One Hundred Years of Solitude: rediscovery of Catasticta lycurgus (Godman & Salvin, 1880), a yellow butterfly from the Sierra Nevada de Santa Marta, Colombia (Lepidoptera: Pieridae)

Zootaxa ◽  
2021 ◽  
Vol 4975 (1) ◽  
pp. 176-186
Author(s):  
BLANCA HUERTAS ◽  
CARLOS PRIETO ◽  
FREDY MONTERO ◽  
MIKE ADAMS ◽  
JEAN FRANÇOIS LE CROM ◽  
...  
Keyword(s):  
Sierra Nevada ◽  
High Elevation ◽  
Mountain Range ◽  
Conservation Assessment ◽  
The North ◽  
The Andes ◽  
San Pedro ◽  
Systematic Relationships ◽  
The Uk ◽  
First Time

Catasticta lycurgus is a striking endemic butterfly, restricted to high elevation habitats in the Sierra Nevada de Santa Marta, an isolated mountain range separate from the Andes in the north of Colombia. The type, which for almost a hundred years was the only known specimen, was collected in 1878 by Frederick Simons in the vicinity of Atánquez and was sent to the UK to be described by renowned naturalists Godman and Salvin in 1880. In 1972, explorers Adams and Bernard collected a second specimen of C. lycurgus in the locality of San Pedro at 2,900m of elevation in the Sierra Nevada de Santa Marta. These two specimens were the only known ones for many decades until recently, when Colombian entomologists found the species again in San Pedro de la Sierra and later, when a female was discovered in 2013. Here, we report the rediscovery of this rare and charismatic species, with new specimens collected near the type locality, which have not been reported previously. The female of C. lycurgus is described and illustrated for the first time as well the male genitalia of this species. We combine all information available to provide some insights on the systematic relationships of this species within the genus Catasticta Butler, discuss its distribution and provide a preliminary conservation assessment. Despite the newly collected specimens, the species remains very rare in the field and in collections. 

Overview of Naturally Occurring Asbestos in California and Southwestern Nevada

2020 ◽  
Vol 26 (1) ◽  
pp. 9-14
Author(s):  
R. Mark Bailey
Keyword(s):  
Sierra Nevada ◽  
North American ◽  
Volcanic Belt ◽  
Island Arc ◽  
North American Plate ◽  
Mountain Range ◽  
The North ◽  
Rock Types ◽  
Naturally Occurring ◽  
Naturally Occurring Asbestos

ABSTRACT Naturally occurring asbestos (NOA) is being discovered in a widening array of geologic environments. The complex geology of the state of California is an excellent example of the variety of geologic environments and rock types that contain NOA. Notably, the majority of California rocks were emplaced during a continental collision of eastward-subducting oceanic and island arc terranes (Pacific and Farallon plates) with the westward continental margin of the North American plate between 65 and 150 MY BP. This collision and accompanying accretion of oceanic and island arc material from the Pacific plate onto the North American plate, as well as the thermal events caused by emplacement of the large volcanic belt that became today's Sierra Nevada mountain range, are the principal processes that produced the rocks where the majority of NOA-bearing units have been identified.

scholarly journals Intercomparison of Meteorological Forcing Data from Empirical and Mesoscale Model Sources in the North Fork American River Basin in Northern Sierra Nevada, California*

2013 ◽  
Vol 14 (3) ◽  
pp. 677-699 ◽  
Author(s):  
Nicholas E. Wayand ◽  
Alan F. Hamlet ◽  
Mimi Hughes ◽  
Shara I. Feld ◽  
Jessica D. Lundquist
Keyword(s):  
River Basin ◽  
Sierra Nevada ◽  
Mesoscale Model ◽  
Wrf Model ◽  
High Elevation ◽  
Meteorological Forcing ◽  
The North ◽  
Single Station ◽  
American River ◽  
North Fork

Abstract The data required to drive distributed hydrological models are significantly limited within mountainous terrain because of a scarcity of observations. This study evaluated three common configurations of forcing data: 1) one low-elevation station, combined with empirical techniques; 2) gridded output from the Weather Research and Forecasting Model (WRF); and 3) a combination of the two. Each configuration was evaluated within the heavily instrumented North Fork American River basin in California during October–June 2000–10. Simulations of streamflow and snowpack using the Distributed Hydrology Soil and Vegetation Model (DHSVM) highlighted precipitation and radiation as variables whose sources resulted in significant differences. The best source of precipitation data varied between years. On average, the WRF performed as well as the single station distributed using the Parameter Regression on Independent Slopes Model (PRISM). The average percent biases in simulated streamflow were 3% and 1%, for configurations 1 and 2, respectively, even though precipitation compared directly with gauge measurements was biased high by 6% and 17%, suggesting that gauge undercatch may explain part of the bias. Simulations of snowpack using empirically estimated longwave irradiance resulted in melt rates lower than those observed at high-elevation sites, while at lower elevations the same forcing caused significant midwinter melt that was not observed. These results highlight the complexity of how forcing data sources impact hydrology over different areas (high- versus low-elevation snow) and different time periods. Overall, results support the use of output from the WRF model over empirical techniques in regions with limited station data.

