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Underwater acoustic telemetry has emerged as a powerful tool for practical applications, including resource exploration, environmental monitoring, and aquatic animal tracking. However, current acoustic telemetry systems lack the capability to transmit the collected data continuously in real time, primarily because the acoustic networking bandwidth is limited. Retrieval of the recorded measurements from the deployed receivers usually must be manual, leading to long delays in data retrieval and processing, high operational costs associated with the required manpower, and safety risks for the operators. In addition, there is no efficient way to continuously assess the status of the acoustic telemetry system, including the acoustic transmitters and receivers. Here, we describe the design, implementation, and field validation of a cloud-based, real-time, underwater acoustic telemetry system with edge computing for estimating fish behavior and monitoring environmental parameters. The system incorporates microcontrollers for edge computing and connects to a cloud-based service that further post-processes the transmitted data stream to derive behavior and survival information of tagged animals. The developed system has been demonstrated to have significantly improved performance over the benchmark system because of the integration of edge computing, with a greatly reduced energy consumption of 0.014 W resulting in the energy used by the acoustic modem being reduced by over 300 times. This work opens up new design opportunities for future real-time and multifunctional underwater acoustic systems. U.S. Department of Energy (DOE) Office of Technology Transitions and Water Power Technologies Office; Laboratory Directed Research and Development Program at Pacific Northwest National Laboratory (PNNL); DOE [DE-AC05-76RL01830] Published version This work was supported by the U.S. Department of Energy (DOE) Office of Technology Transitions and Water Power Technologies Office and the Laboratory Directed Research and Development Program at Pacific Northwest National Laboratory (PNNL). PNNL is a multiprogram national laboratory operated by Battelle for DOE under Contract DE-AC05-76RL01830.

Two goals of the Paleogeography Working Group of the Deep-Time Digital Earth (DDE) program of the International Union of Geological Sciences (IUGS) are: (1) to interconnect national databases for all geologic formations, and to compile new online "lexicons" for countries that currently lack these; (2) to display the merged paleogeographic output for any time interval of these distributed databases onto appropriate plate tectonic reconstructions.Therefore, we have worked with regional and time-period experts to compile cloud-based lexicon databases for Asian and for select African regions. The new databases are currently completed for the Precambrian through Phanerozoic of Asia (ca. 4000 geologic formations as of March 2023) and of a part of Africa (Niger, ca. 200 formations). In addition to standard search criteria (age, region, lithology keywords, etc.), the user interfaces include map-based and stratigraphic-column navigation. The returned entries be displayed by-age or in alphabetical order. Many of the formation details include GeoJSON-formatted polygons of its regional extent. These enable plotting of the individual formations filled with their appropriate lithologic facies patterns onto any of three proposed plate reconstruction models with a single click. Or, if a geologic age is specified, a user can query all the linked regional databases to plot the locations of all formations (with lithologic facies patterns) that span that age onto a plate reconstruction model.Our team is currently working with the teams at Macrostrat (Univ. Wisconsin (Madison) and at One-Stratigraphy (DDE, IUGS) and with other geologic surveys to interlink their regional facies-time compilations for other global regions. The goal is to users to access the information on any geologic formation, and to obtain a view of the sediments and volcanics that were accumulating at any time on the ancient Earth.

Building paleogeographic maps requires team efforts to compile databases of regional sedimentary and volcanic facies, to validate and update information, and to develop visualization and computer projection methods. We have worked with experts on regional geologic systems to assemble cloud-based detailed lexicons of all geologic formations within China-Indochina regions (ca. 3000 formations as of March 2023; http://chinalex.geolex.org; vietlex.geolex.org; thailex.geolex.org). A parallel program through the past decade by the Geobiodiversity Database (GBDB) team has completed a detailed grid of outcrops and borehole stratigraphic-biostratigraphic columns for much of China (http://www.geobiodiversity.com). The GBDB had initially focused on the Early Paleozoic; for example, the Ordovician portion for the South China plate contains detailed stratigraphic information at biozone level from 750 exposed sections. The user interfaces for both projects include various search options, and map or stratigraphic navigation. Both of these database projects are now components of the paleogeography program of the IUGS Deep-time Digital Earth system (deep-time.org). These databases enable display of all lithologies of a desired time horizon onto the modern geography or onto modeled plate reconstructions of that geologic age. For the interlinked Lexicon databases of China-Indochina (and the Indian Plate), the auto-merged output provides a visualization of all formations as polygons filled with a colored generalized facies pattern projected onto the dispersed Asian plates (Du et al., Geoscience Data Journal, 2023). The GBDB database produces very detailed isopach and paleogeographic depositional-facies reconstructions, for example the paleogeography and sediment patterns of South China for each Ordovician stage (Zhang, L.N., et al., Earth-Science Reviews, 2023). The main coordinators for the China Lexicon database include Gao Linzhi (Precambrian), Shanchi Peng (Cambrian), Xiaofeng Wang (Ordovician-Silurian), Hongfei Hou (Devonian), Xiangdong Wang (Carboniferous), Rennong Wang (Permian), Jinnan Tong (Triassic), Jingeng Sha (Jurassic), Wan Xiaoqiao (Cretaceous) and Deng Tao (Cenozoic); and the details will be published in a forthcoming Stratigraphic Lexicon of China. For Vietnam, the team at Vietnam National University provided extensive updates and GeoJSONs to their previous published-book compilation by Tran Van Tri and Vu Khuc (Editors, 2011; Geology and Earth Resources of Viet Nam, General Dept. of Geology and Minerals of Viet Nam).

