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Water management structures (WMS) are used to regulate water levels between large floodplain river backwaters and their adjacent river systems offering a balance between maintaining quality backwater habitat and providing benefits to the river systems. The design and operation of these WMS is dependent on unique management goals, and their impacts on the surrounding ecosystem are understudied. From 2016-2018 we quantified the response of the surrounding fish assemblages (i.e., backwater and river abundance and composition) to the WMS operation at the Emiquon Preserve, a 2723 ha restored floodplain lake located adjacent to the main channel of the Illinois River, U.S.A. Environmental conditions were recorded, and fish were collected using boat electrofishing on both sides of the WMS under three operational levels: closed and no flow, gravity flowing water, and mechanically pumping water to the river. Multivariate analyses determined that there was no difference in fish community composition within the Emiquon Preserve among operation levels. Within the river there were differences in community composition when the WMS was closed and mechanically pumping water. Environmental parameters varied seasonally and WMS operation level varied but indicated an increase in chlorophyll-a in the river when the WMS was mechanically pumping water, although the chlorophyll-a decreased within 200 m downstream of the WMS in the Illinois River. This study suggests that managed connections between restored backwater and habitats operated like this WMS have variable, spatially isolated impacts on fish communities despite supplying chlorophyll-a to large river ecosystems., INTRODUCTION Connected backwaters are essential to maintain secondary production and diversity of large floodplains rivers (Junk et al, 1989; Bayley, 1991). Riverine organisms depend on the periodic lateral overflow of [...]

This paper reports the first records of Cercopagis pengoi in the Mississippi River Basin, Illinois, USA. In 2017, a total of 11 C. pengoi were collected from two different locations during zooplankton sampling in the Illinois Waterway. One location was in the Chicago Sanitary and Ship Canal and the second location was in the Calumet-Sag Channel, approximately eight and 35 river kilometers from Lake Michigan, respectively. In 2021, eight additional individuals were encountered in ichthyoplankton samples collected in the Chicago Sanitary and Ship Canal, three river kilometers upstream of the 2017 capture location. The extent and density of C. pengoi within the Illinois Waterway is currently unknown; therefore, additional sampling is warranted to better understand their distribution and abundance to facilitate an assessment of the risks of spread to other connected waterways. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The Shroud of Turin is one of Christianity's most famous, and controversial, sacred artifacts. A large part of its fame is due to the manufacture of reproductions which for five centuries have provided the means to worship the Shroud in absentia. The newest of these, from a project titled Lino Val Gandino, interweave the legacies of centuries of copying up through and including modern digital renderings, multimedia broadcasts, and mass-produced pilgrimage souvenirs that today sustain devotion to the original Shroud. But they stand apart by the unprecedented attention to recreating the original through novel forms of production to achieve enhanced material and mimetic exactness. This paper argues that the Lino Val Gandino reproductions of the Shroud of Turin become "original copies" that make claims to their own authenticity and originality. In so doing, these copies constitute mediative and material means of religious devotion not recognized in the types of artistic images and popular objects hitherto studied by scholars in art history and religious studies. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The Shroud of Turin experienced its most intense devotional enthusiasm in the century after its first public exhibition in Turin in 1578. During this period, the cloth and its mysterious imprint of Christ’s body transcended the static nature of an icon by becoming a performative image in the context of private devotional worship. Operating in consort with devotional texts, the figuration of Christ’s crucified body activates the otherwise static depiction of flowing of blood. Furthermore, the Shroud permitted beholders to witness a narrative performance of Christ’s death and resurrection through the possession and manipulation of reproductions, making the movement of Christ’s body in and out of the tomb a kinetically visible phenomenon. These performative qualities of the Shroud of Turin, as well as the beholder’s active interaction with it, guaranteed its devotional prestige and facilitate new considerations of the role of images in religious devotion. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]