scholarly journals Elevation-dependent trends in extreme snowfall in the French Alps from 1959 to 2019

2021 ◽  
Vol 15 (9) ◽  
pp. 4335-4356
Author(s):  
Erwan Le Roux ◽  
Guillaume Evin ◽  
Nicolas Eckert ◽  
Juliette Blanchet ◽  
Samuel Morin
Keyword(s):  
Temporal Trends ◽  
Information Criterion ◽  
Warming Trend ◽  
High Elevation ◽  
Extreme Value ◽  
Mountain Range ◽  
Hazard Management ◽  
French Alps ◽  
The North ◽  
Return Levels

Abstract. Climate change projections indicate that extreme snowfall is expected to increase in cold areas, i.e., at high latitudes and/or high elevation, and to decrease in warmer areas, i.e., at mid-latitudes and low elevation. However, the magnitude of these contrasting patterns of change and their precise relations to elevation at the scale of a given mountain range remain poorly known. This study analyzes annual maxima of daily snowfall based on the SAFRAN reanalysis spanning the time period 1959–2019 and provided within 23 massifs in the French Alps every 300 m of elevation. We estimate temporal trends in 100-year return levels with non-stationary extreme value models that depend on both elevation and time. Specifically, for each massif and four elevation ranges (below 1000, 1000–2000, 2000–3000, and above 3000 m), temporal trends are estimated with the best extreme value models selected on the basis of the Akaike information criterion. Our results show that a majority of trends are decreasing below 2000 m and increasing above 2000 m. Quantitatively, we find an increase in 100-year return levels between 1959 and 2019 equal to +23 % (+32kgm-2) on average at 3500 m and a decrease of −10 % (-7kgm-2) on average at 500 m. However, for the four elevation ranges, we find both decreasing and increasing trends depending on location. In particular, we observe a spatially contrasting pattern, exemplified at 2500 m: 100-year return levels have decreased in the north of the French Alps while they have increased in the south, which may result from interactions between the overall warming trend and circulation patterns. This study has implications for natural hazard management in mountain regions.

scholarly journals A suite of new plant records from the Sierra de San Pedro Mártir, Baja California, Mexico

2018 ◽  
Vol 12 (1) ◽  
pp. 229-238
Author(s):  
J.P. Rebman ◽  
S.E. Vanderplank ◽  
A.B. Harper
Keyword(s):  
Biodiversity Conservation ◽  
Baja California ◽  
New Records ◽  
High Elevation ◽  
Plant Distribution ◽  
Mountain Range ◽  
Endemic Plants ◽  
San Pedro

Ninety-two southernmost plant distribution records were documented on an expedition in 2016 to a remote meadow at the southern end of the Sierra de San Pedro Mártir, the highest mountain range in Baja California, Mexico. Among these new records, there are 12 additions to the known high elevation flora. Noteworthy new populations were documented for 14 regionally endemic plants, and several collections of rare or rarely collected taxa were also significant. Our findings suggest that the Santa Rosa Meadow should be targeted for biodiversity conservation efforts, with an emphasis on managed grazing, to support the recovery of rare meadow-endemic taxa.

Young Criminal Lives: Life Courses and Life Chances from 1850

2017 ◽  
Author(s):  
Barry Godfrey ◽  
Pamela Cox ◽  
Heather Shore ◽  
Zoe Alker
Keyword(s):  
Institutional Care ◽  
Digital Data ◽  
North West ◽  
Life Chances ◽  
The North ◽  
Biographical Research ◽  
Industrial Schools ◽  
The Uk ◽  
Early English ◽  
First Time

Young Criminal Lives is the first cradle-to-grave study of the experiences of some of the thousands of delinquent, ‘difficult’, and destitute children passing through the early English juvenile industrial school and reformatory system. Applying biographical research methodologies to digital data, we have reconstructed the lives, families, and neighbourhoods of 500 children who were sent to reformatory and industrial schools in the north-west of England from courts around the UK over a fifty-year period from the 1860s onwards. For the first time, we have been able to follow these children on their journey in and out of institutional care, and then though to their adulthood and old age. We centre on institutions celebrated in this period for their pioneering approaches to child welfare and others that were investigated for cruelty and scandal. Both were typical of the new kind of state-certified provision offered, from the 1850s onwards, to children who had committed criminal acts, or who were considered ‘vulnerable’ to predation, poverty, and the ‘inheritance’ of criminal dispositions.

