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111. [Article] Feral Swine Action Plan for Oregon
Feral swine are defined as free roaming animals of the genus Sus that are not being held under domestic management or confinement. Swine have spread from Europe and Russia to habitats around the world ...Citation Citation
- Title:
- Feral Swine Action Plan for Oregon
- Author:
- Sytsma, Mark, Rouhe, Arick Christopher
- Year:
- 2007
Feral swine are defined as free roaming animals of the genus Sus that are not being held under domestic management or confinement. Swine have spread from Europe and Russia to habitats around the world via human introduction. Currently, feral swine populations are established on every continent except Antarctica. Unlike other large mammal invaders, swine have a high reproductive capacity and are omnivorous, which allows for a quick assimilation into most habitats. Once a breeding population is established in an area, the population can quickly increase and negatively impact the ecosystem. A successful invasion of feral swine is difficult, and sometimes impossible, to reverse. A feral swine pest risk assessment for Oregon, released in 2004, designated feral swine as a very high-risk species due to high potential for establishment, environmental and economic impacts, and disease transmission to wildlife, livestock and humans. Economic impacts on ecosystems and disease transmission to wildlife are difficult to assess, but restoration of ecosystems and losses to agriculture and livestock have been estimated to exceed US$800 million in the United States each year. Environmental impacts include facilitation of noxious weed invasions, shifts in dominant plant species, reduction of forest regeneration, and soil erosion. Facilitation of noxious weeds and erosion due to feral swine rooting are documented in Oregon. Feral swine in Oregon have not been implicated in disease transmission to humans, but the recent E. coli outbreak from spinach grown on a California farm that caused three deaths has been genetically traced to feral swine excrement deposited in spinach fields. The feral swine population in Oregon is currently small and dispersed. Few disturbances have been documented but state and federal biologists report regular occurrence of disturbances due to feral swine. Actions to prevent the effects of an invasion fall into three categories: management, control or eradication. Of the three categories, only eradication efforts have successfully slowed or reversed the effects of swine invasions. Case studies from California, Australia, Hawaii, the Galapagos Islands and the Channel Islands off the coast of California show that management and control efforts, while effective in the short term, have not successfully kept small feral swine populations from increasing to levels that are unmanageable and uncontrollable. A four-year feral swine eradication plan is proposed. The Plan includes recommended legislative changes to facilitate eradication, outreach and education, population assessment, rapid response, and eradication elements. A 0.5 FTE position is required at the Oregon Department of Fish and Wildlife to implement the plan. Eradication of feral swine in Oregon is estimated to require a four-year, $1.29 million effort. Follow-up control of new releases and escapes will require a maintenance effort estimated at less than $50,000 per year (excluding contingency funds for emergency response). These costs are small relative to the value of the $3.6 billion Oregon agriculture and livestock industries and the investment Oregon has made in riparian restoration efforts. Sustained control of feral swine in Oregon will require a longterm commitment that will include annual domestic swine marking, education, and monitoring.
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Dry forests account for nearly half of the world’s tropical and subtropical forests and provide a multitude of ecological services. They contribute to hydrological cycles and livestock and wildlife provisioning; ...
