Hello and welcome to the session. The given question says two dices are rolled once. Find the probability that first the numbers on the two dice are different and second is the total of numbers on the two dice is at least four. Let's start with the solution and we are given that two dices are rolled. So when two dices are rolled once then the sample space let us denote it by s is equal to on the first die if one appears and on the second die 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6 can appear. Similarly if on the first die two appears then again on the second die 1 to 6 numbers can appear since a die has six faces having numbers 1, 2, 6, 2, 3, 2, 4, 2, 6. Similarly when three appears on the first dice so we have 3, 1, 3, 2, 3, 3, 3, 4, 3, 5 and 3, 6 and similarly doing it for 4, 5 and 6 which appears on the first die we have 1 to 6 numbers on the second die. So this is the sample space when two dices are rolled and here the total number of possible outcomes is equal to 36. Now let us find the probability that the numbers on the two dice are different. So first let us find the probability that the numbers on the two dice are same. Let us start with the first one. Let us denote a by the event of getting same number both the dice. So here on observing we find that 1, 1, 2, 2, 3, 3, 4, 4, 5, 5 and 6, 6 are the events of getting the same number on both the dice. So a it is equal to the sample space having 1, 1, 2, 2, 3, 3, 4, 4, 5, 5 and 6, 6. Number of elements in a is equal to 6. Now we know that probability of an event is equal to the number of favorable outcomes to the event a divided by the total number of possible outcomes. Therefore here we have probability of a is equal to number of outcomes favorable all divided by the total number of possible outcomes. So here probability of a is equal to the number of possible outcomes favorable to a are 6 and the total number of possible outcomes are 36. So this is equal to 1 divided by 6. Now according to the equation we have to find the probability that the numbers on the two dice are different. That is we have to find the probability of a complement. That is we have to find the probability that the event of getting three numbers on both the dice and this is equal to 1 minus probability of a which is further equal to 1 minus 1 divided by 6 which is equal to 5 by 6. Hence answer to the first part is 5 divided by 6. Now let us proceed on to the second part. Find the probability that the total of numbers on the two dice is at least 4. So in the second part let us denote the event b by the event of getting total equal to 4 on both the dice. Since we have to find the probability that the total numbers on the two dice is at least 4. So the minimum is 4 and maximum it can go up to 12 since on both the dice the numbers which can appear last are 6 and 6 which gets the total of 12 which is the maximum total. So here we have to find the probability of b. So first let us write down the sample space for b. 1 appears on the first die then the smallest number which can appear on the second die such that sum of two numbers is 4 or greater than 4 is 3. Since 1 plus 3 is 4 then 4 can also appear on the second die. Since 1 plus 4 is 5 and we can get a total greater than or equal to 4 then we have 1 5 and 1 6. Then with 2 we can have 2 on the second die if 2 appears on the first die then we can have 2 3, 2 4, 2 5 and with 3 we can have 3 1, 3 2, 3, 3 4, 3 5 and 3 6 then with 4 we can have 4 1, 4 3, 4 4, 4 5, 4 6 but 5 also we can have all the probabilities 1, 2, 6 on the second die. So we have 5 4, 5 5 and 5 6 and on the last we can get 6 on the first die then again we have the probabilities of getting 1 to 6 on the second die. Observing we find that the number of elements in set b is equal to 33. So the probability of b is equal to the number of possible outcomes to the event b which are 33 divided by the total number of possible outcomes and simplifying this we get 11 divided by 12. Hence the answer to the second part is 11 divided by 12. So this completes the question buy and take care.


Ok, yn gwasanaeth ym gyfnodd, wrth gwrs, ddau'n gweithio i gydag, ar y llifffordd Llog 2020. Felly erbyn i'n meddwl bod yn gweithio ar y llifffordd Llog 2020. Yn teimlo'r gwybodaeth, rydyn ni'n rhaid i gael eu ffawr o'r rei'r Llog 2020. Mae'n gofal o'r llei, mae'n gweithio ar y llifffordd Llog 2020. Felly,'r llei yma, yn eto, ar y llifffordd Llog 2020. Johanna is a PhD candidate and also research assistant in various universities at the University of Münster in Germany. I'm looking at the attitudes that Africans have to different varieties of English, international varieties of English. I'm just comparing them to Germans as a reference group to see what's specific about their answers. Thank you very much for the introduction and I'm very happy to see you here. I hope you don't mind that I deliver this talk sitting down. Unfortunately I can't stand up for extended periods of time so I hope that everyone can see me and then I think that should work well. Julia already introduced my PhD topic so I'm looking at attitudes to different varieties of English by which I mean different varieties of English worldwide. In African communities in the UK and Germany so it's a bit complicated because lots of different groups and different speakers with different backgrounds come in but I mean that's what is also I think essential about my PhD research to show that things are sometimes not simple and that you have to actually look at international and transnational things as well. That's the first short introduction to something important about my PhD project and I'll get started here. A roadmap for today, I'll first give you a short introduction and talk about the aims of my project and the aims of today's presentation which overlap. I'll just put it like that and then I'll have a short look at important tendencies that have been established in previous language attitudes research on varieties of English and then I'll focus briefly on Kenyon and Nigerian communities in Germany and the UK. Then I'll talk about what I actually do in my PhD so which data am I using, which methods am I using and so as you can see from numbers five and six there are two essential things interviews and an excellent evaluation study and I'll quickly talk about both parts and then have a short discussion and outlooks section there. So you could already see in point three there that I have to kind of focus not on Africa in general as the title of my talk says but I'm sure you're all aware that you cannot really say Africa and I discussed with my supervisor that it would be good for now to focus on these two groups for several reasons, some of which are practical because I have a lot of people or most people from these two groups and also they might give different perspectives because they're from entirely different areas in Africa but as I also can already say now I think they also overlap in some things. So I think that's all for now. So a quick word about the spread of global English. There are lots of different approaches to describe the spread of English worldwide. This is just one approach that's a map in Schneider and he just says these are the territories worldwide where English has some sort of a special status. So yeah that I think does not include the English as a foreign language countries but just those where it actually has some sort of official status and we're all aware I think that the spread of English worldwide is enormous and that it also comes to some extent at the cost of other languages, smaller languages that are thankfully being researched a lot here at Suas. Nonetheless I've decided to look at English at this killer language because I think that the spread of English is also not very straightforward, not very simple and that some varieties of English or some accents of English might be just as they seem to have a far lower status than others and so there are really problematic tendencies if you look at the different varieties of English as well. Then I would just quickly I'm sure most of you must have seen this model. It's presented in different ways as well so but I think one of the most important models to describe the spread of worldwide English is Khachru's circles model of English and you have three circles, the inner, outer and expanding circle. And the model has been criticized as well but nonetheless it's used so widely and it's also useful I think to have a first description for language situations that exist regarding English so for the inner circle that includes countries like for example Great Britain or the US that would be considered to be English. Countries where English is spoken as a native language and they are thought to be providing the norm of English for the other countries. Then you have the outer circle countries which would be countries where English is spoken as a second language or but nonetheless where it also has a very important status and where very often new norms of English are developing. So I think a lot of African countries would actually fall into this so-called outer circle of English and then we have the expanding circle of English which includes mostly countries where English still has an important role but is where English is spoken as a foreign language and where really people are norm dependent so they look to other countries in the kind of English that they speak and that they learn and I just wanted to quickly introduce this because I'm using these terms as well and you need to know what I'm talking about here and as I said it's not an unproblematic model it's been criticized but nonetheless I think it's quite helpful for a first impression. Okay now I've kind of started to talk about the global spread of English and one thing that we should all be aware of I think is that these varieties of English these different accents of English don't just exist side by side and as Maya has put it so nicely the concert of world Englishes in his opinion is not a happy democracy of voices. So they are blatant inequalities and power differentials even among the standard varieties but also among non-standard varieties and between the two of course in English and Maya puts forward a hierarchy of English in which he says American English is the hub so the most important variety