Recent Submissions

  • Flexible and inclusive ecology projects that harness collaboration and neon-enabled science to enhance student learning

    Stack Whitney, Kaitlin; Heard, Matthew Joshua; Anderson, Laurel J.; Cooke, Sandra; Garneau, Danielle; Kilgore, Jason S.; Kolozsvary, Mary Beth; Kuers, Karen; Lunch, Claire K.; McCay, Timothy S.; et al. (2022-04)
    "The COVID-19 pandemic significantly impacted undergraduate education and fundamentally altered the structure of course delivery in higher education. In field-based biology and ecology courses, where instructors and students typically work collaboratively and in-person to collect data, this has been particularly challenging. In this context, faculty from the Ecological Research as Education Network (EREN) collaborated with the National Ecological Observatory Network (NEON) to design five free flexible learning projects for use by instructors in varied modalities (e.g., socially distanced in-person, remote, or HyFlex). The five flexible learning projects incorporated the Ecological Society of America’s 4DEE framework and included field data collection, data analysis components, and an activity that incorporates existing NEON field protocols or datasets. Each project was designed to provide faculty members with a high degree of flexibility so that they could tailor the implementation of the projects to fit course-specific needs. Collectively, these learning projects were designed to be flexible, inclusive, and facilitate hands-on research while working in alternative classroom settings."
  • Where is garlic mustard? Understanding the context for dense invasions of Alliaria petiolata

    Rodgers, Vikki L.; Scanga, Sara E.; Kolozsvary, Mary Beth; Garneau, Danielle; Kilgore, Jason S.; Anderson, Laurel J.; Hopfensperger, Kristine N.; Aguilera, Anna G.; Urban, Rebecca A.; Juneau, Kevyn (BioScience, 2022-06)
    "The invasive plant Alliaria petiolata (garlic mustard) has spread throughout forest understory and edge communities in much of North America, but its persistence, density, and impacts have varied across sites and time. Surveying the literature since 2008, we evaluated both previously proposed and new mechanisms for garlic mustard’s invasion success and note how they interact and vary across ecological contexts. We analyzed how and where garlic mustard has been studied and found a lack of multisite and longitudinal studies, as well as regions that may be under- or overstudied, leading to poor representation for understanding and predicting future invasion dynamics. Inconsistencies in how sampling units are scaled and defined can also hamper our understanding of invasive species. We present new conceptual models for garlic mustard invasion from a macrosystems perspective, emphasizing the importance of synergies and feedbacks among mechanisms across spatial and temporal scales to produce variable ecological contexts"
  • Digital and Social Media Marketing Strategies of American and Canadian Restaurants in a Pandemic

    Gultek, Mark (Journal of Marketing Management, 2021)
    This paper examines the impacts of COVID-19 pandemic on restaurant marketing practices and outlines a two-pronged approach of analyzing digital marketing and social media platforms that restaurants use to market their product. The presence of COVID-19 information and practices in these marketing platforms is explored in a comparison model of restaurants between the United States and Canada. Understanding the marketing impact of these practices during a global pandemic can provide actionable insights to promote development and sustainability in the restaurant industry. Since very little research has examined the marketing strategies of restaurants during a pandemic as well as exploring a country comparison model to shed light on the global aspects of it, this paper is one of the frontier studies looking critically at the potential impacts of the COVID-19 pandemic on the restaurant industry.
  • Manipulating Chladni Patterns of Ferromagnetic Materials by an External Magnetic Field

    Podolak, Kenneth R.; Wickramasinghe, Vihan A.W.; Mansfield, Gareth A.; Tuller, Alex M. (Sound & Vibration, 2021)
    Ernst Chladni is called the father of acoustics for his work, which includes investigating patterns formed by vibrating plates. Understanding these patterns helps research involving standing waves and other harmonic behaviors, including studies of single electron orbits in atoms. Our experiment vibrates circular plates which result in well-known patterns. Alternatively to traditional experiments that used sand or salt, we use magnetic materials, namely iron filings and nickel powder. We then manipulate the patterns by applying a localized external magnetic field to one of the rings that moves a segment of the magnetic material in that ring to the next inner ring. The results show a significant decrease in magnetic field necessary to move the magnetic material at higher frequencies as well as a significant decrease in the magnetic field required to move the magnetic material as nickel powder is substituted for iron filings while keeping the mass constant.
  • The Impact of CEOs’ Incentives for Risk-Taking or Risk-Aversion on Corporate Performance: Using CEO Vega and CEO Delta as Incentive Measures

