bluuebunny/crossref_metadata_2025 huggingface dataset:
Obsolescence
Authors: Ehrenfeld David
Published: November 2020

At the end of the Cretaceous period, the last dinosaurs disappeared from the earth, setting off an evolutionary jubilee among the Milquetoast-like mammals that survived them, and preparing the ground for what was to become, 65 million years later, a permanent source of gainful occupation for scientists whose job it is to wonder why the dinosaurs died out. Scores of reasons have been given for this remarkable concatenation of extinctions. Global climate and sea level were changed by a city-sized asteroid striking the earth near what is now the Yucatan, or by a massive set of volcanic eruptions, or by the solar system passing through the core of a giant molecular cloud, perhaps colliding with a supercomet loosened from the Oort cluster, which orbits the Sun beyond Pluto. Theories of catastrophic extinction abound. Some of the most daring even conjure up the specter of an unseen companion star to our Sun, named Nemesis, whose eccentric orbit brings a wave of potentially deadly comet showers—and extinctions—every 26 million years. But there are also paleontologists who argue that the dinosaurs went away gradually, not suddenly, over a period of millions of years, and that toward the end they coexisted with the earliest hooved mammals, including ancestors of horses, cows, and sheep. If extinction was gradual, a different line of thought opens up: perhaps the dinosaurs died out because they couldn’t adapt and compete in a changing world. The big lummoxes were obsolete. I heard about the dinosaurs’ obsolescence back in my student days. It was as satisfying a notion then as it is today, especially if you didn’t think about it too hard. Here were these lumbering, pea-brained reptiles, barely able to walk and chew gum at the same time, while all around and underneath them, cleverly hiding behind clumps of primitive vegetation and cleverly burrowing in tunnels in the ground, were the nerdy but smart little mammals about to emerge from the shadows and begin their ascent to glory—somewhat, it occurs to me now, like Bill Gates in the waning days of heavy manufacturing.
Conservation and Conservatism
Authors: Orr David W.
Published: November 2020

The philosophy of free-market conservatism has swept the political field virtually everywhere, and virtually everywhere conservatives have been, in varying degrees, hostile to the cause of conservation. This is a problem of great consequence for the long-term human prospect because of the sheer political power of conservative governments. Conservatism and conservation share more than a common linguistic heritage. Consistently applied they are, in fact, natural allies. To make such a case, however, it is necessary first to say what conservatism is. Conservative philosopher Russell Kirk (1982, xv–xvii) proposes six “first principles” of conservatism. Accordingly, true conservatives:… • believe in a transcendent moral order • prefer social continuity (i.e., the “devil they know to the devil they don’t know”) • believe in “the wisdom of our ancestors” • are guided by prudence • “feel affection for the proliferating intricacy of long-established social institutions” • believe that “human nature suffers irremediably from certain faults.”… For Kirk the essence of conservatism is the “love of order” (1982, xxxvi). Eighteenth-century British philosopher and statesman Edmund Burke, the founding father of modern conservatism and as much admired as he is unread, defined the goal of order more specifically as one which harmonized the distant past with the distant future. To this end Burke thought in terms of a contract, but not one about “things subservient only to the gross animal existence of a temporary and perishable nature.” Burke’s societal contract was not, in other words, about tax breaks for those who don’t need them, but about a partnership promoting science, art, virtue, and perfection, none of which could be achieved by a single generation without veneration for the past and a healthy regard for those to follow. Burke’s contract, therefore, was between “those who are living, those who are dead, and those who are to be born . . . linking the lower with the higher natures, connecting the visible and invisible world” ([1790] 1986, 194–195). The role of government, those “possessing any portion of power,” in Burke’s words, “ought to be strongly and awefully impressed with an idea that they act in trust” (ibid., 190).
2020: A Proposal
Authors: Orr David W.
Published: November 2020

By a large margin 1998 was the warmest year ever recorded. The previous year was the second warmest (IPCC 2001). A growing volume of scientific evidence indicates that, given present trends, the combustion of fossil fuels, deforestation, and poor land-use practices will cause a major, and perhaps self-reinforcing, shift in global climate (Houghton 1997). With climatic change will come severe weather extremes, superstorms, droughts, killer heat waves, rising sea levels, spreading disease, accelerating rates of species loss, and collateral political, economic, and social effects that we cannot imagine. We are conducting, as Roger Revelle (quoted in Somerville 1996, 35) once noted, a one-time experiment on the earth that cannot be reversed and should not be run. The debate about climatic change has, to date, been mostly about scientific facts and economics, which is to say a quarrel about unknowns and numbers. On one side are those, greatly appreciated by some in the fossil fuel industry, who argue that we do not yet know enough to act and that acting prematurely would be prohibitively expensive (Gelbspan 1998). On the other side are those who argue that we do know enough to act and that further procrastination will make subsequent action both more difficult and less efficacious. In the United States, which happens to be the largest emitter of greenhouse gases, the issue is not likely to be discussed in any constructive manner. And the U.S. Congress, caught in a miasma of ideology and partisanship, is in deep denial, unable to act on the Kyoto agreement that called for a 7 percent reduction of 1990 carbon dioxide levels by 2012. Even that level of reduction, however, would not be enough to stabilize climate. To see our situation more clearly we need a perspective that transcends the minutiae of science, economics, and current politics. Because the effects, whatever they may be, will fall most heavily on future generations, understanding their likely perspective on our present decisions would be useful to us now. How are future generations likely to regard various positions in the debate about climatic change? Will they applaud the precision of our economic calculations that discounted their prospects to the vanishing point? Will they think us prudent for delaying action until the last-minute scientific doubts were quenched?
Soil Stratigraphy in Geoarchaeological Contexts
Authors: Holliday Vance T.
Published: November 2020