and he would say that it's now also more important. More important for most people than British English which I think can be doubted but I mean please say so so that's one approach and Blomard also points out that there are very much hierarchical systems of value in this concert of world Englishes and that different centers are competing for authority here. And especially in the so-called post-colonial contexts it's been well a very common tendency also that there has been a movement from a very much exonormative orientation so an orientation towards a variety of English from outside a country to an endonormative orientation so an orientation to a variety from inside the country but that's just one point where we can see different centers or a change of normativity in their obviously very different tendencies in other contexts as well. Blomard talks very much about something that is what could be called a clash of norms so what's considered to be good English in one place doesn't necessarily have to be considered to be a good English in another place and especially he says it's problematic that the norms of the so-called center differ from the norms of the so-called periphery. And problems arise particularly in translocal contexts of course where people move between different places and where they actually encounter very concrete consequences of this clash of norms and they might discover that the resources that they've been using all along and that they and everyone else may be considered something good is suddenly not valued any longer and so that's I think an important point about my research as well because I'm obviously looking at people who move between different places. Okay so the aims of this project I would like to describe the attitudes towards different varieties of English among Kenyans and Nigerians who live here in Europe in Germany and the UK and I would also like to so basically I'm looking at the spread of English from an attitudinal perspective. I mean I showed you a couple of approaches to this but most have not been based on attitudes towards these varieties so I'm looking at which consequences this spread of English has on attitudes that people show. And I'm analyzing the role of the different Englishes and the norms connected to them in the very complex linguistic ecology of the speakers. And as a last point especially for today's presentation I would like to suggest an expansion of the terminology exo and endonormativity that has been put forward by Ammon and used a lot for the description of language attitudes because I think it's not sufficient for the context it doesn't really cover the concepts that I need so. Okay previous tendencies in language attitude research to give you some background especially in the early studies on varieties of English and attitudes towards them. There have been a lot of studies that have shown that RP is evaluated as very high in prestige. But on the other hand US English and or local varieties from the settings where people did their research where sometimes evaluated as high in solidarity. And examples of this are for example Giles in the UK or Ball for Australia and the others you can see there. There have also been more recently studies that have shown that American English might be equaling or replacing the UK varieties as the prestige accent. Most notably Bayard et al have shown this in New Zealand and Australia or Mackenzie for Japan. But on the other hand then for example Garrett at Allen 2005 have also shown that there might be yet negative evaluations of American English. So this goes back also again to Myers claim that American English might become or be already be the hub of world Englishes. And from an attitudinal perspective that's still to be debated I guess. When we look at the accents that are used in the people's own backgrounds in the home countries or their home territories. There are also different tendencies so for example for New Zealand Bayard has shown a downgrading of the own accent and has said that there is something that could be called a cultural cringe. So people are not proud of their own accents and they rather choose a different one. But on the other hand in some context there has also been shown that there is a growing acceptance of local standard English. Shown for Kenya in a study that a non what they call non ethnically marked Kenyan English is preferred over native English and an ethnically marked kind of English for the public domain. And then there's also a study by Mutonya for Africans in the US that they show a loyalty towards heavily accented local varieties from Africa. There are exceptions but outer circle contexts are not exactly the context that have been researched most widely. In some of the studies that I've shown you know you could also see that the inner circle contexts have been very much researched. And there have been outer circle contexts as well in some studies but it's not exactly at the heart of attitude research. Also diaspora and migrant communities there are some studies on African diaspora or migrant communities and their attitudes towards varieties of English. Mutonya the one that I just named would be one of them and there are others but I think there's still need for more studies. And that is so even though Blomard points out that a sociolinguistics of globalization is per force a sociolinguistics of mobility. And so I think diaspora and migrant communities should really be at the heart of these studies because they can really provide insight into what's actually going on in this sociolinguistics of globalization. And so this move from one country to another where speakers of English are actually mobile and where different varieties of English, different accents of English are not just something that they encounter on a holiday or on some basis of whatever sort. But where this is actually a very personal and very concrete experience for everyone I think is yeah this is a very important context to look at. Okay before I move on to my study I would like to give a very short explanation about my not very refined use of the words diasbras and immigrants here today. So I know that there are lots of different definitions and you can go to very fine grain definitions but I would like to include two points here for my study and for today. So Clifford has pointed out that there's one difference between the two that immigrants are enroute to a whole new home in a new place whereas diasbras are groups that maintain important allegiances and practical connections to a homeland or dispersed community located elsewhere. My Accord claims that this distinction cannot and should not be upheld for different reasons and for what I'm doing here I agree. So I'm not really distinguishing here and I think what's important is that the connections to the homeland as well as transnational networks as well as the new environment matter for most people I talk to or most people who come here. So basically from this definition that Clifford's give both aspects or all aspects come in and I don't think in that respect there should be a distinction between the two. And in this situation where connections to the home country transnational networks and the new environment matter to people obviously that results in very complex linguistic ecologies for the people. So they encounter not just different Englishes but also their first languages of course but if we just look at the Englishes so they are indigenous L2 varieties very often. For some English is also the mother tongue. For some they are pigeonised and creolised varieties of English. Then they encounter British English particularly if they're in Great Britain of course. They might encounter foreign learner Englishes here as well as in Germany and then if they're in Germany obviously German comes in as well. On top of that very often there's contact between the different varieties or obviously always there's contact between different varieties. So for example also between the different migrants Englishes. So as I said I think in this situation this is really an experience that I think everyone I talk to encounters on a daily basis and that also matters to a lot of people. Some people have actually told me interviews that that's been the story of their life this walking between different accents and between different linguistic resources. And if you just put it like this you have this wonderful list of different languages or varieties that come together but I think it's important that it also matters to people. Okay a few numbers about Kenyan and Nigerian communities in Germany and the UK. It's incredibly difficult to actually get numbers that you can rely on. I tried to use some sources that seem to make sense so but I will not put it down to the exact numbers there. What we can see from the numbers though and I think that's pretty certain is that the communities in Germany are obviously far smaller than those in the UK. Which also makes sense because in the UK people speak English and for a lot of Kenyans and Nigerians. That is a huge plus if they want to go abroad then the language problem or factor doesn't come in as much as in Germany where it's even more difficult to find jobs and to enter a university and so on. We can also see that a lot of them are in their very best age so in their 30s or between 20 and 40. That goes I think for all the communities there and so they are fairly young still. In England most Kenyans and Nigerians are apparently based in London. The research questions that I'm asking so the overarching question is obviously tied to my aims very much which attitudes do Kenyans and Nigerians in Germany and the UK hold towards different varieties of English. But then there are a couple of sub questions that I'm particularly interested in also in the light of the previous research that I've just very briefly had a look at with you. So one important question is what is the status of British and American English for my respondents. Then is there a growing acceptance or a downgrading of the home country varieties for my respondents. And then because I would like to get a little more complete picture I would also like to ask how are other outer circle and expanding circle varieties evaluated. And in order to find out a bit more about what the answers actually