    Garas, Samy; Kienpin, Tee; Lee, Chuo-Hsuan (2022)
    This article has a two-fold purpose. First, we investigate whether the CEOs’ risk-taking incentives are associated with better concurrent firm performance. Second, we examine the impact of gender on the aforementioned relationship. We find solid empirical evidence that CEOs’ risk-aversion incentive, as represented by a higher CEO delta, can be linked to better concurrent firm performance such as return on assets (ROA) and Market-to-Book Value (MTB) ratio. By contrast, we find that the risk-taking incentive, as represented by CEO vega, has no significant impact on ROA, but has a significant impact on MTB ratio only among the group of CEOs with larger share ownerships. Furthermore, we research on the same incentives using only female CEOs in our sample. Our panel-data findings indicate that female CEOs on average possessed a lower CEO delta (low risk aversion) and a lower CEO vega (risk-taking incentive) in their compensation packages when compared with their male counterparts. Taken together, these two risk incentives; are linked to a lower concurrent ROA and MTB value. Our findings also indicate that the aforementioned positive relationship between CEOs’ risk- aversion incentive (as measured by CEO delta) and firm performance (as measured by ROA) are less pronounced when a CEO is female. This implies that a female CEO is less likely to increase the firm’s ROA relative to a male CEO, given the same sensitivity of personal wealth to stock price change (i.e., the same CEO delta).
  • The Impact of Ruling Family Board Members on the Performance of Commercial Banks

    Kienpin, Tee; Garas, Samy (Association for Accountancy & Business Affairs, 2021)
    We examine the impact of royal family involvement in the ownership and strategic management of commercial banks within the Gulf Cooperation Council (GCC) region. Existing finance literature has examined the impact of board members with political connections on bank performance to find mixed evidence of whether such connections have a positive or negative impact. However, such empirical studies have not been applied to the commercial banks of the GCC region. Our empirical analysis uses four separate metrics of performance to examine what influence board membership, board chairmanship and bank ownership shares by a royal family member has on bank performance. Our panel data analysis of GCC commercial bank data across six countries from 2013 to 2018 reveals that all three potential royal family roles exert a positive influence over GCC commercial bank performance. We derive these empirical results using relevant control variables at both the firm level and the industry level. Furthermore, we apply a system generalized moments of methods specification to our sample and find that these results are invariant to various specification robustness checks. Our results appear to support the Resource Dependency Theory (RDT), where the commercial banks rely on external resources to enhance financial performance.
  • Wildlife Response to Wildfire in a Northern New York Jack Pine Barrens

    Cave, Hannah; Adams, Matthew; Jaeger, Tristan; Peet, Taylor; Staats, Lloyd; Garneau, Danielle; Lesser, Mark (MDPI AG, 2021-05-25)
    Natural disturbances are an integral part of forested ecosystem function and successional path-ways. In many forested ecosystems, wildfires are critical to shaping composition and structure, which in turn has major implications for wildlife usage and behavior. In July 2018 a wildfire burned 225 ha of the Altona Flat Rock pine barrens in northern New York. This event presented the opportunity to study how wildlife respond to the immediate effects of disturbance in this unique habitat but also how that response would change through time as regeneration progressed. Game cameras were deployed from September 2018-September 2020 at two reference (unburned) and two disturbed (burned) sites within the pine barrens. We analyzed total and seasonal occurrences, to determine how usage differed between disturbed and reference conditions, and with time since disturbance. Additionally, for coyote (Canis latrans, Say), white-tailed deer (Odocoileus virginianus, Zimmermann), and snowshoe hare (Lepus americanus, Erxleben), we evaluated daily activity patterns and overlap to determine how predator-prey relationships differed between conditions, and with time since disturbance. Over 730 days a total of 1,048 wildlife occurrences were captured across 23 wildlife species. Fifty-seven percent of all occurrences were at reference sites with over 100 more occurrences than disturbed sites, however, differences were most pronounced immediately following the fire and overall occurrences have grown more similar between the sites over time. Specifically, deer and hare were found more often at reference sites immediately following the fire, but shifted to using both conditions equally by the first growing season. Habitat overlap among sympatric prey (deer, hare) can be explained by understory regeneration increasing foraging opportunities and concealment cover in the disturbed condition, while predators (coyotes) tracked prey availability regardless of the habitat condition. This study provides wildlife management guidance on habitat use and response to disturbance for this unique sandstone pavement barrens.
  • Predicted Metabolic Function of the Gut Microbiota of Drosophila melanogaster