The various kinds and states of soils, surface and buried, discussed in the previous chapter can be found in an almost infinite variety of combinations, and most can also be found in archaeological contexts. Furthermore, most soil stratigraphic relationships and conditions of soil burial can form a continuum through time or space or both, depending on local and regional variations in rates and depth of burial (i.e., rates and thickness of sedimentation). The most common and most extensive depositional environments with buried soils that illustrate these relationships are alluvial and eolian. These are the settings for much research on buried soils and soil stratigraphy. Alluvial settings likewise have been the loci of considerable archaeological and geoarchaeological research. Tephra—airfall deposits from volcanic eruptions—also commonly contain buried soils because of the episodic nature of eruptions. Though not as extensive as alluvial or other kinds of eolian deposits, tephra stratigraphy is locally important. Archaeological sites are also common in tephra layers from a variety of settings and regions. This chapter illustrates geoarchaeologically significant soil stratigraphic relationships in a variety of alluvial and eolian settings and at various spatial and temporal scales. Alluvial systems probably have been the site of more geoarchaeological research than any other type of depositional environment because they have always attracted occupants who left archaeological sites. A significant amount of archaeological research has also focused on riverine settings owing to “rescue” or “salvage” archaeology. In the United States, for example, this work included the federally funded River Basin Surveys of the 1940s, 1950s, and 1960s, followed by CRM studies beginning in the 1970s and continuing into the 21st century. The importance of alluvial stratigraphy in interpreting the archaeological record of alluvial settings has been recognized throughout most of this work (e.g., Mandel, 2000). Furthermore, the significance of soils in alluvial stratigraphic records has long been recognized; for example, soils were an important component of Haynes’s (1968) classic geoarchaeological model of an “alluvial chronology” for the central and western United States. Alluvial soil stratigraphy per se is more poorly known, however, being underrepresented in the traditional pedology or even traditional soil stratigraphic literature.
Soil Genesis and Site-Formation Processes
Authors: Holliday Vance T.
Published: November 2020

Pedogenic processes that produce or alter the soils associated with a landscape (buried or unburied) also modify the archaeological sites and other traces of human activity associated with that landscape and buried landscapes. The wide range of processes that form soils can profoundly affect the archaeological record. Pedogenesis, therefore, is an important component of the processes of archaeological site formation. Archaeological “site-formation processes” are those processes that modify artifacts and archaeological sites from the moment they were formed until they are uncovered by archaeologists (Stein, 2001b, pp. 37–38). Understanding formation processes is crucial in archaeology because archaeologists use the patterns of artifacts in the ground to infer behaviors. Formation processes identify patterns that are created by ancient behaviors and separate those patterns from the ones created by later cultural and natural processes (Stein, 2001b, p. 37). In his influential volume Formation Processes of the Archaeological Record, Schiffer (1987, p. 7) notes that archaeologists try to infer past behavior based on the archaeological record, but the record “must be handled with great care by the investigator seeking to infer past behaviors, for the evidence that survives has been changed in many ways by a variety of processes.” These processes introduce variability and ambiguity into the archaeological record. Schiffer (1987, p. 7) further distinguishes between cultural processes, in which the agency of transformation is human behavior, and noncultural processes, which stem from processes of the natural environment. Natural formation processes are many and varied and include plants, animals, wind, water, ice, and gravity, among others. Soil formation is also identified as an important process of site formation. Schiffer (1987) provides a comprehensive discussion of natural site-formation processes, which are summarized by Stein (2001b). Nash and Petraglia (1987) and Goldberg et al. (1993) also provide a number of case histories of natural formation processes identified at archaeological sites. Because soil formation represents the alteration of rock and sediment (chapter 1), pedogenic processes are important natural processes in the formation of archaeological sites. Other weathering processes that are significant in site formation can be grouped as “diagenetic alterations.”
Climate Forcing at the Arctic LTER Site
Authors: Hobbie John E. , Bettez Neil
Published: November 2020

