Posts tagged change
More fire restrictions in Boulder open space &mt. parks
Jun 12th
City implements additional fire restrictions for Open Space & Mountain Parks
The City of Boulder has implemented a City Manager’s Rule banning fire and smoking on all Open Space & Mountain Parks properties. OSMP imposes these bans during extreme fire hazard conditions for public safety and resource protection. Fire danger is currently at a very high level.
“As we can tell from the tragic fire in Larimer County, and as we know all too well here in Boulder, dry conditions can be very dangerous,” said Eric Stone, division manager for OSMP. “We are asking the public to take all precautions possible to prevent a fire on open space and in our community.”
The ban includes smoking and the use of any cook stoves on OSMP lands. The sheriff’s office has already put a ban in place that makes it illegal to use charcoal grills or campfires anywhere in Boulder County. The new OSMP ban could be lifted if and when fire conditions change. Violators are subject to criminal prosecution with penalties up to 90 days in jail and a $1,000 fine.
OSMP and firefighters would appreciate the cooperation from the public in this important matter.
For more information on OSMP, please call 303-441-3440 or visit www.osmp.org
Nightmare in the mountains scheduled
Jun 5th
County road chip seal projects begin Monday
Boulder County, Colo. – The Boulder County Transportation Department will apply chip seal to 25 miles of county roads beginning this Monday, June 11.
Starting Monday, crews will begin working on Overland Road above Jamestown and work their way down James Canyon, and then Lefthand Canyon all the way to U.S. 36 (Foothills Highway).
The chip application will be followed closely by rollers and sweepers to set the material into the road surface along with the application of a “fog-coat” to further reduce the amount of loose material. The process is expected to take less than a week for each section of road.
2012 chip seal schedule:
Week of June 11
- Overland Road
- James Canyon Drive
Week of June 18
- Lefthand Canyon Drive from James Canyon to U.S. 36
- North 75th Street from south of St. Vrain Road to Highway 66
- St. Vrain Road from 75th Street to Longmont city limits west of Airport Road
Week of June 25
- North 73rd Street from Niwot Road to Clover Basin Drive
- Niwot Road from 63rd Street to the Diagonal Highway (119)
- Jay Road from U.S. 36 to 47th Street
Week of July 2
- Jay Road from 47th Street to 75th Street
- Baseline Road from 55th Street to Cherryvale Road
Schedules are subject to change due to weather and other factors and the projects will cause minor traffic delays. Visitwww.BoulderCounty.org/Transportation for updates.
Applying chip seal to county roads is a cost-effective means of extending their life and reducing potholes. Adding stone chips to pavement after it has sat for more than five years extends the pavement life considerably, allowing for more use of the original overlay. Additionally, the cost of chipping a road is a small fraction of the cost of new paving and chip sealing uses less oil and less material than paving.
“We understand the chip seal can be disruptive to cycling and can make for a rough ride for a period of time,” Boulder County Transportation Director George Gerstle said. “We’ll continue using the smaller chips, which we’ve used for the last two years with good results, and we will continue sweeping and fog-sealing the roads immediately after the chips are applied to create as smooth a surface as possible. However, there will still be impacts and cyclists should expect poorer riding conditions and use caution on these roads for a couple of weeks after the work is completed.”
–
CU researchers plotting the "Map of Life
May 22nd
Effort could be a key to preserving rare species
A research team involving Yale University and the University of Colorado Boulder has developed a first public demonstration version of its “Map of Life,” an ambitious Web-based endeavor designed to show the distribution of all living plants and animals on the planet.
The demonstration version allows anyone with an Internet connection to map the known global distribution of almost 25,000 species of terrestrial vertebrate animals, including mammals, birds, amphibians, reptiles and North American freshwater fish. The database, which continues to expand, already contains hundreds of millions of records on the abundance and distribution of the planet’s diverse flora and fauna.
“We are taking 200 years of different types of knowledge coming from different sources, all documenting the locations of species around the world and compiling them in a way that will greatly enhance our knowledge of biodiversity,” said CU-Boulder Associate Professor Robert Guralnick of the ecology and evolutionary biology department, part of the Map of Life research team. “Such information could be used by any organization that needs to make informed decisions regarding land management, health, conservation and climate change.”
The initial version of the map tool being released today is intended to introduce it to the broader public, according to the researchers. It allows users to see several levels of detail for a given species — at its broadest, the type of environment it lives in, and at its finest, specific locations where the species’ presence has been documented. One function allows users to click a point on the map and generate a list of vertebrate species in the surrounding area. More functions will be added over time, according to the team.
The bryozoa fish are found in the Connecticut River
“It is the where and the when of a species,” said Walter Jetz, associate professor of ecology and evolutionary biology at Yale and the project lead. “It puts at your fingertips the geographic diversity of life. Ultimately, the hope is for this literally to include hundreds of thousands of animal and plant species and show how much or indeed how little we know of their whereabouts.”
A paper by Jetz, Guralnick and Jana McPherson of the Calgary Zoological Society describing the evolving Map of Life technology tool appeared in a recent issue of the journal Trends in Ecology and Evolution.
By highlighting the known abundance and distribution of species, the researchers hope to identify and fill knowledge gaps and also offer a tool for detecting change over time. They expect the map tool will prove useful for professional scientists, wildlife and land managers, conservation organizations and the general public.
The team is using information gleaned from a wide variety of sources, including field guides, museum collections and wildlife checklists that involved scientists, conservation organizations and “citizen scientists.” The project’s success will depend on participation by other scientists and informed amateurs, and subsequent versions of the mapping tool will offer mechanisms for users to supply new or missing information about the distribution and abundance of particular species.
Snow Leopards of Tibet are nearly extinct
Jetz called the Map of Life “an infrastructure, something to help us all collaborate, improve, share and understand the still extremely limited geographic knowledge about biodiversity.” The team continues to work on several other tasks and challenges, including who will be contributing data and how information supplied by the contributors will be verified and curated.
“A small but powerful next step is to provide a means for anyone, anywhere on the globe to use their mobile devices to instantly pull up animal and plant distributions and even get a realistic assessment on the odds of encountering a particular species of wildlife,” said Guralnick, who also is the curator of invertebrate zoology at the University of Colorado Museum of Natural History.
Guralnick said the Map of Life project is following in the footsteps of other knowledge repositories like the GenBank project, a National Institutes of Health-funded effort with a public database of more than 135 million gene sequences from more than 300,000 organisms that allows users to explore genes and genomes using bioinformatics tools. In the biodiversity arena, the Global Biodiversity Information Facility in Copenhagen has developed an important resource that provides access to more than 300 million records of plant and animal occurrences, which is one of the distributional databases being used by the Map of Life team.
The National Science Foundation has provided initial support for the Map of Life project. Other supporters are the Encyclopedia of Life; the International Union for the Conservation of Nature; and the Senckenberg Research Institute and Natural History Museum, and the Biodiversity and Climate Research Center, both in Germany.
The public demonstration version of Map of Life can be found at http://www.mappinglife.org/ and more information about the project is available at http://www.mappinglife.org/about.
