spring  Three years of heavy defoliation may result in high oak mortality 
The gypsy moth caterpillars drop leaf fragments and frass (droppings) while feeding creating a mess for decks, patios, outdoor furniture, cars and driveways  Crawling caterpillars can be a nuisance and their hairs irritating  The egg masses can be transported by vehicles to areas where the moth is not yet established  Under state quarantine laws, the CAES inspects certain plant shipments destined to areas free of the gypsy moth, particularly for egg masses 
There are several ways to manage the gypsy moth: biological, physical and chemical 
Biologically, the major gypsy moth control agent has been the fungus E  maimaiga  This fungus can provide complete control of the gypsy moth but is dependent on early season moisture from rains in May and June to achieve effective infection rates and propagation of the fungus to other caterpillars
Context 3: Overfishing is a major threat to the survival of shark species, primarily driven by international trade in high-value fins, as well as meat, liver oil, skin and cartilage  The Convention on the International Trade in Endangered Species of Wild Fauna and Flora (CITES) aims to ensure that commercial trade does not threaten wild species, and several shark species have recently been listed on CITES as part of international efforts to ensure that trade does not threaten their survival  However, as international trade regulations alone will be insufficient to reduce overexploitation of sharks, they must be accompanied by practical fisheries management measures to reduce fishing mortality  To examine which management measures might be practical in the context of a targeted shark fishery, we collected data from 52 vessels across 595 fishing trips from January 2014 to December 2015 at Tanjung Luar fishing port in East Lombok, Indonesia  We recorded 11,920 landed individuals across 42 species, a high proportion of which were threatened and regulated species  Catch per unit effort depended primarily on the number of hooks and type of fishing gear used, and to a lesser degree on month, boat engine power, number of sets and fishing ground  The most significant factors influencing the likelihood of catching threatened and regulated species were month, fishing ground, engine power and hook number  We observed significant negative relationships between standardised catch per unit effort and several indicators of fishing effort, suggesting diminishing returns above relatively low levels of fishing effort  Our results suggest that management measures focusing on fishing effort controls, gear restrictions and modifications and spatiotemporal closures could have significant benefits for the conservation of shark species, and may help to improve the overall sustainability of the Tanjung Luar shark fishery  These management measures may also be applicable to shark fisheries in other parts of Indonesia and beyond, as sharks increasingly become the focus of global conservation efforts 
Copyright: © 2018 Yulianto et al  This is an open access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License, which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original author and source are credited 
Funding: Data collection of this study was funded by the Darwin Initiative (grant number 2805)  The funder had no role in study design, data collection and analysis, decision to publish, or preparation of the manuscript 
Overfishing is the greatest global threat to marine fish stocks [1–5]  Several shark species (Selachimorpha) are particularly vulnerable to overexploitation due to their conservative life history strategies, large body sizes and the high economic value of their preserved body parts [6–8]  With increasing fishing pressure in recent decades, primarily driven by international demand for a range of consumer goods (including fins, liver oil, skin, cartilage and meat), it is estimated that annual fishing mortality now exceeds the intrinsic rebound potential of most commercially exploited species [5, 9, 10]  This fishing pressure is taking its toll, with an estimated one in four Chondrichthyan species now threatened with extinction, making sharks amongst the most threatened species groups in the world  
It is also increasingly acknowledged that sharks play a critical role in maintaining functional and productive ocean ecosystems , as well as providing an important source of food and income for many coastal communities   Recognising both the plight and importance of shark populations, there is growing professional and public interest to improve shark conservation, and the management of shark fisheries and trade   This is reflected in several recent policy decisions to afford new international regulations for 12 species of sharks across seven genera under the Convention on the International Trade of Endangered Species of Wild Fauna and Flora (CITES)  This is a promising step for shark conservation; however, in order to create tangible outcomes for species conservation CITES must be implemented through domestic measures that are adapted to national and local contexts 
Indonesia is the world’s largest shark fishing nation [9, 14], and a global priority for shark conservation   Until recently Indonesia’s shark fishery has largely functioned as de facto open-access [12, 16]  However, in the past five years the Indonesian government has demonstrated a clear commitment to shark conservation and resource management, with domestic measures put in place to implement international obligations under CITES   Exploitation of all CITES-listed species is now regulated, either through full species protection or export controls (these species are hereafter referred to as ‘regulated’ species)  However, CITES only affords protection to a small number of Indonesia’s 112 known shark species , of which 83 are threatened with extinction according to the IUCN Red List of Threatened Species (i e  Vulnerable (VU), Endangered (EN) or Critically Endangered (CR) , these species are hereafter referred to as ‘threatened’ species), many of which continue to be landed throughout the country   Further, these policy measures predominantly regulate trade at the point of export, but do not necessarily influence fisher behaviour or local demand at the point of catch, such that the ‘trickle-down’ impacts on species mortality are unknown  In addition, effectively implementing species-specific shark mortality controls remains challenging due to the non-selectivity of fishing gears, and practical and cultural barriers to changing fisher preferences for certain gear-types and fishing methods  As such, existing regulations alone (e g  Indonesian Law on Fisheries 31/2004 and its derivative regulations) will likely be insufficient to curb mortality of threatened and regulated species, as fishers must be both willing and able to change their fishing behaviour   Moreover, most of Indonesia’s shark fisheries are small-scale, and in relatively poor coastal communities where there are often no legal, sustainable marine-based alternatives to shark fishing that offer similar financial returns [22, 23]  It is therefore imperative to consider the ethical and socioeconomic impacts of shark trade controls  Most shark species listed under CITES are listed on Appendix II, which is designed for sustainable use  International trade is permitted for CITES Appendix II species provided it is non-detrimental to wild populations of the species, as proven through a scientific non-detriment finding (NDF) report and implemented through a system of export permits  However, in Indonesia there is currently a lack of species-specific trade data for conducting NDFs and setting sustainable export quotas, such that the Indonesian government has to introduce trade bans for these species in order to meet CITES obligations  With new CITES-listings for thresher sharks (Alopias spp ) and silky shark (Carcharhinus falciformis) recently coming into force, this is likely to have huge implications for Indonesia’s economically important shark industry, and the coastal communities depending on it  In order to balance conservation and socioeconomic objectives, robust management systems must be put in place that ensure and allow sustainable fishing and trade  This necessitates the identification of practical management measures that can reduce mortality of threatened and regulated species at the point of catch, and provide realistic options for fishers to effectively and measurably improve the sustainability of their fishing practices 
This study analyses two years of qualitative and quantitative data from one of Indonesia’s targeted shark fisheries in Tanjung Luar, West Nusa Tenggara Province  We outline the key characteristics of the fishery, including fishing behaviour and overall catch volumes and composition  We analyse the impacts of different fishing techniques, and present factors influencing overall catch per unit effort (CPUE) of individual shark fishing trips, as well as factors influencing the likelihood of catching threatened and regulated species  Finally, we discuss the implications of our findings, and provide practical recommendations for fisheries management measures, which can support CITES implementation for sharks and reduce the catch of threatened and regulated species, in Indonesia and beyond 
