Academic literature on the topic 'Little Blue River'

The Big Blue River Basin is located in southeastern Nebraska and northeastern Kansas and consists of surface water in the Big Blue River, Little Blue River, Black Vermillion River, and various tributaries draining 24,968 km2. Approximately 75% of the land area in the basin are cultivated cropland. The Big Blue River flows into Tuttle Creek Reservoir near Manhattan, Kansas. Releases from the lake are used to maintain streamflow in the Kansas River during low flow periods, contributing 27% of the mean flow rate of the Kansas River at its confluence with the Missouri River. Tuttle Creek Reservoir and the Kansas River are used as sources of public drinking water and meet many of the municipal drinking water supply needs of the urban population in Kansas from Junction City to Kansas City. Elevated concentrations of pesticides in the Big Blue River Basin are of growing concern in Kansas and Nebraska as concentrations may be exceeding public drinking water standards and water quality criteria for the protection of aquatic life. Pesticides cause significant problems for municipal water treatment plants in Kansas, as they are not appreciably removed during conventional water treatment processes unless activated carbon filtering is used. Pesticides have been detected during all months of the year with concentrations ranging up to 200 μg/l. If high concentration in water is associated with high flow conditions then large mass losses of pesticides can flow into the water supplies in this basin. This paper will investigate the use of a monitoring program to assess the non-point source of this atrazine contamination. Several practices will be examined that have shown ability to remediate or prevent these impairments.

Abstract The Ethiopian portion of the Blue Nile River basin is subject to significant interannual variability in precipitation. As this variability has implications for local food security and transboundary water resources, numerous studies have been directed at improved understanding and, potentially, predictability of the Blue Nile rainy season (June–September) precipitation. Taken collectively, these studies present a wide range of large-scale drivers associated with precipitation variability in the Blue Nile: El Niño–Southern Oscillation (ENSO), the Indian summer monsoon, sea level pressure (SLP) anomalies over the Arabian Peninsula and Gulf of Guinea, the quasi-biennial oscillation (QBO), and dynamics of the tropical easterly jet (TEJ) and African easterly jet (AEJ) have all been emphasized to varying degrees. This study aims to reconcile these diverse analyses by evaluating teleconnection patterns and potential mechanisms of association on the subseasonal scale. It is found that associations with the TEJ, Pacific modes of variability, and the Indian monsoon are strongest in the late rainy season. Mid–rainy season precipitation (July and August) shows mixed associations with Pacific/Indian Ocean variability and Atlantic Ocean indices, along with connections to regional pressure patterns and the AEJ. June precipitation is negatively correlated with SLP over the equatorial Atlantic and upper-tropospheric geopotential height. June and July precipitation show little significant correlation with the sea surface temperature over the equatorial Pacific Ocean. The observed intraseasonal evolution of teleconnections across the rainy season indicates that subseasonal analysis is required to advance understanding and prediction of Blue Nile precipitation variability.

This paper examines the temporal distribution of 163 distinct species recovered from 21 well-dated Holocene age archaeological sites in the Ohio River valley to determine patterns of faunal resource procurement and their response to periods of climate change. Climate change proxies include bison, long-billed curlew, pine marten, porcupine, prairie vole, and swamp rabbit. While the rice rat may be a proxy of climate change, its initial appearance in the Archaic cultural period co-occurs with storable starchy and oily seed crops such as erect knotweed, little barley, marsh elder, maygrass, and sunflower. Subsistence proxies that transcend climate change include variety of aquatic (bass/sunfish, buffalo, channel catfish, freshwater drum, gar, mussels, snails, snapping and spiny softshell turtles, and river redhorse sucker), avian (blue-wing teal, Canada goose, and turkey), and terrestrial species (dog, eastern cotton-tail, elk, gray and fox squirrels, opossum, raccoon, timber rattlesnake, and woodchuck). Caldwell’s Primary Forest Efficiency remains a valid theoretical model of Holocene subsistence strategy in the Ohio River valley.

Imagery from unoccupied aerial vehicles (UAVs) is useful for mapping floating and emerged primary producers, as well as single taxa of submerged primary producers in shallow, clear lakes and streams. However, there is little research on the effectiveness of UAV imagery-based detection and quantification of submerged filamentous algae and rooted macrophytes in deeper rivers using a standard red-green-blue (RGB) camera. This study provides a novel application of UAV imagery analysis for monitoring a non-wadeable river, the Klamath River in northern California, USA. River depth and solar angle during flight were analyzed to understand their effects on benthic primary producer detection. A supervised, pixel-based Random Trees classifier was utilized as a detection mechanism to estimate the percent cover of submerged filamentous algae and rooted macrophytes from aerial photos within 32 sites along the river in June and July 2019. In-situ surveys conducted via wading and snorkeling were used to validate these data. Overall accuracy was 82% for all sites and the highest overall accuracy of classified UAV images was associated with solar angles between 47.5 and 58.72° (10:04 a.m. to 11:21 a.m.). Benthic algae were detected at depths of 1.9 m underwater and submerged macrophytes were detected down to 1.2 m (river depth) via the UAV imagery in this relatively clear river (Secchi depth > 2 m). Percent cover reached a maximum of 31% for rooted macrophytes and 39% for filamentous algae within all sites. Macrophytes dominated the upstream reaches, while filamentous algae dominated the downstream reaches closer to the Pacific Ocean. In upcoming years, four proposed dam removals are expected to alter the species composition and abundance of benthic filamentous algae and rooted macrophytes, and aerial imagery provides an effective method to monitor these changes.

