Changes in the Timing of Snowmelt and Streamflow in Colorado: A Response to Recent Warming

David W. Clow from the U.S Geological Survey out of Lakewood, Colorado investigated how SWE (snow water equivalent) and streamflow, are correlated to the rate and timing of snowmelt in Colorado. Monthly air temperatures, snowfall, latitude, and elevation were also used in multiple linear regression models to determine the controls on snowmelt. Interval/ratio data for SWE was collected from Natural Resource Conservation Service (NRCS) snowpack telemetry sites (SNOTEL sites) and the streamflow data was collected from headwater streams. Data from 1978-2007 was collected from the SNOTEL sites with 97% of sites had ≥21 years of data and all sites <18 years being excluded. Daily streamflow data were obtained for 58 headwater streams in Colorado with long-term gauges operated by the U.S. Geological Survey (USGS) or the Colorado Division of Water Resources. The regional Kendall test (RKT) was used to determine changes in trends to air temperature and SWE over the 27 year period. Multiple linear regressions were used to determine how and to what degree the changes impacted the timing of snowmelt.

A benefit of using the RKT is that by grouping data into geographic regions trend detection is increased. The multiple linear regressions were beneficial in determining which variables impacted the timing and degree of melt the greatest. Increasing springtime air temperature and declining SWE explained most, 45%, of the interannual variability in snowmelt timing. Regression coefficients for air temperature were negative, indicating that warm temperatures promote early melt. Regression coefficients for SWE, latitude, and elevation were positive, indicating that abundant snowfall tends to delay snowmelt, and snowmelt tends to occur later at northern latitudes and high elevations (Clow, 2010). The use of these methods demonstrates the strength of more traditional data analysis techniques and how they can be applied to data sets.

The conclusions found in this article will influence my research proposal by demonstrating which variables are most influential in generating melt in a snowpack. Similarly, this research demonstrates how to use variables similar to the variables I will be using a multiple linear regression. The article also validates a portion of my research topic by stating, “It may be useful to include other possible controls on snowmelt timing, such as dust deposition, in regression models in the future.” (Clow, 2010) This article also makes predictions about how Nov-May air temperatures increased by a median of 0.9°C decade−1, while 1 April SWE declined by a median of 4.1 decade−1 and maximum SWE declined 3.6 cm decade−1. This could be utilized in my proposal by investigating if these trends have stayed consistent over the past decade since the research was conducted. Another aspect of this research that I am possibly going to include in my proposal is grouping data by region because certain areas might be influenced by variables in different ways. Using this technique I could determine, for example, if higher temperatures in southwest Colorado and more influential than SWE.  

Clow, D. W. (2010). Changes in the Timing of Snowmelt and Streamflow in Colorado: A Response to Recent Warming. Journal of Climate,23(9), 2293-2306. doi:10.1175/2009jcli2951.1

One of the main school counties in the Los Angeles county is the LAUSD. In this district alone, there are about 745,000 students enrolled to go to school in the district. The real disappointing statistic is that a third of these students will not graduate high school. This statistic is way too high and there needs to be a fix to lower the statistics. And given that the average graduation rate for the Los Angeles county is 79.3%, the LAUSD needs to improve the way they teach students. Along with the graduation rate, the California Department of Education estimated that 90.9% of students are apart of an ethnic group. In this study, Denise Huang and others from UCLA looked at the BEST program, an after school program, to see if drop out rates would decrease for students who participate in BEST. What the results showed was that students who were apart of the BEST program saw better academic achievement, positive attitudes, and better relationships towards one or both parental figures. They concluded that the BEST program and other programs like BEST are a good way for kids to be involved in extracurricular activities while also doing better in school. This article is important for my topic because it talks about ways to fix the dropout rate in Southern California schools. There have been many different methods,  but maybe there is a clear solution. While the BEST program showed that it can do positives for the community, it cannot help everyone, which is where we as a society want to reach: getting equal education for every student.

