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Coconut rhinoceros beetle (Oryctes rhinoceros; CRB) was discovered in 2015 in a small outbreak in Honiara, Guadalcanal, Solomon Islands. This was the first record of CRB from Solomon Islands and a response plan was prepared. An awareness programme was launched and where CRB sightings were confirmed, delimitation surveys were carried out. Following the launch of the awareness programme, later in 2015, CRB was also reported from the Shortland Islands in the Western Province. Other islands were surveyed from 2015 to 2020. If CRB presence was confirmed, beetles were collected and analysed for haplotype and presence of the classical biological control agent, Oryctes rhinoceros nudivirus (OrNV). A distribution map and timeline of invasion were developed. The initial populations belonged to two distinct haplotypes: CRB-G (clade IA) in Honiara and CRB-S (clade II) in Shortland Islands. Despite control measures, by 2020 CRB-G had spread to islands in eight provinces and CRB-S had spread to islands in seven provinces. CRB-S and CRB-G co-occur in Guadalcanal and Malaita provinces. In 2019, OrNV was detected from field collected CRB from Guadalcanal and has since spread to Malaita Island. In both cases the virus was detected where CRB-G and CRB-S co-occur. Other outbreak areas in Solomon Islands remain OrNV-free. The two haplotypes appear to have spread following patterns of air and sea movement between the point of origin (CRB-G from Honiara and CRB-S from the Shortland Islands) to other islands/provinces.

This project describes strategies presented in the fiction of three American novelists which alter our relationship to the epistemological codes of modernity, standards in which we are implicated by a vast network of cultural assumptions and institutional apparatuses. Such confinement within an ethical hegemony—a system permitting only a limited range of acceptable conduct, contemplation, and resistance in both public and private spheres—restricts the bounds not only of what can be practiced but also of what can be safely thought. This system I identify as the epistemology of modernity and, ushered in by the advent of modernization, capitalist relations, and the contemporary continuation of enlightenment reason against which any form of expression must situate itself either in opposition or corroboration. Because divergence is permitted to a certain degree, the possibility of epistemological shifting cannot be achieved by outward participation in such a system and thus must be perceptual: achieved through mentality and self-awareness. The strategies involve a shift in epistemological and thus ethical relations to modernity. Briefly, for Nabokov, it is the ridding of focus on the self; for Pynchon, comprehending the influences of totality; and for Morrison, the depiction of the always-othered non-self rather than one reduced to normative social assumptions and interpretive practices. More specifically, each author offers a particular set of insights on which to build. The project at which most of Nabokov’s (1899-1977) written work is aimed involves the generation, almost separate from the fabric of reality, of a purely aesthetic world. While much of his project is (at worst) doomed to fail or (at best) susceptible to the inevitably invasive material of the real, it remains useful in seeing what potential arises when an imaginative mind consciously attempts to work outside of and resist established systems. Pynchon (b. 1937), on the other hand, is far more rooted in the project of describing the systemic effects of a totalizing modernity. His daunting narratives (often labeled encyclopedic) depict the overwhelming saturation of apparatuses under which individuals find themselves situated and interpolated. What Pynchon’s work portrays is the oppressive and interconnected systems conducting the flow of control in modern life and, most important for this project, the realization of this as a social technology along with the means by which, once understood as such, to subversively navigate it. Finally, Morrison (b. 1931) represents the most directly and aggressively destabilizing personality of this trio. Her novels adopt as a constituted whole an aesthetic form that seeks to confront and expose the hegemonic systems responsible for the perpetuation of ideologies that come to seem natural but which need not be. Rather than constructing an alternative world or showing the means by which one can navigate the current one, Morrison assails and deconstructions the assumptions that constitute modern reality. Together, these three novelists offer distinct possibilities for epistemological change that can be wrought, and my future work—proceeding this dissertation project—will turn to transforming the literary strategies uncovered here into an actionable praxis that reaches beyond the readership of the novel.

Detecting and improving the scientific understanding of global trends in complex Earth systems, such as climate, increasingly depend on assimilating datasets from multiple instruments and platforms over decadal timescales. Calibration accuracy, stability, and inter-consistency among different instruments are key to developing reliable composite data records from sensors in low Earth and geostationary orbits, however, achieving sufficiently low uncertainties for these performance metrics poses a significant challenge. Space-borne instruments commonly carry on-board references for calibration at various wavelengths, but these increase mass and mission complexity and are subject to degradation in the space environment. The Moon can be considered a natural solar diffuser which can be utilized as an on-orbit calibration target by most space-borne Earth-observing instruments. Since the lunar surface reflectance is effectively time-invariant, establishing the Moon as a high-accuracy calibration reference enables broad inter-calibration opportunities even between temporally non-overlapping instruments and provides an exo-atmospheric absolute radiometric standard. This on-orbit radiometric spectral reference helps enable high-accuracy absolute calibrations and inter-calibrations of past, current, and future Earth-observing sensors, meteorological imagers, and long-term climatemonitoring satellite systems. The goal of the ARCSTONE In-Space Validation of Earth Science Technologies (InVEST) project, funded by NASA ESTO, is to demonstrate its novel lunar measurement approach from space and improve the Moon as a radiometric SI-traceable reference for high-accuracy on-orbit calibrations spanning the visible and nearinfrared spectral regions. The ARCSTONE instrument is a compact spectrometer which will be accommodated on a 6U CubeSat intended for low Earth orbit with planned readiness for launch in about 2 years. It will measure the lunar spectral reflectance with combined standard uncertainty of 0.5% (k=1) across the 350 nm to 2300 nm spectral range. The ARCSTONE InVEST team will present the status of the project, the instrument design, calibration approach, concept of operations, and the planned path toward mission implementation.