Abstract. Water Footprint Assessment is a fast-growing field of research, but as yet little attention has been paid to the uncertainties involved. This study investigates the sensitivity of and uncertainty in crop water footprint (in m3 t−1) estimates related to uncertainties in important input variables. The study focuses on the green (from rainfall) and blue (from irrigation) water footprint of producing maize, soybean, rice, and wheat at the scale of the Yellow River basin in the period 1996–2005. A grid-based daily water balance model at a 5 by 5 arcmin resolution was applied to compute green and blue water footprints of the four crops in the Yellow River basin in the period considered. The one-at-a-time method was carried out to analyse the sensitivity of the crop water footprint to fractional changes of seven individual input variables and parameters: precipitation (PR), reference evapotranspiration (ET0), crop coefficient (Kc), crop calendar (planting date with constant growing degree days), soil water content at field capacity (Smax), yield response factor (Ky) and maximum yield (Ym). Uncertainties in crop water footprint estimates related to uncertainties in four key input variables: PR, ET0, Kc, and crop calendar were quantified through Monte Carlo simulations. The results show that the sensitivities and uncertainties differ across crop types. In general, the water footprint of crops is most sensitive to ET0 and Kc, followed by the crop calendar. Blue water footprints were more sensitive to input variability than green water footprints. The smaller the annual blue water footprint is, the higher its sensitivity to changes in PR, ET0, and Kc. The uncertainties in the total water footprint of a crop due to combined uncertainties in climatic inputs (PR and ET0) were about ±20% (at 95% confidence interval). The effect of uncertainties in ET0was dominant compared to that of PR. The uncertainties in the total water footprint of a crop as a result of combined key input uncertainties were on average ±30% (at 95% confidence level).

Macroinvertebrate assemblages were semi-quantitatively sampled from the Little Blue River and an isolated headwater stream in Wilbur Wright Fish and Wildlife Area from March through November of 2000. Physicochemical conditions and qualitative habitat characteristics were recorded at each site. Each stream contained unique community assemblages based on taxa richness, composition, functional feeding groups, behavioral groups, reproductive habits, and drought tolerance/avoidance. Collections from the first-order stream contained fewer taxa and a greater proportion of non-insects and tolerant taxa than those from the Little Blue River. Taxa from the Little Blue River were adapted for filtering/collecting and for swimming or clinging, while taxa from the first-order stream were primarily gathering/collecting and swimming or sprawling. The proportion of taxa with adaptations for drought resistance or avoidance was significantly higher in the first-order stream than in the Little Blue River (p<0.001).
Department of Biology

