The subject of this diploma thesis is an analysis of the historical existence of European bison in the Czech geographical region and an evaluation of the significance of its presence to the surrounding landscape. The goal of the thesis is to depict bison population changes in the Czech territory over time and the meaning of efforts to reintroduce the bison into its natural habitat. An important part of the work then will be the preparation, realization and evaluation of two excursions during which students go for European bison directly into the field.

<p>In the winter of 1819 the United States shook under the first Great Depression, and on the Missouri River a great military/scientific enterprise sent to secure Missouri Territory shivered and died from cholera and scurvy. In 1820 Maj. Stephen Long and a poorly equipped expedition of twenty-three soldiers, amateur scientists, and landscape painters, set out from Engineer Cantonment to circumnavigate the unknown Central Great Plains during the height of summer, and rescue something from the debacle. After weathering endless rain and hallucinating waves of Comanche, they divided into two groups at the Arkansas, and then either starved and endured weeks of rain on the lower Arkansas, or ate rancid skunk and endured blistering sun on the 'Red River'. On return they found Long had 'mistaken' the Canadian River for the Red, and that they were yet another failed expedition to know the Louisiana Purchase. Unsurprisingly, Long labeled the whole place a "great desert." An editor improved the phrase to <i>Great American Desert</i>, and emblazoned the phrase on history.</p> <p><i>A Persistent Mirage</i> is both an exegesis of the GAD myth and an HGIS study of the groups and biomes the desert mirage occludes. Desert was a cultural term meaning <i>beyond the pale</i> that beached with the Puritans. Like Turner's frontier, it stayed a step ahead of settlement, moving west to the tall grass prairies before crossing the Mississippi to colonize the Great Plains. Once there it did calculable damage to the writing of Plains Aboriginal history. After all, who lives upon deserts but wandering beasts and savages? Beneath the mirage was an aboriginal network of agricardos, or agricultural and trading centers, growing enough food to support large populations, and produce tradable surpluses, under-girded by bison protein. Euramericans from Cabeza de Vaca on were drawn to agricardos which helped broker the passages of horses to the Northern Plains and of firearms to the Southwest. While some withstood epidemic disease, the escalation of inter-group violence and environmental degradation due to the adoption of the horse by agricardo groups proved their undoing. Beneath the Great American Desert lies the great Indian agricardo complex, with its history just begun.</p>

<p>In the winter of 1819 the United States shook under the first Great Depression, and on the Missouri River a great military/scientific enterprise sent to secure Missouri Territory shivered and died from cholera and scurvy. In 1820 Maj. Stephen Long and a poorly equipped expedition of twenty-three soldiers, amateur scientists, and landscape painters, set out from Engineer Cantonment to circumnavigate the unknown Central Great Plains during the height of summer, and rescue something from the debacle. After weathering endless rain and hallucinating waves of Comanche, they divided into two groups at the Arkansas, and then either starved and endured weeks of rain on the lower Arkansas, or ate rancid skunk and endured blistering sun on the 'Red River'. On return they found Long had 'mistaken' the Canadian River for the Red, and that they were yet another failed expedition to know the Louisiana Purchase. Unsurprisingly, Long labeled the whole place a "great desert." An editor improved the phrase to <i>Great American Desert</i>, and emblazoned the phrase on history.</p> <p><i>A Persistent Mirage</i> is both an exegesis of the GAD myth and an HGIS study of the groups and biomes the desert mirage occludes. Desert was a cultural term meaning <i>beyond the pale</i> that beached with the Puritans. Like Turner's frontier, it stayed a step ahead of settlement, moving west to the tall grass prairies before crossing the Mississippi to colonize the Great Plains. Once there it did calculable damage to the writing of Plains Aboriginal history. After all, who lives upon deserts but wandering beasts and savages? Beneath the mirage was an aboriginal network of agricardos, or agricultural and trading centers, growing enough food to support large populations, and produce tradable surpluses, under-girded by bison protein. Euramericans from Cabeza de Vaca on were drawn to agricardos which helped broker the passages of horses to the Northern Plains and of firearms to the Southwest. While some withstood epidemic disease, the escalation of inter-group violence and environmental degradation due to the adoption of the horse by agricardo groups proved their undoing. Beneath the Great American Desert lies the great Indian agricardo complex, with its history just begun.</p>