    Ankrah, Nana Y. D.; Barker, Brandon E.; Song, Joan; Wu, Cindy; McMullen, John G.; Douglas, Angela E. (American Society for Microbiology, 2021-06-29)
    An important goal for many nutrition-based microbiome studies is to identify the metabolic function of microbes in complex microbial communities and their impact on host physiology. This research can be confounded by poorly understood effects of community composition and host diet on the metabolic traits of individual taxa. Here, we investigated these multiway interactions by constructing and analyzing metabolic models comprising every combination of five bacterial members of the Drosophila gut microbiome (from single taxa to the five-member community of Acetobacter and Lactobacillus species) under three nutrient regimes. We show that the metabolic function of Drosophila gut bacteria is dynamic, influenced by community composition, and responsive to dietary modulation. Furthermore, we show that ecological interactions such as competition and mutualism identified from the growth patterns of gut bacteria are underlain by a diversity of metabolic interactions, and show that the bacteria tend to compete for amino acids and B vitamins more frequently than for carbon sources. Our results reveal that, in addition to fermentation products such as acetate, intermediates of the tricarboxylic acid (TCA) cycle, including 2-oxoglutarate and succinate, are produced at high flux and cross-fed between bacterial taxa, suggesting important roles for TCA cycle intermediates in modulating Drosophila gut microbe interactions and the potential to influence host traits. These metabolic models provide specific predictions of the patterns of ecological and metabolic interactions among gut bacteria under different nutrient regimes, with potentially important consequences for overall community metabolic function and nutritional interactions with the host.
  • Succinate: a microbial product that modulates Drosophila nutritional physiology

    Zhang, Freya Q.; McMullen, John G.; Douglas, Angela E.; Ankrah, Nana Y.D. (Wiley, 2021-02-24)
    Gut microorganisms process food in animal guts and release many metabolic by-products, which are predicted to influence host physiological processes such as energy and lipid metabolism. Here, we investigate how succinate, a TCA cycle intermediate that is a major predicted release product of gut bacteria in Drosophila, influences the nutritional physiology of its Drosophila host. We administered succinate as a dietary supplement to microbe- free Drosophila, and quantified key nutritional indices. Dietary succinate significantly reduced fly lipid levels by up to ∼50%. This response was not replicated in parallel experiments conducted with dietary fumarate supplement, indicating that it could not be attributed to a general effect of TCA intermediates. We hypothesize that microbe-derived succinate may contribute to the reduced lipid content of Drosophila bearing gut bacteria, relative to axenic Drosophila. More generally, this study high- lights the importance of microbial-derived metabolites as regulators of host metabolism.
  • Can athletes be tough yet compassionate to themselves? Practical implications for NCAA mental health best practice no. 4

    Stamatis, Andreas; Deal, Paul J.; Morgan, Grant B.; Forsse, Jeffrey S.; Papadakis, Zacharias; McKinley-Barnard, Sarah; Scudamore, Eric M.; Koutakis, Panagiotis (Public Library of Science (PLoS), 2020-12-31)
    Recent tragic events and data from official NCAA reports suggest student-athletes’ wellbeing is compromised by symptoms of mental health (MH) disorders. Self-compassion (SC) and mental toughness (MT) are two psychological constructs that have been shown effective against stressors associated with sports. The purpose of this study was to investigate SC, MT, and MH in a NCAA environment for the first time and provide practical suggestions for MH best practice No.4. In total, 542 student-athletes participated across Divisions (Mage = 19.84, SD = 1.7). Data were collected through Mental Toughness Index, Self-Compassion Scale, and Mental Health Continuum–Short Form. MT, SC (including mindfulness), and MH were positively correlated. Males scored higher than females on all three scales. No differences were found between divisions. SC partially mediated the MT-MH relationship, but moderation was not significant. Working towards NCAA MH best practice should include training athletes in both MT and SC skills (via mindfulness).
  • High-Intensity Interval Exercise Performance and Short-Term Metabolic Responses to Overnight-Fasted Acute-Partial Sleep Deprivation