Nationalism: Past as Prologue began as a single volume being compiled by Ad Akande, a scholar from South Africa, who proposed it to me as co-author about two years ago. The original idea was to examine how the damaging roots of nationalism have been corroding political systems around the world, and creating dangerous obstacles for necessary international cooperation. Since I (Bruce E. Johansen) has written profusely about climate change (global warming, a.k.a. infrared forcing), I suggested a concerted effort in that direction. This is a worldwide existential threat that affects every living thing on Earth. It often compounds upon itself, so delays in reducing emissions of fossil fuels are shortening the amount of time remaining to eliminate the use of fossil fuels to preserve a livable planet. Nationalism often impedes solutions to this problem (among many others), as nations place their singular needs above the common good. Our initial proposal got around, and abstracts on many subjects arrived. Within a few weeks, we had enough good material for a 100,000-word book. The book then fattened to two moderate volumes and then to four two very hefty tomes. We tried several different titles as good submissions swelled. We also discovered that our best contributors were experts in their fields, which ranged the world. We settled on three stand-alone books:” 1/ nationalism and racial justice. Our first volume grew as the growth of Black Lives Matter following the brutal killing of George Floyd ignited protests over police brutality and other issues during 2020, following the police assassination of Floyd in Minneapolis. It is estimated that more people took part in protests of police brutality during the summer of 2020 than any other series of marches in United States history. This includes upheavals during the 1960s over racial issues and against the war in Southeast Asia (notably Vietnam). We choose a volume on racism because it is one of nationalism’s main motive forces. This volume provides a worldwide array of work on nationalism’s growth in various countries, usually by authors residing in them, or in the United States with ethnic ties to the nation being examined, often recent immigrants to the United States from them. Our roster of contributors comprises a small United Nations of insightful, well-written research and commentary from Indonesia, New Zealand, Australia, China, India, South Africa, France, Portugal, Estonia, Hungary, Russia, Poland, Kazakhstan, Georgia, and the United States. Volume 2 (this one) describes and analyzes nationalism, by country, around the world, except for the United States; and 3/material directly related to President Donald Trump, and the United States. The first volume is under consideration at the Texas A & M University Press. The other two are under contract to Nova Science Publishers (which includes social sciences). These three volumes may be used individually or as a set. Environmental material is taken up in appropriate places in each of the three books. * * * * * What became the United States of America has been strongly nationalist since the English of present-day Massachusetts and Jamestown first hit North America’s eastern shores. The country propelled itself across North America with the self-serving ideology of “manifest destiny” for four centuries before Donald Trump came along. Anyone who believes that a Trumpian affection for deportation of “illegals” is a new thing ought to take a look at immigration and deportation statistics in Adam Goodman’s The Deportation Machine: America’s Long History of Deporting Immigrants (Princeton University Press, 2020). Between 1920 and 2018, the United States deported 56.3 million people, compared with 51.7 million who were granted legal immigration status during the same dates. Nearly nine of ten deportees were Mexican (Nolan, 2020, 83). This kind of nationalism, has become an assassin of democracy as well as an impediment to solving global problems. Paul Krugman wrote in the New York Times (2019:A-25): that “In their 2018 book, How Democracies Die, the political scientists Steven Levitsky and Daniel Ziblatt documented how this process has played out in many countries, from Vladimir Putin’s Russia, to Recep Erdogan’s Turkey, to Viktor Orban’s Hungary. Add to these India’s Narendra Modi, China’s Xi Jinping, and the United States’ Donald Trump, among others. Bit by bit, the guardrails of democracy have been torn down, as institutions meant to serve the public became tools of ruling parties and self-serving ideologies, weaponized to punish and intimidate opposition parties’ opponents. On paper, these countries are still democracies; in practice, they have become one-party regimes….And it’s happening here [the United States] as we speak. If you are not worried about the future of American democracy, you aren’t paying attention” (Krugmam, 2019, A-25). We are reminded continuously that the late Carl Sagan, one of our most insightful scientific public intellectuals, had an interesting theory about highly developed civilizations. Given the number of stars and planets that must exist in the vast reaches of the universe, he said, there must be other highly developed and organized forms of life. Distance may keep us from making physical contact, but Sagan said that another reason we may never be on speaking terms with another intelligent race is (judging from our own example) could be their penchant for destroying themselves in relatively short order after reaching technological complexity. This book’s chapters, introduction, and conclusion examine the worldwide rise of partisan nationalism and the damage it has wrought on the worldwide pursuit of solutions for issues requiring worldwide scope, such scientific co-operation public health and others, mixing analysis of both. We use both historical description and analysis. This analysis concludes with a description of why we must avoid the isolating nature of nationalism that isolates people and encourages separation if we are to deal with issues of world-wide concern, and to maintain a sustainable, survivable Earth, placing the dominant political movement of our time against the Earth’s existential crises. Our contributors, all experts in their fields, each have assumed responsibility for a country, or two if they are related. This work entwines themes of worldwide concern with the political growth of nationalism because leaders with such a worldview are disinclined to co-operate internationally at a time when nations must find ways to solve common problems, such as the climate crisis. Inability to cooperate at this stage may doom everyone, eventually, to an overheated, stormy future plagued by droughts and deluges portending shortages of food and other essential commodities, meanwhile destroying large coastal urban areas because of rising sea levels. Future historians may look back at our time and wonder why as well as how our world succumbed to isolating nationalism at a time when time was so short for cooperative intervention which is crucial for survival of a sustainable earth. Pride in language and culture is salubrious to individuals’ sense of history and identity. Excess nationalism that prevents international co-operation on harmful worldwide maladies is quite another. As Pope Francis has pointed out: For all of our connectivity due to expansion of social media, ability to communicate can breed contempt as well as mutual trust. “For all our hyper-connectivity,” said Francis, “We witnessed a fragmentation that made it more difficult to resolve problems that affect us all” (Horowitz, 2020, A-12). The pope’s encyclical, titled “Brothers All,” also said: “The forces of myopic, extremist, resentful, and aggressive nationalism are on the rise.” The pope’s document also advocates support for migrants, as well as resistance to nationalist and tribal populism. Francis broadened his critique to the role of market capitalism, as well as nationalism has failed the peoples of the world when they need co-operation and solidarity in the face of the world-wide corona virus pandemic. Humankind needs to unite into “a new sense of the human family [Fratelli Tutti, “Brothers All”], that rejects war at all costs” (Pope, 2020, 6-A). Our journey takes us first to Russia, with the able eye and honed expertise of Richard D. Anderson, Jr. who teaches as UCLA and publishes on the subject of his chapter: “Putin, Russian identity, and Russia’s conduct at home and abroad.” Readers should find Dr. Anderson’s analysis fascinating because Vladimir Putin, the singular leader of Russian foreign and domestic policy these days (and perhaps for the rest of his life, given how malleable Russia’s Constitution has become) may be a short man physically, but has high ambitions. One of these involves restoring the old Russian (and Soviet) empire, which would involve re-subjugating a number of nations that broke off as the old order dissolved about 30 years ago. President (shall we say czar?) Putin also has international ambitions, notably by destabilizing the United States, where election meddling has become a specialty. The sight of Putin and U.S. president Donald Trump, two very rich men (Putin $70-$200 billion; Trump $2.5 billion), nuzzling in friendship would probably set Thomas Jefferson and Vladimir Lenin spinning in their graves. The road of history can take some unanticipated twists and turns. Consider Poland, from which we have an expert native analysis in chapter 2, Bartosz Hlebowicz, who is a Polish anthropologist and journalist. His piece is titled “Lawless and Unjust: How to Quickly Make Your Own Country a Puppet State Run by a Group of Hoodlums – the Hopeless Case of Poland (2015–2020).” When I visited Poland to teach and lecture twice between 2006 and 2008, most people seemed to be walking on air induced by freedom to conduct their own affairs to an unusual degree for a state usually squeezed between nationalists in Germany and Russia. What did the Poles then do in a couple of decades? Read Hlebowicz’ chapter and decide. It certainly isn’t soft-bellied liberalism. In Chapter 3, with Bruce E. Johansen, we visit China’s western provinces, the lands of Tibet as well as the Uighurs and other Muslims in the Xinjiang region, who would most assuredly resent being characterized as being possessed by the Chinese of the Han to the east. As a student of Native American history, I had never before thought of the Tibetans and Uighurs as Native peoples struggling against the Independence-minded peoples of a land that is called an adjunct of China on most of our maps. The random act of sitting next to a young woman on an Air India flight out of Hyderabad, bound for New Delhi taught me that the Tibetans had something to share with the Lakota, the Iroquois, and hundreds of other Native American states and nations in North America. Active resistance to Chinese rule lasted into the mid-nineteenth century, and continues today in a subversive manner, even in song, as I learned in 2018 when I acted as a foreign adjudicator on a Ph.D. dissertation by a Tibetan student at the University of Madras (in what is now in a city called Chennai), in southwestern India on resistance in song during Tibet’s recent history. Tibet is one of very few places on Earth where a young dissident can get shot to death for singing a song that troubles China’s Quest for Lebensraum. The situation in Xinjiang region, where close to a million Muslims have been interned in “reeducation” camps surrounded with brick walls and barbed wire. They sing, too. Come with us and hear the music. Back to Europe now, in Chapter 4, to Portugal and Spain, we find a break in the general pattern of nationalism. Portugal has been more progressive governmentally than most. Spain varies from a liberal majority to military coups, a pattern which has been exported to Latin America. A situation such as this can make use of the term “populism” problematic, because general usage in our time usually ties the word into a right-wing connotative straightjacket. “Populism” can be used to describe progressive (left-wing) insurgencies as well. José Pinto, who is native to Portugal and also researches and writes in Spanish as well as English, in “Populism in Portugal and Spain: a Real Neighbourhood?” provides insight into these historical paradoxes. Hungary shares some historical inclinations with Poland (above). Both emerged from Soviet dominance in an air of developing freedom and multicultural diversity after the Berlin Wall fell and the Soviet Union collapsed. Then, gradually at first, right wing-forces began to tighten up, stripping structures supporting popular freedom, from the courts, mass media, and other institutions. In Chapter 5, Bernard Tamas, in “From Youth Movement to Right-Liberal Wing Authoritarianism: The Rise of Fidesz and the Decline of Hungarian Democracy” puts the renewed growth of political and social repression into a context of worldwide nationalism. Tamas, an associate professor of political science at Valdosta State University, has been a postdoctoral fellow at Harvard University and a Fulbright scholar at the Central European University in Budapest, Hungary. His books include From Dissident to Party Politics: The Struggle for Democracy in Post-Communist Hungary (2007). Bear in mind that not everyone shares Orbán’s vision of what will make this nation great, again. On graffiti-covered walls in Budapest, Runes (traditional Hungarian script) has been found that read “Orbán is a motherfucker” (Mikanowski, 2019, 58). Also in Europe, in Chapter 6, Professor Ronan Le Coadic, of the University of Rennes, Rennes, France, in “Is There a Revival of French Nationalism?” Stating this title in the form of a question is quite appropriate because France’s nationalistic shift has built and ebbed several times during the last few decades. For a time after 2000, it came close to assuming the role of a substantial minority, only to ebb after that. In 2017, the candidate of the National Front reached the second round of the French presidential election. This was the second time this nationalist party reached the second round of the presidential election in the history of the Fifth Republic. In 2002, however, Jean-Marie Le Pen had only obtained 17.79% of the votes, while fifteen years later his daughter, Marine Le Pen, almost doubled her father's record, reaching 33.90% of the votes cast. Moreover, in the 2019 European elections, re-named Rassemblement National obtained the largest number of votes of all French political formations and can therefore boast of being "the leading party in France.” The brutality of oppressive nationalism may be expressed in personal relationships, such as child abuse. While Indonesia and Aotearoa [the Maoris’ name for New Zealand] hold very different ranks in the United Nations Human Development Programme assessments, where Indonesia is classified as a medium development country and Aotearoa New Zealand as a very high development country. In Chapter 7, “Domestic Violence Against Women in Indonesia and Aotearoa New Zealand: Making Sense of Differences and Similarities” co-authors, in Chapter 8, Mandy Morgan and Dr. Elli N. Hayati, from New Zealand and Indonesia respectively, found that despite their socio-economic differences, one in three women in each country experience physical or sexual intimate partner violence over their lifetime. In this chapter ther authors aim to deepen understandings of domestic violence through discussion of the socio-economic and demographic characteristics of theit countries to address domestic violence alongside studies of women’s attitudes to gender norms and experiences of intimate partner violence. One of the most surprising and upsetting scholarly journeys that a North American student may take involves Adolf Hitler’s comments on oppression of American Indians and Blacks as he imagined the construction of the Nazi state, a genesis of nationalism that is all but unknown in the United States of America, traced in this volume (Chapter 8) by co-editor Johansen. Beginning in Mein Kampf, during the 1920s, Hitler explicitly used the westward expansion of the United States across North America as a model and justification for Nazi conquest and anticipated colonization by Germans of what the Nazis called the “wild East” – the Slavic nations of Poland, the Baltic states, Ukraine, and Russia, most of which were under control of the Soviet Union. The Volga River (in Russia) was styled by Hitler as the Germans’ Mississippi, and covered wagons were readied for the German “manifest destiny” of imprisoning, eradicating, and replacing peoples the Nazis deemed inferior, all with direct references to events in North America during the previous century. At the same time, with no sense of contradiction, the Nazis partook of a long-standing German romanticism of Native Americans. One of Goebbels’ less propitious schemes was to confer honorary Aryan status on Native American tribes, in the hope that they would rise up against their oppressors. U.S. racial attitudes were “evidence [to the Nazis] that America was evolving in the right direction, despite its specious rhetoric about equality.” Ming Xie, originally from Beijing, in the People’s Republic of China, in Chapter 9, “News Coverage and Public Perceptions of the Social Credit System in China,” writes that The State Council of China in 2014 announced “that a nationwide social credit system would be established” in China. “Under this system, individuals, private companies, social organizations, and governmental agencies are assigned a score which will be calculated based on their trustworthiness and daily actions such as transaction history, professional conduct, obedience to law, corruption, tax evasion, and academic plagiarism.” The “nationalism” in this case is that of the state over the individual. China has 1.4 billion people; this system takes their measure for the purpose of state control. Once fully operational, control will be more subtle. People who are subject to it, through modern technology (most often smart phones) will prompt many people to self-censor. Orwell, modernized, might write: “Your smart phone is watching you.” Ming Xie holds two Ph.Ds, one in Public Administration from University of Nebraska at Omaha and another in Cultural Anthropology from the Chinese Academy of Social Sciences, Beijing, where she also worked for more than 10 years at a national think tank in the same institution. While there she summarized news from non-Chinese sources for senior members of the Chinese Communist Party. Ming is presently an assistant professor at the Department of Political Science and Criminal Justice, West Texas A&M University. In Chapter 10, analyzing native peoples and nationhood, Barbara Alice Mann, Professor of Honours at the University of Toledo, in “Divide, et Impera: The Self-Genocide Game” details ways in which European-American invaders deprive the conquered of their sense of nationhood as part of a subjugation system that amounts to genocide, rubbing out their languages and cultures -- and ultimately forcing the native peoples to assimilate on their own, for survival in a culture that is foreign to them. Mann is one of Native American Studies’ most acute critics of conquests’ contradictions, and an author who retrieves Native history with a powerful sense of voice and purpose, having authored roughly a dozen books and numerous book chapters, among many other works, who has traveled around the world lecturing and publishing on many subjects. Nalanda Roy and S. Mae Pedron in Chapter 11, “Understanding the Face of Humanity: The Rohingya Genocide.” describe one of the largest forced migrations in the history of the human race, the removal of 700,000 to 800,000 Muslims from Buddhist Myanmar to Bangladesh, which itself is already one of the most crowded and impoverished nations on Earth. With about 150 million people packed into an area the size of Nebraska and Iowa (population less than a tenth that of Bangladesh, a country that is losing land steadily to rising sea levels and erosion of the Ganges river delta. The Rohingyas’ refugee camp has been squeezed onto a gigantic, eroding, muddy slope that contains nearly no vegetation. However, Bangladesh is majority Muslim, so while the Rohingya may starve, they won’t be shot to death by marauding armies. Both authors of this exquisite (and excruciating) account teach at Georgia Southern University in Savannah, Georgia, Roy as an associate professor of International Studies and Asian politics, and Pedron as a graduate student; Roy originally hails from very eastern India, close to both Myanmar and Bangladesh, so he has special insight into the context of one of the most brutal genocides of our time, or any other. This is our case describing the problems that nationalism has and will pose for the sustainability of the Earth as our little blue-and-green orb becomes more crowded over time. The old ways, in which national arguments often end in devastating wars, are obsolete, given that the Earth and all the people, plants, and other animals that it sustains are faced with the existential threat of a climate crisis that within two centuries, more or less, will flood large parts of coastal cities, and endanger many species of plants and animals. To survive, we must listen to the Earth, and observe her travails, because they are increasingly our own.

