Human enlargement and improvements are following the same scheme as the world economies, and have through the same structure damaged and overexploited the ecological systems of the Earth, leading to a progressive degradation of its biodiversity. The need for protected areas is now inescapable when it comes to restoring species while sustainable development and prevention of damaging the environment have become prominent. It is now even more important that the awareness of an actual impact of our living standards on the ecological system has been established. International and more specifically European Laws have been established to prevent and ensure species of all kinds to live in a safe and preserved environment, but the question of their effectiveness has to be asked and nuanced. In that respect the issue of bird species is one of major importance as they are victims of human development. Within the European member states the problem is coming from the inability of some of them to implement and apply European laws because all do not agree on the terms of a protection provided for bird species.

The Bernic Lake Formation in the Bird River greenstone belt consists dominantly of mafic to felsic arc volcanic and volcaniclastic rocks, with varying amounts of mafic to felsic intrusive rocks, including the Bernic Lake pegmatite group. U-Pb geochronoligical analyses on selected samples around the Bernic Lake area, indicate that the Tanco gabbro, the Birse Lake granodiorite and the volcanic rocks of the Bernic Lake Formation are contemporaneous ca. 2724 Ma and form part of a singular volcanic and subvolcanic complex. The highly evolved, LCT-type, rare element-bearing Bernic Lake pegmatite group, including the world class Tanco pegmatite, was emplaced in the Bernic Lake Formation during a belt-scale tectonomagmatic event associated with G3 deformation between ca. 2650 and 2640 Ma. Early and rarely preserved isoclinal folding in the Bernic Lake Formation attributed to G1 deformation was followed north-south directed compression resulting in refolding and transposition of G1 structures by east-west trending upright F2 folds. Continued compression caused strain localization and south-side-up shearing along the North Bernic Lake Shear Zone (NBLSZ), which juxtaposes MORB-like basalt of the south panel to the south against arc rocks of the Bernic Lake Formation to the north. G3 deformation is characterized by a spaced S3 fracture cleavage that overprints the penetrative S2 fabric, and dextral reactivation of the NBLSZ. Pegmatitic melt ascended from depth along the reactivated NBLSZ during this time and was emplaced both within the shear zone and within rock units adjacent to it. The shapes and orientations of the pegmatites are controlled in part by the rheology of the host rocks into which they were emplaced. Rheologically competent lithologies responded to G3 strain by brittle fracture and the pegmatites occurring therein are flat and tabular; rheologically incompetent lithologies responded to G3 strain by ductile-brittle deformation and the pegmatites therein are irregular, folded, and/or boudinaged. The contrasting styles suggest that the pegmatites intruded while the rocks of the Bernic Lake Formation were at or near the brittle-ductile transition.