Citation Citation
- Title:
- Strengthening the Resiliency of Dryland Forest-Based Livelihoods in Ethiopia and South Sudan: A Review of Literature on the Interaction Between Dryland Forests, Livelihoods and Forest Governance
- Author:
- Lawry, Steven, McLain, Rebecca J., Kassa, Habtemariam
- Year:
- 2015
Dry forests account for nearly half of the world’s tropical and subtropical forests and provide a multitude of ecological services. They contribute to hydrological cycles and livestock and wildlife provisioning; and host pollinators and wild plants. They are also important ecological zones for dryland agriculture and pastoral livelihood strategies that support hundreds of millions of people around the world. Dry forests cover large areas and their biomass stores carbon and helps mitigate climate change. Dry forests are particularly important to people in Africa. They provide wood for construction and energy, contribute to local diets with wild fruits, vegetables, nuts, edible insects and bushmeat. Wild, edible plants provide essential nutrients, particularly during times of food scarcity. Yet dry forests are subject to high rates of deforestation and degradation driven mainly by agricultural expansion and growing energy demands. Other challenges include limited information on dry forests (their inventories, changes over time, major drivers of deforestation and recovery, etc.), their biophysical aspects and ecosystem services and the potential roles they could play in increasing the sustainability of crop and livestock farming. Governments, development partners and communities are looking for options to better manage these resources at the landscape level. Dry forests are complex ecosystems that are not fully understood. Scientific knowledge to better manage dry forests and sustain the livelihoods of people that depend on these ecosystems remains scanty as research to inform policy and practice is still very limited. The knowledge gap is even more pronounced in northeastern Africa, notably Ethiopia and South Sudan where these forest types are important in terms of areas coverage and in supporting rural livelihoods. Ethiopia and South Sudan share histories of political unrest and conflict that have contributed to famines; large-scale land acquisition for investment and agricultural expansion by smallholders are resulting in major and rapid land-use changes in their dry forested areas. Ethiopia’s two decades of peace and stability and its experience in managing its natural resources could inform post-conflict intervention measures in South Sudan. This study was conducted as an effort to help fill the knowledge gap in dry forest-based livelihoods through a critical review of the available literature. It used publications from CIFOR’s work on dry forests and product marketing in Ethiopia and from other sources, including gray literature. The study assessed the socio-ecological context, including relevant laws and strategies, with an emphasis on the biophysical characteristics of the dryland forests of Ethiopia and South Sudan and the major causes of deforestation and forest degradation. Using livelihood systems as an analytical framework, it examined (i) major livelihood strategies; (ii) the contribution of dry forests to livelihoods; (iii) forest product markets and value chains; and (iv) forest and land governance with an emphasis on the relationship between political, economic and resource management policies and the level of degradation of dry forests and their contributions to the livelihoods of forest-dependent communities in Ethiopia and South Sudan. It also identified major threats to dry, forest-based livelihoods and key issues for policy, research and practice that need to be addressed to maintain the multifunctionality of dryland forests while also ensuring the well-being of communities dependent on these landscapes.
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113. [Article] Being Human: How Four Animals Forever Changed The Way We Live, What We Believe, And Who We Think We Are
Our lives would not be what they are today without animals. From the food we eat, to the clothes we wear, animals provide tangible evidence of their importance every day. But more than that, animals have ...Citation Citation
- Title:
- Being Human: How Four Animals Forever Changed The Way We Live, What We Believe, And Who We Think We Are
- Author:
- Brady, Jocelyn Mary
- Year:
- 2014
Our lives would not be what they are today without animals. From the food we eat, to the clothes we wear, animals provide tangible evidence of their importance every day. But more than that, animals have shaped who we are and what we believe. Often in ways we don't see. That's what inspired me to write Being Human. This work began as an examination of how humans have altered animals to better match our imaginations and ideals, and too, the way these animals have irrecoverably altered how we live and look at the world. Consider, for example, that before they became physically useful to us in providing meat or skills or companionship, animals were central figures in our stories, mythologies, and religions. All the while, of course, these animals remained both ignorant and at the mercy of whatever we imagined--or needed--them to be. And what does all of this say about us? What can we learn about ourselves from looking at animals, and more specifically, looking at the way we treat them? In a society where animal flesh comes to us freshly packed and cleanly saran-wrapped, and pets are treated as members of our families, we tend to look at animals as one thing or another. A farm pig is not a companion animal, any more than a cat is a meal-in-waiting. At least not in our culture. We generally see what's convenient or desirable and when things get messy or complicated, we tend to look away. In so doing, we miss the opportunity to clearly see who we really are, what we're capable of, and what, if anything, we might want to change as a result. I chose four specific animals that show us different sides of ourselves. These beings are both familiar and strange, part of our everyday lives but often only found on the periphery. Each animal symbolizes one of four categories: food, pest, worker and pet. And each connects to a human need: pigs with consumption, pigeons with communication, horses with control and cats with companionship. They are arranged in this order to reflect the deepening complexity of their respective human needs--from the simplest, the need to eat, to the most complex, the need for companionship. (Arguably, control can be considered the most complex, however I chose companionship as the culminating need because it inherently involves all of the other three.) I hope if I accomplish only one thing, it is this: after reading, you see these animals--and your relationship to them--a little bit differently than before.