mean I think it's also very interesting to have a look at a reference group because if you just look at one group and their answers then you can't really say okay would this be different from another group but I think from looking at a reference group that can give you an additional insight into the actual answers of your group. So regarding my method I'm combining two approaches a quantitative and a qualitative approach and I think they're both necessary and both helpful. And in the quantitative approach I have an accent evaluation study with vocal stimuli so two sets of vocal stimuli one taken from newscasts and one from broadcast interviews with athletes. I have conducted a pilot study with an open ended questionnaire first in order to elicit evaluative adjectives for my accent evaluation study. And currently my data collection is still ongoing but hopefully coming to some close soon for my rating scale study in Germany and the UK. It's been incredibly difficult to find enough people and to convince people to take part so maybe I'll talk about that later a bit. And then I'm combining that with a qualitative approach in which I conduct conversational interviews that vary a bit in length because people have had well simply some people have had more to say than others. And I didn't want to cut anyone short so some interviews were 45 minutes I wasn't planning for that in advance but they were very interesting so I would love to include them all. And I think I've currently conducted almost 50 interviews so I've conducted them with Kenyans and Nigerians who were born in Kenya or Nigeria respectively and who are currently living in Germany or the UK. I would like to start with a couple of examples from the interviews here to give you a first impression into what people have actually told me. And I've told you earlier that Blomard says that there's a clash of norms particularly in transnational contexts where people move from one place to another. And so I was interested of course in first of all whether this clash of norms plays a role for people whether this actually is a problem or not. So from the comments that I have here they are from interviews that I conducted here in the UK and I'm just going to read them out now. So one person said there was already sort of a big African diaspora like from all over Nigerian, Ghanaian, Congolese so there wasn't this sense you know from others that I was somehow different because everyone was different somehow. That was a young woman I asked you know what was it like when you came to Great Britain what did it feel like for you with respect to language. There was another comment pretty similar to that that I chose for this that someone said I think most people here in the UK or London especially they are not really bothered about accents because they know that London is a multicultural city. That's how they want to label it. So from these two examples we could get the idea that there actually is a happy democracy of voices in London and I think that's also important to mention that not everyone I talked to has said that this has been a problem. Some have simply said yeah there are lots of different people with lots of different accents I don't have a problem with that they don't have a problem with that so they were fine. On the other hand I've actually had a lot of comments of the following kind that have shown that people do have problems in everyday life related to accents related to different varieties of English. So that this clash of norms actually matters to their everyday life in some way. There have been comments that have shown that it's problematic regarding work so if you look at this comment here someone said I think the most difficulty I found is when I started working in the office. Because I feared when the phone would ring because the other person on the line would sometimes would not sometimes understand you but the way you're pronouncing then it make you think excuse me is it that I don't know the English. So this person really said she was mortified to pick up the phone because people kept saying I can't understand you and she thought that her English was pretty clear and everyone should be able to understand her. I didn't have a problem understanding her anyway but apparently that really made her work life very hard. Then I had another person who said my flatmates granddad he would joke you know every time I picked up the phone but he'd say you know it sounds like I've called one of those takeaway joints. I didn't think she sounded like a takeaway joint at all you know she had this really almost to me very British sounding Queens English like variety of English and I think these comments really hurt her. So it's really a very personal thing as well that this flatmates granddad kept saying these sorts of things. And then a more general comment at the end here when you're speaking people might think you don't know English maybe because you're not pronouncing the way they are pronouncing so I don't know then who is right in pronunciation and who is wrong. So yeah that already tells us something about the orientation maybe as well so people actually think about what might be the right pronunciation in this context because obviously if you're confronted with these kinds of things all the time you start thinking hey what is actually this correct English and who's right here and who's not. Because before that the English seem to be fine before they move to Great Britain in this case but then suddenly it's not and not everyone thinks that that should be so simple. I also then ask people directly in the interviews you know what do you think about certain varieties of English in order to find out what their opinion about these different varieties is and also maybe which hierarchy for them. From their attitudinal perspective exists between the different varieties of English. So when I asked them about British English I think that there was a very strong tendency for many people to say that that seemed to be somewhat of a target English for them and they said that they found it to be the correct variety of English the original and they saw it as very prestigious. And I'm talking about standard British English here because they did not like other varieties of British English all that much when I asked them in the interviews. And some of them also said they were quite surprised and quite taken aback when they came to Great Britain and actually felt that lots of people couldn't speak British English at all even though they were British. So yeah so these are just two examples I like the British accent well I would say the posh British accent would be a typical example. Someone else in that case a young Kenyan English young Kenyan lady said when I asked her about her favorite accent it's Queens English just because it was what I was taught and even what my parents were taught to be the correct English. It was what was spoken in the time we were colonized and so that's what I see to be correct as opposed to nowadays when there's a lot more slang involved. So that is quite a strong motivation there as well and I wouldn't have expected such a comment from such a young lady actually but that's what she said and so I'm including it here. Anyway but the point is that British English seemed to be very much a target for lots of people I talked to. American English on the other hand in the interviews not very popular often perceived to be incorrect and people had very strong opinions about American English actually so two examples that are quite typical for my interviews here. American English is very strange and loud aggressive and strong. I really really hate the American accent it is slow pitched and very nasal so it's sort of whiny to me. And I'm not distinguishing between my British and sorry between my Kenyan and Nigerian respondents here because I think the tendencies are pretty similar actually from the interviews that I conducted. I also asked people about their own home country English which seemed to carry covert prestige for them seemed to be an identity marker as well of course and for some also it was important with respect to Pan-Africanism so not just to show that they were from Kenya or Nigeria but also to show that they were African. So a very typical comment here sounds like home and another comment that I found very interesting was there's that unique accent and I think that's a diversity that makes us appreciate ourselves as being Kenyan being African. One further tendency that I would like to point out that also came out in some interviews at least was that people said actually I like a lot of accents. I wouldn't really make such a difference. I wouldn't choose one over the other so someone said what I like is people speaking clearly. I don't mind whether there's an accent overlaid on top of that so it didn't matter at all to this person whether someone had an accent that sounded Kenyan, Nigerian, African, Chinese, French or something completely different altogether. I think that's an important tendency as well. Not everyone said something like that but that actually is something that a couple of people also pointed out. I would now like to switch to the other perspective to my quantitative accent evaluation study and I would like to introduce quickly what I used as vocal stimuli for the accent evaluation study. I used authentic recordings. That's an approach that has been employed successfully by a couple of researchers but obviously has some shortcomings as well. If you use very controlled vocal stimuli that has its advantages but I thought it might be of advantage for my study to use authentic recordings as well. If you use very controlled vocal stimuli, for example, I've read somewhere that people said they chose a neutral text for people to read out. I really wonder how a text could ever be neutral but we could discuss that later on. Anyway, I thought it would be good to actually use authentic material for that. I already pointed out that I used a more formal context on the one hand from newscasts and a more informal context on the other hand, so athletes in broadcast interviews. I tried to control the content to some extent of course so I tried to pick similar international news items for the newscasts and similar interview passages for the athletes. I