The Arctic LTER site is located at 68º38'N and 149º43'W, at an elevation of 760 m in the northern foothills of the Brooks Range, Alaska. The location, 208 km south of Prudhoe Bay, was chosen for accessibility to the Dalton Highway, which extends along the Trans-Alaska Oil Pipeline from north of Fairbanks to Prudhoe Bay on the Arctic Ocean (figure 5.1). The rolling foothills at the site are covered with low tundra vegetation (Shaver et al. 1986a), which varies from heaths and lichens in dry sites to sedge tussocks on moist hillslopes to sedge wetlands in valley bottoms and along lakes. Riparian zones often have willow thickets up to 2 m in height. Small lakes are frequent; the best studied such lake is the 25-m-deep Toolik Lake (O’Brien 1992), the center of the LTER research site. Some 14 km from Toolik Lake, the Dalton Highway crosses the fourth-order Kuparuk River, the location of much of the LTER stream research (Peterson et al. 1993). Climate records at Toolik Lake have been kept since the early 1970s when a pipeline construction camp was established. On completion of the road in 1975, climate stations were set up by the U.S. Army Cold Regions Research Laboratory (CRREL, climate reported in Haugan 1982 and Haugen and Brown 1980). Since 1987, the LTER project has maintained climate stations at Toolik Lake (http:// ecosystems.mbl.edu/arc/) whereas the Water Resources Center of the University of Alaska has continuous records beginning in 1985 from nearby Imnavait Creek. An automatic station at Imnavait now reports every few hours to the Natural Resources Conservation Service–Alaska of the U.S. Dept. of Agriculture. The characteristics of the climate in northern Alaska are summarized by Zhang et al. (1996), who pointed out the strong influence of the ocean during both summer and winter months. They reported that the mean annual air temperature is coldest at the coast (–12.4ºC), where there are strong temperature inversions in the winter, and warmest in the foothills (–8.0ºC). At Toolik Lake, snow covers the ground for about eight months, and some 40% of the total precipitation of 250–350 mm falls as snow.
Introductory Overview
Authors: Smith Raymond C.
Published: November 2020

The El Niño–Southern Oscillation (ENSO) is a coupled ocean–atmosphere phenomena that has a worldwide impact on climate. An aperiodic phenomena that reoccurs every 2 to 7 years, the ENSO is second only to seasonal variability in driving worldwide weather patterns. As Greenland notes in chapter 6, the term “quasi-quintennial” is chosen to recognize that climatic events other than ENSO-related events might occur at this timescale, although it is widely recognized that ENSO contributes the lion’s share of the higher frequency variability in paleorecords of the past several thousand years. In this section, we consider variability with cycles of 2 to 7 years and the resulting ecological response. Although we emphasize the ENSO timescale in this section, there is growing evidence that this phenomena is neither spatially nor temporally stable over longer time periods. Indeed, Allan (2000) suggests the ENSO climatic variability must be viewed within the context of climate fluctuations at decadal to interdecadal timescales, which often modulate the higher frequency ENSO variability. As a consequence, results in this and the next section often display overlapping patterns of variability, and their separation is not sharply defined. An important theme in this section is the worldwide influence of ENSO-related climate variability. Greenland (chapter 6) provides an LTER network overview with an analysis of ENSO-related variability of temperature and precipitation records for many LTER sites from the Arctic to the Antarctic. He discusses the general nature of ENSO and its climatic effects, summarizes previous climate-related work in the LTER network, and provides a cross-site analysis of the correlations between the Southern Oscillation Index (SOI) and temperature and precipitation at LTER sites. His results are consistent with the expected patterns of the geography of ENSO effects on the climate. Greenland’s cross-site analysis provides the basis for studying climate variability and ecosystem response within the context of the series of framework questions that form an underlying theme for this volume. Brazel and Ellis (chapter 7) provide an excellent analysis of climate-related parameters within the context of ENSO indices. Reporting on the Central Arizona and Phoenix (CAP) LTER urban-rural ecosystem, these authors provide a comprehensive analysis linking water-related parameters to climate forcing, as indicated by these indexes. Their studies show a strong connection between ENSO and winter moisture in Arizona, perhaps making it possible to forecast impending conditions.
Interdecadal-Scale Variability: An Assessment of LTER Climate Data
Authors: McHugh Maurice J. , Goodin Douglas G.
Published: November 2020