This work was conducted under a Memorandum of Understanding (MoU) and Technical Cooperation Agreement (TCA) between the Wildlife Conservation Society (WCS) and the Ministry of Environment and Forestry (MoEF), Ministry Marine Affairs and Fisheries (MMAF) and the Marine and Fisheries Agency (MFA) of West Nusa Tenggara Province  These documents were approved and signed by Sonny Partono (Director General of Conservation of Natural Resources and Ecosystem MoEF), Sjarief Widjaja (Secretary General MMAF), and Djoko Suprianto (Acting Head of MFA of West Nusa Tenggara Province)  Due to this MoU and TCA no specific research permit was required  We collected data by measuring sharks that were already caught, dead, and landed by fishers in Tanjung Luar, with no incentives, compensation or specific requests for killing sharks for this study  WCS participates in the Conservation Initiative on Human Rights and the rules and guidelines of our Internal Review Board ensures that any research protects the rights of human subjects  We did not apply for an IRB permit for this study because our study design focused on collecting fish and fisheries data as opposed to personal socio-economic data  The FDGs and interviews were conducted to obtain early scoping information about fishing practices, and to establish protocols for more detailed fisheries data collection (as used in this study), and socio-economic data collection (as used in a later study (Lestari et al ), which underwent further ethical review due to the specific focus on human subjects) 
Tanjung Luar, located in East Lombok, West Nusa Tenggara Province, Indonesia (Fig 1), is a landing site for one of Indonesia’s most well-known targeted shark fisheries  Tanjung Luar serves at least 1,000 vessels, and the majority of these are less than 10 gross tonnes (GT) in size   A group of specialised fishers operating from Tanjung Luar village and a neighbouring island, Gili Maringkik, specifically target sharks  Shark catch is landed in a dedicated auction facility at the Tanjung Luar port  The shark industry is well established in Tanjung Luar, with product processing facilities and trade connections to local, national and international markets  Research by Lestari et al   indicates that the shark industry is significantly more profitable than non-shark fisheries in Tanjung Luar, particularly for boat owners  Strong patron-client relationships exist between boat owners and fishers, with shark fishers exhibiting high dependency on shark fishing, limited occupational diversity and low adaptive capacity for shifting into other fisheries  
Fig 1  Sharks landing monitoring site and fishing grounds of shark fishers that land at Tanjung Luar 
In January 2014 we conducted preliminary scoping research to better understand the operational and socioeconomic characteristics of Tanjung Luar’s shark fishery  During a three-week scoping visit a team of four trained Indonesian enumerators conducted semi-structured interviews and focus group discussions (FDGs) with fishers, boat owners and traders, alongside naturalistic observation in the field  Respondents were selected through purposive sampling, since the research was exploratory in nature and a priori sampling decisions were not possible   We conducted a total of 34 semi-structured interviews (S1 File) and four FDGs, which were attended by a total of 30 individuals  All interviews and discussions took place in Indonesian, with the help of a local enumerator who was fluent in the Tanjung Luar local dialect  Interviews took approximately 30 minutes, with no remuneration for participating  All respondents gave their full prior and informed consent before contributing to the research  During the interviews and FDGs we gathered information on number of boats, fishing gears used, fishing grounds, fishery operational characteristics, and shark supply chain, including estimated volumes and value of shark catch relative to other fisheries  We improved the accuracy of information on shark fishery characteristics and fishing behaviour through informal daily interactions and discussions with 131 shark fishers during our daily landings data collection and community engagement activities  More detailed socioeconomic data were collected in a full household survey in 2016, as outlined in Lestari et al   
Shark landings data were collected by three experienced enumerators, who were trained in species identification and data collection methods during a two-day workshop and three weeks of field mentoring to ensure the accuracy of the data collected  Landings were recorded every morning at the Tanjung Luar shark auction facility where shark fishers usually landed dead sharks, from 5am to 10am from January 2014 to December 2015  The enumerators recorded data on catch composition and fishing behaviour (Table 1) from 52 different vessels across a total of 595 fishing trips  The enumerators also measured the weight of selected sharks to calculate biomass and length-weight relationship 
Table 1  Types of data collected on fishing behaviour and catch composition during daily landings data collection at Tanjung Luar 
From fishing behaviour and catch data we calculated the overall species composition of catch  We calculated catch per unit effort (CPUE) by number of individuals using both catch per set (hereafter CPUE per set) and catch per 100 hooks per set (hereafter standardised CPUE) [25,26]  This was deemed necessary since different vessels and gear-types systematically deploy different numbers of hooks, and standardised CPUE allows for a more meaningful comparison 
To understand factors influencing overall CPUE we log transformed CPUE per trip to fit a normal distribution, and fitted linear models (LMs) of CPUE per trip to fishing behaviour variables (Table 1)  We considered all variables and used minimum AIC values with stepwise analysis of variance to identify the best fit and most significant influencing variables 
To inform the development of practical fisheries management measures (e g  gear restrictions), we also specifically analysed differences in CPUE for surface and bottom longline gears employed in the fishery, using two-way ANOVAs 
Factors affecting catch of threatened and regulated species 
To identify variables influencing the catch of threatened and regulated species we conducted a two-step process  In the first step, we identified factors influencing the likelihood of catching any threatened/regulated species during a given fishing trip, by creating binary response variables for whether a threatened species had been caught during a trip (yes = 1, no = 0), and separately for whether a regulated species had been caught during a trip (yes = 1, no = 0)  We then fitted generalised linear models (GLMs) with binomial errors to the binary response variables, separately for catch of threatened species and catch of regulated species  In the second step we identified variables that significantly influenced the CPUE of threatened species and the CPUE of regulated species, given that any were caught  We removed all records in which no threatened or regulated species were caught, log transformed standardised CPUE of threatened and regulated species, and fitted linear models (LMs) of standardised CPUE of threatened species and standardised CPUE to regulated species to fishing behaviour variables  Again, we considered all meaningful models and used minimum AIC values with stepwise analysis of variance to identify the best fit  and most significant influencing variables  This approach was necessary since catch of threatened and regulated species is zero-inflated, and creating binary response variables with a binomial error structure allowed for a simpler and more powerful statistical analysis  Note that we conducted two separate analyses, one for threatened species only and one for regulated species only, but used the same methods and process, as outlined above, for each analysis  We did not group threatened and protected species together, since although some species are both threatened and protected, this is not the case for all shark species landed in Tanjung Luar 
A total of 52 shark fishing vessels operate from Tanjung Luar, all of which are classified as small-scale according to the Indonesian Ministry of Marine Affairs and Fisheries (MMAF) vessel categorisation system, with <7GT capacity  These vessels are operated by approximately 150 highly-specialised shark fishers, from Tanjung Luar village and Gili Maringkik, who make up roughly 5% of the local fisher population  The shark industry is more profitable than non-shark fisheries, and shark fishers report high household dependency on shark resources, low occupational diversity, and limited capacity and aspirations to move into other fisheries or industries 
Surface and bottom longlines are used as the primary fishing gears to target sharks, with pelagic fish (e g  Euthynnus spp , Rastrellinger spp ) used as bait  Surface and bottom longlines systematically vary in length, depth deployed, number of sets, number of hooks used, and soak times (Table 2)  Gear types are typically associated with certain vessel types, and fishers–captain and crew—tend to exhibit preferences for specific gear types  Shark fishers also use gillnets and troll lines as secondary gears, to catch bait and opportunistically target other species, such as grouper, snapper, skipjack and mackerel tuna 
Table 2  Characteristics of surface and bottom longlines 