<em>Abstract</em>.—Flathead catfish <em>Pylodictis olivaris</em> and blue catfish <em>Ictalurus furcatus</em> thrive in large rivers and constitute large sport fisheries. Defining a spatial scale for new management strategies has become increasingly important due to rapid expansion of the sport fishery. To investigate life history characteristics, migratory pathways, and space use, we used telemetry to monitor the movement behavior of flathead catfish and blue catfish during two complete annual cycles. Individuals were sampled from a 97-km reach of the lower Missouri River and surgically implanted with transmitters during April 2006 (<EM>N</EM> = 77) and again in April and July of 2007 (<EM>N</EM> = 80). Acoustic tracking by boat and radio tracking by helicopter were used on the Missouri, Lamine, Chariton, Little Chariton, and Grand rivers during 2006–2008. The proportion of individuals that used a tributary during the putative spawning period (May 15–July 15) increased from 10% (8 of 77) in 2006 to 18% (14 of 80) in 2007. Flood conditions in May 2007 may have contributed to this increase. Between April 2006 and May 2007, the majority of flathead (51%) and blue catfishes (55%) moved less than 100 river kilometers from where they were tagged. The maximum linear range during 2006–2007 was 347.6 river kilometers for blue catfish and 751.9 river kilometers for flathead catfish. Seasonal structure to annual movements was evident with periods of both restricted movement (December–March; July–September) and migratory behavior (March–June; October–December). The variability in observed behaviors provides a substantial basis for managers to identify and protect distant habitats that are used by adult catfish for spawning, feeding and growth, and overwintering.