Interdecadal-scale climate variability must be considered when interpreting climatic trends at local, regional, or global scales. Significant amounts of variance are found at interdecadal timescales in many climate parameters of both “direct” data (e.g., precipitation and sea surface temperatures at specific locations) and “indirect” data through which the climate system operates (e.g., circulation indices such as the Pacific North American index [PNA] or the North Atlantic Oscillation index [NAO]). The aim of this study is to evaluate LTER climate data for evidence of interdecadal-scale variability, which may in turn be associated with interdecadal-scale fluctuations evident in ecological or biophysical data measured throughout the LTER site network. In their conceptualization of climatic variability, Marcus and Brazel (1984) describe four types of interannual climate variations: (1) Periodic variations around a stationary mean are well known to occur at short timescales, such as diurnal temperature changes or the annual cycle, but are difficult to resolve at decadal or longer timescales. (2) Discontinuities generated by sudden changes in the overall state of the climate system can reveal nonstationarity in the mean about which data vary in a periodic or quasi-periodic manner. These sudden alterations can result in periods perhaps characterized by prolonged drought or colder than normal temperatures. (3) The climate system may undergo trends such as periods of slowly increasing or decreasing precipitation or of warming or cooling until some new mean “steady” state is reached. (4) Climate data may exhibit increasing or decreasing variability about a specific mean value or steady state. Interdecadal contributions to climate variability can be described in terms of types 2 and 3 of Marcus and Brazel’s conceptual classification—discontinuities in the mean and trends in the data. Records of the Northern Hemisphere’s average land surface temperature show discontinuities in the mean state of the hemispheric temperature record in conjunction with obvious trends. Conceptually, it is hard to distinguish between these aspects of climate variability. Trends are an essential component of an alteration in the mean state of the temperature series, as they serve as a temporal linkage between the different mean states.
Decadal Climate Variation and Coho Salmon Catch
Authors: Greenland David
Published: November 2020

When temporally smoothed data are used for the period 1925 to 1985 there is a close inverse statistical relationship acting at an interdecadal timescale between the Pacific Northwest (PNW) air temperatures and Coho salmon catch off the coast of Washington and Oregon. This relationship is now well known, although not fully explained, but at the time of its discovery in 1994 it was part of advances being made by several research groups on interdecadal-scale climate/ecological changes in the PNW (Greenland 1995). The discovery and later, related findings may be usefully examined within the context of the framework questions of this book (see chapter 1) because it provides a very interesting example of climate variability and ecosystem response found, in part, by Long-Term Ecological Research (LTER) investigators. The logical progression for this chapter is first to review a little of the relationship between Coho salmon and climate and then to explain how a study at one LTER site led to a finding with regional implications. An update of the findings at interdecadal-scale climate/ecological changes in the PNW is then appropriate, followed by a discussion of the topic with the framework questions of this book. The PNW is defined, for the purposes of this chapter, as the area of Washington and Oregon west of the crest of the Cascade Range. The term decadal is used loosely in this chapter to refer to changes that focus on time periods of about 10 to 30 years in length. Salmon live part of their lives in terrestrial, freshwater environments and part in marine, saltwater environments. The salmon life history starts with fertilized eggs remaining in gravel in freshwater stream beds and hatching after 1–3 months. One to five months later, fry emerge in the spring or summer. Juvenile fish are in freshwater from a few days to 4 years, depending on species and locality. After the juveniles change to smolts, they can migrate to the ocean, usually in spring or early summer, often taking advantage of streamflows driven by snowmelt. The fish spend 1–4 years in the ocean and then return to their freshwater home stream to spawn and die. More specifically, the typical life cycle for Oregon Coho spans 3 years (18 months in freshwater and 18 months in the ocean).
The Interdecadal Timescale—Synthesis
Authors: Goodin Douglas G. , McHugh Maurice J.
Published: November 2020

The five chapters of part III provide a broad overview of decadal-scale climate processes and their ecological effect in a variety of ecosystems. Written by authors with disciplinary backgrounds that encompass climatology, biometeorology, and ecology, the chapters range from cross-site climate analysis with little direct attention to ecosystem effects (e.g., McHugh and Goodin, chapter 11; Hayden and Hayden, chapter 14) to more intensive studies of direct climate/ecological interaction at single sites or over more defined geographical areas (e.g., Greenland, chapter 13; Juday et al., chapter 12; Milne et al., chapter 15). Separately, each of these chapters contributes to understanding some aspect of the interaction of climate and ecology. As an integrated whole, they encapsulate many of the cross-disciplinary problems confronted by LTER scientists as they explore the interaction of climate and ecology. Despite the widely varying topics addressed and the disparate backgrounds of the contributors, similar themes emerge in each of the chapters. Here, we elucidate these themes and place them within the framework questions that have guided this volume. Climatologists have long recognized the existence of cyclical or quasi-cyclical modes or patterns in the global circulation system. Typically, these patterns are characterized by variation in the strength or position of semipermanent pressure centers within the global circulation system. These variations occur at timescales ranging from seasonal to decadal, and such variability is frequently invoked as a causal mechanism for climatic trends or fluctuation at these various timescales. A variety of indexes have been constructed to characterize these pressure patterns and the teleconnections that result from them (see van Loon and Rogers 1978, Rogers 1984, and Trenberth and Hurrell 1994 for in-depth discussion of the derivation and interrelationships of atmospheric circulation indices). Evidence of some of these patterns recurs throughout each of the chapters, suggesting their importance in decadal-scale climate/ecology interactions at LTER sites. Although the chapters in this section concentrate on interdecadal variability, climate variability is a multiscale phenomenon in both space and time. Several authors acknowledge this, notably Milne et al. (chapter 15), McHugh and Goodin (chapter 11), and Greenland (chapter 13). Each of these chapters notes the importance of nondecadal variations, particularly the El Niño–Southern Oscillation (ENSO) phenomenon.
Century- to Millennial-Scale Climate Change and Ecosystem Response in Taylor Valley, Antarctica
Authors: Fountain Andrew G. , Lyons W. Berry
Published: November 2020