This data file was converted from the publicly available meteorological data at PROS station (46.39175,-119.41179) at the Hanford site into ARL format. The source meteorological data is hourly data from December 1, 2016, to September 30, 2017. The Geospatial Risk Analysis Graphical User Interface for Identifying Hazardous Chemical Emission Sources developed by Pacific Northwest National Laboratory is used for the conversion.

Acoustic telemetry has been used extensively to study the behavior of aquatic animals. The Juvenile Salmon Acoustic Telemetry System (JSATS) is one such system; it was developed for studying juvenile salmonids but has been used to study numerous species. A recent innovation of the JSATS system is an acoustic transmitter that is small enough to be implanted through injection or small incision that doesn’t require sutures. Use of the JSATS system involves deploying cabled acoustic receivers at hydroelectric dams, or other structures, and autonomous acoustic receivers in free-flowing sections of a river. The raw detections from acoustic-tagged fish are processed to remove potential false positives. The clean detections (5,147,996 total) are used to generate detection events and to compute 3-D trajectories (403,900 total), which are used to assign fish to a passage route through a dam. Controlled field testing involving a high-accuracy Global Positioning System receiver is done to validate the submeter accuracy of the trajectories. The JSATS dataset could be reused for expanding the understanding of near-dam fish behavior., Measurement(s) voluntary movement behavior • 3-D trajectory Technology Type(s) acoustic telemetry • Computation Factor Type(s) river • array type Sample Characteristic - Organism Oncorhynchus tshawytscha Sample Characteristic - Environment dam • freshwater biome Sample Characteristic - Location Little Goose Lock and Dam • Snake River • Columbia River • Lower Monumental Lock and Dam • McNary Dam • Bonneville Dam • Ice Harbor Lock and Dam • John Day Dam • Tucannon River Machine-accessible metadata file describing the reported data: 10.6084/m9.figshare.14939169

Existing water quality monitoring systems near hydropower facilities are limited by the lack of mobility of the sensors' carrier platform. Most systems use a buoy, a mounting fixture attached to a solid structure, or a human worker, which significantly limits the selection of the sampling sites and poses safety risks during data collection and equipment maintenance. To improve on this technology, we developed an autonomous water quality monitoring system that can operate in dangerous water environments near hydropower facilities for water sampling at multiple locations. The goal is to enable safe, timely, and comprehensive water-quality data collection; maximize power generation revenue with improved operational control; and reduce Federal Energy Regulatory Commission and state water quality monitoring costs for compliance. The system incorporates a remotely operated vehicle as the mobile monitoring platform, a dissolved oxygen sensor for monitoring water quality, a tether management system for automatically winding the tether, a solar mobile docking platform for supplying power to the ROV, and a web-based graphical user interface for data post-processing and visualization. Preliminary field deployment results from McNary Dam and High Rock Dam are presented to demonstrate the system capabilities. In addition, the system's adaptability for coastal monitoring was briefly discussed.

Fish can be injured or killed during turbine passage. This paper reports the first in-situ evaluation of hydraulic conditions that fish experienced during passage through Francis turbines using an autonomous sensor device at Arrowrock, Cougar, and Detroit Dams. Among different turbine passage regions, most of the severe events occurred in the stay vane/wicket gate and the runner regions. In the stay vane/wicket gate region, almost all severe events were collisions. In the runner region, both severe collisions and severe shear events occurred. At Cougar Dam, at least 50% fewer releases experienced severe collisions in the runner region operating at peak efficiency than at the minimum and maximum opening, indicating the wicket gate opening could affect hydraulic conditions in the runner region. A higher percentage of releases experienced severe events in the runner region when passing through the Francis turbines than through an advanced hydropower Kaplan turbine (AHT) at Wanapum Dam. The nadir pressures of the three Francis turbines were more than 50% lower than those of the AHT. The three Francis turbines had much higher magnitudes and rates of pressure change than the AHT. This study provides critical information on hydraulic conditions and fish passage information of Francis turbines, which can help guide future laboratory studies of fish passing through Francis turbine, design fish-friendly turbines, and optimize the operation of existing turbines for better fish passage conditions.