scholarly journals Reducing the impact of summer cattle grazing on water quality in the Sierra Nevada Mountains of California: a proposal

2009 ◽  
Vol 8 (2) ◽  
pp. 326-333 ◽  
Author(s):  
Robert W. Derlet ◽  
Charles R. Goldman ◽  
Michael J. Connor
Keyword(s):  
Water Quality ◽  
Sierra Nevada ◽  
Public Lands ◽  
Organic Pollution ◽  
Cattle Grazing ◽  
High Elevation ◽  
Mountain Range ◽  
Nitrogen And Phosphorus ◽  
Sierra Nevada Mountains ◽  
The Impact

The Sierra Nevada Mountain range serves as an important source of drinking water for the State of California. However, summer cattle grazing on federal lands affects the overall water quality yield from this essential watershed as cattle manure is washed into the lakes and streams or directly deposited into these bodies of water. This organic pollution introduces harmful microorganisms and also provides nutrients such as nitrogen and phosphorus which increase algae growth causing eutrophication of otherwise naturally oligotrophic mountain lakes and streams. Disinfection and filtration of this water by municipal water districts after it flows downstream will become increasingly costly. This will be compounded by increasing surface water temperatures and the potential for toxins release by cyanobacteria blooms. With increasing demands for clean water for a state population approaching 40 million, steps need to be implemented to mitigate the impact of cattle on the Sierra Nevada watershed. Compared to lower elevations, high elevation grazing has the greatest impact on the watershed because of fragile unforgiving ecosystems. The societal costs from non-point pollution exceed the benefit achieved through grazing of relatively few cattle at the higher elevations. We propose limiting summer cattle grazing on public lands to lower elevations, with a final goal of allowing summer grazing on public lands only below 1,500 m elevation in the Central and Northern Sierra and 2,000 m elevation in the Southern Sierra.

Sierra Motherlode, Domain 2

2007 ◽  
Author(s):  
Earl B. Alexander ◽  
Roger G. Coleman ◽  
Todd Keeler-Wolfe ◽  
Susan P. Harrison
Keyword(s):  
Sierra Nevada ◽  
Western Slope ◽  
Mountain Range ◽  
Serpentine Soils ◽  
East Side ◽  
The West ◽  
Eastern Side ◽  
The North ◽  
Great Valley ◽  
Block Faulting

The Sierra Motherlode domain is in a series of allochthonous terranes, sometimes called the “Foothill Belt,” along the western edge of the north-northwest–south-southeast trending Sierra Nevada, adjacent to the Great Valley of California. It is a discontinuous belt from the southern Sierra Nevada, in Tulare and Fresno counties, to Butte County in the northern Sierra Nevada , but a branch within the belt is practically continuous from El Dorado County about 140 km north to Plumas County at the north end of the range. Cenozoic block faulting has lifted the Sierra Nevada and tilted the mountain range toward the west; therefore the highest elevations are on the east side of the range. Uplift is more pronounced in the southern than in the northern Sierra Nevada. Altitudes range from <200 m adjacent to the Great Valley to more than 4000 m along the crest of the central to southern part of the mountain range. The highest altitudes in the Sierra Motherlode domain are 1939 m (6360 feet) on Red Mountain and 1935 m (6335 feet) on Red Hill in Plumas County, and even higher on some of the granitic plutons that are within the outer limits of the serpentine domain. These plutons were intruded into the allochthonous terranes after the terranes had been accreted onto the continent. Much of the western slope of the northern Sierra Nevada is an undulating to rolling plateau. This plateau is a remnant from the early Tertiary when its surface was deeply weathered to produce lateritic serpentine soils with silica deposited in the subsoils and in fractures in the bedrock (Rice and Cleveland 1955, Rice 1957). The ancient plateau was capped by volcanic flows that produced a practically continuous cover in the northern Sierra Nevada (Durrell 1966). Uplift along the eastern side of the northern part of the Sierra Nevada to initiate its current relief commenced 4 or 5 Ma ago (Wakabayashi and Sawyer 2001). Since the range began to rise a few million years ago, the larger streams flowing across it have cut deep canyons up to about 600 m below the plateau.

scholarly journals Investigating the Variability of High-Elevation Seasonal Orographic Snowfall Enhancement and Its Drivers across Sierra Nevada, California

2018 ◽  
Vol 19 (1) ◽  
pp. 47-67 ◽  
Author(s):  
Laurie S. Huning ◽  
Steven A. Margulis
Keyword(s):  
Sierra Nevada ◽  
Snow Water Equivalent ◽  
High Elevation ◽  
Mountain Range ◽  
Distributed Data ◽  
Mountainous Regions ◽  
Average Maximum ◽  
Spatially Distributed ◽  
Orographic Enhancement ◽  
Snow Water