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114. [Article] A gold dream in the Blue Mountains : a study of the Chinese immigrants in the John Day area, Oregon, 1870-1910
More than one hundred years have passed since the Chinese laborers first landed in this country in the mid-nineteenth century. Yet their history remains cloudy. This phenomenon is quite understandable ...Citation Citation
- Title:
- A gold dream in the Blue Mountains : a study of the Chinese immigrants in the John Day area, Oregon, 1870-1910
- Author:
- Chen, Chia-lin
- Year:
- 1972
More than one hundred years have passed since the Chinese laborers first landed in this country in the mid-nineteenth century. Yet their history remains cloudy. This phenomenon is quite understandable if one considers the facts that most of the laborers were illiterate, did not have the ability, and never intended, to speak for themselves. It is true that many scholarly works have been published, but few were written by Chinese historians. As a matter of fact, Chinese scholars are unaware that a small number of their countrymen played a strange, pitiful role in American history. The published works reflect the viewpoint of only American observers. The labor of the Chinese workers was indispensable to the development of the frontier West at a time when resources were abundant and labor hands were few. So much work had to be done building railroads and dams, digging mines, clearing farm lands, canning salmon, etc. And the Chinese were welcomed to every line of manual work. There was a time when nearly every family at Astoria of Oregon and Olympia of Washington hired a Chinese as servant, as some writers claim. When the great number of whites moved in from the east, along with them came the floating laborers and the European immigrants, as well as the labor union. Conditions changed rapidly, the Chinese found themselves not only excluded from all employment, but persecuted everywhere. California was the state which first utilized Chinese labor and first expelled it. This unfavorable circumstance forced the Chinese to flee from California to other states. The purpose of this paper is not to give an account of how the Chinese were maltreated in a country known as a free, equal land opened widely to the whole world, but rather tries to find out how they survived, what were their daily problems, sorrows, and happiness, if any, and what were their inner feelings, their attitudes toward the white hosts. In short, the paper is written in an attempt to reconstruct their life in an alien land. In addition, the paper tries to answer the question why this oriental group appeared so peculiar in their behavior, as some whites commented, that they were both condemned and contemned. One of the crucial problems facing the researcher in the field of early Chinese immigration history is the lack of original materials. This is the common defects in all the published works on this subject. Fortunately for the author, by an unique chance, he was able to study numerous objects left in a Chinese grocery store, the Kam Wah Chung Co. at John Day--a small town once a busy mining area in Eastern Oregon. The pioneer artifacts in this town are disappearing, though the gravels of the old gold placers are still visible along the hillsides and canyons. But the queer old building of the Chinese store is still standing stubbornly as it did one hundred years ago, on a road called Canton Street So many objects were left in the building that the city of John Day is endeavoring to open it as a museum. From a historical point of view, many of these objects are very valuable. Among them are a great number of letters. Some were sent to the laborers from their families, in care of that building. Others were from the laborers to their homes, and for some unknown reason had not been sent to China. They are unique and of special importance to this paper. Perhaps nowhere else in the United States, or in War-torn China, can one find such a number of first hand records about the early Chinese in this country. Although few significant events, romantic affairs, or anything exciting can be expected of them, still, one can reconstruct a plain sketch of their life from these materials. The paper, though it only presents a small picture of the Chinese group in Eastern Oregon, is aimed to serve, hopefully, as a footnote leading to an understanding of how the early Chinese immigrants once lived in the Pacific Northwest.