Worldwide, riparian areas are considered among the most biologically productive and species-rich habitats on the landscape and provide important breeding areas for many bird species. In the Boreal Plain ecozone of western Canada, forests adjacent to riparian areas are generally protected from forest harvesting through the retention of treed buffer strips. <p>Riparian buffer strips are expected to provide habitat for wildlife including many passerine bird species. Recently, non-conventional methods of riparian management have been implemented in parts of the Boreal Plain with the intent of aligning forestry more closely with natural disturbance processes. How bird communities associated with these management scenarios diverge from natural disturbances and how riparian birds interact with disturbances in the adjacent upland habitat are key questions in the conservation of boreal riparian bird communities. To answer these questions, I surveyed birds inhabiting riparian areas with adjacent naturally disturbed (burned) and harvested forest to determine how bird communities differ early (1-5 years) post-disturbance and, separately, in a before-and-after harvesting study. <p>Riparian species associated with burned merchantable shoreline forests and riparian areas included Common Yellowthroat (<i>Geothlypis trichas</i>) and Eastern Kingbird (<i>Tyrannus tyrannus</i>). Le Contes Sparrow (<i>Ammodramus leconteii</i>) was associated with burned riparian habitats adjacent to non-merchantable forests (e.g., bog, fen), while Alder Flycatcher (<i>Empidonax alnorum</i>) and Wilsons Warbler (<i>Wilsonia pusilla</i>) were indicative of harvested sites with larger buffers (30 m). Riparian species richness was highest in burned non-merchantable sites. Multivariate Redundancy Analysis of post-disturbance bird communities showed greater divergence in overall (riparian and upland) community composition than one with only riparian species. This suggests reduced sensitivity of riparian birds to disturbances in forested areas compared to upland bird communities. However, a higher natural range of variability was exhibited in riparian bird community composition in post-fire sites than in post-harvested sites. This emphasizes that forest management practices do not currently fully approximate natural disturbance for boreal riparian birds. <p>To assess the response of bird communities in riparian habitats to forestry, I studied bird communities one year (2004) prior to forest harvest and two years (2005 and 2006) after harvest. One of three treatments, 1) 5-35% retention (0 m buffer), 2) 35-75% retention (10 m buffer with variable retention in the next 30 m), 3) 75-100% retention (50 m buffer) and unharvested reference sites, was randomly assigned to 34 wetlands. Treatments were designed to represent buffer management strategies currently applied in the Boreal Plain. Eight of 22 species showed a significant response (p<0.1) to treatment, year or year*treatment effects including two riparian species, the Common Yellowthroat and Song Sparrow (<i>Melospiza melodia</i>) that increased in abundance in harvested sites. Overall pre-disturbance communities diverged (p<0.05) over the three-year study period as shown using Multiple-response Permutation Procedures (MRPP). However, riparian bird communities did not diverge from pre-disturbance or from reference sites providing further evidence that riparian bird communities are less impacted by forestry in the adjacent upland habitats than overall bird communities. Therefore, alternative forest harvesting methods should be explored that encompass landscape-scale management including total buffer removal to maximize conservation objectives for boreal forest bird communities while attempting to maintain natural disturbance processes.

A recent outbreak of bird flu or avian influenza (AI), an especially highly pathogenic strain (HPAI) of H5N1, started in Hong Kong in January 2003 and caused 159 human deaths in Asia, Africa and Europe through early 2007. In addition, this outbreak resulted in millions of slaughtered birds and banned international trade of poultry meat in the infected countries. Such events harmed the poultry, tourism, and other related industries in the infected countries and changed the world poultry trade flow. Even in some uninfected countries, related industries were negatively affected. This study investigates the impact of bird flu outbreaks as manifested in financial markets within the US and Japan. The first essay explores how the avian influenza (AI) outbreaks impacted the security values of poultry-related firms. Using partial equilibrium analysis, this study infers that within a country AI outbreaks drop stock prices of poultry meat producers and raise stock prices of poultry food producers. Simultaneously, we infer that AI outbreaks in other poultry exporting countries raise stock prices of poultry meat producers and drop stock prices of poultry food producers. The empirical findings support our model results. Recent developments in time series method, directed graphs and search methods of cointegration rank are applied in this study. The second essay examines whether avian influenza outbreaks cause structural breaks in a model of their prices. It employs the dynamic programming algorithm and the reduced regression method for a cointegrated vector autoregressive (VAR) model to compute the break dates for the data sample. This research then compares the long run relation, and the short run relation and contemporaneous relation. The model estimations in these three sub-periods find these three sub-samples are significantly different. The breaks were caused by the invasion of Iraq on March 2003 and the 20 Bovine Spongiform Encephalopathy (BSE) induced ban of Canadian live cattle imports to the US on 03 March 2005, not by avian influenza outbreaks in early 2004. The third essay explores the effects of the avian influenza announcement in Japan on the prices of agricultural commodity futures contracts traded in Japan. Both the VAR model with asymmetric generalized autoregressive conditional heteroskedastic (GARCH) terms and the event study methods were used to examine whether avian influenza outbreaks significantly affected these markets. Our findings point out that the avian influenza outbreak only impacted the egg futures contract. These three essays found that outbreaks of avian influenza have significant impact on poultry-related stock prices and futures markets. The examined impacts changed the movement of those financial equity prices in the short run, but not in the long run. Research showed investors and poultry-related producers still encounter huge financial risk and loss.