The view of climate change during the Pleistocene and the Holocene was very much different a mere decade ago. With the collection and detailed analyses of ice core records from both Greenland and Antarctica in the early and mid-1990s, respectively, the collective view of climate variability during this time period has changed dramatically. During the Pleistocene, at least as far back as 450,000 years b.p., abrupt and severe temperature fluctuations were a regular occurrence rather than the exception (Mayewski et al. 1996, 1998; Petit et al. 1999). During the Pleistocene, these rapid and large climatic fluctuations, initially identified in the ice core records, have been verified in both marine and lacustrine sediments as well (Bond et al. 1993; Grimm et al. 1993), suggesting large-scale (hemispheric to global) climate restructuring over very short periods of time (Mayewski et al. 1997). Similar types of climatic fluctuations, but with smaller amplitudes, have also occurred during the Holocene (O’Brien et al. 1995; Bond et al. 1997; Arz et al. 2001). What were the biological responses to these changes in temperature, precipitation, and atmospheric chemistry? We must answer this question if we are to understand the century- to millennial-scale influence of climate on the structure and function of ecosystems. Because the polar regions are thought to be amplifiers of global climate change, these regions are ideal for investigating the response of ecological systems to, what in temperate regions might be considered, small-scale climatic variation. Our knowledge of past climatic variations in Antarctica comes from different types of proxy records, including ice core, geologic, and marine (Lyons et al. 1997). It is clear, however, that coastal Antarctica may respond to oceanic, atmospheric, and ice sheet–based climatic “drivers,” and therefore ice-free regions, such as the Mc- Murdo Dry Valleys, may respond to climate change in a much more complex manner than previously thought (R. Poreda, unpubl. data 2001). Since the initiation of the McMurdo Dry Valleys Long-Term Ecological Research program (MCM) in 1993, there has been a keen interest not only in the dynamics of the present day ecosystem, but also in the legacies produced via past climatic variation on the ecosystem. In this chapter we examine the current structure and function of the dry valleys ecosystem from the perspective of our work centered in Taylor Valley.
Climate Variability and Ecosystem Response—Synthesis
Authors: David Greenland , Goodin Douglas G.
Published: November 2020

At the outset we identified the theme of this book as how ecosystems respond to climate variability. We have examined this theme at a variety of LTER sites and at a variety of timescales. The subject matter of the book was also to be focused on a series of framework questions. We noted that the theme of climate variability and ecosystem response is inherently deterministic and implicitly carries with it the notion of climate cause and ecosystem result. The analyses in this volume demonstrated that this is a valid and fruitful working assumption. However, the idea of a simple single climate cause and effect might be true in some cases, but it is obviously simplistic. More realistically, the effects of climate variability cascade through ecosystems. In almost all cases there is the probability of many secondary and associated effects accompanying the primary effects. As an example, the possible results of potential warming in the Pacific Northwest forests include changes in global carbon dioxide input, nutrient cycling between the plants and the soil, and feedback links between the plant and soil organisms (Perry and Borchers 1990). In general there seem to be at least three broad classes of interaction between climate and ecosystems. First, the ecosystem simply responds to individual climate events or episodes that exceed some threshold for response. Second, ecosystems may buffer climate variability. In this sense they are filtering the effect of the climate event or episode. The same component in an ecosystem can sometimes act as a buffer and sometimes not, according to the nature of the climate event. Thus a riparian environment might provide soil moisture that acts as a buffer to a drought, but the whole environment might be destroyed by a large flood event. Third, we hypothesize that the ecosystem may move into resonance with the climate variability with positive and negative feedbacks that produce a strong ecosystem response. The relationship between fire and the Southern Oscillation indicates that the South west United States (Swetnam and Betancourt 1990) may provide an example of such resonance. Other examples of resonance, discussed subsequently, may exist in the forests of Interior Alaska and Puerto Rico. If there is indeed an ecosystem response to climate variability, the response tends to occur in cascades.
Who Controls the Internet?
Authors: Goldsmith Jack , Wu Tim
Published: November 2020

