Developing 2015 High-Resolution Impervious Cover Estimates for the 52 Towns in the Piscataqua Region Estuaries Partnership: Final Report

Estimates of 2015 impervious cover (IC) for the 52 towns of the Piscataqua Region Estuaries Partnership (PREP) were generated from 2015 1-foot imagery (for the 42 towns in NH) and 2015 1-meter NAIP imagery (for the 10 towns in Maine). The 2015 IC mapping updated previous high resolution mapping developed from 2010 (New Hampshire) and 2011 (Maine) orthophotography for the study area. Impervious features covered 32,462 acres (5.8% of the land area) in the New Hampshire towns and 13,295 acres (5.3% of the land area) in the Maine towns, with a total of 46,634 (5.6% of the land area) acres mapped in the entire study area. The towns with the highest percent impervious cover in 2015 were in New Hampshire, and included Portsmouth (26.7%), New Castle (20.0%), and Seabrook (20.0%). The largest increases in IC between 2010 and 2015 occurred in Rochester, NH (122 acres), Wells, ME (64 acres), and Seabrook, NH (64 acres). Minimal amounts of IC increases occurred in most towns, with the least amounts in Madbury, NH (4 acres), New Castle, NH (2 acres), and Brookfield, NH (2 acres)

Restricting Access to Books on the Internet: Some Unanticipated Effects of U.S. Copyright Legislation

One manifestation of the trend towards the strengthening of copyright protection that has been noticeable during the past two decades is the secular extension of the potential duration during which access to copyrightable materials remains legally restricted. Those restrictions carry clear implications for the current and prospective costs to readers seeking “on-line” availability of the affected content in digital form, via the Internet. This paper undertakes to quantify one aspect of these developments by providing readily understandable measures of the restrictive consequences of the successive modifications that were made in U.S. copyright laws during the second half of the twentieth century. Specifically, we present estimates of the past, present, and future number of copyrighted books belonging to different publication-date “cohorts” whose entry into the public domain (and consequent accessibility in scanned on-line form) will thereby have been postponed. In some instances these deferrals of access due to legislative extensions of the duration of copyright protection are found to reach surprisingly far into the future, and to arise from the effects of interactions among the successive changes in the law that generally have gone unnoticed.copyright legistlation, Internet, digital books

Shoreland Buffer Module for GRANIT Data Mapper

The Complex Systems Research Center at the University of New Hampshire enhanced the GRANIT Data Mapper (http://mapper.granit.unh.edu) by incorporating data describing shoreline buffers in New Hampshire. The project supports an ongoing, comprehensive New Hampshire Estuaries Project (NHEP) outreach initiative that seeks to educate municipal decision-makers about the importance of stream buffers in preserving water quality in coastal New Hampshire. It complements these existing outreach efforts by allowing coastal managers, local land use boards, and the general public to readily visualize the spatial extent of current and/or proposed shoreline regulations in their community. The primary data source for the analysis was the high-resolution New Hampshire National Hydrography Dataset (NHHD). Using standard GIS tools, six concentric buffers incrementing in 50’ widths from 50’ to 300’ were generated around stream and shoreline features recorded in the NHHD. To provide the greatest flexibility to users, two data sets were generated at each buffer increment – one representing shorelines and streams classified as either perennial or intermittent, and the second comprising shorelines and only streams classified as perennial. The resulting buffers were merged with the GRANIT surface water data, and acreage by town and subwatershed was calculated for each buffer category. The shoreline buffer data sets were added to the water resources theme of the Data Mapper, thereby providing the public with the ability to view buffers of varying widths in the context of other data layers (including aerial imagery) available through the viewing tool. The associated acreage data tables were added to the water resources theme tool tab. Findings indicated that aggregated at the HUC-12 level, almost 24,000 acres within the Coastal Basin were covered by 50’ buffers when perennial and intermittent streams as well as shorelines were buffered, with over 133,000 acres covered by 300’ buffers. When only perennial streams and shorelines were considered eligible for buffering, the totals declined to just under 17,000 acres (50’ buffers) and over 96,000 acres (300’ buffers)

Optimization in a Simulation Setting: Use of Function Approximation in Debt Strategy Analysis

The stochastic simulation model suggested by Bolder (2003) for the analysis of the federal government's debt-management strategy provides a wide variety of useful information. It does not, however, assist in determining an optimal debt-management strategy for the government in its current form. Including optimization in the debt-strategy model would be useful, since it could substantially broaden the range of policy questions that can be addressed. Finding such an optimal strategy is nonetheless complicated by two challenges. First, performing optimization with traditional techniques in a simulation setting is computationally intractable. Second, it is necessary to define precisely what one means by an "optimal" debt strategy. The authors detail a possible approach for addressing these two challenges. They address the first challenge by approximating the numerically computed objective function using a function-approximation technique. They consider the use of ordinary least squares, kernel regression, multivariate adaptive regression splines, and projection-pursuit regressions as approximation algorithms. The second challenge is addressed by proposing a wide range of possible government objective functions and examining them in the context of an illustrative example. The authors' view is that the approach permits debt and fiscal managers to address a number of policy questions that could not be fully addressed with the current stochastic simulation engine.Debt management; Econometric and statistical methods; Fiscal policy; Financial markets

Developing 2010 High-Resolution Impervious Cover Estimates for Selected Towns in the Piscataqua Region Estuaries Partnership: Final Report

Estimates of 2010 impervious cover (New Hampshire) and 2011 impervious cover (Maine) were generated to extend the coverage of previous work in Rockingham and Strafford Counties, New Hampshire, to include all of the Piscataqua Region Estuaries Partnership (PREP) footprint. The newly mapped area comprised the town of Alton in Belknap County, New Hampshire, the towns of Brookfield, Wakefield, and Wolfeboro in Carroll County, New Hampshire, and the towns of Acton, Berwick, Eliot, Kittery, Lebanon, North Berwick, Sanford, Shapleigh, South Berwick, Wells, and York in York County, Maine1. With these new data, standardized, high resolution impervious cover estimates are now available for the entire PREP watershed. Impervious features covered 3,026 acres (2.7%) in the New Hampshire towns and 13,612 acres (4.9%) in the Maine towns, with a total of 16,637 (4.3%) acres mapped in the entire study area. As expected, the more urbanized towns of Kittery (11.3%), Sanford (7.9%), Eliot (7.0%), and York (6.2%) contained the highest percentage of impervious cover

Low-emittance tuning at the Cornell Electron Storage Ring

In 2008 the Cornell Electron/Positron Storage Ring (CESR) was reconfigured from an electron/positron collider to serve as a testbed for the International Linear Collider (ILC) damping rings. One of the primary goals of the CESR Test Accelerator (CesrTA) project is to develop a fast low-emittance tuning method which scales well to large rings such as the ILC damping rings, and routinely achieves a vertical emittance of order 10 pm at 2.085 GeV. This paper discusses the tuning methods developed at CesrTA to achieve low-emittance conditions. One iteration of beam-based measurement and correction requires about 10 minutes. A minimum vertical emittance of 10.3 +3.2/-3.4(sys) +/-0.2(stat) pm has been achieved at 2.085 GeV. In various configurations and beam energies the correction technique routinely achieves vertical emittance around 10 pm after correction, with RMS coupling < 0.5%. The measured vertical dispersion is dominated by beam position monitor systematics. The propagation of uncertainties in the emittance measurement is described in detail. Simulations modeling the effects of magnet misalignments, BPM errors, and emittance correction algorithm suggest the residual vertical emittance measured at the conclusion of the tuning procedure is dominated by sources other than optics errors and misalignments