Man-made farm ponds are unique geographic features of the Taoyuan Tableland. Besides irrigation, they provide refuges for wintering birds. The issue at hand is that these features are disappearing and bring with it the loss of this refuge function. It is ecologically significant because one fifth of all the bird species in Taiwan find a home on these ponds. This study aims at characterizing the diversity of bird species associated with these ponds whose likelihood of survival was assessed along the gradient of land development intensities. Such characterization helps establish decision criteria needed for designating certain ponds for habitat preservation and developing their protection strategies. A holistic model was developed by incorporating logistic regression with error back-propagation into the paradigm of artificial neural networks (ANN). The model considers pond shape, size, neighboring farmlands, and developed areas in calculating parameters pertaining to their respective and interactive influences on avian diversity, among them the Shannon-Wiener diversity index (H’). Results indicate that ponds with regular shape or the ones with larger size possess a strong positive correlation with H’. Farm ponds adjacent to farmland benefited waterside bird diversity. On the other hand, urban development was shown to cause the reduction of farmland and pond numbers, which in turn reduced waterside bird diversity. By running the ANN model with four neurons, the resulting H’ index shows a good-fit prediction of bird diversity against pond size, shape, neighboring farmlands, and neighboring developed areas with a correlation coefficient (r) of 0.72, in contrast to the results from a linear regression model (r < 0.28). Analysis of historical pond occurrence to the present showed that ponds with larger size and a long perimeter were less likely to disappear. Smaller (< 0.1 ha) and more curvilinear ponds had a more drastic rate of disappearance. Based on this finding, a logistic regression was constructed to predict pond-loss likelihood in the future and to help identify ponds that should be protected. Overlaying results from ANN and form logistic regression enabled the creation of pond-diversity maps for these simulated scenarios of development intensities with respective to pond-loss trends and the corresponding dynamics of bird diversity.

Hardwood bottomland ecosystems provide critical habitat for various wildlife among numerous ecosystem services. Since the 1800s, these forested wetlands have been logged and drained for agriculture. The federal government passed a series of legislative acts that protected wetlands and provided monetary support for restoration. The Wetlands Reserve Program (WRP) was established in 1990 with the goal of restoring ecological function in wetlands. Although several studies have measured plant and wildlife responses to WRP restorations, no standard protocol has been developed to monitor the state of ecological restoration at sites. Index of biotic integrity (IBI) models are commonly used to evaluate ecological function by assigning scores derived from biological characteristics measured at disturbed sites and comparing them with reference sites. Therefore, the objectives of my study were to: (1) characterize vegetation, amphibian and bird communities among 17 WRP restoration and 4 reference bottomland sites, and (2) develop IBI models for these communities to use in monitoring ecological restoration. My study was conducted across 10 counties in western Tennessee from March – August 2008, and communities were measured using standard sampling techniques. I detected 15 amphibian and 95 bird species at bottomland WRP sites, which ranged 2 – 21 years old. Anurans were common among sites, but salamanders were only detected at reference sites containing mature forests. The bird community changed predictably in response to succession, with grassland birds dominating young restoration sites and scrub-shrub and forest birds dominating older restoration and reference sites. Vegetation structure was related to site age, and a good predictor of bird community composition. Variables retained in the vegetation IBI model included density of snags, logs and overstory trees, basal area, and percent vertical cover measured using a profile board. The bird IBI model contained relative abundance of bark feeding, branch nesting, and twig nesting guilds. Presence of salamanders was the only variable in the amphibian IBI model. My results indicate that the WRP is contributing to the regional biodiversity of western Tennessee. The IBI models that I developed can be used for monitoring ecological restoration in Tennessee hardwood bottomlands; however, their applicability outside this region should be validated.

Thesis (M.S.)--University of Tennessee, Knoxville, 2002. / Title from title page screen (viewed Sept. 4, 2002). Thesis advisor: David Buehler. Document formatted into pages (xiii, 100 p. : ill. (some col.)). Vita. Includes bibliographical references (p. 60-67).