also chose situations where they all were asked directly after their competition so it wasn't unfair to one of them because they were just giving an interview in some completely different context so it was pretty much the same situation for all of them. There are about 30 seconds long. I only have female speakers which is due to time constraints. I would have loved to have a male set for all of them again but then I have people from seven different countries, the UK, the US, Kenya, Nigeria, Jamaica, Germany and China. That for both sets and then in additional male and female speakers and no one would do the survey so I think it's simply a time constraint. For the newscasts I tried to pick speakers who used standard English plus what's been described as representative for the individual varieties in the relevant literature. For the interviews similarly I tried to use speakers who did show features that are supposed to be representative of the varieties but here they all also use some non-standard features. I then had this type of questionnaire so a four point lickered scale people could choose between disagree, tend to disagree, tend to agree and agree and they were always asked to say something about the following question. To me this newscaster sounded or statement and then one item so professional, friendly, confident, arrogant, correct, clear, refined, pleasant and authentic and for the athletes pleasant was replaced by cool. I had two additional items that kind of lie outside this core a little bit so I also asked to me this speaker sounded like a native speaker of English and like she tried to address a worldwide audience. Then there were always for each speaker two open ended questions so where do you think this newscaster comes from and any further impressions that people had of a newscaster. Because sometimes really interesting thoughts come up there as well. So who are my respondents for this study? I have 64 respondents from Kenyon and Nigerian communities in Germany and the UK. 61 of them are included in the analysis, three of them I didn't like, no just kidding. They simply didn't give enough answers so I couldn't include them in the analysis. They would all be considered to be educated so they all have a high school degree and most of them have some university education or are currently pursuing a university degree. They are adults of different age groups, they were all born in Kenya or Nigeria respectively. Their length of stay in the country of residence varies from below one year to more than ten years so a couple of months was the minimum. There are 27 respondents from Kenya and 34 from Nigeria and you can see that there's a slight problem still with my data if you look at the distribution here in the different groups. So I still need especially some male Kenyans and some female Nigerians. If you know any please put them in touch with me so that they can fill out the survey. Okay, regarding my results so far so this is obviously work in progress. It's not set in stone and if a couple of people still answer this might change a bit. I left the two groups together here. I did have a look at them separately as well but they were actually quite similar and so I thought before I have all the answers I will leave them together so this will be an overview for both groups for today. I conducted a NOVA for the evaluation of the newscasters and I would now like to show you the descriptive statistics with the overall means that each newscaster received for the nine core traits that I illustrated earlier. So the newscaster sounded professional friendly and so on on a scale from one disagree to four agree so four is good one is not. If we look at the results here we can see that the British speaker is the front runner. But if we look at the lowest speaker there the overall mean is 2.95 so on a scale from one to four that's actually still pretty high. And we can say that all newscasters actually receive fairly positive ratings in this group. The British speaker actually also is rated significantly higher than all other speakers except the German one who by the way sounds quite British as well. So I need to mention that. The home country newscaster so for the Nigerians that's the Nigerian for the Kenyans the Kenyan newscaster is still fairly high there and on one level with the American speaker actually. So they come in pretty much exactly the same position at the moment and then the other African speaker Chinese and Jamaican speakers are preferred. And I would like to show you a direct comparison to my German reference group there so that you can see that the respondents from Kenya and Nigeria actually differ. We still get fairly positive evaluations for all the speakers in this group but there's a wider range and I think that could be an indication that there's actually a higher tolerance towards different accents in the African group of respondents than among Germans who seem to have pretty strong opinions and stronger opinions from what I can say about how English should be spoken and what is correct and what not. So the German speaker was not identified as a German speaker by the German respondents at all. They all thought she was British so basically the German and the British speaker come in first both representing a British or British influence variety of English and then there's a fairly huge gap before all others. And then the African and Jamaican speakers actually received the lowest ratings in this group so that also obviously differs very much from the African answers because the home country variety received a fairly high rating there. I was also interested in this question then and in how it compares to the overall means for the newscasters. So when people were asked to state whether to them the newscaster sounded like a native speaker I was interested in whether this corresponds to a high rating in the overall mean when they think that someone does sound like a native speaker. So what we can actually see here is very clearly that the overall ratings lie very close together so that didn't come out as clearly in the other table that I just showed you. So the blue bars here are the answers for how much did they think this person sounded like a native speaker and the red ones represent the overall mean. So we can see that the British and American speakers were considered to be the prototypical native speakers surprisingly and that very low native speaker ratings correspond to a lower overall evaluation although the overall evaluation is not as much lower as the native speaker rating of course. Speakers from the home country and Germany have kind of medium ratings as how much did they sound as a native speaker but they have pretty high overall ratings so that does actually not correspond very much to each other in the group of African respondents that I asked. We have had a look at the overall means but I did look at very different items actually so you can see a wonderful chart here with the different items don't worry you don't have to follow every line here. This just shows that there are huge differences actually depending on which exact trade or which exact item you look at. You can see that the British speaker is pretty much consistently very high that's the light blue line up here for all trades except for not arrogant. So other speakers are much preferred or at least to some extent and what we can also see is that the American speaker is considered to be the least friendly by far and the most arrogant here. Anything else I want to mention here? Yeah if we look at the home country English that would be the green line here so you can see that for example for clarity that's fairly high up for how confident did the speaker sound it's also fairly high and it's also not considered to sound very arrogant. I did conduct a principal component analysis to have a look at how the individual items bundled together then and I don't know if that's clear enough but I'll explain. So I still have to work on the statistics a little bit here and actually for the newscasts the principal component analysis does not work perfectly because most of the items bundle on one factor that could be called confidence. Sorry competence for newscasts so professional friendly confident correct clear refined pleasant and authentic and on the other hand solidarity so not or arrogant and friendly bundle together to some extent. However it's problematic that friendly for whatever reason seems to bundle or seems to load on to both factors. But if we look at the different results here we can see that for competence especially the British speaker that's up here very high. So is the German speaker by the way and the if we look at the solidarity ratings American and British English are actually downgraded to some degree so we can see that for American English this much lower than for all the others. So that obviously corresponds to what I just showed you earlier considered to be the least friendly and the most arrogant speaker and British English is solidarity is lower than competence but still up fairly high and we can see that for those varieties where competence was somewhat low for Jamaican English for the other African variety of English and Chinese English the solidarity ratings actually go up a lot and it's also interesting to see that for the home country variety that's this here both are fairly high. So for the newscasts we can see that all varieties are actually evaluated fairly positively by my canyon and Nigerian respondents and that a range of accents seems to be accepted here and more so than among the German respondents. And there seems to be some acceptance of the home country variety even though it's not the first in terms of overall means that comes in here among the respondents in terms of both competence and solidarity. The Chinese are the African and Jamaican newscasters so speakers from the outer and expanding circle are rated lower in terms of competence but upgraded in terms of solidarity. British English overall is preferred also rated significantly higher than most other varieties and certainly not replaced by American English in this context so from an attitudinal perspective. Not from the interviews and not for the newscasts we can see that there's any sort of replacement of British English by American English