The shark fishing vessels can be divided into two broad categories according to fishing behaviour: larger vessels (≥14 m) with higher horsepower (HP) engines spend more time at sea than smaller vessels (≤12m) (p<0 001), and reach fishing grounds outside of West Nusa Tenggara  These vessels primarily fish in southern Sumbawa and Sumba Islands, however, they also reach as far as eastern Flores, Timor Island, and the Java Sea (Fig 1)  Larger, higher HP vessels also tend to employ surface longlines (p<0 001), and since they spend more time at sea, have a higher number of sets per trip than smaller vessels (p<0 001)  Smaller vessels (≤12 m) with smaller engines tend to remain in waters around West Nusa Tenggara only, carrying out shorter fishing trips using bottom longlines (Table 3) 
Table 3  Characterisation of the different fishing vessels used to target sharks in Tanjung Luar 
During the study period we recorded shark catch from a total of 595 fishing trips  We recorded 11,678 individual sharks, with an average total catch of 963 individuals per month (SD ± 434) and 19 7 individuals per trip (SD ± 15 6)  Standardised CPUE (per 100 hooks per set) ranged from 0 05 to 22 13 individuals, with an average of 0 96 and a mode of 0 20  Catch consisted of 42 different species from 18 families (Table 4)  22% of all landings were classified as threatened species (i e  VU, EN, CR) according to the IUCN Red List of Threatened Species, and 73% were near threatened  Almost half (46 3%) of landings were regulated (i e  CITES-listed) species  The most commonly caught species were silky shark (Carcharhinus falciformis), black tip shark (Carcharhinus limbatus) and scalloped hammerhead (Sphyrna lewini) 
Table 4  Sharks species landed in Tanjung Luar from January 2014 –December 2015 (VU = Vulnerable, EN = Endangered, NT = Near Threatened, LC = Least Concern, NE = Not Evaluated (VU and EN classified as ‘threatened’ in this study); II = CITES Appendix II, N = Not CITES-listed (II species classified as ‘regulated’ in this study)) 
Measures of CPUE for the Tanjung Luar shark fishery vary spatially and temporally, and with several aspects of fishing effort including gear type, hook number, engine power and number of sets  An initial comparison of average catch per trip and catch per set of the two major gear types, surface longline and bottom longline, indicates that CPUE of surface longlines was significantly higher than that of bottom longlines (ANOVA, p<0 001)  CPUE (individuals per set) was also positively associated with number of hooks, engine power, and number of sets (Fig 2)  However, these relationships are for unstandardised CPUE i e  without controlling for number of hooks 
Plots of CPUE: Number of individuals per set (A) and number of individuals per 100 hooks per set (standardised CPUE) (B) by gear type (1), number of hooks (2), number of sets (3) and engine horsepower (4) 
When controlling for hook number using standardised CPUE (individuals per 100 hooks per set) the relationships were reversed, with standardised CPUE of bottom longlines significantly higher than that of surface longlines (ANOVA, p<0 001; Fig 2)  A similar pattern was observed when comparing relationships between CPUE (individuals per set) and standardised CPUE for other measures of fishing effort, including numbers of hooks, engine power and number of sets (Fig 2)  There was a positive relationship between unstandardised CPUE (individuals per set) and number of hooks, number of sets and engine power, but a negative relationship between CPUE and these fishing behaviour variables when CPUE was standardised by hook number (individuals per 100 hooks per set) 
The best fit LM of standardised CPUE indicated that the most significant factors influencing standardised CPUE were fishing gear and number of hooks (p<0 001)  Month, engine power, number of sets and fishing ground were also identified as significant variables (Table 5), although there was considerable covariance between these factors  Standardised CPUE was significantly lower in January, and decreased with higher numbers of hooks, despite a higher total catch per trip and set (Fig 2) 
Table 5  Analysis of variance for linear model of standardised CPUE (individuals per 100 hooks per set) data from Tanjung Luar; significant values (p<0 05) are given in bold 
Best fit GLMs indicated that the most significant factors influencing the likelihood of catching threatened species were month (January and November were significantly lower: p<0 001 and p<0 05, respectively) and fishing ground (Other (i e  fishing grounds outside of WNTP and ENTP) was significantly higher: p<0 01)  Significant factors associated with standardised CPUE of threatened species were number of hooks (p<0 001), fishing ground (other: p<0 001, ENTP p<0 05), engine power (p<0 001) and trip length (p<0 001) (Table 6 and Fig 3) 
Plots of most significant factors affecting standardised CPUE (number of individuals per 100 hooks per set) of threatened species: a) hook number, b) fishing ground, c) engine power and d) trip length 
Analysis of variance for the best fit models of factors affecting: a) the likelihood of catching and the standardised CPUE of threatened species b) the likelihood of catching and the standardised CPUE of regulated species 
The most significant factors influencing the likelihood of catching regulated species were month (January was significantly lower: p<0 001), number of hooks (p<0 001) and engine power (<0 01)  Significant factors associated with standardised CPUE of regulated species were number of hooks (p<0 001), fishing gear (<0 001), number of sets (p<0 001), engine power (p<0 01) and month (November and January: p<0 05) (Table 5 and Fig 4) 
Plots of most significant factors affecting standardised CPUE (number of individuals per 100 hooks per set) of regulated species: a) hook number, b) gear type, c) number of sets 
Although Tanjung Luar’s targeted shark fishery is small in scale, considerable numbers of shark are landed, including a large proportion of threatened and regulated species  A key finding is that measures of CPUE, for all sharks and for threatened and regulated species, vary spatially and temporally, and with several aspects of fishing effort including gear type, hook number, engine power and number of sets  Moreover, the relationships between CPUE and fishing behaviour variables are different for different measures of CPUE (CPUE per trip, CPUE per set, CPUE per 100 hooks per set)  This highlights the importance of using appropriate standardisation for meaningful comparisons of CPUE across different gears and vessel types, and has important implications for fisheries management 
Unstandardised CPUE (individuals per set) was significantly lower in January  This is during the west monsoon season, which is characterised by high rainfall and adverse conditions at sea for fishing  Unstandardised CPUE was also significantly lower in West Nusa Tenggara Province (WNTP) than East Nusa Tenggara Province (ENTP) and other provinces, suggesting a lower abundance of sharks in this area  Engine power had a significant positive influence on unstandardised CPUE, and was also associated with longer trips and more sets, which was likely due to the ability of vessels with larger engines to travel longer distances, over longer time periods, and with higher numbers of sets, to favoured fishing grounds  Unstandardised CPUE was also significantly higher for surface longlines than bottom longlines  However, when standardising CPUE for the number of hooks (i e  individuals per 100 hooks per set) this relationship was reversed  Bottom longlines exhibit a higher standardised CPUE, with negative relationships between catch per 100 hooks per set and number of hooks and frequency of sets  Vessels with moderate engine horsepower (50-59hp) also had the highest standardised CPUE  Since surface longlines systematically employ significantly more hooks than bottom longlines (400–600 vs 25–200 hooks), and tend to be associated with larger boats, longer trips and more sets, these findings suggest that although increasing fishing effort increased total catch for these gears and trips, there were diminishing returns of this increased effort above low to moderate levels 
A large proportion of Tanjung Luar’s shark catch consisted of threatened (22%) and regulated species (46%)  Month is a significant factor in explaining standardised CPUE of both threatened and regulated species, which could indicate seasonal variation in the abundance of these species in the Tanjung Luar fishing grounds, or seasonal impacts on CPUE due to poor weather conditions  Fishing ground was a significant factor in explaining the catch of threatened species but not the catch in regulated species  This may be due to differences in range, distribution and relative abundance of species within these groups  Threatened species make up a relatively small proportion of Tanjung Luar’s catch in comparison to regulated species, which make up almost half of the catch (46%)  As such, regulated species may generally be more abundant and spatially diffuse than threatened species, and therefore caught more uniformly across fishing grounds  For example, regulated species catch is dominated by silky sharks (Carcharhinus falciformis), which are circum-tropical and coastal-pelagic, and exhibit limited site-fidelity or aggregation behaviour, while threatened species catch is dominated by scalloped hammerheads (Sphyrna lewini), which are known to aggregate in schools  These schools of scalloped hammerheads may be more restricted to specific aggregation sites outside of WNTP and ENTP waters, while silky sharks are found in uniform abundance throughout fishing grounds



