The Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) must ensure that the use of a pesticide will not jeopardize federally listed threatened or endangered species, nor damage their critical habitats. For certain pesticides where runoff or soil erosion may pose threats to listed species, EPA may require users to ensure that protections are in place that will limit the potential for pesticide exposure. This is done through a system of “mitigation points” or “credits” that are obtained by users through adopting mitigation practices or documenting existing conditions that reduce risks of runoff and erosion. If points are needed to apply a pesticide, this requirement will be listed on the pesticide label and/or on an Endangered Species Bulletin. Arizona has many common field conditions, including a low to very low potential for runoff, that should make it easy for most growers in most situations to comply with mitigation requirements. This piece outlines situations where fields may be completely exempt from point requirements and identifies the most common conditions and practices in Arizona agriculture that can earn mitigation relief points. A link is provided to EPA’s Mitigation Menu website where definitions and additional mitigation practices are listed.

The Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) must ensure that the use of a pesticide will not jeopardize federally listed threatened or endangered species, nor damage their critical habitats. When required on a pesticide label, online Endangered Species Bulletins provide geographic-specific protections for listed species while allowing full labeled use of the pesticide in other areas. They are obtained through EPA’s Bulletins Live! Two, an interactive web-based app. An increasing number of pesticide products, though not all, require users to view and download Endangered Species Bulletins prior to making an application. Part 1 in this series explains how to determine when an Endangered Species Bulletin is required, where and how to obtain a bulletin, and what type of information is provided.

This article, published in the Vegetable IPM Newsletter (Vol. 16, No. 23), provides diagnostic features to distinguish eggs and early instar larvae of beet armyworm, diamondback moth, and cabbage looper. It highlights key differences in color, shape, clustering, and larval behavior to improve field identification and management of these common vegetable pests.

Citrus growers are essential to protecting Arizona’s citrus industry from the spread of HLB. Consistent monitoring for ACP and early disease symptoms, combined with timely and effective management practices, can significantly reduce the risk of infection. Reporting infected trees to the appropriate authorities and following recommended control strategies can help prevent the spread of both the vector and the disease. Cooperation of growers and pest control advisors is vital; HLB management is most successful when efforts are coordinated across regions. By staying informed and proactive, we can help preserve the health, productivity, and future of citrus groves across the state. Your actions make a lasting impact.

The Future of Law Libraries initiative convened six regional roundtables on Artificial Intelligence & the Future of Law Libraries with experts from academic, court, firm, and government law libraries, as well as allied professions, using scenario-building methodology to examine how AI is reshaping legal education, work, and systems and what law libraries must do to lead that change. The common message: legal information professionals must take an active, coordinated role in AI policy, training, and infrastructure or risk being sidelined as legal information vendors and non-library actors set the agenda. This white paper distills convergent themes and proposes collaborative directions. It explores three recommendations that sprang from the roundtables: 1) create a centralized AI organization, 2) develop tiered training for legal information professionals, and 3) establish a shared knowledge hub. If we are successful in this next stage, we will have coordinated advocacy and standards, a workforce with more advanced skills, and an open, authoritative, dynamic, centralized repository. We will be convening teams to push these recommendations forward and we provide a link in the Call to Action section for our colleagues to join this effort.

This article, published in the Vegetable IPM Newsletter (Vol. 16, No. 21), explains how temperature, moisture, and soil conditions affect seed germination and seedling development, with focus on lettuce thermodormancy and managing heat with sprinkler irrigation.

Research on direct public participation has largely focused on stable democracies with only recent extensions to some stable authoritarian contexts, while hybrid or oscillating regimes remain understudied. This dissertation addresses this gap using Thailand as the empirical setting. It asks: (1) what do direct participation or public engagement practices look like in a developing democracy with volatile politics, and (2) what drives variation in those practices? I conceptualize public engagement variation along three dimensions (recruitment inclusiveness, information flow or communication mode, and perceived impact) and operationalize them as indices at the policy-task level rather than at the level of individual public engagement activity, to better reflect how public managers make decisions. The study uses administrative data, original interview data, and original survey data conducted on K3-level Thai public managers and their equivalents covering 230 policy tasks, nested in 125 managers, across 8 organizations. At the policy-task level, multilevel linear models with random intercepts for individuals and organizations show that higher Public Service Motivation (PSM) and greater political autonomy are associated with higher scores across all three indices. Other variables, such as technocratic orientation and legal requirements, have different relationships with different dimensions. For example, having no legal requirement but having norms to engage the public has a significant relationship only with the perceived impact of the engagement activities of a policy task, not with inclusiveness or communication. These findings suggest that it might be useful to model public engagement as multidimensional dependent variables, since disaggregating the dimensions can reveal more specific ways that independent variables influence variations of public engagement. The study also compares the policy-task level results with results from analyses at the engagement-activity level. These results diverge in theoretically informative ways. No predictor is consistently significant across all dimensions within one activity. Attitude toward democracy shows a significant negative relationship with committee meeting’s information flow while it does not appear as a significant driver at the policy-task level. Technocratic orientation has positive relationship with committee’s inclusiveness but not task-level inclusiveness. These patterns are consistent with managers making policy-task-level design choices rather than thinking about each engagement venue or activity in isolation. Overall, modeling participation with policy-task-level indices aligns more closely with theoretical expectations, but these indices still have limitations and should be further refined.