The article “Self-immolation and its adverse life-events risk factors: results from an Iranian population” by Ahmadi, Alireza; Schwebel, David C; Bazargan-Hejazi, Shahrzad; Taliee, Kobra; Karim, Hosein; Mohammadi, Reza, and Kermanshah at the University of Medical Sciences.http://0-search.proquest.com.books.redlands.edu/pqrl/docview/1645864331/abstract/A1D28186244447AAPQ/4?accountid=14729ic. The article search for factors that led to the substantial loss of life caused by deliberate self-immolation such as adverse life events. Immolation. This case-control study investigated adverse life-events as risk factors for self–immolation patients admitted to a burn center serving the western region of Iran. Variables investigated included the adverse life-events such as unplanned pregnancy, infertility, homelessness, financial hardship problems at work, personal history of suicide attempts, family history of suicide attempts, individual history of mental disorders, and malignant disease. The research question was what factors lead to self-immolation in Iran the topic being self-immolation’s surge. The researchers collected demographic data by using by using private and public records. Internal-coding was used to analyze the data. I believe that the research should have aimed to understand the factors that lead to self immolation as a symbolic form of suicide in Iran rather than evaluating it as a suicide based on internal conflicts. Given the nature of the environment it would have been wise to have the data also reflect the effects of social disorder on rates on self immolation. I found it to be very interesting that the study found the break-up of an intimate relationship was one of the largest contributing factors that led to self immolation. In addition, social dysfunction was found to not be among the largest contributing factors to self immolation.

After researching doing more research on my topic I have found that there is a lot that we already know regarding crime and where it happens. However, what we don’t know is why those certain crimes are limited to those certain areas and other possible factors that contribute to crime and how, where, and when it occurs. Police relations and procedures are things that could have an effect on this. When trying to find more specific information on possible new areas of the topic to explore I found a good article that illustrates my point. The article, “Why the Police Have an Effect on Violent Crime After All: Evidence from the British Crime Survey,” written by Ben Vollaard of Tilburg University does a good job of presenting sometimes overlooked problems within the topic of crime, types of crime, and geography. This article goes into depth to try to figure out why property crime and violent crimes are reported differently by police and victims with the violent crimes being those without true numbers being reported. The article uses survey data for its analysis of the problem it is investigating. After analyzing the data the article goes on to conclude that police do have an effect on violent crime and its statistics. This is something not widely known or that would be thought about. That’s why its important to broaden your question to encompass concepts and questions out of the ordinary and that have not been investigated widely yet. They found that police have a bias when reporting thee crimes. The police themselves can have an effect on the information that is even available on the topic.

Ben Vollaard; Joseph Hamed. “Why the Police Have an Effect on Violent Crime After All: Evidence from the British Crime Survey.” The Journal of Law & Economics, Vol. 55, No. 4 (November 2012), pp. 901-924

Prescribed fire mortality of Sierra Nevada mixed conifer tree species: effects of crown damage and forest floor combustion

Scott L. Stephens and Mark A. Finney

A total of 1025 trees were analyzed in a study of white fir, sugar pine, ponderosa pine, black oak, incense-cedar, and giant sequoia. These trees were analyzed to find out how they would be affected by a prescribed fire. Indicators that were measured included the diameter of the tree (DBH), the percent of the crown that was scorched, along with the height it was scorched at, and the amount of the forest floor that was consumed by the fire. It was found that these indicators were not significant for predicting the death of black oak. The indicators did conclude however that death rates were lower for giant sequoia, incense-cedar, and ponderosa pine than the other species measured. It was also found that consumption of life on the forest floor is a good indicator of morality in most species.

Data needed for this study was behavioral because the forest ecologists were determining how oaks and other species responded in levels of morality to a disturbance in surroundings. This is simply observing the tree’s behavior, but can be confusing because you are not testing human subjects. Data was collected by measuring four indicators of the tree’s overall health. Data was analyzed by running regression models for four different species, although there was no pre-burn data for the forest floor of the giant sequoias measured.

Stephens, Scott L., and Mark A. Finney. “Prescribed fire mortality of Sierra Nevada mixed conifer tree species: effects of crown damage and forest floor combustion.” Forest Ecology and Management 162.2 (2002): 261-271.