ground_truth: γh.

prompt_front: Now, answer the following question based on the text below, only give me the answer and do not output any other words.

Question: What is the group's request to the Connecticut DEEP Commissioner?

Read the following text and answer briefly.

Context 2:  The dry spring of 2015 resulted in little or no apparent fungal inoculation or spread until it killed late-stage caterpillars in some areas of the state, after most defoliation 
Infected caterpillars hang vertically from the tree trunk, head down  Some die in an upside down “V” position, a characteristic of caterpillars killed by the less common gypsy moth nucleopolyhedrosis virus (NPV)  This was not detected in caterpillars examined in 2015 
Physical controls include removing and destroying egg masses, which can be drowned in a soapy water and disposed of  Another method is to use burlap refuge/barrier bands wrapped around tree trunks so that migrating caterpillars will crawl into or under the folded burlap or be trapped by the sticky band 
There are a number of crop protection chemicals labeled for the control of gypsy moth on ornamental trees and shrubs  There are treatments for egg masses, larvae and adult moths  Detailed information about these chemical treatments is available in the CAES factsheet 
For complete information about the gypsy moth and its management, visit the CAES website and look for the fact sheet on gypsy moth 
Filed Under: News, Outdoors East Lyme Public Trust Invites Community to Celebrate Boardwalk Re-dedication May 25, 2016 by admin Leave a Comment On Saturday, May 28, at 11 a m , the East Lyme Public Trust Foundation, in co-operation with East Lyme Parks and Recreation Department, will sponsor A Dream Fulfilled, the official re-dedication of the East Lyme Boardwalk  The re-dedication ceremony, which will be held on the Boardwalk, will feature keynote speaker, Sen  Paul Formica, former First Selectman of East Lyme 
Other speakers will include East Lyme First Selectman Mark Nickerson, Public Trust President Joe Legg, Public Trust Past-President Bob DeSanto, Public Trust Vice-President John Hoye, and Parks and Recreation Director Dave Putnam; all the speakers will recognize the many people who have helped made this dream a reality 
The East Lyme Public Trust Foundation would like to invite the general public to witness this historic occasion  In addition, the members would especially like to encourage the participation of the 200 people who dedicated benches and the innumerable people who sponsored plaques  They would also love to welcome all members of the Trust – past and present – and all those who originally helped make the Boardwalk a reality 
Participants should enter the Boardwalk at Hole-in-the Wall on Baptist Lane, Niantic  Then, there will be a short walk to the area of the monument where the ceremony will take place  At the entrance to Hole-in-the Wall, the Public Trust will have a display of historical information and memorabilia related to the construction and re-construction of the Boardwalk  Public Trust members, Pat and Jack Lewis will be on hand to host the exhibit titled Before and After and to welcome participants  After the ceremony, participants will have the opportunity to visit “their bench” and re-visit “their plaque ” During and after the dedication, music will be provided by Trust member, Bill Rinoski, who is a “D J  for all occasions ” Rinoski will feature “Boardwalk-related” music and Oldies plus Top 40 selections  This historic occasion will be videotaped as a public service by Mike Rydene of Media Potions of East Lyme  High school volunteers will be on hand to greet participants and help with directions 
The organizing committee is chaired by Michelle Maitland  Her committee consists of Joe Legg, President of the East Lyme Public Trust, Carol Marelli, Bob and Polly DeSanto, June Hoye, and Kathie Cassidy 
Visit Facebook – East Lyme Public Trust Foundation – for more information on the re-dedication ceremony  For more information on the Boardwalk, explore this website 
Filed Under: Outdoors Lyme Land Trust Seeks to Preserve Whalebone Cove Headwaters May 8, 2016 by admin Leave a Comment Lyme Land Trust Preservation Vice President Don Gerber stands with Chairman Anthony Irving (kneeling) next to Whalebone Creek in the proposed Hawthorne Preserve in Hadlyme 
The Lyme Land Conservation Trust has announced a fund raising drive to protect 82 acres of ecologically strategic upland forest and swamp wildlife habitat in Hadlyme on the headwaters of Whalebone Cove, one of the freshwater tidal wetlands that comprises the internationally celebrated Connecticut River estuary complex 
The new proposed preserve is part of a forested landscape just south of Hadlyme Four Corners and Ferry Road (Rt  148), and forms a large part of the watershed for Whalebone Creek, a key tributary feeding Whalebone Cove, most of which is a national wildlife refuge under the management of the US Fish & Wildlife Service 
The Land Trust said it hopes to name the new nature refuge in honor of William Hawthorne of Hadlyme, whose family has owned the property for several generations and who has agreed to sell the property to the Land Trust at a discount from its market value if the rest of the money necessary for the purchase can be raised by the Land Trust 
“This new wildlife preserve will represent a triple play for habitat conservation,” said Anthony Irving, chairman of the Land Trust’s Preservation Committee 
“First, it helps to protect the watershed feeding the fragile Whalebone Cove eco-system, which is listed as one of North America’s important freshwater tidal marshes in international treaties that cite the Connecticut River estuary as a wetland complex of global importance  Whalebone Creek, one of the primary streams feeding Whalebone Cove, originates from vernal pools and upland swamps just south of the Hawthorne tract on the Land Trust’s Ravine Trail Preserve and adjacent conservation easements and flows through the proposed preserve  Virtually all of the Hawthorne property comprises much of the watershed for Whalebone Creek 
“Second, the 82 acres we are hoping to acquire with this fund raising effort represents a large block of wetlands and forested wildlife habitat between Brush Hill and Joshuatown roads, which in itself is home to a kaleidoscope of animals from amphibians and reptiles that thrive in several vernal pools and swamp land, to turkey, coyote, bobcat and fisher  It also serves as seasonal nesting and migratory stops for several species of deep woods birds, which are losing habitat all over Connecticut due to forest fragmentation 
“Third, this particular preserve will also conserve a key link in the wildlife corridors that connects more than 1,000 acres of protected woodland and swamp habitat in the Hadlyme area ” Irving explained that the preserve is at the center of a landscape-scale wildlife habitat greenway that includes Selden Island State Park, property of the US Fish & Wild Life’s Silvio O Conte Wildlife Refuge, The Nature Conservancy’s Selden Preserve, and several other properties protected by the Lyme Land Conservation Trust 
“Because of its central location as a hub between these protected habitat refuges,” said Irving, “this preserve will protect forever the uninterrupted access that wildlife throughout the Hadlyme landscape now has for migration and breeding between otherwise isolated communities and families of many terrestrial species that are important to the continued robust bio-diversity of southeastern Connecticut and the Connecticut River estuary ”
Irving noted that the Hawthorne property is the largest parcel targeted for conservation in the Whalebone Cove watershed by the recently developed US Fish & Wildlife Service Silvio O Conte Wildlife Refuge Comprehensive Conservation Plan  Irving said the Land Trust hopes to create a network of hiking trails on the property with access from both Brush Hill Road on the east and Joshuatown Road on the west and connection to the Land Trust’s Ravine Trail to the south and the network of trails on the Nature Conservancy’s Selden Preserve 
