Fraser Shilling

Contaminated fish consumption in California's Central Valley Delta.

Extensive mercury contamination and angler selection of the most contaminated fish species coincide in Californias Central Valley. This has led to a policy conundrum: how to balance the economic and cultural impact of advising subsistence anglers to eat less fish with the economic cost of reducing the mercury concentrations in fish? State agencies with regulatory and other jurisdictional authority lack sufficient data and have no consistent approach to this problem. The present study focused on a critical and contentious region in Californias Central Valley (the Sacramento-San Joaquin Rivers Delta) where mercury concentrations in fish and subsistence fishing rates are both high. Anglers and community members were surveyed for their fish preferences, rates of consumption, the ways that they receive health information, and basic demographic information. The rates of fish consumption for certain ethnicities were higher than the rates used by state agencies for planning pollution remediation. A broad range of ethnic groups were involved in catching and eating fish. The majority of anglers reported catching fish in order to feed to their families, including children and women of child-bearing age. There were varied preferences for receiving health information and no correlation between knowledge of fish contamination and rates of consumption. Calculated rates of mercury intake by subsistence anglers were well above the EPA reference dose. The findings here support a comprehensive policy strategy of involvement of the diverse communities in decision-making about education and clean-up and an official recognition of subsistence fishers in the region.

Large Extent Volunteer Roadkill and Wildlife Observation Systems as Sources of Reliable Data

Large-extent wildlife-reporting systems have sets of goals and methods to facilitate standardized data collection, statistical analysis, informative visualizations, and use in decision-making within the system area. Many systems employ “crowds” of volunteers to collect these data at large spatial extents (e.g., US state or small country scale), especially along roadways. This raises the important question of how these systems could be standardized and the data made broadly useful in ecological and transportation studies, i.e. beyond the system area or goals. We describe two of the first and longest-running systems for volunteer observation of road-associated wildlife (live and dead) at the US state scale. The California Roadkill Observation System (CROS, http://wildlifecrossing.net/california) uses a form-based data entry system to report carcasses resulting from wildlife-vehicle collisions (WVC). Operating since 2009, it currently (June, 2017) contains 1,338 users and >54,000 observations of 424 species of ground-dwelling vertebrates and birds, making it one of the most successful examples of crowd-sourced, roadkill and wildlife reporting. Its sister system, the Maine Audubon Wildlife Road Watch (http://wildlifecrossing.net/maine) has a similar structure, and can accept data from transect surveys, animal tracks and scat observations, and reports of “no animal observed”. Both systems can operate as web-applications on a smart-phone (using a web browser), providing the ability to enter observations in the field. Locational accuracy for California observations was estimated to be +/-14 m (n=552 records). Species identification accuracy rate for observations with photographs was 97% (n=3,700 records). We propose that large extent, volunteer systems can be used to monitor wildlife occurrences along or away from roads and that these observations can be used to inform ecological studies and transportation mitigation planning.

Using Indicators to Measure Water Resources Sustainability in California

As part of the California Water Plan Update 2013, the California Department of Water Resources has teamed with the University of California, Davis and U.S. EPA Region 9 to develop an analytical framework to quantify water resources sustainability indicators for California. The California Water Sustainability Indicators Framework (Framework) describes indicators that will inform us about water system conditions and relationships to ecosystems, social systems, and economic systems. The Framework provides: 1) a logical hierarchy of goals and objectives for organizing indicators, 2) a suite of suitable indicators, and 3) analytical methods for measuring sustainability relative to targets. The Framework is being tested at state and region scales. The Framework includes the Water Footprint (the water required to provide goods and services) as an index of sustainability in its own right. The sustainability indicators are being presented in an online decision-support tool to improve Californias assessment of water sustainability.

Adaptive Planning for Transportation Corridors Threatened by Sea Level Rise

This paper describes a generalizable planning and assessment process for transportation planning adaptive to sea level rise (SLR). State Route 37 (SR-37) is the California highway most vulnerable to temporary flooding and permanent inundation as a result of SLR. Like many other coastal highways in the United States, SR-37 is adjacent to protected coastal systems (e.g., beaches, tidal wetlands), meaning that any activity on the highway is subject to regulatory oversight. Both SR-37 and the surrounding marshes are vulnerable to the effects of SLR. Because of a combination of congestion and threats from SLR, planning for a new highway adaptive and resilient to SLR impacts was conducted in the context of stakeholder participation and Eco-Logical, a planning process developed by FHWA to better integrate transportation and environmental planning. To understand which stretches of SR-37 might be most vulnerable to SLR and to what degree, a model of potential inundation was developed with a recent, high-resolution elevation assessment conducted using lidar. This model projects potential inundation by comparing future daily and extreme tide levels with surrounding ground elevations. The vulnerability of each segment was scored according to its exposure to SLR effects, sensitivity to SLR, and adaptive capacity (ability of other roadways to absorb traffic). The risk to each segment from SLR was determined by estimating and aggregating impacts to costs of improvement, recovery time (from impacts), public safety impacts, economic impacts, impacts on transit routes, proximity to communities of concern, and impacts on recreational activities.