for this particular group of respondents. And both British and American English are rated higher for competence than solidarity. For the athletes we can see that they receive fairly high ratings overall as well but lower than the newscasters. There's a very small range actually for the athletes even smaller than for the newscasters so the lowest overall mean is 2.7, the highest is 2.94. That's really close and there are no statistically significant differences whatsoever. That however also fits with one additional question I asked in the surveys in the survey which accents do you prefer for athletes in newscasts. That's a question that I simply asked in addition and lots of people actually wrote something like whichever accent they speak in as long as they are clear or athletes are athletes they don't need to have specific accents. If we also look at the different trades here we can see that maybe the overall mean evaluation doesn't really make that much sense for the athletes because the individual items differ a lot. So for example in terms of the items how professional did you find the speaker or how clear did you find the speaker. The British and American speakers come in before all others so that's these two the light blue and the dark blue line here and for clear that's here. Even though I chose people who also as I said use non-standard features in their accent. But we can see that for example for friendly or not arrogant again the picture changes completely and the African speakers the Chinese or the German speaker here rate fairly high. So here for example for not arrogant that's most clear I think. Again I try to see how do these things bundled together it works better for the athletes than for the newscasters. So competence for this factor the items professional confident correct clear refined and cool bundled together and for solidarity friendly not arrogant and authentic. So what can we see from this. First of all athletes are generally not considered to be professional because all the professional ratings are below the solidarity ratings or all the competence ratings there. But apart from that British and American speakers are rated higher and also significantly higher than for example the German and Chinese speakers in terms of competence. And in terms of solidarity American and British English and the Jamaican speaker are rated lower than all others. So for the athletes we can say that the overall means are very similar and the UK and US speakers receive the highest ratings followed by the two athletes from Africa. And the UK and US speakers are higher than the other athletes in terms of competence but lower in terms of solidarity. Whereas the home country and other African athletes are fairly high in terms of both competence and solidarity. So overall in my accent evaluation study we can see that for both categories several varieties were evaluated positively by the Canyon and Nigerian respondents and that a range of accents seems to be accepted. There seems to be an acceptance of the home country variety and the other African variety in terms of competence and solidarity. But particularly in newscasts British English is preferred and also rated above all others. Both British English and American English are rated lower in terms of solidarity than competence. American English is not replacing or equaling British English in newscasts but they are on the same level regarding the athletes interviews. The speakers from the expanding circle so in my case China and Germany they pretty much always receive high ratings and solidarity and I think it depends very much on the exact context on the news or the interview depending on what you actually listen to which speaker comes in where and also on the dimension obviously as I've showed. So I said earlier that I find it very difficult that normative orientation is often described in terms of XO and endonormativity and maybe that makes sense if you look at attitudes in one particular country. It does not make so much sense if you actually look at people who move from one country to another because what is this XO? What is outside? What is inside for these people? I mean if you live in one country and never move out maybe it's clear that whatever is spoken in this country is inside and whatever is spoken in somewhere else is outside. But that's not sufficient for the kind of situation that I'm looking at. So it's really difficult to describe the situation in these terms. And so I think that there should be some wider notion of a norm as well because as I've seen and I've also tried to illustrate with the results earlier what if actually a range of accents is accepted then we cannot really say that there's an orientation towards one variety. So maybe we need a different kind of notion for this norm as well. And we probably don't need it for every context but at least I think we should think about introducing other terms there and I just thought about a couple of terms that would be necessary there, others that we should maybe introduce as well. But there needs to be a term for what if people actually show loyalty towards a home country variety and I've called this origin normativity here. What if several varieties are accepted as the norm? Maybe plurinormativity and what something that I think might also be quite likely is that people accept a small set of varieties only and so we might call this oligonormativity. OK, so what's going to happen in the future with my study? So as I said I'm still hoping to get a few more respondents so that the different groups kind of are more even and I can actually compare them better and now kind of put them together but I need to actually look at the differences in more detail as well. And so I'm hoping for some more people and please as I said send them my way if you know anyone else. I'm also currently trying to get a few more people from other backgrounds as reference groups and I have a couple of answers but I'm trying to collect some more so that I can not only have a look at how do they compare to German respondents but also to British and African respondents from Nigeria and Kenya. And obviously for the interviews I only gave you a couple of examples now but in general I'm also still in the process of analyzing them and hoping to get a more in depth analysis soon about these experiences. Oh sorry this is double. So I would like to end on the quote here, the rest I've already said that so sorry about that. And I hope that maybe there might be a happy democracy of voices if more people think like that. One of my respondents said, listening to me and trying to put yourself in my shoe we can all understand one another so I think that's a nice way to end this and I thank you very much for your attention and I'm looking forward to your questions and comments. Thank you all for the American English. There were different varieties so I can't really compare them directly. I mean obviously the ideological structure of living also will be leveraged at one point and making it a different cause and so it will be interesting to see if Kenya and Nigeria are living in the United States. I tend to think that they would be very different actually. I also think that maybe people... I tend to think that maybe also people who really like American English might have moved to America if they had the choice and not to Great Britain. I mean the reasons for moving to a country can be various obviously but I think that maybe if people have financial opportunities to choose where to go and they really like the American culture and the American kind of way of speaking English they might not have moved to Great Britain in the first place. So that would be one possible reason and I also think simply what people are used to might also play a huge role and yeah maybe I've only asked very conservative people. I don't know but certainly from that set of respondents British English was more popular especially for the newscast but also in the interviews when I simply asked people but I think that might be different if you ask people in the US. Of course it might be entirely different however this aspect is kind of cancelled out if you only use people from one gender because then you simply only look at the varieties. I already said it I think it would be very very interesting but I think that will have to wait for my next study because really I couldn't have included more samples and I just had to cut it and I wanted to really leave in the informal and formal distinction between the context as well. And so it would have been so many speakers and that I think I would have even fewer respondents so maybe next paper or study. I don't know if anyone really has done extensive research on this development. I always asked my respondents in the interviews have your attitudes changed since you've left your home country and if yes how. And I think the answer that I got most often was actually that people said it's made me appreciate accents of English more because before I left actually I didn't think about accents a lot. There was just English basically they just saw it as one kind of one thing and not different accents. And then they came here and they actually noticed OK there they might be very very different accents. And the other thing is that well I think I touched on that earlier as well that some people told me OK when I moved I realized that I always thought. British English was this really ideal kind form of language and then I came to Great Britain and I talked to people on the streets or anywhere and it doesn't sound like that at all. And they suddenly thought that their own language was much better than what was actually spoken here. And also with respect to people from other countries for example other European countries where English is not the first language. People felt that well they were simply much more proficient in English because obviously they had used it all their lives and the other people had not. And so these were some aspects that I could detect there but yeah that's obviously not extensive research and but I think yes there are changes in the attitudes. You mentioned one thing you mentioned about getting used to the accent in a particular place if they do to a particular place. And I think that's something that's a little more of