While I lived in Kathmandu, I regularly visited the American Mission Association. Members call it Phora, while some Nepalis call it “mini America.” It’s a club, and expatriates with the right kind of visa can apply to become members. It has a pool and tennis courts, a small gym, a field for baseball and soccer, a children’s playground, movie rentals, manicures and massages, a commissary and wifi café, and very polite Nepali staff. It has a certain colonial feel to it, which bothered me at times: yet it was also a haven where on a weekday afternoon I could exercise, read the papers, and eat lunch. Phora refers to phohara durbar, which in Nepali means “fountain palace.” The extensive, welltended grounds where dozens of expats and their children gather for hours on weekends was once the site of a Rana palace, a place for parties and dances, performances and cinema. It got its name because there were fountains throughout the gardens as well as inside the building. The ornate, neoclassical palace is long gone. In serious disrepair by 1960, the palace was demolished and the land sold to the American government. But phohara durbar has other claims to fame. It was also the site of the first piped water in the Kathmandu Valley. To explain how this came about, I’ll tell you a little more about the valley’s history and culture. The Lichchhavis and Mallas kept the city from growing beyond certain limits. They prohibited building outside a ring of shrines to various mother goddesses, like Kali. They knew that disturbing the land beyond that ring would be “killing your own food, your economic base,” says Sudarshan Tiwari, the architect and cultural historian who has reconstructed aspects of ancient life in the valley. There is still some agriculture in the Kathmandu Valley, because a few of the old landowners stubbornly hold on to their fields even as a sea of “wedding cake,” multistory, pastel houses engulfs them. But daily the green plots of rice and vegetables shrink as the valley succumbs, like the ancient water channels, to unplanned urban development.