    Papadakis, Zacharias; Forsse, Jeffrey S.; Stamatis, Andreas (MDPI AG, 2021-04-01)
    People practicing high-intensity interval exercise (HIIE) fasted during the morning hours under a lack of sleep. Such a habit may jeopardize the health benefits related to HIIE and adequate sleep. Fifteen habitually good sleeper males (age 31.1 ± 5.3 SD year) completed on a treadmill two isocaloric (500 kcal) HIIE sessions (3:2 min work:rest) averaged at 70% VO2reserve after 9–9.5 h of reference sleep exercise (RSE) and after 3–3.5 h of acute-partial sleep deprivation exercise (SSE). Diet and sleep patterns were controlled both 1 week prior and 2 days leading up to RSE and SSE. HIIE related performance and substrate utilization data were obtained from the continuous analysis of respiratory gases. Data were analyzed using repeated measures ANOVA with the baseline maximum oxygen uptake (VO2max) and body fat percentage (BF%) as covariates at p < 0.05. No difference was observed in VO2max, time to complete the HIIE, VE, RER, CHO%, and FAT% utilization during the experimental conditions. Whether attaining an adequate amount of sleep or not, the fasted HIIE performance and metabolism were not affected. We propose to practice the fasted HIIE under adequate sleep to receive the pleiotropic beneficial effects of sleep to the human body.
  • Baseball performance via the lens of anthropometric testing, fitness metrics, and statistics: a longitudinal cross-sectional study

    Papadakis, Zacharias; Padgett, Robert N.; Stamatis, Andreas; Karasch, Richard A. (Ovid Technologies (Wolters Kluwer Health), 2021-03)
    Background: Anthropometric testing (AT) and fitness metrics (FM) are contributing factors for success in sports. Limited evidence exists regarding longitudinal baseball AT or FM roles on baseball performance statistics (PS). AT, FM, and PS associations were examined for 5 yr to create a performance model. Methods: Eighty collegiate Division I players participated in this study. Height, mass, and body fat percentage (BF%) were selected as AT variables of interest. Grip strength (GS), one repetition maximum squat (1RMSQ), and vertical-jump height were selected for FM. Batting average percentage (AVG), slugging percentage (SLG), on-base percentage (OBP) baseball statistics were selected as offensive PS. Earned run average (ERA), batting average against percentage (B/ AVG), and strike-out per innings pitched for 9 innings (SO/IP)*9 were selected for defensive PS. Results: Offensive (r=−0.15, P<0.005; rs=−0.17, P<0.001) and defensive (r =−0.253, P<0.001; rs=−0.314, P<0.001) statistics correlated with BF%. Offensive (r =0.26, P<0.001; rs=0.43, P<0.001) and defensive (r =0.39, P <0.001) statistics correlated with GS. Offensive (r =0.26, P<0.001; rs=0.43, P <0.001) and defensive (r =0.27, P <0.001) statistics correlated with 1RMSQ. Offensive statistics AVG (R2=0.48) and SLG (R2=0.46) were explained by 1RMSQ. For defensive statistics, 1RMSQ was the best fit for (SO/IP)*9 (R2=0.43) and B/AVG (R2=0.52), and GS was the best fit for ERA (R2=0.39). Squat and time interaction for B/AVG was significant (P=0.04). Conclusions: Baseball PS are associated with 1RMSQ and GS. Time moderates the effect of squat training on B/AVG. Pitchers need to include squats to lower their B/AVG. Coaches may focus on improving such FM variables and consider the time effect on selected FM that may affect PS.
  • Forest pests and wood pellets: A literature review of the opportunities and risks in the United States’ northeastern forests