an obligation than a question. People have done research into English in a language of anchor. They say that you have to get sort of to say this politely kind of fresh meat if you like because they said that the minute that somebody moves to a country where English is the north is the language of that country. Then their accent changes and their attitude changes and you have to do research with people who haven't moved somewhere else. And you said your people have moved in the middle of Germany for about 10 years so that's quite a question. The length of the state differs from a few months to more than 10 years. I tried to have a look at that and I'm still kind of hoping to get a few more people so that the groups in that respect also even out a little bit because statistically you can't really say anything. There are differences yes and I feel that from the people I asked people who have been here for longer actually tell me that it was more problematic for them when they moved here, when they first moved here than those people who have only been here for a very short time now. So that was one tendency that kind of was interesting and I thought okay maybe things have changed in London and these comments that I showed you earlier about this happy place with multicultural English that were all younger people who hadn't been here for very long. Maybe. So yes I think that's a factor. And where did they come from? I think there's a difference if someone really starts learning English and comes from a country like Germany or whether you are from a country like Kenya for example where you actually do encounter British English in a lot of newscasts and so on so I think most people I talked to didn't find it as difficult to follow as maybe someone from Germany would find it and they are already a little bit used to it when they come here. So maybe that also goes back to your question and maybe the people are loyal to their country of residence as well and maybe that's where a difference between American people living in the US and people living here could come in. They were not, there wasn't anyone from Liverpool in my sound samples for the accent evaluation study but I always talked about this in the interviews as well. And most people pretty much said that they found other accents from the UK pretty strange and hard to follow. Most of the time people then stated accents from the north of England or also Scottish English that they found very strange and just funny but certainly not to be taken seriously. When my experience came in when I was at Manchester and I was living here in London I said because my experience also showed that I didn't differentiate between the accent until today because London was not in the world. But I was just looking at the issues outside London. That's different. So this is online by the way if you want to do the test so I think I've circulated the link. I couldn't actually listen to it myself because I didn't have the updated flash play out. So is your British accent like RP type or BBC English or is it a London kind of accent? In the newscasts I would say it's a BBC type English and for the athletes not so much. That's more East London with a little bit of glottal stops. Because I thought if I'm looking at a context that's more informal then it makes more sense to actually take an example where someone also uses a couple of features that don't sound like RP. If you compare foreign accents and your home country English and another African accent and a non-standard British accent that's completely different than if you compare a foreign accent and BBC English obviously. So that's why for the athletes I try to choose a different form of British English. Because the way I speak and the way another British person with a bit more animated or someone with a bit more monotonous maybe how much your accent affects what people think you're doing and how much it's just your personality. That's obviously a very problematic point. In the original matched guys type studies people tried to trick their respondents by using the same speaker for different languages and just telling them that they were different speakers and kind of mixing one or two speakers up and that then cancels out this problem. However for the accents that I'm using you couldn't really do that because I don't think that anyone could really claim to do these accents authentically or at least I wouldn't be sure if they could do it authentically. Yeah there is to some extent that problem will always remain and you cannot really take it out completely. Obviously I tried not to use speakers that sound completely different but yeah I mean that's one problem with the authentic material. Yeah for the contents as I said I tried to use fairly similar international news items so they were always a news item on the Middle East or North Africa which also results in some people simply always when asked to guess where the speaker comes from guessing the country that's mentioned in the newscast. But yeah so I mean from the newscasts I think from the content you can't really guess where the speakers are from because they are all about another country so no one is reporting about their own country at all and I think that would be hard to guess from the content really. For the athletes I actually tried to get athletes from just one kind of sport first but it's really difficult to actually get similar sounding athletes with the linguistic features that you want and from all seven countries and all female and all with this very same sport. So I kind of had to give up on that and I still tried to kind of control it by using the same situation and I tried to use as many people doing athletics or running as possible because that seems to be more universal than other sports but unfortunately I had to include one tennis player that results in people saying that's Serena Williams even though she's from China and certainly does not sound like Serena Williams but yeah. So you can't really say it's as informal as an informal conversation between people obviously that's still a public context and that obviously still influences the ratings as well. So maybe in for a conversation the people would choose a completely different hierarchy of Englishes than for this context. However yeah I think that still most of the athletes for most I can be pretty certain that they have not had any coaching regarding language and maybe especially for the Chinese athlete maybe she has but she's still struggling with English. You can hear that and so yeah I think others I tried to also use athletes that are not very famous so that that is not so much of an issue because I think the more famous someone is the more successful they are. The more money they have and the more likely they will be to pay for a voice coach and the others probably probably not so much. Yeah I think all of them. I mean you can obviously discuss whether the coaching has been similar for all of them. I don't know about that and I would say maybe not but I think they all have received coaching. Yeah I had one set of results now because that's one of the problems that I still have is as I said with a couple of other things that the groups are not. Not even and you can't really then work very well with the statistics but I think yes there is a difference or a couple of differences but I can't really give you a very detailed account of them yet. Yeah. No. They had to guess. I think for oh no I didn't ask them to guess which you know economic status or which class they thought for this week. They just had to guess which country they were from. So no they did not mention anything about class. I always had this question. Are there any further impressions about the newscaster and I'm thankful that some people actually took the time to fill. In these things as well because that gives you some additional insight into some of the answers for the newscasters. I think it doesn't play much of a role because they all as you pointed out have had some sort of voice training and I think that they all speak standard English in such a way that you couldn't really tell easily what their background with respect to classes or anything like that for the. Athletes yes I did get some comments but that was more or less consistent so it wasn't just one athlete that got these comments you know maybe has a background. I didn't get one comment where someone said we actually referred explicitly to class other than that class was not actually mentioned but yeah they were some comments. Referring to the speakers backgrounds then saying you know especially for the British speaker for example this is the person who grew up in East London and so being very specific about that sort of thing. Yes good observation yeah I did there obviously also you can argue for against that and what I'm doing is forcing people to choose between good and bad basically so because if you leave the middle choice in then. It can happen that people will just you know always say yeah it's in between in between in between and then I thought maybe that kind of makes it difficult to interpret the results and I just thought you know maybe it's better to. By this force people to at least say I tend to agree or tend to disagree which might sometimes be difficult but then I think. I talked to people about whether they had any problems with the questionnaire and they didn't find it too problematic to choose so. If maybe it was a good approach for that then. Sometimes maybe you find a pattern in those who. Of just the middle one. Maybe you find a pattern. I didn't yeah. If you had enough performance you could compare but he doesn't have enough so. Yeah. As you said there are pros and cons. How? One more question I think we only have to talk. So. I'm not sure if I missed it. Did you find out. How much that. One of the participants. How much they could. Make themselves understood or. The opposite how much. Because they have been making themselves understood. Is that a significant difference. Well my. Survey is anonymous so I don't really know who answered. What in the surveys I can't relate it to the interviews directly. What they said in the survey. So that's difficult I can only go from the interview information. And I don't think I can really point out a tendency there. No. No. So first people first thing people. Is it. And then. Yeah. Thank you. Thank you.