Authors: David C. Pyrooz, Scott H. Decker, Vincent J. Webb

Title: The Ties That Bind Desistance From Gangs

This study focuses on Gang members and their desistance from the gang. This journal three processes during this research which are onset, persistence, and desistance. So, the research question for this journal is “How can we get members to desist from gang life to lower victimization and delinquency?”.  These authors believe that when people are in a gang they tend to commit more crimes so they wanted to figure out why gang members desisted from a gang. The type of data used in this article is Report of acts, behaviors, and events. They asked the people “currently in a gang” or “ever been a gang member”. So, these people had to report their actions whether they were in a gang. Out of all the people they asked which were 239 individuals. 153 of them said they were currently in a gang and 83 of them said they were former gang members. The data gathering method they used was Public records. They got their data from Arrestee Drug Abuse Monitoring (ADAM). ADAM got their data from a juvenile detention facility. The arrestees were interviewed within 48 hours of booking. This sample better reflected the streets because they were interviewed so early in the process so they had just come from the streets.  I think this research overall is great they start with a topic and turn it into a research question and they get data to see if they can answer their research question. It shows me a way that I can do my research project because my research question is like this one.  I want to do something similar but I’m sure I’ll get different results.

This article analyzes the pollution and economic growth trends in China as it has industrialized exponentially in recent decades. The article claims that unless China changes its methods, it will become environmentally and socially unstable. Instead of analyzing city GDP or overall GDP, the article highlights the “city-clusters” that have been essential to rapid Chinese growth. Specifically, city-clusters are groups of large cities dotted across China. Instead of an interconnected whole, the author explains how large cities form in groups and clusters. This seems a lot like American urbanization/suburbia; however, China’s clusters are far smaller and more densely populated. These economic hubs, sometimes acting completely self-sufficiently, contribute a lot to Chinese growth but also utilize an extreme amount of resources. These city-clusters tend to form around the eastern coast, where access to local trade and more natural resources gives more economic output. Some of these city clusters are now struggling to maintain the same levels of output, as they have decimated the surrounding natural resources (natural gas, coal, etc.). China is also facing water shortages, which the city-clusters are worsening with over-consumption and pollution. Much of China’s little available surface water is already polluted. In the conclusion, the author explains how China’s aspirations are unrealistic for its reality. Urbanization cannot increase at the previous rate, and estimates that by 2020 (this was written in 2006) China will face resource shortage. This is a similar theme I have found in scholarly literature—that China is approaching a tradeoff point, and must decide if it will take care of its domestic issues or keep pushing for economic output. If they choose the latter, the economy could crumble in the long-run. The article used scholarly literature and aggregate data to support its claims. It used environmental data such as water quality and PPM (parts per million) and for economic data primarily relied on GDP of individual city-clusters.

Shao, Min, Xiaoyan Tang, Yuanhang Zhang, and Wenjun Li. “City clusters in China: air and surface water pollution.” Frontiers in Ecology and the Environment 4, no. 7 (2006), 353-361. doi:10.1890/1540-9295(2006)004[0353:ccicaa]2.0.co;2.

In this research article by Sarah E. Bergen, Charles O. Gardner, and Kenneth S. Kendler, the researchers chose to explore genetic influences on people’s behavior during their adolescence and their young adult years. They examined primary research that minimized the age-to-age error variability.  They look at externalized behaviors, anxiety symptoms, depressive symptoms, IQ, and social attitudes and nonsignificant increases for alcohol consumption, and nicotine initiation. To help them distinguish between the possibilities they used longitudinal studies, all together helping them look at not just one point in a person’s life to find if environment makes significant changes to a person but looking at the differences across a lifespan. They also only studied phenotypes that have been repeatedly studied to, what I assume, maximize the accuracy of their findings. They focused on the ages between 13 and 25, they mention that during childhood children are affected by the environment that their parents may keep them but as we get older and have more freedom to change our surroundings this is where we might start seeing changes in heritability. They chose this because those are times in our lives where our dynamics and environment are most likely to change the most.

The researcher’s topic is of changes in adolescents and young adults is narrowed by their search to determine whether measures of heritability for a variety of phenotypic domains manifest increases over time. They used meta-analysis, through their collections of different forms of research to study, to get their data which was reports of acts, behaviors, or events. They gathered their data using public records and once everything was collected thematic analysis would have been best used for this information because they were looking for themes or relationships between their data.