The recent boom in the “history of capitalism” has neglected one of the most noted and maligned features of its subject: the connection between capitalism and inequality. To address this gap, this dissertation develops and employs the concept of “economic impunity.” It argues that impunity is a function of three variables acting with the sphere of the economy, each of which changed over time even as the structure of the economy itself changed. The first variable is prosecutorial discretion, whether contingent and corrupt or institutionalized in the limits of jurisprudence. The second is technical knowledge, as financial instruments became increasingly esoteric and economic theory became increasingly formalized across the eighteenth century. The third is international mobility, of both capital and its owners, since European capital markets integrated sooner and more thoroughly than markets for land, labor, or commodities. To test this approach, this dissertation uses documents from twenty-three archives in four countries to analyze the disparity between the increasing complexity of international financial instruments and the simultaneously limited scope of securities regulation in Britain and France to argue that the Financial Revolution witnessed the first expansion of economic impunity from the sovereign to the technical managers of capital, culminating in the world’s first international financial crisis in 1720. The second chapter shows how eighteenth century economic thought tried to solve the conceptual and political problems this crisis raised. The third chapter uses the financial records of the speculator Étienne Clavière to illustrate the normal workings of eighteenth century finance and how that systems came apart during the French Revolution, turning impunity into a nationalized and politicized attribute. The fourth chapter investigates the revolutionary interregnum through a pair of case studies in Dublin and Strasbourg. The final chapter shows how international private banks like Barings, Rothschilds, and Laffitte reconstituted the European financial system after 1815, culminating with their efforts to contain the first crisis of the nineteenth century gold standard in 1825. This dissertation accomplishes three things: it injects a tractable approach to inequality into the new “history of capitalism” that goes beyond national income accounting or cultural representations by using the concept of impunity to illustrate how institutional exceptions allow for the frequent but disavowed episodes of dispossession that accompanied the rise of modern finance. It illuminates why a constitutive element of the modern, self-authorizing economic sphere is that great moral and material harm can take place within it despite nobody being legally at fault or politically held accountable. Finally, it allows for a method of historicizing financial crises, which otherwise are taken to be eternal, inevitable, and above all, natural. This last moves the recent effort to historicize “the economy” towards an approach that grapples with how economies fail rather than how they grow.

El éxito de un bioproducto a base de microorganismos depende de que la formulación sea adecuada para su uso y estable en condiciones de almacenamiento. En este contexto, se evaluó la estabilidad de cuatro sistemas de liberación para la formulación de conidios del hongo antagonista Trichoderma asperellum Samuels, Lieckfeldt & Nirenberg (polvo mojable, gránulo cubierto, gránulo dispersable y concentrado emulsionable). La estabilidad de los prototipos almacenados a 4 °C y 30 °C fue evaluada durante seis meses mediante la determinación de características microbiológicas y fisicoquímicas. Los productos almacenados a 4 °C fueron más estables que los almacenados a 30 °C; presentando estos últimos una pérdida total de la germinación después de seis meses de almacenamiento, con excepción del polvo mojable (WP) que mantuvo su germinación por encima del 80%. Dentro de los sistemas de entrega, el polvo mojable fue el prototipo más estable, manteniendo una germinación de conidios mayor al 85% y una viabilidad de 1x108 unidades formadoras de colonias por gramo (UFC/g). Esta formulación además mantuvo las propiedades fisicoquímicas dentro de los estándares de calidad cuando fue almacenada bajo condiciones de refrigeración. The success of a microorganism-based bio product depends on an appropriate formulation for use, stable under storage conditions. In this context, four delivery systems were evaluated for the formulation of conidia of the antagonist fungus Trichoderma asperellum (wettable powder, coated granule, dispersible granule and emulsifiable concentrate). The stability of the prototypes stored at 4º C and 30º C was assessed for six months by determining microbiological and physicochemical characteristics. The products stored at 4º C were more stable than those stored at 30º C, the latter presenting a total loss of germination except for the wettable powder (WP), which presented a germination of over 80% after six months of storage. Within delivery systems, wettable powder was the most stable prototype, maintaining conidia germination above 85% and viability in 1x108 colony forming units per gram (UFC/g). This formulation also maintained all physicochemical properties within quality standards, when stored under refrigeration. Gerencia de Comunicación Institucional, DG SICyP, INTA Fil: Perdomo-Quispe, Cynthia Estefanía. Instituto Interamericano de Cooperación para la Agricultura; Ecuador Fil: Villamizar, Laura. Instituto Nacional de Investigaciones Agropecuarias; Ecuador Fil: Báez-Cevallos, Francisco Javier. Instituto Interamericano de Cooperación para la Agricultura; Ecuador Fil: Viera-Arroyo, William Fernando. Instituto Interamericano de Cooperación para la Agricultura; Ecuador Fil: Jackson, Trevor. AgResearch Ltd. Lincoln Research Centre. Microbial Solutions; Nueva Zelandia