First speaker this morning is Allison Long. Allison Long is a science fellow with Minnesota North Dakota South Dakota units of the Nature Conservancy. Her work involves many aspects of conservation science including communicating science, conservation planning, managing data and traditional field science and grassland monitoring projects. She's also involved in work around sustainable grazing, climate adaptation and metrics around benefits to people from conservation interventions. Allison earned her master's of science degree in environment and conservation science from the North Dakota State University. Studying community composition of my micro rise of fungi across the Northern Great Plains. She also has a bachelor's of science degree in psychology. She currently resides in Fargo, North Dakota where she is perfectly located to travel, perfectly located in Fargo. To travel to all beautiful nature areas of the Dakotas in Minnesota to offer. Her title today is adaptive management on tall grass prairie for native species composition. Let's welcome Allison. Well, as Sarah mentioned yesterday, I'll be talking to you about an adaptive management project similar to MPAM called the Grassland Moderate Team or GMT which has a focus on improving native species cover and composition in our tall grass prairies. Like Sarah said about MPAM, we certainly don't have all the answers but I'm excited to share with you a little bit about the project and the work that we've done so far. So to give you a quick summary of what I'll be talking about today, I'll just give an overview of the project. I'll give some results of previous retrospective analyses. I'll talk a little bit about trends in abundance of smooth brome and Kentucky bluegrass that we've seen and then share some conclusions. So first I wanna highlight and acknowledge that this project is a collaborative effort mainly between the nature conservancy and US Fish and Wildlife Service and Minnesota Department of Natural Resources but also in partnership with the US Geological Survey, University of Minnesota, University of Colorado at Boulder and South Dakota Game Fish and Parks. So the Grassland Moderate Team or GMT began in 2007 among a multi-agency group of grassland managers and scientists. The group felt that a cooperative strategy and like a standardized monitoring effort would improve our effectiveness at resolving uncertainties about grassland management and would also facilitate comparisons of data across ownership and throughout the tallgrass prairie region. So as we've talked a lot about in this workshop, remnant and restored prairies in the Northern Great Plains are threatened by encroaching invasive species, especially cool season introduced grasses and woody vegetation. And as you know, the main focus of grass and monitoring efforts, or sorry, management efforts is to protect and enhance the competitive ability of a native plant species. And for this project in particular, more focused on the native tallgrass prairie communities in the Western Minnesota and the Eastern Dakotas. And the purpose of the GMT project is to evaluate which management actions have the greatest likelihood of improving cover and composition of native plant communities and also recommending management actions. So the aim of the adaptive management approach is to evaluate the best management actions and their frequencies to maintain and enhance native tallgrass prairie plant communities in the region using real-time management information. So similar to NPAM's mixed grass prairie management treatments, the management actions that we use in the GMT project are burning, grazing, burning and grazing in the same management year and rest. So for this project, a management unit is considered burned if greater than or equal to 50% of the vegetation has been exposed to fire. A management unit is considered grazed if greater than or equal to 25% of the area or the biomass has been impacted by livestock in some way. And there's no limits on the number or type of animal or length of grazing. And then we also wanted to look at burning and grazing within the same management year, which is defined as October 1st to September 30th, separately from those actions separately. And the last option is rest or no management action. And because managers still face a lot of uncertainty over which actions to take and how often to take them, we've employed this adaptive management model to help us learn. So adaptive management is a structured iterative process of decision-making in the face of uncertainty with a goal of reducing uncertainty over time via monitoring. And the grass and monitoring team uses double loop learning with iterative and deliberative phases. So the first deliberative phase identified stakeholders, project objectives and other decision components and that occurred in 2007 and 2008. And then from 2008 to 2020, the team has been in an iterative phase of the cycle. So implementing management, monitoring, using data from monitoring to evaluate management and update the model and adjusting management recommendations. And then in 2020, the team started the double loop learning phase. So re-entering the deliberative phase of the cycle. So focusing on reassessing and updating the model. And then the iterative phase resumed again in 2020, following that double loop learning and updates to the adaptive management model. So I'm not gonna go into much depth on this, but I want to highlight that the model, the outputs are management recommendations is run every year and it uses a state transition model which has been mentioned several times in this workshop. In GMT, the states are defined by native cover and plant community. And each state receives its own management recommendations from the model each year. And then really briefly in case anybody is interested, the process use a random forest model to calculate transition matrices. And then data are used to inform stochastic dynamic programming. And then finally, the model generates management recommendations dependent on the current conditions of the site, such as level of invasion and predominance of herbaceous versus shrub cover. And then those management recommendations are provided to land managers. So this is a map of our sites with the orange polygon showing the distributions of sites across the western, across western Minnesota and the eastern Dakotas. And then that gray outline is the northern tallgrass prairie ecoregion boundary. The sites span to ecological provinces, the tallgrass aspen parklands in the north and the prairie parklands in the south and the west. And the sites in the model are all unplowed remnant prairies. And prairie community types include wet prairie, music prairie and dry prairie. The dominant vegetation varies by community type and includes big bluestem, yellow and gene grass, prairie cord grass and prairie drop seed in wet to music prairie and little bluestem and porcupine grass in dry prairie. The most common invasive species are the non-native cool-season grasses, Canada thistle and sweet clovers. And I should mention that the sites in the model would only unplowed prairie, but their condition really ranges from having a high diversity of native plant species and low abundance of invasive all the way to the other end of the spectrum. Okay, so now I'm gonna share with you an overview of the monitoring that we do at these sites. So the protocols we use were designed to measure baseline plant community composition as well as changing composition and structure in response to the selected management actions. They're also developed to be simple, fast, robust and effective for large-scale monitoring. So the sample units are permanent transects distributed randomly within a management unit at a density of one transect per 10 acres with a minimum of five and a maximum of 15. And they're generally revisited about every three years. So most transects are not monitored every year. And the transects are 25 meters long, a 10th of a meter wide, and they're subdivided into 50 half-meter plots. So you can see in this picture that red outline kind of gives you an idea of what those plots look like. So every time I say plots, think of that. And we also collect data on vegetation structure by using a robel pole placed at the center point of the transect. And we use the robel pole as is shown in that photo to get a visual obstruction reading or VOR. And we collect as well a litter depth measurement every five meters along the transect. And then the other important part of our monitoring is plant community composition data, which is collected two ways. We record any native or invasive indicator species observed within a three-meter wide belt transect, so a meter and a half on either side of the meter tape all the way along the transect. And then also within each half-meter plot along the transect, we record any invasive species that are there and whether they are present or dominant. Then the other aspect of this is for each half-meter plot along the transect, we assign and record a plant species code, or I'm sorry, a plant group code, which reflects three different dimensions, native to invasive, herbaceous to low shrub to tall shrub and grass to grass form to forb. So you can see here the decision tree that we use in the field. So for example, if there's more than 50% native cover in a plot, that's the first step here. And then the next step would be to decide if it's all native or mostly native and these classes are determined by the percent of cover, then you would decide if it's herbaceous or low shrub or tall shrub. And then the last step would be if it's grassy, grass form mixed or just forb. And at the end of that process, you get a three-digit plant group code that reflects all those different decisions. So after we have all that monitoring data and all of our management data, we put all that into the model and to just give you an example of what the model output might look like, we put in all the data into the model and then the model will assign each transect to one of six states and then gives a recommendation. So for example, a transect with high native cover and herbaceous community would be assigned to state four, high herb. And then for that state, the