Is the Internet erasing national borders? Will the future of the Net be set by Internet engineers, rogue programmers, the United Nations, or powerful countries? Who's really in control of what's happening on the Net? In this provocative new book, Jack Goldsmith and Tim Wu tell the fascinating story of the Internet's challenge to governmental rule in the 1990s, and the ensuing battles with governments around the world. It's a book about the fate of one idea--that the Internet might liberate us forever from government, borders, and even our physical selves. We learn of Google's struggles with the French government and Yahoo's capitulation to the Chinese regime; of how the European Union sets privacy standards on the Net for the entire world; and of eBay's struggles with fraud and how it slowly learned to trust the FBI. In a decade of events the original vision is uprooted, as governments time and time again assert their power to direct the future of the Internet. The destiny of the Internet over the next decades, argue Goldsmith and Wu, will reflect the interests of powerful nations and the conflicts within and between them. While acknowledging the many attractions of the earliest visions of the Internet, the authors describe the new order, and speaking to both its surprising virtues and unavoidable vices. Far from destroying the Internet, the experience of the last decade has lead to a quiet rediscovery of some of the oldest functions and justifications for territorial government. While territorial governments have unavoidable problems, it has proven hard to replace what legitimacy governments have, and harder yet to replace the system of rule of law that controls the unchecked evils of anarchy. While the Net will change some of the ways that territorial states govern, it will not diminish the oldest and most fundamental roles of government and challenges of governance. Well written and filled with fascinating examples, including colorful portraits of many key players in Internet history, this is a work that is bound to stir heated debate in the cyberspace community.
Conclusion: Globalization Meets Governmental Coercion
Authors: Goldsmith Jack , Wu Tim
Published: November 2020

Most contemporary assessments of globalization share two ideas. The first is a recognition that we live in an era where technology has made it easier than ever before to move capital, goods, and services across national borders and around the world. The second is a belief that globalization diminishes the relevance of borders, territory, and location, and thereby undermines the territorial nation-state’s role as the central institution for governing human affairs. The Internet has widely been viewed as the essential catalyst of contemporary globalization, and it has been central to debates about what globalization means and where it will lead. “The Internet is going to be like a huge vise that takes the globalization system . . . and keeps tightening and tightening that system around everyone, in ways that will only make the world smaller and smaller and faster and faster with each passing day.” That’s the prediction of globalization’s popularizer and prophet, Thomas Friedman, in his 1999 book The Lexus and the Olive Tree. Friedman went farther in his 2005 sequel, The World is Flat, claiming to show how the Internet and related technologies have “made us all next door neighbors,” and are killing geography, distance, and language. Friedman and others are right to emphasize the Internet’s transformative potential. As the Internet becomes more pervasive and as more and more aspects of life become digitalized, it is indeed becoming much easier for human beings everywhere to access, learn from, share, and improve upon the impossibly varied and plentiful information available on the Net. This book, in fact, was written while its peripatetic authors lived in and communicated with one another via the Net from Tokyo, Boston, Geneva, Chicago, Charlottesville, Boca Raton, and Washington, D.C., among other places—something that would have been nearly impossible a mere decade ago. The question we have addressed in this book is not whether the technological changes of the last decade have created changes in the way human beings live or interact. The question is whether those changes have had a lasting effect on how nations, and their peoples, govern themselves. The diminishing costs of moving information on the Internet have obviously made it harder for governments to suppress communications and related activities that they dislike.
Regional Overview of Interior Alaska
Authors: Stone David , Verbyla David L.
Published: November 2020

From continental macroclimate to microalluvial salt crusts, geology is a dominant factor that influences patterns and processes in the Alaskan boreal forest. In this chapter, we outline important geologic processes as a foundation for subsequent chapters that discuss the soil, hydrology, climate, and biota of the Alaskan boreal forest. We conclude the chapter with a discussion of interior Alaska from a regional perspective. Alaska can be divided into four major physiographic regions. The arctic coastal plain is part of the Interior Plains physiographic division of North America, analogous to the great plains east of the Rocky Mountains. The arctic coastal plain is predominantly alluvium underlaid by hundreds of meters of permafrost, resulting in many thaw lakes and ice wedges. South of the arctic coastal plain lies the Northern Cordillera, an extension of the Rocky Mountain system dominated by the Arctic Foothills, Brooks Range, Baird Mountains, and Delong Mountains. These mountains were glaciated during the Pleistocene. South of the Brooks Range lies interior Alaska, which is an intermontane plateau region analogous to the Great Basin/Colorado Plateau regions. This extensive region is characterized by wide alluvium-covered lowlands such as the Yukon Flats, Tanana Valley, and Yukon Delta, as well as moderate upland hills, domes, and mountains. Largely unglaciated, this region served as a refugium for biota during glacial periods. With the Northern and Southern Cordilleras acting as barriers, the major rivers of this region have long, meandering paths to the Bering Sea. The Southern Cordillera is composed of two mountain ranges: the Alaska Range to the north and the Kenai/Chugach/Wrangell-St. Elias Mountains to the south. The lowland belt between these mountains includes the Susitna and Copper River lowlands. The entire Southern Cordillera was glaciated during the Pleistocene and today has extensive mountain glaciers. Much of Alaska is made up of multiple geologic fragments that have been rafted together by the movements of the major plates called tectonic terranes (Thorson 1986, Connor and O’Haire 1988). Plate-tectonic theory explains such observations as the changing distribution of fossils with geologic time, the deep Aleutian Trench, high Alaskan mountain barriers, and mountain glaciers.
State Factor Control of Soil Formation in Interior Alaska
Authors: Packee Edmond C. , Swanson David K.
Published: November 2020