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115. [Article] Indians and Criminal Justice in Early Oregon, 1842-1859
Indian-white relations in early Oregon are often viewed in terms of warfare and treatymaking, but these are only the most obvious aspects of a larger struggle to resolve cultural conflicts, settle land ...Citation Citation
- Title:
- Indians and Criminal Justice in Early Oregon, 1842-1859
- Author:
- Ferrell, John Samuel
- Year:
- 1973
Indian-white relations in early Oregon are often viewed in terms of warfare and treatymaking, but these are only the most obvious aspects of a larger struggle to resolve cultural conflicts, settle land disputes, and establish order in a new territory. Additional understanding of both white attitudes toward Indians and of Indian exasperation with the settlers may be gained from a study of how criminal justice applied to the red man during the turbulent pre-reservation era. Prior to the coming of America settlers, Oregon Indians knew the justice of the Hudson's Bay Company. In dealing with personas accused of harming HBC personnel or property, Dr. John McLoughlin acted with firmness and persistence while taking cognizance of the Indian's own ideas of just treatment, The American leaders of later years sometimes imitated McLoughlin's firmness but failed to recognize the importance of Indian tradition. Dr. Elijah White, after bring appointed the first U.S. Indian agent for Oregon in 1842, presented the natives with a law code which largely ignored their own traditions and confused them by making major offenses of what had formerly been viewed as minor infractions. Dr. White assured his charges that the new law code came from God and was recognized by all civilized nations. A similar smugness was apparent in later leaders who were convinced that the court proceedings against Indian troublemakers could not help but make a deep and beneficial impression on the defendants' fellow tribesman. Such assurance sometimes blinded the whites to inequities in their application of justice to Indian-white disputes and this blindness contributed to friction between the races. Criminal justice for Indians was a more complex matter during Oregon's territorial period than it had been during the HBC era. To the Indians, the British had been trading partners, but the Americans were dispossessors. A sizable influx of settlers preceded the signing of the Indian treaties, and the presence of two divergent cultures on the same disputed ground made necessary some means of dealing with the disagreements which inevitably arose. But civil officials, army officers, judges, and Indian agents were still working out their respective spheres of influence while new settlers might be many miles away from any hands. The belief expressed by leading figures in the army and the Indian Bureau that whites were to blame for outbreaks of violence did not encourage irate settlers or miners to rely on these agencies to settle disputes with Indians, and citizens' courts, minors' committees, or indiscriminate reprisals were often only forms of "justice" employed. Indians noted the infrequencies of prosecution for whites who committed crimes against them and complained that the whites had one set of laws for themselves and another for the red man, Adverse public opinion worked against the efforts of Indian superintendent Joel Palmer to correct this grievance, and lawyers sometimes questioned whether Indian were, in fact, "persons" or whether their mistreatment could constitute a crime. Even Dick Johnson, a successful Indian farmer who abandoned his native culture and won the support of Palmer and of Jesse Applegate in his efforts to model his life on white men's ideals, had so little legal identity that his suspected murderers were not tried and one of them was allowed to take his farm. Segregation of land and of peoples was the distraction in which both the law and public opinion pointed in Oregon Territory. Consciously and unconsciously, whites encouraged Indians to accept a reservation solution to the problems generated by land-hunger and culture clash, and among these problems legal discrimination and vigilante justice figured prominently. Hatred of the Indians among many of the settlers contributed substantially to distortion and non-application of criminal justice, but even with favorable public opinion, as in the case of Dick Johnson, the law itself was insufficient for an Indian who did not remove himself from white society and accept the treaty protections of the reservation.
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The nutria (Myocastor coypus) is a large semi-aquatic mammal native to South America that has been introduced to numerous countries around the world, primarily for fur farming. Nutria were introduced in ...