Underwater acoustic telemetry is an important tool for studying the behavior of aquatic animals and assessing the environmental impact of man-made structures such as hydropower turbines. However, the current design of acoustic telemetry systems lack the ability to transmit collected data continuously in real-time and requires manual retrieval of the recorded measurements, leading to a long delay of data retrieval, high operational cost associated with manpower as well as safety risk for the operators. In addition, there is no efficient way to monitor the status of the acoustic telemetry system, including acoustic transmitters and receivers. For example, if multiple receivers in an array fail, the detection efficiency could be significantly reduced. Herein, we developed a cloud-based, real-time underwater acoustic telemetry system that can be used to estimate behavior or survival of tagged aquatic animals and monitor environmental parameters in near-real-time (< 2 hours). The system incorporates microcontrollers and integrated circuits to create real-time data communication and processing units with a cloud-based service that processes the transmitted data stream to derive behavior and survival information of the tagged animals.

Hydropower is one of the most important energy sources: it accounts for more than 80% of the world’s renewable electricity and 16% of the world’s electricity. Significantly more hydropower capacity is planned to be developed. However, hydro-structures, including hydroelectric dams, may have adverse biological effects on fish, especially on migratory species. For instance, fish can be injured or even killed when they pass through turbines. This is why biological evaluations on hydro-structures are needed to estimate fish injury and mortality rates. The Hydropower Biological Evaluation Toolset (HBET) is an integrated suite of science-based desktop tools designed to evaluate whether the hydraulic conditions of hydropower structures are fish friendly by analyzing collected data and providing estimated injury and mortality rates. The Sensor Fish, a small autonomous sensor package, is used by HBET to record data describing the conditions that live fish passing through a hydropower structure will experience. In this paper, we present a plan to incorporate cloud computing into HBET, and migrate into a cloud-based decision support system framework for hydropower biological evaluation. These enhancements will make the evaluation system more scalable and flexible; however, they will also introduce a significant challenge: how to maintain security while retaining scalability and flexibility. We discuss the technical methodologies and algorithms for the proposed framework, and analyze the relevant security issues and associated security countermeasures.

Approximately 16% of the world’s electricity and over 80% of the world’s renewable electricity is generated from hydropower resources, and there is potential for developing significantly more new hydropower capacity. In practice, however, optimizing the use of potential hydropower resources is limited by various factors, including environmental effects and related mitigation requirements. That is why hydropower regulatory requirements frequently call for targets to be met regarding fish injury and mortality rates. The sensor fish (SF) is a small autonomous sensor package that can be deployed through complex hydraulic structures, such as a turbine or spillway, to collect high resolution measurements that describe the forces and motions that live fish would encounter. The Hydropower Biological Evaluation Toolset (HBET), an integrated suite of science-based tools, is designed to use the SF (implemented) and other tools (to be implemented in the future) to characterize the hydraulic conditions of hydropower structures and provide quantitative estimates of fish injury and mortality rates resulting from exposure to various physical stressors including strike, pressure, and shear. HBET enables users to design new studies, analyze data, perform statistical analyses, and evaluate biological responses. It can be used by researchers, turbine designers, hydropower operators, and regulators to design and operate hydropower systems that minimize ecological impacts in a cost-effective manner. In this paper, we discuss the technical methodologies and algorithms implemented in HBET and describe a case study that illustrates its functionalities.

Mechanochemical synthesis is a promising method for studying the size-dependent melting of metals if the size of the resulting metallic nanoparticles can be tuned effectively. Here, with Cu as an example, we show that tuning of particle sizes can be accomplished by extending the milling time at a high milling speed and following annealing of the milled samples. With the so prepared samples, the melting point depression of Cu nanoparticles and its size dependence are successfully investigated.

Precision agriculture is a data-driven farming practice that uses intra-and inter-field information to optimize farming operations. The "brain" of precision agriculture is a decision support system (DSS) that acquires data from various sources, analyzes them, and recommends actions to farmers. Recently cloud computing has been used to improve the scalability and reliability of a DSS. Cloud-based DSSs present some major challenges for software design:(1) how can a cloud-based DSS process a diversified profile of intra-and/or inter-field data from various sources? (2) how can a cloud-based DSS accommodate and support the diversity of farming operations? (3) how can a cloud-based DSS automate the entire decision process and control field devices directly? we proposed an extensible cloud-based software platform that integrated 3 novel components to address these questions: (1) a meta-model-based data acquisition and integration module that accepts data in different formats and semantics, (2) an adaptive software architecture supporting on-the-fly re-configuration of decision modules, and (3) software-defined control, a new software design paradigm we proposed for handling control diversity. It enables a DSS to control various field devices through unified software-defined interfaces. We implemented the platform in Agrilaxy, a cloud-based DSS, and deployed it on Amazon Web Services (AWS). An early version of Agrilaxy has been used in a USDA-sponsored project on canopy management for specialty crops.