Irving said there is strong support for the Land Trust’s proposal to preserve the property both within the Hadlyme and Lyme communities and among regional and state conservation groups  He noted letters of support have come from the Hadlyme Garden Club, the Hadlyme Public Hall Association, the Lyme Inland Wetlands & Watercourses Agency, the Lyme Planning and Zoning Commission, the Lyme Open Space Committee, the Lower Connecticut River Valley Council of Governments, the Lyme Garden Club, the Lyme Public Hall, The Nature Conservancy, The Silvio O Conte Refuge, the Connecticut River Watershed Council, and the Friends of Whalebone Cove, Inc 
He reported that between Hawthorne’s gift and several other pledges the Land Trust has already received commitments of 25 percent of the cost of the property 
Filed Under: Lyme, Outdoors, Top Story, vnn Old Lyme Tree Commission Celebrates Arbor Day April 29, 2016 by admin Leave a Comment Members of the three groups gather around the new oak tree  From left to right are Kathy Burton, Joanne DiCamillo, Joan Flynn  Anne Bing, Emily Griswold and Barbara Rayel 
Filed Under: Old Lyme, Outdoors, Top Story, Town Hall Enjoy a Tour of Private Gardens in Essex, June 4 April 28, 2016 by Adina Ripin Leave a Comment See this beautiful private garden in Essex on June 4 
ESSEX – On Saturday, June 4, from 10 a m  to 3 p m , plan to stroll through eight of the loveliest and most unusual private gardens in Essex  Some are in the heart of Essex Village while others are hidden along lanes most visitors never see  While exploring, you will find both formal and informal settings, lovely sweeping lawns and panoramic views of the Connecticut River or its coves  One garden you will visit is considered to be a ‘laboratory’ for cultivation of native plants  Master Gardeners will be available to point out specific features, offer gardening tips, and answer questions 
The garden tour is sponsored by the Friends of the Essex Library  Tickets are $25 in advance and $30 at the Essex Library the day of the event  Cash, checks, Visa or Master Card will be accepted  Tickets can be reserved by visiting the library or by completing the form included in flyers available at the library and throughout Essex beginning May 2  Completed forms can be mailed to the library  Confirmations will be sent to the email addresses on the completed forms 
Your ticket will be a booklet containing a brief description of each garden along with a map of the tour and designated parking  Tickets must be picked up at the library beginning at 9:45 a m  the day of the event 
Richard Conroy, library director, has said, “The Essex Library receives only about half of its operating revenue from the Town  The financial assistance we receive each year from the Friends is critical  It enables us to provide important resources such as Ancestry com and museum passes, as well as practical improvements like the automatic front doors that were recently installed  I urge you to help your Library by helping our Friends make this event a success! Thank you for your support ”
The tour will take place rain or shine  For more information, call 860-767-1560  All proceeds will benefit Friends of the Essex Library 
Filed Under: Outdoors Potapaug Presents Plum Island Program April 7, 2016 by admin Leave a Comment Potapaug Audubon presents “Preserving Plum Island” on Thursday, April 7, at 7 p m  at Old Lyme Town Hall, 52 Lyme St , Old Lyme, with guest speaker Chris Cryder, from the Preserve Plum Island Coalition 
Cryder will discuss the efforts to protect the island, which provides vital habitat for threatened and endangered birds 
This is a free program and all are welcome 
Filed Under: Old Lyme, Outdoors CT Legislators Support Study to Preserve Plum Island From Commercial Development March 28, 2016 by Jerome Wilson 1 Comment Aerial view of Plum Island lighthouse  (From Preserve Plum Island website)
Last Thursday, March 24, at a press conference in Old Saybrook, a triumvirate of Congressional legislators from Connecticut, State Senator Richard Blumenthal and US Representatives Joe Courtney (D-2nd District) and Rosa DeLauro (D-3rd District) confirmed their support for a study to determine the future of Plum Island located in Long Island Sound 
Members of the Plum Island Coalition — which has some 65 member organizations all dedicated to preserving the island — were in attendance to hear the good news 
The island still houses a high-security, federal animal disease research facility, but the decision has already been taken to move the facility to a new location in Kansas with an opening slated for 2022  The current facility takes up only a small percentage of the land on the island and significantly for environmentalists, the remainder of the island has for years been left to nature in the wild 
In supporting a federal study on the future of Plum Island, Sen  Blumenthal said, “This study is a step towards saving a precious, irreplaceable national treasure from developers and polluters  It will provide the science and fact-based evidence to make our case for stopping the current Congressional plan to sell Plum Island to the highest bidder ” He continued, “The stark truth is the sale of Plum Island is no longer necessary to build a new bioresearch facility because Congress has fully appropriated the funds  There is no need for this sale – and in fact, Congress needs to rescind the sale ” Congress, however, still has a law on the books that authorizes the sale of Plum Island land to the highest bidder  Therefore, opponents of the sale will have the burden of convincing Congress to change a law that is currently in place 
Filed Under: Old Lyme, Outdoors, Top Story, vnn Land Trusts’ Photo Contest Winners Announced March 24, 2016 by admin Leave a Comment Winner of the top prize, the John G  Mitchell Environmental Conservation Award – Hank Golet
The 10th Annual Land Trust’s Photo Contest winners were announced at a March 11 reception highlighting the winning photos and displaying all entered photos  Land trusts in Lyme, Old Lyme, Salem, Essex and East Haddam jointly sponsor the annual amateur photo contest to celebrate the scenic countryside and diverse wildlife and plants in these towns  The ages of the photographers ranged from children to senior citizens 
Hank Golet won the top prize, the John G  Mitchell Environmental Conservation Award, with his beautiful photograph of a juvenile yellow crowned night heron in the Black Hall River in Old Lyme  Alison Mitchell personally presented the award, created in memory of her late husband John G  Mitchell, an editor at National Geographic, who championed the cause of the environment 
William Burt, a naturalist and acclaimed wildlife photographer, who has been a contest judge for ten years, received a special mention  Judges Burt; Amy Kurtz Lansing, an accomplished art historian and curator at the Florence Griswold Museum; and Skip Broom, a respected, award-winning local photographer and antique house restoration housewright, chose the winning photographs from 219 entries 
The sponsoring land trusts – Lyme Land Conservation Trust, Essex Land Trust, the Old Lyme Land Trust, Salem Land Trust, and East Haddam Land Trust – thank the judges as well as generous supporters RiverQuest/ CT River Expeditions, Lorensen Auto Group, the Oakley Wing Group at Morgan Stanley, Evan Griswold at Coldwell Banker, Ballek’s Garden Center, Essex Savings Bank, Chelsea Groton Bank, and Alison Mitchell in honor of her late husband John G  Mitchell  Big Y and Fromage Fine Foods & Coffee provided support for the reception 
The winning photographers are:
John G  Mitchell Environmental Award, Hank Golet, Old Lyme
1st: Patrick Burns, East Haddam
2nd: Judah Waldo, Old Lyme
