Explore the vast range of titles available.

The Sky Island Restoration Collaborative (SIRC) is a growing partnership between government agencies, nonprofit organizations, and private landowners in southeast Arizona, the United States, and northern Sonora, Mexico. Starting in 2014 as an experiment to cultivate restoration efforts by connecting people across vocations and nations, SIRC has evolved over 5 years into a flourishing landscape-restoration initiative. The group is founded on the concept of developing a restoration economy, where ecological and socioeconomic benefits are interconnected and complimentary. The variety of ideas, people, field sites, administration, and organizations promote learning and increase project success through iterative adaptive management, transparency, and sharing. The collaborative seeks to make restoration self-sustaining and improve quality of life for citizens living along the US-Mexico border. Research and experiments are developed between scientists and practitioners to test hypotheses, qualify procedures, and quantify impacts on shared projects. Simultaneously, partners encourage and facilitate connecting more people to the landscape—via volunteerism, internships, training, and mentoring. Through this history, SIRC’s evolution is pioneering the integration of community and ecological restoration to protect biodiversity in the Madrean Archipelago Ecoregion. This editorial introduces SIRC as a unique opportunity for scientists and practitioners looking to engage in binational partnerships and segues into this special journal issue we have assembled that relates new findings in the field of restoration ecology.

The manufacturing systems’ success directly relates to their accurate, reliable and flexible schedules, including how production is planned and scheduled and which constraints are considered in generating the schedules. The study's objective arises from the need to generate an optimal production scheduling system in a connecting plates manufacturing company that works on a Make-To-Stock basis. This research investigates the impact of demand and operational constraints on production schedules, including the facility capacity, operators and machines availability, raw materials availability, inventory level and warehouse capacity. A multi-agent-based optimisation model is developed to face the complexity of considering demand and operational constraints and reflects their impact on generating a reliable production schedule. This model involves a proposed heuristic algorithm that considers demand and operations constraints in such a manufacturing environment and optimises the production schedule based on these restrictions/requirements. A real-life case study based on a connecting plates manufacturer company is used as a test bench of the proposed agent-based heuristic optimisation model. The proposed algorithm is compared with other related approaches to check its superiority based on key criteria, including inventory levels, missed/unsatisfied orders and total production time. Results show that the proposed heuristics algorithm reduced the number of missed orders by 34% compared with similar approaches.

The steep declines over the last quarter century of wild pollinators in the Southwest among native bees, monarch butterflies (Danaus plexippus L.), hummingbirds, and nectar-feeding bats have come during a time of accelerated climate change, and are likely due to a variety of stresses interacting with climatic shifts. Nevertheless, there is mounting evidence that declining availability and altered timing of floral resources along “nectar corridors” accessible to pollinators involves climatic shifts as a serious stressor that had been previously underestimated. Longitudinal studies from both urban heat islands and rural habitats in Southwestern North America suggest peak flowering of many wildflowers serving as floral resources for pollinators is occurring three to five weeks earlier in spring than a century ago, leaving “phenological gaps” in nectar resource availability for certain pollinators. To avoid the threat of what A. Dobson (Professor of Ecology and Evolutionary Biology, Princeton University) and others have termed “food web collapse,” a range of groups have initiated ecological restoration efforts in semi-arid zones that attempt to (a) assemble more resilient plant-pollinator food chains, and (b) hydrologically restore watercourses to ensure water scarcity will be less likely to disrupt re-assembled food chains in the face of droughts, catastrophic floods, and other correlates of global climate change. We recommend “bottom-up food chain restoration” strategies for restoring nectar corridors in protected areas on or near geopolitical and land management boundaries in all regions, but particularly in the Southwest or US-Mexico desert border states. We highlight binational and multicultural workshops facilitated to communicate about, and initiate restoration of, mutualistic relationships among plants, pollinators, and people to protected area managers on both sides of the border.