I thought this research was very interesting, it was different data that I have been seeing on my topic which I really enjoyed. What I found most interesting I think was that in their results they found that there was actually significant heritability differences between males and females in terms of their externalized behaviors. I thought it was interesting because so far in class we haven’t seen much significant differences between the sexes so I was a bit shocked to see it was detected in this research.

https://pdfs.semanticscholar.org/2f07/49f79825120fb6296cdd97bcd7273a99ae51.pdf

This report is from a World Bank project to learn more about sustainable global food production. The topic of this extensive research is how urban farming contributes to health, food security, and economic standing in poor neighborhoods and/or poor countries. This research takes the form of case studies of urban agriculture in four cities: Accra, Ghana; Bangalore, India; Lima, Peru, and Nairobi, Kenya. This report seeks to answer several research questions, including, generally speaking, what do residents of selected neighborhoods report eating, what effect do “producers” (people working for urban farms) report their farm has on the surrounding community, and what can be done to better serve these communities. The data-gathering aspect of this research consisted mainly of interviews with people, as well as demographic data obtained from surveys or previous census years if applicable. For each city they tried to find patterns, especially in the responses of producers, in order to see if there were any common factors that are limiting food production in these areas, such as inadequate access to clean water or simply not having enough space. They also found that urban agriculture as a source of employment had a significant effect on communities. While this an organizational report and not from the usual type of publication we’ve been reviewing, it follows much of the same research structure, although it aims to assess a much more complex research topic.

Reference: World Bank, Urban Development and Resilience Unit. (2013). Urban Agriculture: Findings From Four Case Studies. Urban Development Series Knowledge Papers, 18. Retrieved at https://openknowledge.worldbank.org/bitstream/handle/10986/16273/807590NWP0UDS00Box0379817B00PUBLIC0.pdf?sequence=1&isAllowed=y

Values, Environmental Concern, and Environmental Behavior: A Study into Household Energy Use

Wouter Poortinga, Linda Steg, Charles Vlek

Poortinga, Wouter, Linda Steg, and Charles Vlek. “Values, environmental concern, and environmental behavior: A study into household energy use.” Environment and behavior 36.1 (2004): 70-93.

This research example examines the influence of specific world values on environmental behavior and concern related to the field of household energy use. It was conducted in 2004 by 3 researchers from the University of Groningen in the Netherlands, and University of East Anglia in the UK. Instead of proposing a defined research question (which could not be found in the article), the authors decided to state the aim of the study in the form of a declarative sentence. This stated that their investigation examines whether values, general environmental concern, and specific environmental beliefs are related to household energy use, the acceptability of specific energy-saving measures, and support for environmental policies. The type of data needed to answer the question includes reports of acts, behaviors or events, economic data, demographic data, self-identity data, deeply–held opinions and attitudes as well as personal feelings data. These data are all used to measure different scales of worldviews, quality of life, different beliefs regarding global warming, energy saving measures the respondents say that they participate in their daily life.

Data for this study were collected though a carefully designed questionnaire that was sent to 2,000 randomly selected addresses in the Netherlands, and in-depth interviews were conducted as a follow-up for some of the participants that wanted to go deeper with this study. Since the aim of the study is to determine specific correlations between certain variables, several regression analyses were conducted, with model variables being regressed with all preceding model variables as predictors. Analysis of the results revealed that home and transport energy use were especially related to socio-demographic variables like income and household size.

The overall structure of this research is very straightforward and understandable, however I did notice a few minor flaws in some of the specifics of the study. First, there was no defined research question, which I find quite odd. It was easy to interpret what question the authors were asking, but it should be given despite how easy the topic of study is. Second, the sample respondent’s answers used in the study didn’t accurately represent the entire population of the Netherlands. Lastly, the authors used the old New Environmental Paradigm scale, which contains questions that are considered to be outdated, so that may have caused some discrepancies in the results section of their paper. Something I think is interesting is that these authors found that using a purely attitudinal motivational model to explain environmental behavior may be too limited because environmental concern can be influenced by a great variety of factors. Therefor, concern for the environment may go deeper than we all initially think.