    Neidermeier, Alex; Danks, Cecilia; Coleman, Kimberly; Wallin, Kimberly (Elsevier BV, 2020-11)
    As interest in alternatives to fossil fuels increases, low quality timber may become more attractive as feedstock material for biomass energy. This low-quality timber, referred to here as salvage wood, can be used to manu- facture wood pellets, a densified biomass energy product which can be used for electricity and heating. The process of converting wood to pellets also results in total pest mortality in the final product, an important consideration given wood pellet’s international market and global concerns about phytosanitation, or the risk of pest spread. However, there is still potential to spread pests in the wood pellet supply chain. To better under- stand the potential benefits for forest health and the phytosanitary risks of the use of salvaged wood in the wood pellet supply chain, our study systematically reviews the literature published between 2000 and 2018, gleaning applicable considerations for the northeastern United States (US), a region already affected by the highest density of damaging forest pests in the country and an up-tick in wood pellet use. Our review focuses on three pest species likely to incur considerable change in northeastern US forests: emerald ash borer (Agrilus planipennis or EAB; an exotic, invasive species), hemlock woolly adelgid (Adelges tsugae Annand, or HWA; an exotic, invasive species), and southern pine beetle (Dendroctonus frontalis Zimmermann, or SPB, a native species). Our review finds that wood pellets are being recognized as phytosanitary in their final form and that the forest health opportunities for the use of salvaged wood exist are beginning to be acknowledged in the region. However, our results also indicate that the spread of pests is still possible in the feedstock pre-treatment supply chain, which have yet to be directly addressed in US-related scientific literature. Our review concludes that further research and action on the phytosanitary risks in the supply chain focus on individual pest species behavior during harvesting, on-site comminution of feedstock material, and local processing at facilities within USDA APHIS (United States Department of Agriculture Animal and Plant Health Inspection Service) quarantine zones for maximum mitigation. The results of these considerations can accrue benefits for forest health, mitigate the spread of forest pests, and support the use of an alternative energy to fossil fuels in a changing climate.
  • Bringing the Forest Home: Lessons Learned during the COVID-19 Pandemic about E-Planning in Community Forestry Contexts

    Beck, Samantha; Coleman, Kimberly; Tapper, J Ethan (Oxford University Press (OUP), 2021-09-11)
    This paper examines “e-planning,” or the use of computer-based systems to conduct planning and decision-making, in the context of community forest management. E-planning is growing in the field of environmental planning, as it promises greater equity in terms of public participation. However, a lack of scholarly work exists on the applicability for forest planning. During the COVID-19 pandemic, county foresters and other natural resource professionals in Vermont turned to e-planning when safety restrictions limited their ability to engage in face-to-face efforts. This provided an opportunity to collect empirical data about the potential for e-planning to support the public engagement process in the context of forest planning. We provide an overview of e-planning theory and examine data from Vermont to explore the promise of e-planning for forest management. We make recommendations about the applicability of e-planning in the context of forest planning, and highlight areas for future research to investigate.
  • Rigid Flexibility: Seeing the Opportunities in “Failed” Qualitative Research

    CohenMiller, Anna S.; Schnackenberg, Heidi; Demers, Denise (SAGE Publications, 2020-10-19)
    This article highlights an experience of “failing” within a qualitative research study. Specifically, the authors speak to the failure of recruiting participants in conducting synchronous video and telephone interviews. Drawing from literature in business and examples from research method texts to demonstrate the cross-disciplinary concerns and insights of failure within one’s work, the authors discuss how failure can be reframed as opportunity through the lens of “rigid flexibility” and the innovative steps they implemented. Providing additional insight into the process of framing and reframing failure in research, the authors integrate poetic inquiry as a tool for reflection to highlight their process and suggested steps for new researchers. The authors argue that researchers can approach studies with the idea that failures in the planning and/or execution can lead to opportunities and new insights.
  • Sonia Sotomayor’s Legal Phenomenology, Racial Policing, and the Limits of Law

