Integrated Statistics (United States)

The 21st-century education paradigm and Sustainable Development Goal (SDG) 4 aimed to produce and supply highly calibrated and qualified teachers. A professional teacher should pass the licensure examination to become a full-fledged professional teacher. However, licensure examination is one of the hurdles for beginning teachers, and failing rates were still observed among universities and colleges in the Philippines. Hence, this study aimed to evaluate the licensure examination success of teacher education graduates in one state university in the City of Malolos, Bulacan covering the years of 2019, 2022, and 2023. This study utilized quantitative trend analysis to determine the trends and success of licensure examination of the stated years. The data revealed that the trend and patterns of licensure examination for teachers (LET) results of beginning teachers for the three consecutive years are above the national passing percentage of 75% and described as satisfactory. The beginning teachers’ satisfactory results produce a significant difference in the following: examination year, elementary education area of concentration, secondary education area of concentration, and examination components. Thus, the strengthening and enhancing the existing curricular and pre-board examination program should be intensified and reinforced to sustain and uplift the university’s standing in terms of success rate.

This paper first presents the evolution of the theory of change in psychotherapy from Freud onwards. The second part presents my own struggle to foster change by overcoming obstacles. I believe it is important to avoid confronting defenses that foster an adversarial point of view. Instead, it is helpful to approach the understanding of behavior by focusing on the purpose it serves, i.e., the adaptive point of view.

Visual line transect (VLT) surveys are central to the monitoring and study of marine mammals. However, for cryptic species such as deep diving cetaceans VLT surveys alone suffer from problems of low sample sizes and availability bias where animals below the surface are not available to be detected. The advent of passive acoustic monitoring (PAM) technology offers important opportunities to observe deep diving cetaceans but statistical challenges remain particularly when trying to integrate VLT and PAM data. Herein, we present a general framework to combine these data streams to estimate abundance when both surveys are conducted simultaneously. Secondarily, our approach can also be used to derive an estimate of availability bias. We outline three methods that vary in complexity and data requirements which are (1) a simple distance sampling (DS) method that treats the two datasets independently (DS-DS Method), (2) a fully integrated approach that applies a capture-mark recapture (CMR) analysis to the PAM data (CMR-DS Method) and (3) a hybrid approach that requires only a subset of the PAM CMR data (Hybrid Method). To evaluate their performance, we use simulations based on known diving and vocalizing behavior of sperm whales (Physeter macrocephalus). As a case study, we applied the Hybrid Method to data from a shipboard survey of sperm whales and compared estimates to a VLT only analysis. Simulation results demonstrated that the CMR-DS Method and Hybrid Method reduced bias by >90% for both abundance and availability bias in comparison to the simpler DS -DS Method. Overall, the CMR-DS Method was the least biased and most precise. For the case study, our application of the Hybrid Method to the sperm whale dataset produced estimates of abundance and availability bias that were comparable to estimates from the VLT only analysis but with considerably higher precision. Integrating multiple sources of data is an important goal with clear benefits. As a step towards that goal we have developed a novel framework. Results from this study are promising although challenges still remain. Future work may focus on applying this method to other deep-diving species and comparing the proposed method to other statistical approaches that aim to combine information from multiple data sources.

Animals belonging to the small, endangered population of western gray whales (Echrichtius robustus) are observed today primarily during the summer open-water season in feeding areas off the northeastern coast of Sakhalin Island, Russia. The migration route(s) and wintering area(s) used by this population are largely unknown. Gray whales once had a fairly extensive distribution in the Sea of Okhotsk but little detailed information has been published on when and where they occurred. Open-boat, ship-based whalers from the United States and a few other countries conducted an intensive hunt for bowhead whales (Balaena mysticetus) and North Pacific right whales (Eubalaena japonica) in the Sea of Okhotsk from the 1840s to 1870s. According to entries in voyage logbooks, the American whalers regularly encountered (and sometimes hunted) gray whales in the far northeastern corner of the Okhotsk Sea (Shelikhov Bay, Gizhiginskaya Bay and Penzhinskaya Gulf) between early May-late August. They also observed gray whales in summer along the northern coast of the sea (especially Tauskaya Bay), around the Shantar Islands, in Sakhalin Bay, off Cape Elizabeth at the northern tip of Sakhalin Island and along the west coast of the Kamchatka peninsula. No evidence was found in the logbooks studied of gray whales (and indeed of whaling effort) off northeastern Sakhalin Island where most observations of gray whales occur in the present day.