Citation Citation
- Title:
- Report on Nutria Management and Research in the Pacific Northwest
- Author:
- Sheffels, Trevor Robert, Sytsma, Mark
- Year:
- 2007
The nutria (Myocastor coypus) is a large semi-aquatic mammal native to South America that has been introduced to numerous countries around the world, primarily for fur farming. Nutria were introduced in Oregon and Washington in the 1930s, and feral populations were documented in 1943. Populations are known to be expanding in both Oregon and Washington, and regional nutria damage and nuisance complaints have increased in recent years. Most of the extensive damage caused by nutria is a direct result of feeding and burrowing, but nutria are also capable of transporting parasites and pathogens transmittable to humans, livestock, and pets. Although several past regional and local nutria research and management projects have been identified, there is a shortage of nutria information from the Pacific Northwest considering that the species has been present in the region for approximately seventy years. The Center for Lakes and Reservoirs (CLR) at Portland State University (PSU), in partnership with several local, state, and federal agencies, has taken the lead in addressing the regional nutria problem. Activities completed to date include a regional nutria management workshop, the ongoing development of a regional nutria distribution/density map, and a research project to analyze the impact of nutria herbivory on regional riparian wetland habitat restoration projects. In addition, the CLR at PSU is participating in the development of the national Aquatic Nuisance Species Task Force nutria management plan. This initial assessment of the current nutria situation in the Pacific Northwest conducted by the CLR at PSU has revealed that regional nutria problems are more extensive than previously realized. Nutria sightings have now been confirmed from the Canadian border to near the southern border of Oregon, confirming a larger range than was previously known. It was also found that the main nutria issues in the Pacific Northwest differ from the main nutria issues in Louisiana and Maryland. For example, the most significant category of regional nutria damage appears to be the destruction of water control structures and associated erosion caused by nutria burrowing, as opposed to nutria herbivory damage in Louisiana and Maryland. Another unique situation in the Pacific Northwest is the high density of nutria populations in urban areas, increasing the potential for conflicts between nutria and humans. Nutria attacks have been reported in isolated cases, and nutria are rodents that carry a variety of transmittable parasites and pathogens. It has also been confirmed that significant regional nutria herbivory damage does occur at some locations. Fortunately, it has become evident through the course of this assessment that a strong regional interest to address the nutria problem exists. A wide variety of agencies and organizations across the region are being negatively impacted by nutria, and these entities are ready to move forward to develop a feasible solution. To date, small-scale nutria management and eradication efforts have been somewhat effective temporarily, but a more permanent solution requires that the situation be addressed on a much larger scale. Due to the long period of time since the initial nutria introduction, the extent of current regional nutria populations, and the changing climate patterns, a long-term effort will likely be required to effectively address the regional nutria issue. The most immediate management need is to develop an official regional nutria management plan with the focus of greatly reducing the amount of damage being caused by this invasive rodent and preventing further population growth and expansion. The effectiveness of initial management efforts will shed light on how to adapt management strategies in the future and whether or not regional eradication is a feasible option. Continued nutria research and the development of coordinated management efforts at the regional scale are vital in order to bring the current regional nutria problem under control. The CLR at PSU has developed initial recommendations to help guide the process of determining how to most effectively manage nutria in the Pacific Northwest. First and foremost, funding sources for continued work on the regional nutria problem must be found. Once funding is secured, the development of an official nutria regional management plan is crucial. Priorities connected with the management plan would include creating an early detection rapid response plan, identifying best management practices, initiating a pilot eradication program, and identifying priority research needs. Potential research studies include a long-term pilot eradication project at the watershed level, relationships between climate change and regional nutria dispersal, and the dynamics of nutria-muskrat interactions. It is also evident that further coordination between local, state, and federal agencies is necessary to delegate responsibilities and keep all parties updated. The creation of a central regional database and appropriate agency protocols could be used to collect information about nutria damage and associated economic impacts. Current laws and regulations pertaining to nutria should be enforced and possibly updated so that Oregon and Washington laws are uniform. Finally, it is important to inform the public about current nutria issues and utilize resources the general public can potentially provide.