It was not entirely clear to me why Ngawang Lama and his group wanted the intake point—the head of the Melamchi tunnel—moved to the spot that was proposed back in the early 1990s, when the World Bank was funding the revamping of Kathmandu’s water supply. But I learned that Norwegian engineers, who were then consultants on the project, had originally placed that intake upstream to provide for a hydropower plant. They saw the Melamchi project as a good opportunity to get more for the same investment of money. The Norwegians had proposed to place the intake several miles above the spot that Cholendra and I almost reached as we walked up the damaged access road. Using that intake point, called Nukute, would have allowed for a twenty-five-megawatt hydropower plant in Sundarijal, where the tunnel ended. The higher intake could give an additional three hundred meters of “head”—water pressure to generate electricity. When the Asian Development Bank took over the project, they scuttled the hydropower component. After this, the Norwegians pulled out. The proposed twenty-five megawatts of electricity would have been welcome in a country that is likely to see power outages for at least another decade. Now, with the planned intake point lower on the river, hydropower is not possible because there would be insufficient water pressure. The ADB’s reasons for dropping the hydro component are a little vague. Ratna Sansar Shrestha dismisses the economic and environmental costs the organization cites as its rationale for dropping hydropower. Ratna is a water resources specialist who is well known for wanting the Melamchi project to include hydropower. He is one of three members of the Regulatory Commission for Water Supply that oversees tariffs and quality of service throughout Nepal. To be charitable to the ADB, he says, “working with Nepal’s bureaucracy is not easy.” Hydropower projects require negotiating with an entirely different ministry from the one that oversees water supply. Cutting out the hydropower component also cut out half the administrative red tape on a project that has been drowning in it for years.