Stream temperature plays an important role in many biotic and abiotic processes, as it influences many physical, chemical, and biological properties in rivers. As such, a good understanding of the thermal regime of rivers is essential for effective fisheries management and the protection of aquatic habitats. Moreover, a thorough understanding of underlying physical processes and river heat fluxes is essential in developing better and more adaptive water temperature models. Very few studies have quantified river evaporation and rivers’ corresponding evaporative cooling component. The present study investigated the evaporative cooling of the Little Southwest Miramichi River in Eastern Canada by calculating the evaporative heat flux and overall heat fluxes using in-situ data. Results showed that the evaporative heat flux reached −300 W m−2 mid-day when high water temperatures were observed. The daily evaporative heat flux can thus account for close to 50% of the total heat losses, followed by longwave radiation (25%), streambed heat fluxes (20%), and sensible heat (5%). Our results show that the evaporative heat flux can be a critical cooling mechanism for wide and shallow rivers during high summer temperatures.

The code in this repository contains the scripts to run the analyses described in the manuscript " Integrating passive acoustic data from a towed hydrophone array with visual line transect data to estimate abundance and availability bias: A case study with sperm whales (<em>Physeter macrocephalus</em>)" by Sigourney et al. 2023 (submitted to PeerJ). It is publicly available on github at https://github.com/NEFSC/READ-PSB-DSIGOURNEY-AcousticDataIntegration.

As species respond to warming water temperatures, fishers dependent upon such species are being compelled to make choices concerning harvest strategies. Should they “follow fish” to new fishing grounds? Should they change their mix of target species? Should they relocate their operations to new ports? We examined how fishing communities in the Northeast United States —a hotspot of recent warming—have already responded to documented shifts in the distribution and abundance of fluke, red and silver hake. We focused on groundfish trawl communities that historically targeted these species and examined their “at-sea” responses by combining qualitative interviews with quantitative analysis of fishing records and ecological surveys. Three distinct responses emerged: shifting fishing grounds, shifting target species, and shifting port of landing. Our research finds that following the fish is rare and only occurred in one of the assessed communities, the large trawler community of Beaufort, North Carolina. The more common response was a shift in target species and a change in catch composition. However, regulations and markets often constrained the ability to take advantage of a changing mix of species within fishing grounds. Indeed, the overall species diversity in catch has declined among all of our focal communities suggesting that communities have lost the ability to be flexible when it may be most needed as a response to climate change. Additionally, the high value of fluke and the need to land in southern states with higher quota allocations is likely a driver of the changing nature of “community” with increasing vessels landing outside their home port, especially when landing fluke. Our findings suggest that fidelity to historical fishing grounds combined with perceiving environmental change as non-permanent, predispose many fishers to trust in “cyclicality” and return of species over time. However, this strategy may make those communities unable or unwilling to “follow fish” more vulnerable to changes in distribution and abundance due to climate change. Our findings have the potential to directly inform resource management policies as well as more deliberate adaptations by communities themselves as they strive to address the imminent risks of climate change.

Despite a long-documented history of severe harmful algal blooms (HABs) in New England coastal waters, corresponding HAB-associated marine mammal mortality events in this region are far less frequent or severe relative to other regions where HABs are common. This long-term survey of the HAB toxins saxitoxin (STX) and domoic acid (DA) demonstrates significant and widespread exposure of these toxins in New England marine mammals, across multiple geographic, temporal and taxonomic groups. Overall, 19% of the 458 animals tested positive for one or more toxins, with 15% and 7% testing positive for STX and DA, respectively. 74% of the 23 different species analyzed demonstrated evidence of toxin exposure. STX was most prevalent in Maine coastal waters, most frequently detected in common dolphins (Delphinus delphis), and most often detected during July and October. DA was most prevalent in animals sampled in offshore locations and in bycaught animals, and most frequently detected in mysticetes, with humpback whales (Megaptera novaeangliae) testing positive at the highest rates. Feces and urine appeared to be the sample matrices most useful for determining the presence of toxins in an exposed animal, with feces samples having the highest concentrations of STX or DA. No relationship was found between the bloom season of toxin-producing phytoplankton and toxin detection rates, however STX was more likely to be present in July and October. No relationship between marine mammal dietary preference and frequency of toxin detection was observed. These findings are an important part of a framework for assessing future marine mammal morbidity and mortality events, as well as monitoring ecosystem health using marine mammals as sentinel organisms for predicting coastal ocean changes.