3rd: James Beckman, Ivoryton
Honorable Mention Gabriel Waldo, Old Lyme
Honorable Mention Sarah Gada, East Haddam
Honorable Mention Shawn Parent, East Haddam
Cultural/Historic
1st: Marcus Maronne, Mystic
2nd: Normand L  Charlette, Manchester
3rd: Tammy Marseli, Rocky Hill
Honorable Mention Jud Perkins, Salem
Honorable Mention Pat Duncan, Norwalk
Honorable Mention John Kolb, Essex
Landscapes/Waterscapes
1st: Cheryl Philopena, Salem
2nd: Marian Morrissette, New London
3rd: Harcourt Davis, Old Lyme
Honorable Mention Cynthia Kovak, Old Lyme
Honorable Mention Bopha Smith, Salem
1st: Mary Waldron, Old Lyme
2nd: Courtney Briggs, Old Saybrook
3rd: Linda Waters, Salem
Honorable Mention Pete Govert, East Haddam
Honorable Mention Marcus Maronne, Mystic
Honorable Mention Marian Morrissette, New London
First place winner of the Wildlife category – Chris Pimley
1st: Chris Pimley, Essex
2nd: Harcourt Davis, Old Lyme
Honorable Mention Thomas Nemeth, Salem
Honorable Mention Jeri Duefrene, Niantic
Honorable Mention Elizabeth Gentile, Old Lyme
The winning photos will be on display at the Lymes’ Senior Center for the month of March and Lyme Public Library in April  For more information go to lymelandtrust org 
Filed Under: Outdoors Old Lyme’s Open Space Commission Hosts Talk on Sea Level Rise, Salt Marsh Advance March 11, 2016 by admin 1 Comment The Town of Old Lyme’s Open Space Commission invites all interested parties to a workshop by Adam Whelchel, PhD, Director of Science at The Nature Conservancy’s Connecticut Chapter  The workshop will be held on Friday, March 11, at 9 a m  in the Old Lyme Town Hall 
Filed Under: Outdoors, Town Hall Inaugural Meeting of ‘Friends of Whalebone Cove’ Held, Group Plans to Protect Famous Tidal Wetland March 7, 2016 by admin Leave a Comment The newly formed ‘Friends of Whalebone Cove’ are working to preserve and protect the Cove’s fragile ecosystem 
A new community conservation group to protect Whalebone Cove, a freshwater tidal marsh along the Connecticut river in Hadlyme recognized internationally for its wildlife habitat, will hold its first organizational meeting this coming Sunday, March 6, at 4 p m 
Calling the group “Friends of Whalebone Cove” (FOWC), the organizers say their purpose is to “create a proactive, community-based constituency whose mission is to preserve and protect the habitat and fragile eco-systems of Whalebone Cove ”
Much of Whalebone Cove is a nature preserve that is part of the Silvio O  Conte National Wildlife Refuge (www fws gov/refuge/silvio_o_conte) under the jurisdiction of the U S  Fish & Wildlife Service (USFW)  The Refuge owns and manages 116 acres of marshland in Whalebone Cove and upland along its shores 
Prior to being taken over by USFW, the Whalebone Cove preserve was under the protection of The Nature Conservancy 
As part of the Connecticut River estuary, the Cove is listed in the Ramsar Convention on International Wetlands (www ramsar org) as tidal marshlands on the Connecticut River that constitute a “wetlands complex of international importance ”
The Ramsar citation specifically notes that Whalebone Cove has one of the largest stands of wild rice in the state  Except at high tide, most of the Cove is open marshland covered by wild rice stands with relatively narrow channels where Whalebone Creek winds its way through the Cove to the main stem of the Connecticut River 
Brian Slater, one of the group’s leaders who is filing the incorporation documents creating FOWC, said the creation of the organization was conceived by many of those living around the Cove and others in the Hadlyme area because of increased speeding motor boat and jet ski traffic in the Cove in recent years, damaging wetland plants and disrupting birds and other wildlife that make the Cove their home 
Slater said “Our goal is to develop a master plan for protection of the Cove through a collaborative effort involving all those who have a stake in Whalebone Cove – homeowners along its shores and those living nearby, the Silvio O  Conte Refuge, the Connecticut Department of Energy & Environmental Protection (DEEP), hunters, fishing enthusiasts, canoeing and kayaking groups, Audubon groups, the Towns of Lyme and East Haddam, The Nature Conservancy, the Connecticut River Watershed Council, the Lyme Land Conservation Trust, the Connecticut River Gateway Commission, and others who want to protect the Cove ”
“Such a plan”, said Slater, “should carefully evaluate the habitat, plants, wildlife and eco-systems of the Cove and the surrounding uplands and watershed and propose an environmental management plan that can be both implemented and enforced by those entrusted with stewarding the Cove and its fragile ecosystems for the public trust ”
FOWC has written a letter to Connecticut DEEP Commissioner Rob Klee asking that he appoint a blue ribbon commission to conduct the research and develop the management plan  FOWC also asked that Commissioner Klee either deny or defer approval on any applications for new docks in the Cove until the management plan can be developed and implemented  Currently there are no docks in the Cove 
“We are very concerned that the installation of docks permitted for motor boat use will greatly increase the amount of motorized watercraft in the Cove,” said Slater  “There’s already too much jet ski and speeding motorboat traffic in the Cove  Those living on the Cove have even seen boats towing water skiers crisscrossing the wild rice plants at high tide  Something has to be done to protect the birds and marine life that give birth and raise their young in the Cove ”
Slater urged all those “who treasure Whalebone Cove and the many species of birds, turtles, fish, reptiles, amphibians, beaver, and rare flora and fauna that make their home in it to attend the meeting, whether they live in the Hadlyme area or beyond ”
Expected to be at the meeting will be representatives from USFW, DEEP, the Connecticut River Watershed Council, and several other conservation organizations 
The meeting will be held at Hadlyme Public Hall, 1 Day Hill Rd , in Lyme, which is at the intersection of Ferry Rd  (Rte  148), Joshuatown Rd , and Day Hill Rd  Representatives from the Silvio O  Conte Refuge will make a short presentation on the history and mission of the Conte Refuge system, which includes nature preserves throughout the Connecticut River Valley in four states 
For more information, call 860-322-4021 or email fowchadlyme@gmail com
Filed Under: Lyme, News, Outdoors Next Page »
Context 3: 
As with CPUE of all catch, there was a positive relationship between unstandardised CPUE (catch per set) of threatened and regulated species and number of hooks, but a significant negative relationship between standardised CPUE (catch per 100 hooks per set)  This was likely due to diminishing returns of adding additional hooks, and indicates that the effort for threatened and regulated species was exceeding maximum sustainable yield effort, such that increases in effort (e g  hook number) were leading to decreases in catch [28–30] 
Due to the profitability of the shark industry in Tanjung Luar, and limited adaptive capacity and willingness of shark fishers to move into other industries, it is necessary to identify practical and ethical management interventions that can improve the sustainability of the fishery whilst also mitigating the negative socio-economic consequences for coastal communities  Our findings indicate that spatiotemporal closures and restrictions on fishing effort could improve the overall catch per unit effort and sustainability of the Tanjung Luar shark fishery, and lead to positive conservation outcomes for priority species 