    McMahon, John (University of Chicago Press, 2021-10-01)
    Sonia Sotomayor’s dissent in the Fourth Amendment case Utah v. Strieff (2016) received a great deal of media attention, particularly for its citations to prominent Black political thinkers and its evocations of Black Lives Matter. This article interprets Justice Sotomayor’s dissent as constructing an emergent legal theory that incorporates Black Lives Matter and the experiences of people of color subject to being stopped and searched into the core of Fourth Amendment jurisprudence. In contrast to Clarence Thomas’s abstracted majority opinion, I argue Sotomayor contests the meaning of law’s relations to subjects, bringing the feeling, moving, restrained, invaded, prodded, shaped, habitual, racialized subject of the police stop into Supreme Court legal reasoning. In tension with Sotomayor’s phenomenological alternative are structural and institutional constraints on the liberatory possibilities for any Supreme Court dissent, particularly one focused on racial injustice. The article argues for recognizing both the generativity of the emergent legal phenomenology and the constraints on its politics in order to grapple with the potential for legal critique to surface from what Sotomayor calls law’s “cold abstractions.”
  • Magicians of the Twenty-first Century: Enchantment, Domination, and the Politics of Work in Silicon Valley

    Crandall, Emily K.; Brown, Rachel H.; McMahon, John (Project Muse, 2021)
    What is the political theorist to make of self-characterizations of Silicon Valley as the beacon of civilization-saving innovation? Through an analysis of "tech bro" masculinity and the closely related discourses of tech icons Elon Musk and Peter Thiel, we argue that undergirding Silicon Valley's technological utopia is an exploitative work ethic revamped for the industry's innovative ethos. On the one hand, Silicon Valley hypothetically offers a creative response to what Max Weber describes as the disenchantment of the modern world. Simultaneously, it depoliticizes the actual work necessary for these dreams to be realized, mystifying its modes of domination.
  • Educating in and for uncertainty: climate science, human evolution and the legacy of Arne Naess as guidance for ecological practice

    García-Notario, Margarita (Informa UK Limited, 2021-03-12)
    This paper reflects on how the issue of climate change and the general state of our planet is, among other causes, a main factor in the paralyzing divisions ailing Western societies. This situation, while unsettling to democracies, is promoting a kind of education in and through fear and I question if education can succeed under these circumstances without becoming indoctrination. This paper does not try to diminish the urgency and the importance of current environmental problems but rather expands today´s perspectives and incorporates research in more constructive ways of thinking and doing. I use scientific contributions in climatology, evolution, environmental conservation, economics, and neuroscience to bring new light to today’s investigations about the human and the non-human world. Finally, I propose Deep Ecology’s principles of deep questioning, deep experience and deep commitment, as a guide for new educational and ecological practices.
  • An Engaging and Fun Breakout Activity for Educators and Students about Laboratory Safety

    Nephew, Shannon; Sunasee, Rajesh (American Chemical Society (ACS), 2020-10-13)
    To maintain a safe laboratory working environment, academic institutions are highly committed to providing safety training to all employees, and engaging educators and students in the process must be an integral component of an overall safety training program. At SUNY Plattsburgh, annual mandatory safety training is required for all employees. One of the main challenges is trying to maintain a high level of engagement of educators during the safety training session. This recently led to designing an engaging and simple hands-on breakout safety activity to teach educators and students about safe laboratory practices. The breakout safety activity mimics the fun of a typical “escape room” game. The different components of the breakout safety activity and the effect on the level of engagement of the participants are highlighted here. The versatility of the novel breakout safety activity is appealing as it can easily be modified for various science laboratories and implemented with diverse participants including educators and undergraduate and graduate students. Overall, this new breakout safety activity turned out to be not only engaging, but also fun and effective for all.
  • Challenges of Teaching Organic Chemistry during COVID-19 Pandemic at a Primarily Undergraduate Institution

    Sunasee, Rajesh (American Chemical Society (ACS), 2020-07-28)
    With a sudden move to remote and online teaching due to COVID-19 pandemic, Organic Chemistry became more challenging for both students and educators with the emergence of new technological challenges and instructional strategies. The Organic Chemistry I class at SUNY Plattsburgh was shifted to an online learning model in an attempt to mimic face-to-face teaching as well as maintaining active learning. This communication highlights the instructor’s perspectives on the challenges and insights gained for teaching Organic Chemistry I (lecture component) for the Spring 2020 semester in the time of COVID-19. A combination of asynchronous and synchronous teaching methods was found to be effective for content delivery, active learning, and increasing student’s engagement. Synchronous class attendance was monitored and compared with typical face-to-face class attendance. Synchronous problem-solving exercises had an effect on student’s attendance rate and learning. An exit survey indicated about 64% of students had a preference for face to-face teaching over online teaching of Organic Chemistry.

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