Wyoming

ABSTRACT A new RN/BSN nursing program offers rural students in a western state the opportunity to address significant health care needs on a local level by developing public health leadership competencies in their home communities. The innovative program, funded by a grant from the Health Resources and Services Administration, makes it possible for RNs to complete their BSN degrees without travel, as they position themselves to provide critically needed health care leadership in their local areas. Partnerships between the university, community colleges, and local health agencies allow students in the RN-to-BSN program to benefit from a streamlined BSN admission process, onsite mentoring, and newly developed courses that lead students to reflect on health needs in their home communities. On the basis of Public Health Nursing Competencies as defined by the Nursing Quad Council (2004), the re-designed curriculum prepares students for public health leadership by encouraging application of competencies while participating in the delivery of essential public health services in their communities. Initial response to this new opportunity indicates that students can develop as leaders by developing public health competencies, and facets of the program may encourage more students to commit to completing the BSN while increasing capacity among PHNs.

In this article, chipped stone raw materials from the Garrett Allen site are discussed, with emphasis on the stone tools. As indicated by Eckles (2013), who discussed the history of investigations and chronology, this is one of several articles to be presented on various aspects of the site’s artifacts. One of the remarkable aspects of the site is the variety of chipped stone raw materials. There are varieties of flint, chert, agate, jasper, chalcedony, petrified wood, orthoquartzite, metaquartzite, quartz, silicified shale, clinker, non-volcanic glass, obsidian, and basalt from many parts of Wyoming and surrounding states. The diversity of raw material types is present throughout the cultural deposits. There is no knappable tool stone on site; the only rocks are small fragments of drab, buff-gray sandstone. All culturally manipulated lithic materials were therefore brought into the site, many from considerable distances. The site is located on private land in southeastern Carbon County, Wyoming at the northern end of the Medicine Bow Mountains and southern edge of the Hanna-Carbon Basin. It is within a homoclinal valley near the perennial Quealy Spring. Deposits are primarily alluvial, derived from the surrounding geological formations (Hayter 1981:31).

This poster details the archaeological collections housed at the University of Wyoming Archaeological Repository (UWAR) located in Laramie. The repository houses approximately 3 million artifacts from 15,000 different Wyoming sites as well as comparative, replica, experimental, and educational materials. We highlight our extensive suite of artifacts from across the state, which includes artifacts from all time periods from the Paleoindian to the Historic. Many of these objects are submitted through private donations, academic research, or are curated by contractors through Section 106 projects. We also discuss our partnerships with state, federal, and local agencies to complete education and outreach programs. These programs increase awareness and use of our archaeological collections in a variety of ways including hosting visiting researchers, loans to museums and historical societies, exhibit preparation, school group tours and classroom activity development, and an archaeological collections management class for undergraduates and graduates at the university. Finally, we show how we have used information from our own research on older collections to enhance modern investigations.

Since their introduction in 1995 and 1996, wolves have had effects on Yellowstone that ripple across the entire structure of the food web that defines biodiversity in the Northern Rockies ecosystem. Ecological interpretations of the wolves have generated a significant amount of debate about the relative strength of top-down versus bottom-up forces in determining herbivore and vegetation abundance in Yellowstone. Debates such as this are central to the resolution of broader debates about the role of natural enemies and climate as forces that structure food webs and modify ecosystem function. Ecologists need to significantly raise the profile of these discussions; understanding the forces that structure food webs and determine species abundance and the supply of ecosystem services is one of the central scientific questions for this century; its complexity will require new minds, new mathematics, and significant, consistent funding.

For more than a century paleontologists have used geologic and topographic information to inform their search for fossils. Yet the discovery of fossils is still largely a matter of luck. New computer models that look for hidden patterns in satellite images can generate maps of where fossils are likely to be located, thus helping fossil hunters narrow their search. Ground truthing of such predictive maps in the American West has shown that they do indeed improve the odds of finding fossil sites. In theory this approach could be used anywhere in the world.