The large majority of New Zealand's road network is constructed from thin surfaced unbound flexible pavements where a granular layer provides the main structural strength of the pavement. The current New Zealand empirical design theory states that permanent deformation should largely be attributed to the subgrade and that shape loss in the granular layers is simply a consequence of a previously deformed subgrade. However, recent research and field trials have indicated that basecourse shear strains may be a large contributor to rutting in unbound granular layers. The purpose of this investigation was to determine whether the shear strains induced under heavy vehicle loads can be accurately measured using in-situ induction coils and whether the shear strains are related to permanent pavement deformation. In this investigation a rosette configuration of free floating induction coils was designed to measure principal basecourse shear strains. The principal strains were then used to construct Mohr's circle of strain in order to calculate the maximum shear strain occurring in the granular layer. The rosettes were installed in two full scale test pavements at the Canterbury Accelerated Pavement Testing Indoor Facility (CAPTIF). The pavements were loaded with an 8 tonne dual wheel axle load for 1 million and 600,000 load applications respectively and strain and rut depth testing occurred periodically throughout the test life. The research showed that the rosette coil arrangement was a feasible and accurate device for measuring in-situ shear strains in granular pavement layers. Finite element modelling confirmed the accuracy of the system. The results from the two CAPTIF pavements showed that there was a strong linear relationship between the magnitude of the basecourse shear strain and the rut depth at the end of the post construction compaction period. The investigation also showed that shear strain magnitudes in the region of 5000µƐ result in rapid shear failure in the granular layer. In addition, after the post construction compaction period had finished, the rate of change of shear strain was proportional to the rate of change of rut development. The results indicated that there was approximately a 4:1 ratio between the rate of change in rut depth and the rate of change in shear strain after the initial post construction period. Investigations into the effect of load magnitude on the magnitude of the basecourse shear strain showed that a linear relationship existed between the two parameters. Further to this, load location testing revealed that for a dual wheel configuration, 50mm of lateral wheel variation either side of a point of interest was the maximum allowable movement that would result in similar strain measurements. The research highlighted the dominance of the longitudinal tensile strain and shear strain over the vertical compressive strain within granular layers. As a result, these pavement responses should be considered in further granular pavement research in addition to the commonly used vertical compressive strains.

The OpenModelica Compiler-Compiler parser generator (OMCCp) is an LALR(1) parser generator implemented in the MetaModelica language with parsing tables generated by the tools Flex and GNU Bison. The code generated for the parser is in MetaModelica 2.0 language which is the OpenModelica compiler implementation language and is an extension of the Modelica 3.2 language. OMCCp uses as input an LALR(1) grammar that specifies the Modelica language. The generated Parser can be used inside the OpenModelica Compiler (OMC) as a replacement for the current parser generated by the tool ANTLR from an LL(k) Modelica grammar. This report explains the design and implementation of this novel Lexer and Parser Generator called OMCCp. Modelica and its extension MetaModelica are both languages used in the OpenModelica environment. Modelica is an Object-Oriented Equation-Based language for Modeling and Simulation.

No description available.

The Fincastle site (DlOx-5) is located in Southern Alberta, Canada. Excavations from 2004-2007 unearthed a significant number of lithic artefacts, fire-broken rock and a dense bone bed. Radiocarbon dates (ca. 2500 BP) place the single occupancy kill site in the Late Middle Prehistoric Period. This thesis investigates the butchering activities that took place in the East Block of the site, where 60,000 bone fragments were collected. Of these faunal remains, 5,540 records were processed and examined using Brumley’s (1991) Bone Unit (BU) analysis scheme. They were then assigned to a Bone Unit Butchering Category, a classification system created to identify specific butchering activities. Detailed analyses of the articulations, location and quantity of impact and/or cut marks, and specific fracture types and lengths were also carried out. The evidence shows that both primary and secondary butchering operations occurred at Fincastle, including joint dismemberment, meat removal, marrow extraction and grease rendering processes. / xviii, 298 leaves : col. ill. ; 29 cm. --