<em>Abstract</em>.—The black carp <em>Mylopharyngodon piceus </em>is a large (>1 m long) riverine fish from eastern Asia introduced into the United States via the aquaculture industry. A wild population has been present in the lower Mississippi River basin since the early 1990s, but little is known about the ecological effect of black carp in invaded environments. In its native range, black carp feed almost exclusively on mollusks. In U.S. waters, they likely prey on native mussels, but few wild-caught specimens have been examined by biologists and all have had empty gastrointestinal tracts. In lieu of stomach content data, we examined isotopic values (δ¹³C and δ ¹⁵N) and mercury (Hg) concentrations in muscle tissue of black carp and 10 other large nonnative and native fish species captured in the Red–Atchafalaya River system of Louisiana, USA. Trophic position estimates derived from δ ¹⁵N values ranged from 2.0 for grass carp <em>Ctenopharyngodon idella </em>to 4.8 for blue catfish <em>Ictalurus furcatus </em>and flathead catfish <em>Pylodictis olivaris</em>. Adult black carp had a δ ¹⁵N value (13.2‰), indicating a trophic level of 3.5. Mean total Hg concentrations ranged from 0.02 µg/g in grass carp to 0.27 µg/g in bigmouth buffalo <em>Ictiobus cyprinellus</em>, in black carp 0.17 µg/g; Hg increased with increasing δ ¹⁵N, indicating biomagnification. The limited numbers of taxa and small samples sizes, as well as constraints in methods used, do not allow confirmation that wild black carp are consuming native mollusks. However, our stable isotope results do provide evidence that its diet is similar to other large fish species inhabiting the Red–Atchafalaya system considered to be benthic invertivores, including some known to prey on freshwater mollusks (i.e., smallmouth buffalo <em>I. bubalus </em>and nonnative common carp <em>Cyprinus carpio</em>).

A few years ago I came down a backcountry road in Wisconsin looking for a place where a man had given his life. The road had once been the route of pioneers moving west, then a farm road running through dry, sandy, marginal fields. In the days of Prohibition it had carried illegal whiskey distilled hereabouts, some of the last trees having been cut down to cook the bootlegger’s brew. Then in 1935 another sort of settler came along. It was the time of the Great Depression, and he could buy a lot of land, 120 acres in all, land abandoned by its owners, for a little money in back taxes. The land had no economic value left in it. The man, whose name was Aldo Leopold, knew that but did not mind; he was not after gain or even subsistence. He began coming out regularly from the city of Madison, where he taught at the university, to plant trees. For thirteen years he planted and nurtured. Then, in 1948, he died fighting a forest fire on a neighbor’s land. Knowing those few details, I came wanting to know what manner of man he was and what he had died for. There was no publicity, no tour guide provided, but the dense forest of pines was a sufficient announcement that here was Leopold’s place, now all grown up again to natural splendor. I walked through an open field rich in wild grasses and forbs to a small, gray, weathered shack where he had stayed on those weekends, regaled by the smell of his new pines coming up and the sound of birdsong and wind in their branches. From the shack, I found my way down a short path to the Wisconsin River, rolling silently between its pungent banks, the warm summer sun glinting on its ripples. One August years ago Leopold, as recalled in a sketch he wrote and collected in A Sand County Almanac, found the river “in a painting mood,” laying down a brief carpet of moss on its silty edges, spangling it with blue and white and pink flowers, attracting deer and meadow mice, then abruptly scouring its palette down to austere sand.