Abstract While orographically driven snowfall is known to be important in mountainous regions, a complete understanding of orographic enhancement from the basin to the mountain range scale is often inhibited by limited distributed data and spatial and/or temporal resolutions. A novel, 90-m spatially distributed snow water equivalent (SWE) reanalysis was used to overcome these limitations. Leveraging this SWE information, the interannual variability of orographic gradients in cumulative snowfall (CS) was investigated over 14 windward (western) basins in the Sierra Nevada in California from water years 1985 to 2015. Previous studies have not provided a detailed multidecadal climatology of orographic CS gradients or compared wet-year and dry-year orographic CS patterns, distributions, and gradients across an entire mountain range. The magnitude of seasonal CS gradients range from over 15 cm SWE per 100-m elevation to under 1 cm per 100 m with a 31-yr average of 6.1 cm per 100 m below ~2500 m in the western basins. The 31-yr average CS gradients generally decrease in higher elevation zones across the western basins and become negative at the highest elevations. On average, integrated vapor transport and zonal winds at 700 hPa are larger during wet years, leading to higher orographically driven CS gradients across the Sierra Nevada than in dry years. Below ~2500 m, wet years yield greater enhancement (relative to dry years) by factors of approximately 2 and 3 in the northwestern and southwestern basins, respectively. Overall, the western Sierra Nevada experiences about twice as much orographic enhancement during wet years as in dry years below the elevation corresponding to the 31-yr average maximum CS.

scholarly journals Elevation-dependent trends in extreme snowfall in the French Alps from 1959 to 2019

2021 ◽  
Author(s):  
Erwan Le Roux ◽  
Guillaume Evin ◽  
Nicolas Eckert ◽  
Juliette Blanchet ◽  
Samuel Morin
Keyword(s):  
Temporal Trends ◽  
Information Criterion ◽  
Warming Trend ◽  
High Elevation ◽  
Extreme Value ◽  
Mountain Range ◽  
French Alps ◽  
The North ◽  
Return Levels ◽  
Increasing Trends

Abstract. Climate change projections indicate that extreme snowfall are expected to increase in cold areas, i.e. at high latitude and/or high elevation, and to decrease in warmer areas, i.e. at mid-latitude and low elevation. However, the magnitude of these contrasted patterns of change and their precise relations to elevation at the scale of a given mountain range remain ill-known. This study analyzes annual maxima of daily snowfall based on the SAFRAN reanalysis spanning the time period 1959–2019, and provided within 23 massifs in the French Alps every 300 m of elevation. We estimate temporal trends in 100-year return levels with non-stationary extreme value models that depend both on elevation and time. Specifically, for each massif and four elevation ranges (below 1000 m, 1000–2000 m, 2000–3000 m and above 3000 m), temporal trends are estimated with the best extreme value models selected on the basis of the Akaike information criterion. Our results show that a majority of trends are decreasing below 2000 m and increasing above 2000 m. Quantitatively, we find an increase of 100-year return levels between 1959 and 2019 equal to +23 % (+32 kg m−2) on average at 3500 m, and a decrease of −10 % (−7 kg m−2) on average at 500 m. However, for the four elevation ranges, we find both decreasing and increasing trends depending on location. In particular, we observe a spatially contrasted pattern, exemplified at 2500 m: 100-year return levels have decreased in the north of the French Alps while they have increased in the south which may result from interactions between the overall warming trend and circulation patterns. This study has implications for natural hazards management in mountain regions.

scholarly journals Characterization of an Alsodes pehuenche breeding site in the Andes of central Chile

Herpetozoa ◽  
2020 ◽  
Vol 33 ◽  
pp. 21-26
Author(s):  
Alejandro Piñeiro ◽  
Pablo Fibla ◽  
Carlos López ◽  
Nelson Velásquez ◽  
Luis Pastenes
Keyword(s):  
Natural History ◽  
Geographical Distribution ◽  
Breeding Site ◽  
Physicochemical Characteristics ◽  
Mountain Range ◽  
Central Chile ◽  
The Andes ◽  
History Of ◽  
First Time

Alsodes pehuenche, an endemic anuran that inhabits the Andes of Argentina and Chile, is considered “Critically Endangered” due to its restricted geographical distribution and multiple potential threats that affect it. This study is about the natural history of A. pehuenche and the physicochemical characteristics of a breeding site located in the Maule mountain range of central Chile. Moreover, the finding of its clutches in Chilean territory is reported here for the first time. Finally, a description of the number and morphology of these eggs is provided.

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