An official website of the United States government
Marine protected areas (MPAs) are among the most widely used strategy to protect marine ecosystems and are typically designed to protect specific habitats rather than a single and/or multiple species. To inform the con- servation of species of conservation concern there is the need to assess whether existing and proposed MPA designs provide protection to these species. For this, information on species spatial distribution and exposure to threats is necessary. However, this information if often lacking, particularly for mobile migratory species, such as marine turtles. To highlight the importance of this information when designing MPAs and for assessments of their effectiveness, we identified high use areas of post-nesting hawksbill turtles (Eretmochelys imbricata) in Brazil as a case study and assessed the effectiveness of Brazilian MPAs to protect important habitat for this group based on exposure to threats. Most (88%) of high use areas were found to be exposed to threats (78% to artisanal fishery and 76.7% to marine traffic), where 88.1% were not protected by MPAs, for which 86% are exposed to threats. This mismatch is driven by a lack of explicit conservation goals and targets for turtles in MPA management plans, limited spatial information on species' distribution and threats, and a mismatch in the scale of conservation initiatives. To inform future assessments and design of MPAs for species of conservation concern we suggest that managers: clearly state and make their goals and targets tangible, consider ecological scales instead of political boundaries, and use adaptative management as new information become available.
more »
« less
Assessing Statistical Consultations and Collaborations
As practitioners and teachers of statistical consulting and collaboration, how do we assess the effectiveness of ours and our students’ engagement on projects with domain experts? We propose that assessments of the effectiveness of statistical collaborations should be based on the four areas of attitude, skills, performance, and improvement. In this brief paper, we describe several ways for conducting assessments in these four areas and conclude with a call for the statistics and data science education community to build upon these ideas.
more »
« less
- PAR ID:
- 10227759
- Date Published:
- Journal Name:
- JSM Proceedings, Statistical Consulting Section
- Format(s):
- Medium: X
- Sponsoring Org:
- National Science Foundation
More Like this
-
-
The process of regionalization involves clustering a set of spatial areas into spatially contiguous regions. Given the NP-hard nature of regionalization problems, all existing algorithms yield approximate solutions. To ascertain the quality of these approximations, it is crucial for domain experts to obtain statistically significant evidence on optimizing the objective function, in comparison to a random reference distribution derived from all potential sample solutions. In this paper, we propose a novel spatial regionalization problem, denoted as SISR (Statistical Inference for Spatial Regionalization), which generates random sample solutions with a predetermined region cardinality. The driving motivation behind SISR is to conduct statistical inference on any given regionalization scheme. To address SISR, we present a parallel technique named PRRP (P-Regionalization through Recursive Partitioning). PRRP operates over three phases: the region-growing phase constructs initial regions with a predetermined region cardinality, while the region merging and region-splitting phases ensure the spatial contiguity of unassigned areas, allowing for the growth of subsequent regions with predetermined cardinalities. An extensive evaluation shows the effectiveness of PRRP using various real datasets.more » « less
-
null (Ed.)In the spring of 2020, universities across America, and the world, abruptly transitioned to online learning. The online transition required faculty to find novel ways to administer assessments and in some cases, for students to utilize novel ways of cheating in their classes. The purpose of this paper is to provide a retrospective on cheating during online exams in the spring of 2020. It specifically looks at honor code violations in a sophomore level engineering course that enrolled more than 200 students. In this particular course, four pre-COVID assessments were given in class and six mid-COVID assessments were given online. This paper examines the increasing rate of cheating on these assessments and the profiles of the students who were engaged in cheating. It compares students who were engaged in violations of the honor code by uploading exam questions vs. those who those who looked at solutions to uploaded questions. This paper also looks at the abuse of Chegg during exams and the responsiveness of Chegg’s honor code team. It discusses the effectiveness of Chegg’s user account data in pursuing academic integrity cases. Information is also provided on the question response times for Chegg tutors in answering exam questions and the actual efficacy of cheating in this fashion.more » « less
-
Abstract Droughts are anticipated to intensify in many parts of the world due to climate change. However, the issue of drought definition, namely the diversity of drought indices, makes it difficult to compare drought assessments. This issue is widely known, but its relative importance has never been quantitatively evaluated in comparison to other sources of uncertainty. Here, encompassing three drought categories (meteorological, agricultural, and hydrological droughts) with four temporal scales of interest, we evaluated changes in the drought frequency using multi-model and multi-scenario simulations to identify areas where the definition issue could result in pronounced uncertainties and to what extent. We investigated the disagreement in the signs of changes between drought definitions and decomposed the variance into four main factors: drought definitions, greenhouse gas concentration scenarios, global climate models, and global water models, as well as their interactions. The results show that models were the primary sources of variance over 82% of the global land area. On the other hand, the drought definition was the dominant source of variance in the remaining 17%, especially in parts of northern high-latitudes. Our results highlight specific regions where differences in drought definitions result in a large spread among projections, including areas showing opposite signs of significant changes. At a global scale, 7% of the variance resulted independently from the definition issue, and that value increased to 44% when 1st and 2nd order interactions were considered. The quantitative results suggest that by clarifying hydrological processes or sectors of interest, one could avoid these uncertainties in drought assessments to obtain a clearer picture of future drought change.more » « less
-
Environmental impact assessments for new Arctic infrastructure do not adequately consider the likely long-term cumulative effects of climate change and infrastructure to landforms and vegetation in areas with ice-rich permafrost, due in part to lack of long-term environmental studies that monitor changes after the infrastructure is built. This case study examines long-term (1949–2020) climate- and road-related changes in a network of ice-wedge polygons, Prudhoe Bay Oilfield, Alaska. We studied four trajectories of change along a heavily traveled road and a relatively remote site. During 20 years prior to the oilfield development, the climate and landscapes changed very little. During 50 years after development, climate-related changes included increased numbers of thermokarst ponds, changes to ice-wedge-polygon morphology, snow distribution, thaw depths, dominant vegetation types, and shrub abundance. Road dust strongly affected plant-community structure and composition, particularly small forbs, mosses, and lichens. Flooding increased permafrost degradation, polygon center-trough elevation contrasts, and vegetation productivity. It was not possible to isolate infrastructure impacts from climate impacts, but the combined datasets provide unique insights into the rate and extent of ecological disturbances associated with infrastructure-affected landscapes under decades of climate warming. We conclude with recommendations for future cumulative impact assessments in areas with ice-rich permafrost.more » « less
- Free Publicly Accessible Full Text
-
Accepted Manuscript1.0
- Conference Paper:
- The DOI is not currently available.
