Showing 2171 - 2180 of 5714 Items
Economic Analysis of the Critical Habitat Designation Process for Endangered and Threatened Species Under the Endangered Species Act of 1973
Date: 2022-01-01
Creator: Katherine Fosburgh
Access: Open access
- Habitat destruction is the leading cause of biodiversity loss in the US. Under the Endangered Species Act (ESA), habitat deemed essential to endangered and threatened species recovery is proposed as critical habitat (CH). CH areas are subject to regulations that could alter land development plans or increase costs. The potential economic opportunity cost created by CH regulations may lead to the exclusion of land proposed for CH designation, thereby reducing the conservation benefits of the CH rule. In this paper, I use a unique dataset collected from Federal Register (FR) documents to estimate the reduction in CH acreage from proposed to final ruling, both on the extensive and intensive margin. I find a negative relationship between the level of household income in an area proposed for CH and the probability that a CH gains acreage or maintains acreage during the establishment process. I also find some evidence that higher household income in a CH area is associated with a greater relative loss in acreage between proposal and finalization. I also find that private land proposed for CH designation is less likely to be in the final designation than federal land. Overall, my results suggest that economic considerations influence CH allocation decisions. Whether reducing the amount of private land subject to CH designations is socially efficient depends on the unknown economic benefit of private land exclusions versus the cost of biodiversity and ecosystem service loss that may result from not protecting all land deemed vital to species recovery.
ALGOrhythms: Leveraging Markov Chain-Based Generation of Functional Harmonies with User-Defined Musical Corpus as a Compositional Tool
Date: 2021-01-01
Creator: Coleman Brockmeier
Access: Open access
- Music forms the soundtrack to daily life and serves as an important cultural marker for people around the world. As the world becomes digitized and connected via the internet, the opportunity is increasingly accessible for anyone to share music with the world and to create chart-topping music that defines the cultural vernacular. Many prominent producers have little to no formal musical training, especially in Western music theory. As a result, loop-based music dominates the lists of most-played music on the radio and streaming services, often not deviating from basic functional harmony. With this project, I have created a compositional tool in the form of an iOS app which identifies the harmonic “fingerprint” behind a given set of songs. The app then leverages this understanding to create sequences of chords in the style of that fingerprint. To accomplish this, the app employs web scraping to create a corpus of musical information in the form of Markov chains — a transition table which underlies the data set. I introduce the idea of musical “chunks” defining a harmonic “fingerprint” and various methods of traversing the transition table to create chord progressions employing the fingerprint as a guide. The tool allows for specification of corpus, chunk size, traversal method, and the ability to listen to, share, and save generated results. The resulting app is a tool that allows the user to answer the question: “What would happen if Stevie Wonder and Billie Eilish wrote a song together?”
Monteverde: Ecology and Conservation of a Tropical Cloud Forest
Date: 2000-01-01
Creator: Nalini M. Nadkarni, Nathaniel T. Wheelwright
Access: Open access
- The Monteverde Cloud Forest Reserve has captured the worldwide attention of biologists, conservationists, and ecologists and has been the setting for extensive investigation over the past 40 years. Roughly 40,000 ecotourists visit the Cloud Forest each year, and it is often considered the archetypal high-altitude rain forest. Featuring synthetic chapters and specific accounts written by more than 100 biologists and local residents, the 573-page book documents in a single volume everything known about the biological diversity of Monteverde, Costa Rica, and how to protect it. New short chapters which update and expand the research presented in the 2000 Oxford publication were written in 2014 and are now available.
Manuscripts
- Special Collections & Archives holds nearly 650 manuscript collections that can be consulted in our secure reading room, and select materials are available online. Our particular collection strengths include materials related to abolitionism and anti-slavery movements in the United States, Arctic exploration, the Civil War and Reconstruction, natural history, local and regional history, and the personal and professional papers of many Bowdoin faculty and alumni.