The most striking feature of Alaska’s boreal soils, compared to those from most other biomes, is the lack of significant soil development even though much of interior Alaska has not been glaciated for millions of years. Soils in the boreal region support forest ecosystems that account for nearly half of the land area of Alaska. Worldwide, boreal forests store nearly a third of the terrestrial carbon (Apps et al. 1993). Hence, changes in boreal soils could greatly impact the global carbon balance (Chapter 19). Another striking feature of boreal soils is their great local variation due to slope and aspect. Compared to the well-developed, colorful soils of the temperate and tropical regions, boreal soils generally have ochric (yellowish brown) colors in uplands and dark-colors in lowlands due to organic matter accumulations. These lowlands account for 85% of the wetland inventory in the United States (Bridgham et al. 2001). Soil is a mixture of geological parent material and organic matter altered by weathering and the action of living organisms and conditioned by topography over time. Jenny (1941) defined the major factors that influence soil formation as parent material, organisms, topography, climate, and time. When only one of these factors varies, soil characteristics can be treated as a function of that factor (Chapter 1). Soils are also responsive to anthropogenic changes, such as agriculture and forestry, that alter interactive controls at the local scale (Moore and Ping 1989). Interior Alaska consists of several broad, nearly level lowlands with elevations mostly below 500 m and rounded mountains with elevations up to about 2000 m (Wahrhaftig 1965). The Interior Highlands Ecoregion (Chapter 2) includes the Kuskokwim Highlands and the Interior Highlands. The Interior Bottomlands Ecoregion includes the Koyukuk-Innoko Lowland, the Kanuti Flats, and the Tanana- Kuskokwim Lowlands (Rieger et al. 1979). The Copper River Basin south of the Alaska Range has a climate and vegetation similar to that of interior Alaska. The Copper River Basin has fine-textured subsoils of lacustrine origin. Soils from the Alaska Range, the Kuskokwim, and the Interior Highlands generally form in glacial deposits and residual materials and have abundant rock fragments.
Fire Trends in the Alaskan Boreal Forest
Authors: Kasischke Eric S. , Verbyla David L.
Published: November 2020

Fire is ubiquitous throughout the global boreal forest (Wein 1983, Payette 1992, Goldammer and Furyaev 1996, Kasischke and Stocks 2000). The inter- and intra-annual patterns of fire in this biome depend on several interrelated factors, including the quantity and quality of fuel, fuel moisture, and sources of ignition. Fire cycles in different boreal forest types vary between 25 and >200 years (Heinselman 1981, Yarie 1981, Payette 1992, Conard and Ivanova 1998). Although the increased presence of humans in some regions of boreal forest has undoubtedly changed the fire regime (DeWilde 2003), natural fire is still a dominant factor in ecosystem processes throughout this biome. Boreal forest fires are similar to those of other forests in that they vary between surface and crown fires, depending on forest type and climatic factors. Surface fires kill and consume most of the understory vegetation, as well as portions of the litter or duff lying on the forest floor, resulting in varying degrees of mortality of canopy and subcanopy trees. Crown fires consume large amounts of the smaller plant parts (or fuels) present as leaves, needles, twigs, and small branches and kill all trees. These fires are important in initiating secondary succession (Lutz 1956, Heinselman 1981, Van Cleve and Viereck 1981, Van Cleve et al. 1986, Viereck 1983, Viereck et al. 1986). Unlike fires in other forest types, smoldering ground fires in the boreal forest can combust a significant fraction of the deep organic (fibric and humic) soils in forests overlying permafrost (Dyrness and Norum 1983, Landhauesser and Wein 1993, Kasischke et al. 2000a, Miyanishi and Johnson 2003). During periods of drought, when water tables are low, or prior to spring thaw, organic soils in peatlands can become dry enough to burn, as well (Zoltai et al. 1998, Turetsky and Wieder 2001, Turetsky et al. 2002).
Proteins and Information Processing
Authors: Paton Ray , Fisher Michael
Published: November 2020