The migratory phenomenon of monarch butterflies has many threats to its continued existence. To promote the restoration of monarch butterfly floral corridors and food chains in the desert southwestern United States, this study examined the distribution of 50 important nectar and larval host plants known to support monarch butterflies. Using Maximum Entropy (MaxEnt) to model each individual species’ distribution, the study examined the distribution of monarch butterfly plants individually and collectively for cues toward better understanding of potential monarch movement in the desert southwest. The study proposes strategies for protected area management to benefit pollinators and monarchs, as well as for the distribution of monarch food plants at two different geographical scales and throughout the annual yearly cycle of flowering. The results of this study indicate that stacked species distribution models are successful at explaining the presence of monarch butterflies better than a random sample. However, the precision of any predictive value of these findings is limited due to the overall coarseness of the models. The results indicate modeled phenological predictions are generally accurate and overall provide a visualization tool to promote better understanding of the timing and availability of monarch butterfly floristic habitat in the desert southwest. The results suggest an appropriate response for public land managers is to work at increasing the availability of local native plant materials. Whether in the form of wild harvesting or agronomic production, greater availability of locally-sourced native plant materials has the potential to surmount many existing impediments to successful restoration of monarch butterfly populations.

Whitebark pine (Pinus albicaulis. Engelm.) is vulnerable to a number of threats including an introduced pathogen (Cronartium ribicola J.C. Fisch.), epidemic levels of native mountain pine beetle (Dendroctonus ponderosae Hopkins), fire suppression, and climate change. To describe the structure of whitebark pine populations in two national parks in the southern Cascades (Crater Lake, Oregon, USA (CRLA) and Lassen Volcanic, California, USA (LAVO) National Parks), we surveyed trees in 30 × 50 × 50 m plots in both parks. We used these plots to describe the extent of white pine blister rust (the disease caused by Cronartium ribicola), mountain pine beetle occurrence, and to elucidate factors influencing the presence of pests and pathogens, cone production, and canopy kill. In each plot, we recorded data related to tree health, including symptoms of blister rust and mountain pine beetle, and reproductive vigor (cone production). In both parks, encroachment from other species, particularly mountain hemlock (Tsuga mertensiana (Bong.) Carrière), was negatively associated with cone production. In CRLA, water stress was a good predictor of blister rust infection and cone production. For CRLA and LAVO, the presence of mountain pine beetle and blister rust was associated with higher canopy kill for whitebark pine. Lastly, we found evidence for a pest-pathogen interaction, mountain pine beetle attack was greater for trees that showed symptoms of blister rust infection in CRLA. Our results indicate that whitebark pine populations in the southern Cascade Range are experiencing moderate levels of blister rust infection compared with other sites across the species range, and that competition from shade-tolerant species may result in an additional threat to whitebark pine in both parks. We present our findings in the context of park management and situate them in range-wide and regional conservation strategies aimed at the protection and restoration of a declining species.

Laser-Induced Breakdown Spectroscopy (LIBS) has transitioned from a method found only in research laboratories, to a technique in wide use in commercial settings. Handheld LIBS systems are used to make measurements of metal scrap and other items in the field, while online LIBS systems are widely used in industrial high-speed sorting. This month's column polls several leading LIBS experts to give readers a sense of some of the history of, and most exciting upcoming research problems in, LIBS.

The plan was that Sam Berns was going to be an honorary captain when the Patriots hosted the Indianapolis Colts in a divisional playoff game last night at Gillette Stadium. Sam was to have returned to Gillette Stadium a couple of weeks ago for the Patriots' regular-season finale against the Buffalo Bills.

Jeff Bagwell, Craig Biggio, Edgar Martinez, McGriff, Jack Morris, Mike Piazza, Tim Raines and Curt Schilling. Since the BBWAA failed to elect anybody to Cooperstown last year, and since all eight of my choices are still eligible for induction, I planned to vote for them again this year . . . except that first-timers on the ballot include Greg Maddux, Tom Glavine and Frank Thomas. Frank Thomas, who played 16 of his 19 seasons with the White Sox, was a .301 career hitter, with a .419 on-base percentage and 521 home runs. [...]this for a man with 493 career home runs, eight seasons of 100 or more RBI, and a .377 on-base percentage.

A victory, by the way, that seems to have sucked all the life out of the Texans as they lost three of their last four regular-season games. Since losing to the Pats, Houston has scored a total of four touchdowns (just three by its offense) in four games, including just one in last week's 19-13 wild card playoff victory over Cincinnati. Just yesterday morning, I heard WEEI talkshow host and Herald columnist Gerry Callahan say the Pats-Broncos AFC championship showdown is going to be the biggest non-Super Bowl playoff game in NFL history.