Despite our intuition, birds are no smaller than mammals when the constraints of a flying body plan are taken into account. Nevertheless, the largest mammals are ten times the mass of the largest birds. Allometric equations generated for anseriforms and ratites suggest mid-shaft femur circumference is the best measure to use in estimating avian body mass. The small sample size of extant ratites makes mass estimate extrapolation to larger extinct species inaccurate. The division of ratites into cursorial and graviportal groups is supported. Aepyornithids do not show atypical femoral shaft asymmetry. New and more accurate estimates of egg masses, and separate male and female body masses for sexually-dimorphic ratites are generated. Egg mass scaling exponents for individual bird orders differ from that Aves as a whole, probably due to between-taxa effects. Ratite egg mass does not scale with the same exponent as other avian orders, whether kiwi are included or excluded. Total clutch mass in ratites, however, scales similarly to egg mass in other birds, perhaps as a consequence of the extreme variation in ratite clutch size. Kiwi and elephant bird eggs are consistent with the allometric trend for ratites as a whole, taking clutch size into account. Thus kiwi egg mass is probably an adaptation for a precocial life history, not a side effect of their being a dwarfed descendant of a moa-sized ancestor. Relatively small body size in ancestral kiwis is consistent with a trans-oceanic dispersal to New Zealand in the Tertiary, as suggested by recent molecular trees. This implies multiple loss of flight in Tertiary ratite lineages, which is supported by biogeographic, molecular, paleontological, and osteological evidence, but which is not the currently prevailing hypothesis. / Dissertation

Thesis (M.I.N.C.) -- Lincoln University, 2008. / Also available via the World Wide Web.

Thesis (Ph. D.)--Duke University, 2007. / Includes bibliographical references.

A Multi-Scale Hydrological Information System (HIS) includes three levels of HIS, which are the national CUAHSI HIS, the Texas HIS and the local Capital Area Council of Governments (CAPCOG) HIS. The CUAHSI Hydrologic Information System has succeeded in putting water data together using a Services-Oriented Architecture (SOA). However, maintaining the current metadata catalog service has been problematic. An Open Geospatial Consortium (OGC) standard transformation procedure is happening to transfer the current web services into OGC adopted services and models. The transformation makes CUAHSI HIS compliant with the international OGC standards and to have the capability to host tremendous water data. On a scaled down level, the Texas HIS has been built for the specific Texas hydrologic data, concerning the variables and the web services listed in this thesis. The CAPCOG emergency response system was initiated for the purpose of the Texas flash flood warning, including several data services, such as the USGS NWIS, the City of Austin (COA) and the Lower Colorado River Authority (LCRA). By applying the consistent mechanism, which is the OGC standards-based SOA, in these three scales of HIS, three catalogs of services can be created within the architecture, and hydrologic data services included in different catalogs can be searched across. Each catalog of services has a different scale or purpose. A technique, called KiWIS developed by the KISTERS Company, of publishing OGC standard web services through the WISKI hydrologic database was then described. The technique has been applied to the City of Austin’s water data hosted at CRWR. The OGC standard transformation progress reviewed in the thesis and the technique described can give a reference on how to synthesize Multi-Scale HIS within a standard mechanism. / text