Signal transduction during fertilization: Studies with proteases and heterologous receptors

Summary Recent investigations of fertilization have indicated the importance of signaling pathways in the egg that are initiated by cell surface receptors. The evidence includes: (1) stimulation of heterologous receptors (mammalian) in starfish eggs, leading to activation of both early (e.g., Ca2+ release) and late (e.g., DNA synthesis) events of fertilization (Shilling et al., 1994); and (2) activation of eggs by external treatment with specific proteases (Carroll and Jaffe, 1995). Heterologous receptor-induced activation involves phospholipase C (PLC). This enzyme may be activated by a G-protein mediated pathway (PLC-β) or a tyrosine kinase receptor pathway (PLC-γ). There have been other mechanisms for egg activation proposed, which will not be discussed here, such as the introduction of a “cytoplasmic factor” by the sperm into the egg (Swann, 1990). We propose a multi-subunit receptor complex as the mediator of the activating signal from sperm, with properties similar to those of other receptor-mediate...

Pavement Condition and Residential Property Values: A Spatial Hedonic Price Model for Solano County, California:

Transportation agencies invest billions of dollars every year in resurfacing roadways, ostensibly to improve the travel experience. When locally funded, one justification for increased expenditure on the pavement surface is that it could increase property values. We evaluated this approach directly, using hedonic regression to estimate the relationship between pavement condition and residential property value in Solano County, California. We hypothesized that improving pavement condition would positively affect property values in two ways: directly as an indicator of neighborhood blight and indirectly through its effect on traffic conditions and noise. We estimated this relationship for the County as a whole and for each city within the County, controlling for spatial autocorrelation. The estimated relationship is small in magnitude and often not statistically significant. Although there are certainly reasons to improve pavement condition, our results suggest that increasing property value may not be one of them.

Mapping Roadkill to Improve Driver and Wildlife Safety on Highways

POLICY BRIEF INSTITUTE OF TRANSPORTATION STUDIES TOOL PROFILE: Mapping Roadkill to Improve Driver and Wildlife Safety on Highways Fraser Shilling and David Waetjen Road Ecology Center, UC Davis For more information contact Fraser Shilling at: fmshilling@ucdavis.edu KEY TAKEAWAYS Issue Wildlife-vehicle collisions (WVC) pose a risk to drivers and cost U.S. society billions of dollars annually in property damage, emergency response, maintenance and mitigation, and lost economic activity. Reducing WVC requires identifying where these collisions are most common and what activities improve safety and protect wildlife. Collecting data on the extent and nature of WVC incidents is a challenge, however. Currently, Caltrans maintenance staff record their activities on paper in the field and then transcribe that information to a digital system when they return to the maintenance stations and regional offices. This system not only makes it challenging for individual staff to keep track of activities, it also reduces the chance that valuable information (like WVC location and wildlife species) will be retained and transcribed correctly. To improve data collection, the Road Ecology Center at UC Davis is developing tools such as a “one click” mobile app which will help Caltrans workers and others to collect WVC data in the field, with greater locational accuracy. The app will also enable Caltrains maintenance staff, who are often first responders to non-emergency roadside incidents, to track illegal dumping and as well as record roadside vegetation issues (e.g., areas that need mowing, weed-control, planting) and note fire hazards. Solution The Road Ecology Center has developed a smartphone application as a first step to putting a set of critical and contemporary reporting tools in the hands of the approximately 5,000 Caltrans Maintenance Division staff who clean up trash, collect wildlife carcasses, and manage the roadside along more than 12,000 miles of state highways. Eventually, the app and the system behind it will help both with finding hotspots of wildlife carcasses resulting from collisions and with carrying out other cleanup and maintenance activities (e.g., weed-management, trash cleanup) critical to improving state highway rights of way. • • Wildlife-vehicle collisions (WVC) pose a risk to drivers and annually costs billions of dollars annually. • • One of the greatest hurdles in reducing wildlife-vechile collisions is collecting data on the extend and nature of the incidents. • • The Road Ecology Center developed an easy-to-use smartphone application that streamlines wildlife- vehicle collision reporting for Caltrans Maintenance Division staff who maintain 12,000 miles of state highways. Figure 1. User-submitted photo from the California Roadkill Observation System.

Valuation and Crediting Approaches for Transportation and Metropolitan Planning Agencies

Measurement and crediting tools for ecosystem services are important to the processes of transportation planning and project implementation because these tools can aid in mitigating environmental impacts by reducing transaction costs, improving environmental outcomes, and shortening the time needed to implement projects. Because of this importance, such tools have been identified as a key step in the Eco-Logical framework to integrate transportation and conservation planning, characterized by a SHRP 2 capacity program study as the Integrated Ecological Framework. Currently, throughout much of the United States, there are no straightforward methods for the creation of transportation-centric crediting programs. However, successful programs in California, North Carolina, Oregon, and Washington have developed approaches cooperatively with regulatory agencies, state and nongovernmental conservation programs, those actively involved in mitigation banking, and agencies or organizations that fund restoration activities. An overview of crediting systems and valuation methods and their use at various scales in transportation planning are presented in this paper. Current projects and programs are evaluated to identify the opportunities and the obstacles that transportation organizations may encounter when attempting to implement a crediting program.