Since the location of shark fishing grounds plays a significant role in determining the likelihood of catching threatened species and their associated CPUE, improved marine spatial planning, with the identification of marine protected areas (MPAs) that protect critical shark habitat and shark populations, could reduce catch of species of conservation concern [31–33] and increase abundance of sharks [34, 35]  Provincial governments in West Papua and West Nusa Tenggara have already established ‘shark sanctuary’ MPAs, which protect critical shark habitat and ban shark fishing within their boundaries [16, 36], and monitoring data indicates positive impacts of shark-specific closures on shark abundance [37, 38]  Strengthening Indonesia’s existing MPA network for shark conservation, such as making all MPAs no-take zones for sharks and expanding spatial protection to critical shark habitat, including aggregation sites or pupping and nursery grounds for species of conservation concern, could have considerable conservation benefits  It should be noted, however, that MPAs may only be effective for certain species, such as those with small ranges or site-fidelity   More research is required to identify critical shark habitat and life history stages  For Tanjung Luar these efforts could focus on better understanding scalloped hammerhead (Sphyrna lewini) aggregation sites  Well-targeted spatial closures for this species could significantly reduce catch of threatened species in this fishery 
The relationships between gear type, several aspects of fishing effort (i e  hook number, engine power, number of sets, trip length), standardised CPUE of all shark species and standardised CPUE of threatened and regulated species suggest that there is an optimal effort that could increase overall CPUE of the fishery and significantly reduce fishing mortality of species of conservation concern  For example, our data suggest that CPUE peaks with low to intermediate trip lengths and gear sets, intermediate engine power and hook numbers of less than 75 per set longline  Although standardised CPUE of threatened and regulated species is also higher when fewer hooks are deployed, the catch per set and overall mortality is significantly lower  Regulations that control the number of hooks in combination with incentives for shark fishers to tightly manage the number of hooks they deploy could significantly reduce mortality of threatened and endangered species, maximise the overall CPUE of the fishery, and reduce operational costs for fishers, making shark fishing in Tanjung Luar more sustainable and more cost effective [39–41] 
Acknowledging that almost half of Tanjung Luar’s shark catch consists of CITES-listed species, developing measures that ensure both the sustainability of the fishery, and full traceability and control of onward trade, will be crucial for implementing CITES   The Indonesian government has demonstrated a strong commitment to regulating shark trade and implementing CITES [17–18], as demonstrated through several policy decisions to confer full and partial protection to CITES-listed shark and ray species (Marine Affairs and Fisheries Ministerial Decree No 4 /KEPMEN-KP/2014, Regulation No  48/PERMEN-KP/2016)  This includes zero quotas/export bans for hammerhead and oceanic whitetip sharks  However, these export bans should be considered intermediate policy measures as monitoring systems and data availability are improved, and sustainable quotas are established  This will be challenging, as shark products are often traded in large volumes of fresh and/or preserved body parts, with high morphological similarity between products from regulated species and non-regulated species  To guarantee that trade is not detrimental to the survival of species, sustainable fisheries management will need to be complemented with species-specific trade quotas  This will require catch documentation systems which trace shark products from point of catch to point of export and rapid, low-cost species identification methods 
As baseline data on shark population health are limited, and there is no standardised, fisheries-independent system for monitoring long-term changes in shark populations, indirect bio-indicators (e g  endo- and ectoparasites, [43–45]) could help to elucidate the impact of management measures on fisheries and populations of wild species  In the future, shark conservation and fisheries management could benefit from long-term monitoring of agreed indices of population abundance and health status 
These lessons may also apply to shark fisheries in other parts of the world  As sharks increasingly become the focus of global conservation efforts it should be acknowledged that species protection alone will not be enough to reduce mortality of priority species  More needs to be done to identify practical fisheries management measures that can reduce pressure on the most vulnerable species and populations, but also support sustainable use of species that are less susceptible to overfishing  Shark fishing forms an integral part of the livelihood strategies of many coastal communities [22, 23], and prohibiting catches will not necessarily lead to positive conservation outcomes [21, 46]  Management interventions must take into account local context and the motivations and well-being of fisher communities in order to be ethical, feasible and impactful 
S1 Dataset  Data of landed sharks at Tanjung Luar auction that had been used for this study 
S1 File  Questionnaires have been used to interview shark fishers, collector, traders, and processors 
We wish to acknowledge the support provided by fishers in Tanjung Luar for their great cooperation during fieldwork  We also thank I Made Dharma Aryawan, Muhsin, Abdul Kohar, and Abdurrafik for their assistance during field research, Benaya M Simeon, Peni Lestari, and Siska Agustina for helping with data processing, Ken Kassem for carefully reading the manuscript and providing useful inputs, and the anonymous reviewers for their constructive comments 
3  Hutchings JA, Reynolds JD  Marine fish population collapses: consequences for recovery and extinction risk  AIBS Bulletin  2004 Apr;54(4):297–309 
4  Costello C, Ovando D, Clavelle T, Strauss CK, Hilborn R, Melnychuk MC, et al  Global fishery prospects under contrasting management regimes  Proceedings of the national academy of sciences  2016 May 3;113(18):5125–9 
5  Davidson LN, Krawchuk MA, Dulvy NK  Why have global shark and ray landings declined: improved management or overfishing?  Fish and Fisheries  2016 Jun 1;17(2):438–58 
6  Stevens JD, Bonfil R, Dulvy NK, Walker PA  The effects of fishing on sharks, rays, and chimaeras (chondrichthyans), and the implications for marine ecosystems  ICES Journal of Marine Science  2000 Jun 1;57(3):476–94 
9  Dent F, Clarke S  State of the global market for shark products  FAO Fisheries and Aquaculture Technical Paper (FAO) eng no  590  2015 
12  Christensen J, Tull M, editors  Historical perspectives of fisheries exploitation in the Indo-Pacific  Springer Science & Business Media; 2014 Apr 1 
13  Simpfendorfer CA, Heupel MR, White WT, Dulvy NK  The importance of research and public opinion to conservation management of sharks and rays: a synthesis  Marine and Freshwater Research  2011 Jul 21;62(6):518–27 
14  Lack M, Sant G  The future of sharks: a review of action and inaction  TRAFFIC International and the Pew Environment Group  2011 Jan:44 
15  Bräutigam A, Callow M, Campbell IR, Camhi MD, Cornish AS, Dulvy NK, et al  Global priorities for conserving sharks and rays: A 2015–2025 strategy  The Global Sharks and Rays Initiative; 2015  27p 
16  Satria A, Matsuda Y  Decentralization of fisheries management in Indonesia  Marine Policy  2004 Sep 30;28(5):437–50 
17  Dharmadi , Fahmi , Satria F  Fisheries management and conservation of sharks in Indonesia  African journal of marine science  2015 Apr 3;37(2):249–58 
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ground_truth: Appointing a blue ribbon commission to conduct the research and develop the management plan and denying or defering approval on any applications for new docks in the Cove until the management plan can be developed and implemented.

