Over the last three decades, significant investments made to upgrade wastewater infrastructure and manage pollution from diffuse sources have resulted in measurably improved water quality and biological conditions in Ohio's rivers and streams. Conservation measures to reduce soil loss appear to have contributed significantly to the improvement witnessed over the last two decades and should ther...

Native grasses are increasingly popular and valuable tools for revegetation, erosion control, and wildlife habitat improvement. Many have unique features and benefits that make them advantageous over certain exotic and introduced grasses. In the field of ecological restoration, they are a critical and required component of the target plant community, ecosystem, or natural habitat. A number of n...

This paper is concerned with the empirical relationship between biodiversity conservation values and income. We use random effects panel models to examine the effects of income, and thenGDP per capita, on willingness to pay for habitat and biodiversity conservation. In a meta-analysis, 145 Willingness To Pay estimates for biodiversity conservation where existence value plays a major role were c...

Under the Clinical Laboratory Improvement Act of 1967 the Health Care Financing Administration's proficiency-testing requirement applies to approximately 12,000 hospital, reference, and large-clinic laboratories in the United States. The Wisconsin State Laboratory of Hygiene is approved by the Health Care Financing Administration to provide proficiency testing in all specialties and subspecialt...

Traditional quality-control methods are effective for detecting systematic error caused by deterioration of reagents or instruments, but ineffective for detecting sporadic error, which is more likely to occur in low-volume testing environments. Decentralized testing performed by individuals without formal laboratory training has a high potential for sporadic errors. New methods for validating t...