This thesis examines landscape change from 1889 to the present within the foothills-parkland ecoregion of Waterton Lakes National Park (WLNP) in southwestern Alberta, Canada. Land cover dynamics are explored qualitatively and quantitatively using Geographical Information Systems and a combination of historical and contemporary data sources including: (1) Dominion Land Survey (DLS) transect records (1889), (2) repeat oblique photographs (1914 and 2004) and repeat aerial photography (1939 and 1999). Results indicate a consistent increase in woody vegetation cover, particularly aspen forest cover, within the foothills-parkland since 1889, largely at the expense of native grasslands. The primary drivers of these changes likely include: climatic influences, changes to the historical grazing regime, the suppression of natural fire cycles and the cessation of First Nations’ land management practices. This research illustrates the value of integrating multiple historical data sources for studying landscape change in the Canadian Rockies, and explores the implications of this change for ecological restoration in the foothills-parkland of WLNP.

This thesis examines landscape change from 1889 to the present within the foothills-parkland ecoregion of Waterton Lakes National Park (WLNP) in southwestern Alberta, Canada. Land cover dynamics are explored qualitatively and quantitatively using Geographical Information Systems and a combination of historical and contemporary data sources including: (1) Dominion Land Survey (DLS) transect records (1889), (2) repeat oblique photographs (1914 and 2004) and repeat aerial photography (1939 and 1999). Results indicate a consistent increase in woody vegetation cover, particularly aspen forest cover, within the foothills-parkland since 1889, largely at the expense of native grasslands. The primary drivers of these changes likely include: climatic influences, changes to the historical grazing regime, the suppression of natural fire cycles and the cessation of First Nations’ land management practices. This research illustrates the value of integrating multiple historical data sources for studying landscape change in the Canadian Rockies, and explores the implications of this change for ecological restoration in the foothills-parkland of WLNP.

xviii, 326 p. : ill. (some col.), maps. A print copy of this title is available through the UO Libraries under the call number: KNIGHT GN799 .F6 H46 2002 / Archaeological evidence indicates that cold storage of bison meat was consistently practiced on the eastern Snake River Plain over the last 8000 years. Recent excavations in three cold lava tube caves have revealed a distinctive artifact assemblage of elk antler tines, broken handstones, and bison bone in association with frozen sagebrush features. Similar evidence has also been discovered in four other caves within the region. A patch choice model was utilized in this study to address how the long-term practice of caching bison meat in cold caves may have functioned in prehistoric subsistence patterns. Because the net return rate for bison was critical to the model, the hunting success of fur trappers occupying the eastern Snake River Plain during the early 1800s, as recorded in their daily journals, was examined and quantified. According to the model, the productivity of cold storage caves must be evaluated against the productivity of other patches on the eastern Snake River Plain, such as ephemeral ponds and linear river corridors from season to season and year to year. The model suggests that residential bases occurred only within river resource patches while ephemeral ponds and ice caves would contain sites indicative of seasonal base camps. The predictions of the model were tested against documented archaeological data from the Snake River Plain through the examination of Geographic Information Systems data provided by the Idaho Bureau of Land Management. The results of this analysis indicate that seasonal base camps are directly associated with both ephemeral and perennial water sources, providing strong support for the model's predictions. Likewise, the temporal distribution of sites within the study area indicates that climate change over the last 8000 years was not dramatic enough to alter long-term subsistence practices in the region. The long-term use of multiple resource patches across the region also confirms that, although the high return rates for bison made them very desirable prey, the over-all diet breadth for the eastern Snake River Plain was broad and included a variety of large and small game and plant foods. Bison and cold storage caves were a single component in a highly mobile seasonal round that persisted for some 8000 years, down to the time of written history in the 19th Century. / Committee in charge: Dr. C. Melvin Aikens, Chair; Dr. Lawrence Sugiyama ; Dr. Jon Erlandson ; Dr. Dennis Jenkins ; Dr. Cathy Whitlock ;