<em>Abstract</em>.—The black carp <em>Mylopharyngodon piceus </em>is a large (>1 m long) riverine fish from eastern Asia introduced into the United States via the aquaculture industry. A wild population has been present in the lower Mississippi River basin since the early 1990s, but little is known about the ecological effect of black carp in invaded environments. In its native range, black carp feed almost exclusively on mollusks. In U.S. waters, they likely prey on native mussels, but few wild-caught specimens have been examined by biologists and all have had empty gastrointestinal tracts. In lieu of stomach content data, we examined isotopic values (δ¹³C and δ ¹⁵N) and mercury (Hg) concentrations in muscle tissue of black carp and 10 other large nonnative and native fish species captured in the Red–Atchafalaya River system of Louisiana, USA. Trophic position estimates derived from δ ¹⁵N values ranged from 2.0 for grass carp <em>Ctenopharyngodon idella </em>to 4.8 for blue catfish <em>Ictalurus furcatus </em>and flathead catfish <em>Pylodictis olivaris</em>. Adult black carp had a δ ¹⁵N value (13.2‰), indicating a trophic level of 3.5. Mean total Hg concentrations ranged from 0.02 µg/g in grass carp to 0.27 µg/g in bigmouth buffalo <em>Ictiobus cyprinellus</em>, in black carp 0.17 µg/g; Hg increased with increasing δ ¹⁵N, indicating biomagnification. The limited numbers of taxa and small samples sizes, as well as constraints in methods used, do not allow confirmation that wild black carp are consuming native mollusks. However, our stable isotope results do provide evidence that its diet is similar to other large fish species inhabiting the Red–Atchafalaya system considered to be benthic invertivores, including some known to prey on freshwater mollusks (i.e., smallmouth buffalo <em>I. bubalus </em>and nonnative common carp <em>Cyprinus carpio</em>).

The sky is a blinding white and blue, and the little minibus from Listvianka to Irkutsk flits over the folds of the Angara Valley like a bumblebee, slightly ungainly and, to an observer, perhaps not quite in control of its trajectory, but confident in its own path and in the completion of its journey. We’ve seen our last of Baikal. One last run alongside daughter Angara and James and I will get our final glimpse of the lake’s cobalt water, bearing northwest for the turbines and factories of the Angarsk industrial corridor and then, slightly tarnished, on to her rendezvous with her beloved Yenisei and finally the Arctic ocean, 2,500 river kilometers downstream. One last pass through Irkutsk, and we’ll be back on the beast-machine bound for Moscow and beyond, and a world more familiar if still not known. We’ve seen our last of Baikal, but I’m pretty sure that I, anyway, am not leaving it behind, that it will never quite stop flowing through me. Blood has the same salinity as the ocean, someone once told me—we never really left the sea, we just carry it around inside us. Alas, this little detail of life turns out to be just too exquisite to be true, but it sure works as metaphor—we all carry around a biological memory of where and what we come from, from the water that makes up roughly sixty percent of our bodies to the ninety-eight or so percent of our genes that we share with chimpanzees. And so it is with Baikal—the lake inseparable from the people who love it in so many complex and ambiguous ways—I’ll carry a piece of it around in every part of me, like a new strand of DNA that has spliced itself in with mine and changed ever so slightly who I am and how I live in the world. For our last couple of nights back in Irkutsk, James and I stay in a downtown hotel, for about three times the cost of the American House, where, Olga tells us, we can finally get our visas properly registered.

There are two very different ways to envision a satellite image: as a photograph taken with a camera, or as a visual representation of spectral intensity data quantifying the light reflecting off of objects on a planet’s surface. In working with satellite images, sometimes the objective is to highlight and accent the information in the image using tools to enhance the way the image looks—the same goal that a professional photographer might have when working in the darkroom with film or using Photoshop to manipulate digital photographs. Another objective could be to manipulate the image using automated processing methods within a remote sensing package that rely on a set of equations that quantify information about reflected light. With either approach the goal is to gain information about conditions observed on the ground. At first glance, the image in Fig. 3.1 bears little resemblance to what most people would recognize as a terrestrial landscape. After all, its predominant colors are orange and bright turquoise. The use of colors in creating a visual image allows great breadth in the types of things one can identify on the ground, but also makes image interpretation an art. Even an inexperienced interpreter can make some sense of the image; more experienced interpreters with knowledge of the color scheme in use are able to determine finer details. For example, in Fig. 3.1 some of the more prominent features are a river (blue line on the left side of the image) a gradient of different vegetation (orange colors throughout the image that go from light to dark), and burn scars (turquoise patches). Fig. 3.2 shows a portion of landscape represented in the satellite image in Fig. 3.1. The red dot in Fig. 3.1 indicates the location where the photograph was taken. This photograph shows what a human observer would see looking south (in this case toward the top of the satellite image) from the point represented by the red dot. The view in the photograph differs from the satellite image in two important ways.