prompt_front: Now, answer the following question based on the text below, only give me the answer and do not output any other words.

Question: How are the relationships between catch per set and fishing behavior variables different for different measures of catch per unit effort (CPUE)?

Read the following text and answer briefly.

Context 4: 

Margaret died on the 10th of August 2022 in Cleveland, Queensland 

Bibliography

Single Novels
King Country (1970)
Blaze of Silk (1970)
The Time of the Jacaranda (1970)
Bauhinia Junction (1971)
Man from Bahl Bahla (1971)
Summer Magic (1971)
Return to Belle Amber (1971)
Ring of Jade (1972)
Copper Moon (1972)
Rainbow Bird (1972)
Man Like Daintree (1972)
Noonfire (1972)
Storm Over Mandargi (1973)
Wind River (1973)
Love Theme (1974)
McCabe's Kingdom (1974)
Sweet Sundown (1974)
Reeds of Honey (1975)
Storm Flower (1975)
Lesson in Loving (1975)
Flight into Yesterday (1976)
Red Cliffs of Malpara (1976)
Man on Half-moon (1976)
Swan's Reach (1976)
Mutiny in Paradise (1977)
One Way Ticket (1977)
Portrait of Jaime (1977)
Black Ingo (1977)
Awakening Flame (1978)
Wild Swan (1978)
Ring of Fire (1978)
Wake the Sleeping Tiger (1978)
Valley of the Moon (1979)
White Magnolia (1979)
Winds of Heaven (1979)
Blue Lotus (1979)
Butterfly and the Baron (1979)
Golden Puma (1980)
Temple of Fire (1980)
Lord of the High Valley (1980)
Flamingo Park (1980)
North of Capricorn (1981)
Season for Change (1981)
Shadow Dance (1981)
McIvor Affair (1981)
Home to Morning Star (1981)
Broken Rhapsody (1982)
The Silver Veil (1982)
Spellbound (1982)
Hunter's Moon (1982)
Girl at Cobalt Creek (1983)
No Alternative (1983)
House of Memories (1983)
Almost a Stranger (1984)
A place called Rambulara (1984)
Fallen Idol (1984)
Hunt the Sun (1985)
Eagle's Ridge (1985)
The Tiger's Cage (1986)
Innocent in Eden (1986)
Diamond Valley (1986)
Morning Glory (1988)
Devil Moon (1988)
Mowana Magic (1988)
Hungry Heart (1988)
Rise of an Eagle (1988)
One Fateful Summer (1993)
The Carradine Brand (1994)
Holding on to Alex (1997)
The Australian Heiress (1997)
Claiming His Child (1999)
The Cattleman's Bride (2000)
The Cattle Baron (2001)
The Husbands of the Outback (2001)
Secrets of the Outback (2002)
With This Ring (2003)
Innocent Mistress (2004)
Cattle Rancher, Convenient Wife (2007)
Outback Marriages (2007)
Promoted: Nanny to Wife (2007)
Cattle Rancher, Secret Son (2007)
Genni's Dilemma (2008)
Bride At Briar Ridge (2009)
Outback Heiress, Surprise Proposal (2009)
Cattle Baron, Nanny Needed (2009)

Legends of the Outback Series
Mail Order Marriage (1999)
The Bridesmaid's Wedding (2000)
The English Bride (2000)
A Wife at Kimbara (2000)

Koomera Crossing Series
Sarah's Baby (2003)
Runaway Wife (2003)
Outback Bridegroom (2003)
Outback Surrender (2003)
Home to Eden (2004)

McIvor Sisters Series
The Outback Engagement (2005)
Marriage at Murraree (2005)

Men Of The Outback Series
The Cattleman (2006)
The Cattle Baron's Bride (2006)
Her Outback Protector (2006)
The Horseman (2006)

Outback Marriages Series
Outback Man Seeks Wife (2007)
Cattle Rancher, Convenient Wife (2007)

Barons of the Outback Series Multi-Author
Wedding At Wangaree Valley (2008)
Bride At Briar's Ridge (2008)

Family Ties Multi-Author
Once Burned (1995)

Hitched! Multi-Author
A Faulkner Possession (1996)

Simply the Best Multi-Author
Georgia and the Tycoon (1997)

The Big Event Multi-Author
Beresford's Bride (1998)

Guardian Angels Multi-Author
Gabriel's Mission (1998)

Australians Series Multi-Author
7  Her Outback Man (1998)
17  Master of Maramba (2001)
19  Outback Fire (2001)
22  Mistaken Mistress (2002)
24  Outback Angel (2002)
33  The Australian Tycoon's Proposal (2004)
35  His Heiress Wife (2004)

Marrying the Boss Series Multi-Author
Boardroom Proposal (1999)

Contract Brides Series Multi-Author
Strategy for Marriage (2002)

Everlasting Love Series Multi-Author
Hidden Legacy (2008)

Diamond Brides Series Multi-Author
The Australian's Society Bride (2008)

Collections
Summer Magic / Ring of Jade / Noonfire (1981)
Wife at Kimbara / Bridesmaid's Wedding (2005)

Omnibus in Collaboration
Pretty Witch / Without Any Amazement / Storm Over Mandargi (1977) (with Lucy Gillen and Margaret Malcolm)
Dear Caliban / Heart of the Eagle / Swans' Reach (1978) (with Jane Donnelly and Elizabeth Graham)
The Bonds of Matrimony / Dragon Island / Reeds of Honey (1979) (with Elizabeth Hunter and Henrietta Reid)
The Man Outside / Castles in Spain / McCabe's Kingdom (1979) (with Jane Donnelly and Rebecca Stratton)
Winds From The Sea / Island of Darkness / Wind River (1979) (with Margaret Pargeter and Rebecca Stratton)
Moorland Magic / Tree of Idleness / Sweet Sundown (1980) (with Elizabeth Ashton and Elizabeth Hunter)
The Shifting Sands / Portrait of Jaime / Touched by Fire (1982) (with Jane Donnelly and Kay Thorpe)
Head of Chancery / Wild Heart / One-Way Ticket (1986) (with Betty Beaty and Doris Smith)
Heart of the Scorpion / The Winds of Heaven / Sweet Compulsion (1987) (with Janice Gray and Victoria Woolf)
One Brief Sweet Hour / Once More With Feeling / Blue Lotus (1990) (with Jane Arbor and Natalie Sparks)
Marry Me Cowboy (1995) (with Janet Dailey, Susan Fox and Anne McAllister)
Husbands on Horseback (1996) (with Diana Palmer)
Wedlocked (1999) (with Day Leclaire and Anne McAllister)
Mistletoe Magic (1999) (with Betty Neels and Rebecca Winters)
The Australians (2000) (with Helen Bianchin and Miranda Lee)
Weddings Down Under (2001) (with Helen Bianchin and Jessica Hart)
Outback Husbands (2002) (with Marion Lennox)
The Mother's Day Collection (2002) (with Helen Dickson and Kate Hoffmann)
Australian Nights (2003) (with Miranda Lee)
Outback Weddings (2003) (with Barbara Hannay)
Australian Playboys (2003) (with Helen Bianchin and Marion Lennox)
Australian Tycoons (2004) (with Emma Darcy and Marion Lennox)
A Mother's Day Gift (2004) (with Anne Ashley and Lucy Monroe)
White Wedding (2004) (with Judy Christenberry and Jessica Steele)
A Christmas Engagement (2004) (with Sara Craven and Jessica Matthews)
A Very Special Mother's Day (2005) (with Anne Herries)
All I Want for Christmas    (2005) (with Betty Neels and Jessica Steele)
The Mills and Boon Collection (2006) (with Caroline Anderson and Penny Jordan)
Outback Desire (2006) (with Emma Darcy and Carol Marinelli)
To Mum, with Love (2006) (with Rebecca Winters)
Australian Heroes (2007) (with Marion Lennox and Fiona McArthur)
Tall, Dark and Sexy (2008) (with Caroline Anderson and Helen Bianchin)
The Boss's Proposal (2008) (with Jessica Steele and Patricia Thayer)
Island Heat / Outback Man Seeks Wife / Prince's Forbidden Virgin / One Night Before Marriage / Their Lost-and-found Family / Single Dad's Marriage Wish (2008) (with Robyn Donald, Marion Lennox, Carol Marinelli, Sarah Mayberry and Anne Oliver)
Australian Billionaires (2009) (with Jennie Adams and Amy Andrews)
Cattle Baron : Nanny Needed / Bachelor Dad on Her Doorstep (2009) (with Michelle Douglas)

External links
Margaret Way at Harlequin Enterprises Ltd

Australian romantic fiction writers
Australian women novelists
Living people
Year of birth missing (living people)
Women romantic fiction writers



ground_truth: The relationships between catch per set and fishing behavior variables differ when comparing unstandardized CPUE and standardized CPUE.