model would say in the first year burn, in the second year graze and then third year rest. So now that you have kind of a general understanding of the GMT project and the model that makes management recommendations, I wanted to share some of the retrospective analyses that have come from the work that this team has done. So one of them is this paper by my supervisor, Marissa Allering as well as Sarah and others. And so this analysis uses data from 2008 to 2016 and overall, this analysis showed that native plant cover increased at low quality sites. So that was one of the big takeaways of this. And just diving a little bit more into those results. So the analysis modeled relationships between management actions and native prairie species cover and frequency. And so another important result from this work was that across all the different model configurations that were tested in the analysis, the team found that the strongest predictor of whether the percent of native cover management goal was met was the initial state of the transect. So management goals were different depending on the initial condition of the transect. So for example, for units that began in a high quality state, the goal would just be to maintain that state. So you want no change. And then on the other hand, sites that were initially in a low quality state would have a goal of improving to a higher quality state. So this figure shows the relationship between whether the percent of native cover goal was met. So zero would be that met and one would be met on the y-axis. And then the initial state of the transect is on x-axis. And the bars along the top and bottom show the density of data points that meet the management goals. And there's no trend line here, but you can see that the higher the initial state, the higher the percent of native cover goal met. And again, the point here is that the strongest predictor of whether a transect met its native cover goal was its initial state. So transects that had high native cover to start with are the ones that are most likely to have a high native cover later. And then this figure is the same as the previous slide, except that it shows the proportion of years burned on the x-axis. And again, there's no trend line on this figure, but you can see that the higher proportion of years burned is associated with higher percent of native cover goals met. And one of the big findings from this analysis was that burning was the most effective treatment for enhancing the native plant communities. And then when plotting this relationship for the proportion of years grazed, you can see that a greater proportion of years grazed is related to lower percent of native cover goals met. So actually this analysis found that grazing negatively affected the native plant community, especially at low quality sites. However, I should point out that the effect is weak and the data set is actually a bit biased because not many high quality sites get grazed in this project. So pivoting from that analysis on native cover, I just wanted to share some findings related to cool season invasive grasses. And as we've discussed a lot in this workshop, Kentucky bluegrass and smooth brome are some of the biggest threats in this region. And so we have some data investigating their effects. And I wanted to mention that in addition to Kentucky bluegrass and smooth brome, our data set also includes observations of Poha compressa or Canada bluegrass. So both Poha species are lumped together in our monitoring protocol. And so therefore they're also lumped together in this analysis. So I was curious to see if the GMT data set would show any trends in cover for these species. Oh, sorry. So this analysis included data from 2008 to 2022. And not included in the analysis were transects outside of the northern tallgrass peri-eco region as well as transects that were only monitored once were excluded. And transects that were monitored only twice were excluded if those two monitoring events happened for your fewer years apart. So for each transect, we calculated the proportion of half meter plots where smooth brome is dominant, which is greater than 50% cover. Where smooth brome is present, which is one to 50% cover. And then where Kentucky and Canada bluegrass are dominant, which is 52, or sorry, greater than 50% cover. And the proportion of half meter plots where Kentucky and Canada bluegrass are present, one to 50% cover. And then a one sample Wilcoxon test was used to evaluate if proportion of plots with brome and bluegrass changed over time. So these figures just show the proportions of plots per transect where each species was present or dominant over time with black diamonds representing the means. And one thing to keep in mind is that we can't make conclusions about trends over time from these figures because different transects are monitored each year. But this does give you kind of a sense of the scope of the issue. And you can see that on average, bluegrass is present in a large proportion of plots per transect. So each transect in this analysis has been monitored multiple times over the years. And from each survey, we have the proportion of plots where brome and bluegrass were observed either present or dominant. So in this figure for each transect, I subtracted the first observation from the most recent observation to obtain the overall change in proportion of plots within each transect where each species was present or dominant. So you can see there's a lot of variation there. And you can't tell from this figure, but from some other analyses, I know that brome and bluegrass are increasing in some transects, they're decreasing in some transects, and there's a lot of transects where there's no change. And the black circles on this figure show the means. And if we take a closer look at those in this figure, there's a horizontal line at zero change in proportion over time. And you can see that the three categories above the line are all significantly higher than zero. So brome has become both dominant and present in a greater proportion of plots over time, and bluegrass has the largest increase in presence over time. But across all plots mean proportion of plots within a transect where bluegrass is dominant has not changed over time. So building off of that, I wanted to share one other retrospective analysis using the GMT dataset, looking at invasive species cover and management. So this work was done by Hugh Ratcliffe, Marissa Allring, Sarah and others. And the analysis includes data from 2010 to 2019 at Minnesota sites only. It estimated the effects of burning, start time of the growing season and their interaction on invasive species relative cover and frequency. So overall they found that burning reduced the abundance of cool season grasses, leading to a reduced abundance of invasive species as a whole. The reduction persisted over time for invasive cover, but quickly diminished for the frequency of occurrence. So these plants quickly started to emerge again, even if they didn't have as much cover. So as part of this analysis, it was hypothesized that with earlier growing season starts or GSS invasive species like Kentucky bluegrass and smooth brome shown in red in this figure would be better than natives shown in blue at shifting their phenology and using that new empty niche space, allowing them to increase in abundance either through growing larger or increasing their number of individuals. And the ability for these highly invasive species to grow earlier could then result in seasonal priority effects where their greater abundance earlier in the season reduces access to light and space for later growing species, which tend to be the native species. However, the results did not support this hypothesis at all. Invasive species abundance was not positively affected by earlier growing season starts. Instead, the team actually found evidence that later growing season starts increase the abundance of some invasive species. However, the effects of burning on plant community were mostly unchanged by the timing of the growing season. Although earlier growing season starts did weaken the effectiveness of burning on Kentucky bluegrass and smooth brome. So this figure displays some of those results. It shows the estimated effects on species frequency and cover of burning at the top, growing season start day in the middle and then the interaction of the two at the bottom. The error bars are showing 95% confidence intervals and orange indicates a negative effect, green indicates positive effect and black indicates no effect. You can see on the left-hand side, T minus one means management actions happening in the prior year and T minus two means two years prior. So the two rightmost columns that are highlighted here are Kentucky bluegrass and smooth brome. You can see the negative effects of burning and growing season start date separately, but the positive effects on those two are combined in the bottom. So to summarize all of this, the GMT data show that smooth brome is becoming present or dominant in a greater proportion of plots per transect over time and Kentucky and Canada bluegrass are also becoming present in a greater proportion of plots over time, but there's no change in dominance there. We also saw that burning is most effectively enhanced, sorry, that burning most effectively enhanced the native plant community and increased the dominance of native indicator species. And the earlier growing season starts weakened the effectiveness of burning on Kentucky bluegrass and smooth brome. And then a few thoughts about the project and the process in general. So ecological change is slow. As we know, these ecosystems developed over thousands of years and they're composed of long-lived perennial plants. So it's going to take a lot longer than 15 years for us to dramatically change the system. Also learning from adaptive management is a slow process, although the double loop learning process allows us to reassess and make adjustments to the model and framework as we learn. And then last, I just want to reiterate the benefits of collaboration. So documenting both management actions and monitoring information in a standardized way allows us to learn faster from each other than we can working alone. So that's all I have and happy to take any questions.