For the first time Waulsortian-like carbonate mud banks are described from lower Mississippian strata of South China. The carbonate mud banks occur in the upper member of the Long'an Formation (late Tournaisian in age) at Longdianshan Hill (near Liuzhou, central Guangxi). They are domal to tabular in shape, and locally form aggregates. Horizontal and vertical differentiation of the banks into core and flank facies was not observed. Onlapping thin-bedded, grainy off-bank facies indicates that the banks had depositional relief. The carbonate mud banks are composed of a mixture of two basic microfacies types: (1) spiculitic wackestone with diverse fauna and (2) fine-grained bioclastic wackestone and packstone. Colour changes indicate the presence of several mud generations, but syndepositional cavities are limited in volume. More common are larger spar-filled cavities representing matrix dissolution. The common reddish colour of the bank facies might be related to hematite-rich microaerophilic iron bacteria. Formation of the carbonate mud banks took place in an outer platform setting in several tens of metres water depth under dysphotic conditions during the relative sea-level rise of a third-order sequence. The carbonate mud banks at Longdianshan Hill share some characteristics of classical Waulsortian banks in Europe, notably the presence of bryozoans, crinoids and sponges, different mud generations and spar-filled cavities but, so far, polymuds with distinctive syndepositional cavities and a vertical zonation into grain assemblage zones is not documented. The Longdianshan Hill Waulsortian-like carbonate mud banks significantly enlarge the spectrum of Mississippian buildups in South China, which on a global scale is still relatively poor. Copyright © 2012 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.

With the definition and adoption of the Global Stratotype Section and Point (GSSP) for base of the Visean in China, the newly synthesized zonations and correlation of some significant fossil groups: foraminifera, conodont, coral and brachiopoda near the Tournaisian-Visean boundary beds are reviewed, which help in the recognition of the boundary in various sedimentary facies. The occurrence of two physical events, one pre- and one post- the Tournaisian-Visean boundary is emphasized, which allows for recognition of the position close to the Tournaisian-Visean boundary in the field. The regional correlation in southern China and international correlation throughout Eurasia around the Tournaisian-Visean boundary beds with the GSSP is proposed.

The first appearance of Eoparastaffella simplex in the lineage Eoparastaffella ovalis - Eoparastaffella simplex (foraminifers) has been officially approved by the Voting Members of the SCCS in early 2002 as the new biostratigraphic criterion to define the base of the Vis an. The present paper summarizes eight years of research and proposes a new Global Stratotype Section and Point from Guangxi, South China. The boundary is defined at the base of bed 85 of the Pengchong section where the first E. simplex is recorded, following more primitive Eoparastaffella. The conodont Gnathodus homopunctatus, whose cryptic first appearance has beet? used as an empirical tool for identification of the T-V boundary it? Western Europe, enters a decimetre higher in bed 86. Scaliognathus anchoralis europensis and other conodonts considered characteristic of the late Tournaisian occur below these levels.

Resume La coupe de Tangjiawan - Etaoucun (Guilin, Guangxi, Chine du Sud) expose en continu des terrains sedimentairesallant du Devonien moyen au Carbonifere inferieur. Comme dans d'autres regions du monde, plusieurs niveaux a Leperditiidae (Ostracoda) sont reconnus dans le Givetien. En Chine du Sud, les conditions paleoecologiques lagunaires, responsables de la formation de tels niveaux ou accumulations a Leperditiidae, se sont maintenues pendant le Frasnien et le Famennien, jusque dans le Famennien terminal (Strunien). Dans la region etudiee, un niveau a Leperditiidae est ainsi signale pour la premiere fois dans le Devonien terminal.

A strong {delta}{sup 13}C anomaly coincides with a weak Ir anomaly at the Frasnian/Famennian (F/F) boundary exposed at Xiangtian, Guangxi, south China. The maximum whole-rock Ir abundance is 0.23 ppb (0.35 ppb on a carbonate-free basis) compared with averages of 0.016 and 0.044 ppb above and below the boundary interval. The {delta}{sup 13}C in carbonate abruptly shifts from a late Frasnian level of about +1{per thousand} to {minus}2.49 {per thousand}in the boundary interval and then abruptly returns to pre-boundary levels, suggesting a temporary reduction of surface-water biomass. A widely distributed (over at least several hundred kilometers) limestone breccia unit of possible wave-deposit origin is present directly below the boundary in south China. Enrichments of Al, V, Cr, As, and U, and a dip in the Mn abundance in the boundary interval indicate that reducing conditions might have been associated with the element enrichment. However, an alternative hypothesis is that oceanic impact(s) at the F/F boundary near south China provided the excess Ir and caused the biotic crisis and the formation of breccia deposits observed in the Late Devonian South China Sea.