To enhance our ability to extract palaeobiological and palaeoenvironmental information from ancient thermal spring deposits, we have studied the processes responsible for the development and preservation of stromatolites in modern subaerial thermal spring systems in Yellowstone National Park (USA). We investigated specimens collected from silica-depositing thermal springs along the thermal gradient using petrographic techniques and scanning electron microscopy. Although it is known that thermophilic cyanobacteria control the morphogenesis of thermal spring stromatolites below 73 degrees C, we have found that biofilms which contain filamentous thermophiles contribute to the microstructural development of subaerial geyserites that occur along the inner rims of thermal spring pools and geyser effluents. Biofilms intermittently colonize the surfaces of subaerial geyserites and provide a favoured substrate for opaline silica precipitation. We have also found that the preservation of biot...

Rapid global warming of 5 degrees to 10 degrees C during the Paleocene-Eocene Thermal Maximum (PETM) coincided with major turnover in vertebrate faunas, but previous studies have found little floral change. Plant fossils discovered in Wyoming, United States, show that PETM floras were a mixture of native and migrant lineages and that plant range shifts were large and rapid (occurring within 10,000 years). Floral composition and leaf shape and size suggest that climate warmed by approximately 5 degrees C during the PETM and that precipitation was low early in the event and increased later. Floral response to warming and/or increased atmospheric CO2 during the PETM was comparable in rate and magnitude to that seen in postglacial floras and to the predicted effects of anthropogenic carbon release and climate change on future vegetation.

Background

Few studies on eurypterids have taken into account morphological changes that occur throughout postembryonic development. Here two species of eurypterid are described from the Pragian Beartooth Butte Formation of Cottonwood Canyon in Wyoming, and included in a phylogenetic analysis. Both species comprise individuals from a number of instars, and this allows for changes that occur throughout their ontogeny to be documented, and how ontogenetically variable characters can influence phylogenetic analysis to be tested.
Results

The two species of eurypterid are described as Jaekelopterus howelli (Kjellesvig-Waering and Størmer, 1952) and Strobilopterus proteus sp. nov. Phylogenetic analysis places them within the Pterygotidae and Strobilopteridae respectively, both families within the Eurypterina. Jaekelopterus howelli shows positive allometry of the cheliceral denticles throughout ontogeny, while a number of characteristics including prosomal appendage length, carapace shape, lateral eye position, and relative breadth all vary during the growth of Strobilopterus proteus.
Conclusions

The ontogeny of Strobilopterus proteus shares much in common with that of modern xiphosurans, however certain characteristics including apparent true direct development suggest a closer affinity to arachnids. The ontogenetic development of the genital appendage also supports the hypothesis that the structure is homologous to the endopods of the trunk limbs of other arthropods. Including earlier instars in the phylogenetic analysis is shown to destabilise the retrieved topology. Therefore, coding juveniles as individual taxa in an analysis is shown to be actively detrimental and alternative ways of coding ontogenetic data into phylogenetic analyses should be explored.

You might wonder why western Colorado doesn’t already have a thriving population of wolves, given that the Federal government reintroduced gray wolves in the Northern Rockies over a quarter century ago. Gary Skiba and I embarked on a journey to find out, crossing much of the landscape between the Northern and Southern Rockies, looking for wolf sign—and mostly coming up empty. This spring, I paddled over 400 miles of the Green River, at about the speed of a dispersing wolf, from the big-predator country of the Wind River Range on the southern side of Greater Yellowstone, across the arid Green River Basin of southwestern Wyoming, into the Uinta Mountains in northeastern Utah and northwestern Colorado, through Browns Park and Dinosaur National Monument—passing within a day’s trot of where Colorado’s first wolf pack had been located. A year ago, Gary and I had been among the first—and then for a while the last—people to hear wolves howl in Colorado. By then, someone had already killed three of those pioneering wolves—legally—just across the state line in Wyoming. Therein lies the answer: it isn’t just the arid Green River Basin and the Red Desert, or even the dangerous barrier formed by I-80 and the transcontinental railroad, a proverbial border wall across the desert. It’s the divide in our minds between wild and domestic. Human societies have so often used wolves as symbols of untamed nature, whether or not that’s considered desirable, and of both the best and worst in ourselves. Literally caught in the crossfire: the real wolves, who are just living their lives. To Colorado’s north, states responsible for managing wolves have had very liberal wolf killing programs. That’s especially the case in Wyoming, where state policy is to manage wolves as a trophy game species in the northwestern corner of the state, and as vermin to be shot on sight across about 85% of the state. We’re working to change that storyline here in Colorado, laying the groundwork for human-wolf coexistence.