This chapter reviews and briefly discusses a set of computational methods that can assist biologists when seeking to model interactions between components in spatially heterogeneous and changing environments. The approach can be applied to many scales of biological organization, and the illustrations we have selected apply to networks of interaction among proteins. Biological populations, whether ecological or molecular, homogeneous or heterogeneous, moving or stationary, can be modeled at different scales of organization. Some models can be constructed that focus on factors or patterns that characterize the population as a whole such as population size, average mass or length, and so forth. Other models focus on values associated with individuals such as age, energy reserve, and spatial association with other individuals. A distinction can be made between population (p-state) and individual (i-state) variables and models. We seek to develop a general approach to modeling biosystems based on individuals. Individual-based models (IBMs) typically consist of an environment or framework in which interactions occur and a number of individuals defined in terms of their behaviors (such as procedural rules) and characteristic parameters. The actions of each individual can be tracked through time. IBMs represent heterogeneous systems as sets of nonidentical, discrete, interacting, autonomous, adaptive agents (e.g., Devine and Paton [5]). They have been used to model the dynamics of population interaction over time in ecological systems, but IBMs can equally be applied to biological systems at other levels of scale. The IBM approach can be used to simulate the emergence of global information processing from individual, local interactions in a population of agents. When it is sensible and appropriate, we seek to incorporate an ecological and social view of inter-agent interactions to all scales of the biological hierarch. In this case we distinguish among individual “devices” (agents), networks (societies or communities), and networks in habitats (ecologies). In that they are able to interact with other molecules in subtle and varied ways, we may say that many proteins have social abilities . This social dimension to protein agency also presupposes that proteins have an underlying ecology in that they interact with other molecules including substrates, products, regulators, cytoskeleton, membranes, water, and local electric fields.
The Device Science of Whole Cells as Components in Microscale and Nanoscale Systems
Authors: Simpson Michael L. , Sayler Gary S.
Published: November 2020

Intact whole cells may be the ultimate functional molecular-scale machines, and our ability to manipulate the genetic mechanisms that control these functions is relatively advanced when compared to our ability to control the synthesis and direct the assembly of man-made materials into systems of comparable complexity and functional density. Although engineered whole cells deployed in biosensor systems provide one of the practical successes of molecular-scale devices, these devices explore only a small portion of the full functionality of the cells. Individual or self-organized groups of cells exhibit extremely complex functionality that includes sensing, communication, navigation, cooperation, and even fabrication of synthetic nanoscopic materials. Adding this functionality to engineered systems provides motivation for deploying whole cells as components in microscale and nanoscale devices. In this chapter we focus on the device science of whole cell components in a way analogous to the device physics of semiconductor components. We consider engineering the information transport within and between cells, communication between cells and synthetic devices, the integration of cells into nanostructured and microstructured substrates to form highly functional systems, and modeling and simulation of information processing in cells. Even a casual examination of the information processing density of prokaryotic cells produces an appreciation for the advanced state of the cell’s capabilities. A bacterial cell such as Escherichia coli ( 2 μm2 cross-sectional area) with a 4.6 million basepair chromosome has the equivalent of a 9.2-megabit memory. This memory codes for as many as 4300 different polypeptides under the inducible control of several hundred different promoters. These polypeptides perform metabolic and regulatory functions that process the energy and information, respectively, made available to the cell. This complexity of functionality allows the cell to interact with, influence, and, to some degree, control its environment. Compare this to the silicon semiconductor situation as described in the International Technology Roadmap for Semiconductors (ITRS). ITRS predicts that by the year 2014, memory density will reach 24.5 Gbits/cm2, and logic transistor density will reach 664 M/cm2. Assuming four transistors per logic function, 2 μm2 of silicon could contain a 490-bit memory or approximately three simple logic gates.
Cellular Computation and Communication Using Engineered Genetic Regulatory Networks
Authors: Weiss Ron , Knight Thomas F. ,Jr.,
Published: November 2020

In this chapter we demonstrate the feasibility of digital computation in cells by building several operational in vivo digital logic circuits, each composed of three gates that have been optimized by genetic process engineering. We have built and characterized an initial cellular gate library with biochemical gates that implement the NOT, IMPLIES, andANDlogic functions in E. coli cells. The logic gates perform computation using DNA-binding proteins, small molecules that interact with these proteins, and segments of DNA that regulate the expression of the proteins. We also demonstrate engineered intercellular communications with programmed enzymatic activity and chemical diffusions to carry messages, using DNA from the Vibrio fischeri lux operon. The programmed communications is essential for obtaining coordinated behavior from cell aggregates. This chapter is structured as follows: the first section describes experimental measurements of the device physics of in vivo logic gates, as well as genetic process engineering to modify gates until they have the desired behavior. The second section presents experimental results of programmed intercellular communications, including time–response measurements and sensitivity to variations in message concentrations. Potentially the most important element of biocircuit design is matching gate characteristics. Experimental results in this section demonstrate that circuits with mismatched gates are likely to malfunction. In generating biology’s complex genetic regulatory networks, natural forces of selection have resulted in finely tuned interconnections between the different regulatory components. Nature has optimized and matched the kinetic characteristics of these elements so that they cooperatively achieve the desired regulatory behavior. In building de novo biocircuits, we frequently combine regulatory elements that do not interact in their wild-type settings. Therefore, naive coupling of these elements will likely produce systems that do not have the desired behavior. In genetic process engineering, the biocircuit designer first determines the behavioral characteristics of the regulatory components and then modifies the elements until the desired behavior is attained. Below, we show experimental results of using this process to convert a nonfunctional circuit with mismatched gates into a circuit that achieves the correct response.