This thesis discusses a novel hybrid optical LiDAR architecture that employs Texas Instruments’ Digital Micromirror Devices (DMDs) for coarse beam and image steering, a Phase Light Modulator (PLM) for fine field of view steering in a Time-of-Flight (ToF) solid-state LiDAR with contiguous panoramic LiDAR scanning and higher resolution imaging.By synchronizing the laser pulse to the dynamic tilt movement of the micromirrors on the DMD, a blazed grating condition can be satisfied, and light is diffracted and steered into one of the several diffraction orders with high diffraction efficiency. By employing Computer Generated Holograms (CGHs) on the PLM, the micro-mirrors’ height on the PLM can be modulated based on the hologram’s parameters, and a variety of grating patterns can be created for controlled image and/or field of view steering. There are multiple hierarchies of FoVs in this paper. For simplicity, the system’s total field of view is defined as the FOV of the system, the subdivisions of FOVs from the diffractive beam steering by DMDs are termed as ‘Sub-FOV’, and the finer FOVs within the sub-FOV of the DMD are termed as ‘Sub-Sub-FOV’. The proposed DMD-PLM Hybridized scanning and solid-state flash LiDAR architecture utilizes a near-infrared nanosecond pulsed laser, two synchronized DMDs (one for ‘Transmitter’ and the other for ‘Receiver’) for coarse sub-FOV beam steering, a PLM for finer sub-sub-FOV steering, and a Multi-Pixel Photon Counter (MPPC) to capture two-dimensional ToF LiDAR images. The experimental results demonstrate that the proposed LiDAR architecture increases the effective pixel count by 9-fold in a single sub-FOV by employing PLM sub-sub-FOV steering. There are seven diffraction orders from the DMDs used for coarse steering in the experiment, and each DMD order’s sub-FOV carries 9 sub-sub-FOVs from the PLM fine steering. Therefore, there is a 9-fold increase in the effective pixel count of the original LiDAR architecture, which only employed DMDs for the beam and image steering [2]. An addition of a holographic-based FOV steering PLM increases the pixel resolution by multiple folds in the LiDAR imaging by fine steering into the sub-FOV regions. With advantages, there exist some challenges in this hybrid LiDAR as well. There is the presence of the strong specular reflections at the 0th order due to the cover glass reflection from both the DMDs and PLM, as well as PLM’s 0th order interference with its higher orders from PLM’s MEMS mirror due to non-linearity and truncated phase modulation in the infrared region. The protective cover glass layer of both the DMDs and PLM is VIS/UV coated but not coated for infrared, causing strong Fresnel reflection at the 0th order. This unmodulated reflection introduces crosstalk between the 0th order and higher orders, making it difficult to distinguish higher-order diffraction images from the zeroth-order image. To mitigate this issue, a physical Fourier mask is applied to block the cover glass reflection from the transmitter-DMD, while a polarization-selective Fourier filtering technique is used to suppress the PLM’s cover-glass reflection and its zeroth order. This thesis presents a further advancement in the hybridized scanning and flash LiDAR architecture described by Chan (2023) [2]. The proposed new architecture enables an n²-fold enhancement in pixel resolution over Chan’s architecture of DMD-only based LiDAR by employing phase modulation with a PLM to perform sub-sub-FOV steering within each DMD’s sub-FOV. Along with the pixel resolution enhancement, this new architecture addresses the crosstalk issues caused by the cover glass specular reflection, beam spilling on adjacent orders, and gaps in beam steering and LiDAR imaging, utilizing a paraxial raytrace model for illumination design of the transmitter and contiguous receiver FOV design. Both the theoretical formulation and experimental validation of the resolution enhancement mechanism are provided. The crosstalk suppression techniques are effectively handled using Fourier-domain masking for DMD’s cover-glass reflection and polarization-selective filtering for the PLM’s cover glass and 0th order. The system is further supported by an analytical first-order model for contiguous, gap-free LiDAR imaging, and also demonstrates foveated scanning capabilities. These advancements offer significant potential for high-resolution, compact, and adaptive LiDAR systems in applications such as autonomous driving, robotics, and 3D mapping.

Purpose: The purpose of this quality improvement project was to increase the knowledge of new providers in the Rural Telehealth Certificate Program (RTCP) at the University of Arizona about the benefits of Remote Patient Monitoring (RPM) for heart failure patients. This project also assessed the intent of new providers to incorporate RPM into their practice. Background: Studies show that 75% of 30-day readmissions could be prevented if heart failure management was focused on patient understanding and compliance of their heart failure self-care (Sohn et al., 2020). Retrospective research of remote monitoring has shown decreased hospital readmissions as well as decreased emergency department visits (Lynch et al., 2022). Methods: An educational PowerPoint presentation about RPM was distributed to new providers through the RTCP coordinator. A pretest-posttest was available to the new providers to fill out at the beginning and end of the presentation, respectively. This helped evaluate the effectiveness of the educational presentation and any intent to incorporate RPM into current or future practice. Results: Two new rural providers participated in the intervention and completed the anonymous pretest-posttest. There was a positive change score for both participants for the Likert-scale questions. They both also indicated in the open-format questions of their intent to utilize RPM in their current/future practice. Conclusions: Due to a small sample size, results are not generalizable, but may imply that educating new rural providers about RPM for heart failure patients could initiate future RPM use for eligible patients. This would potentially benefit rural providers and improve their patient outcomes. The overall conclusion depicts that education on RPM benefits and utilization for heart failure patients should be pushed forward fervently.