A current pine beetle infestation has caused extensive mortality of lodgepole pine (Pinus contorta) in forests of Colorado and Wyoming; it is part of an unprecedented multispecies beetle outbreak extending from Mexico to Canada. In United States and European watersheds, where atmospheric deposition of inorganic N is moderate to low (< 10 kg⋅ ha⋅ y), disturbance of forests by timber harvest or violent storms causes an increase in stream nitrate concentration that typically is close to 400% of predisturbance ...

Declaring a human right to water in the western United States could conflict with current patterns of energy development, with implications for land use and energy policy. In particular, developing coal and coalbed methane resources in the Powder River Basin of Wyoming and Montana currently involves large volumes of water. Water discharged from mines and coalbed methane wells is typically not measured and recorded unless it is used for beneficial purposes, though the Powder River Basin’s developable energy reserves coincide with underground sources of drinking water in some areas. Questions of whether the human right to water applies to this or all future generations, and to what degree; of the amount of water designated as a human’s right, and for what purposes it may be used; of the quality of water designated usable for rights-driven human purposes; and of ownership of the water, particularly on federal lands, would likely have significant impacts on leasing and development practices for coal and coalbed methane in the Powder River Basin. Second order concerns involve water’s dependence on energy for purification, conveyance, and distribution. If water in some region of the West is supplied for human use only at great energy expense, human rights to water – including the rights of future generations – would need to be carefully defined, as disposing drinking-quality water in the Powder River Basin might be a prerequisite for developing the energy resources deemed necessary to supply high-quality water to western population centers that are frequently far from natural water supplies. A human right to water in the West would probably require more accurate accounting of how energy development in the Powder River Basin affects water resources, particularly regarding mine and pumped formation water from high-quality sources.

Premise of research. Although largely neglected by the paleobotanical literature, the Early Devonian genus Sphondylophyton Schultes and Dorf is on record as the oldest sphenophyte. Given current understanding of the fossil record, a revised interpretation of the depositional environment at the fossil locality, and the discovery of new specimens, reconsideration of the taxonomic affinities of Sphondylophyton is necessary.
Methodology. All known Sphondylophyton specimens were examined for morphological comparison with plant and algal lineages exhibiting a similar whorled architecture.
Pivotal results. Sphondylophyton is characterized by sparsely branched, flexuous axes bearing whorled, simple, terete appendages with dimorphic apical morphology. Sphenophyte affinities are ruled out, as whorled taxis does not appear in vascular plants until the Late Devonian. Evidence for marine influences in the depositional environment of Sphondylophyton warrants consideration of algal affinities. Although dasycladalean and charophycean green algae share superficial morphological similarities with Sphondylophyton, they can be excluded upon detailed comparison (e.g., branching, lateral appendage dimensions and complexity).
The combination of characters of Sphondylophyton falls within the morphospace of the Rhodophyta. Among these, Sphondylophyton is most similar to rhodomelacean taxa in overall habit, appendage morphology, and thallus durability. Generic and specific emended amplified diagnoses are provided.
Conclusions. Sphondylophyton is not a sphenophyte as previously suggested; dasycladalean and charophycean
affinities are not supported. We demonstrate that Sphondylophyton is a red alga most comparable to Rhodomelaceae, although no taxonomic placement below the phylum rank is proposed; as such, it contributes to the limited fossil record of the Rhodophyta.