Title from title page of PDF (University of Missouri--St. Louis, viewed March 10, 2010). Includes bibliographical references (p. 26-31).

This dissertation is an exploration of Charles Bird King’s Gallery of Paintings. The Gallery opened in 1824 and, aside from a brief hiatus in the mid-1840s, was open to the public through the end of the antebellum era. King, who trained in London at the Royal Academy and under the supervision of Benjamin West, presented to his visitors a diverse display that encompassed portraits, genre scenes, still lifes, trompe l’oeils and history paintings. Though the majority of the paintings on display were his original works across these various genres, at least one third of the collection was made up of copies after the works of European masters as well as after the American portraitist Gilbert Stuart. This study is divided into four chapters. In the first, I explore late-colonial and early-republic public displays of the visual arts. My analysis demonstrates that King’s Gallery was in step with a tradition of viewing that stretched back to John Smibert’s Boston studio in the mid-eighteenth century and created a visual continuity into the mid-nineteenth century. In a second chapter, focused on portraiture, I examine what it meant to King and to his visitors to be “American.” The group of men and women King displayed in his Gallery was far more diverse than typical for the time period. King included many prominent politicians, but no American President after John Quincy Adams (whom King had painted before Adams’ election). Instead he featured portraits of many men of commerce as well as prominent women and numerous American Indians. In the third chapter, I look at a group of King’s original compositions, genre paintings. King’s style in this category was clearly indebted to seventeenth-century Dutch tradition as filtered through an eighteenth- and early-nineteenth-century British lens, in particular the works of Sir David Wilkie. My final chapter continues the exploration of Dutch influences over King’s work. These paintings draw together the themes of King’s sense of humor, his attitudes towards patronage and his methods of circumventing inadequate patronage through the establishment of the Gallery. Finally, they prompt us to reconsider the importance of European precedents in our understanding of how artists and viewers worked together to establish an American visual cultural dialogue. / text

Core samples were collected in September 1995 from live coral heads of Montastraea annularis at Bird Key reef in the Dry Tortugas, Florida (24 degrees 55 minutes N, 82 degrees 92 minutes W). Four 4 mm-thick coral slabs from two cores were continuously sampled at 12 samples per year (0.025 cm per sample for Core 31, 0.023 cm per sample for Core 35). Visual inspection of X-radiographs indicates an average skeletal extension rate of about 3 mm per year in Bird Key corals. The goal of this study was to perform a replication test in Montastraea annularis by using elemental and stable isotopes from four coral slabs from two different coral heads to address the following questions: 1) how well do geochemical signals replicate within a single coral head, 2) how well do geochemical signals replicate from two different cores from the same coral head, 3) how well do geochemical signals replicate from two coral heads from the same general area, and 4) do growth effects influence the geochemistry of slow-growing corals at the Dry Tortugas? Geochemical variations versus depth and time of all coral records show strong seasonal cyclicity. Variations in d18O in the suite of Bird Key coral records replicate the best; d13C and Sr/Ca variations replicate less well. For example, differences in the mean Sr/Ca record from two different coral heads are large (0.179 mmol/mol for BK31B-BK35CC; 0.196 mmol/mol for BK31C-BK35CC; ~4 degrees C) and nearly 4 times greater than analytical precision. Therefore, caution must be exercised in interpreting Sr/Ca-SST records in Montastraea annularis. Mean differences in coral d18O for all records, on the other hand, are within analytical precision and translate to temperature differences of less than 0.5 degrees C. Robust d18O values among cores that co-vary with a significant level of agreement further point to this proxy being more reliable than Sr/Ca. Because of its skeletal complexity, drilling difficulty, and large bio-geological error for Sr/Ca, Montastraea annularis seems poorly suited for coral-based Sr/Ca-SST studies. However, the species must be studied to understand tropical Atlantic interannual-decadal scale variability, so further assessment is warranted.