ScholarWorks@UMassAmherst

Native plants evolve over time to have deep, specialized relationships in their environments. Movement due to changing environmental conditions is a normal part of that process. However, as humans move plants around, and change our ecosystems in other ways, we may outpace our ecosystems' abilities to keep up. This short comic provides an introduction to native plants and introduced plants, and explains why some plant introductions may lead to ecological imbalance (and be considered "invasive"). It also explores the impacts of climate change on plant communities. This is intended to be used as an educational resource for children K-5 (written for an approximately 3rd grade level). It includes glossary and discussion pages, though an art-page only version is also included.

This paper develops Nomological Foundations of Emergent Agency as a conceptual framework for relating micro-level lawfulness, macro-level organization, and emergent human agency within a single layered ontological picture. The proposal is a philosophical framework designed to clarify how locally governed interactions can be conceptually linked to large-scale order and, under suitable organizational conditions, to reason-responsive agency. A central aim of the paper is to prevent category confusion in cross-domain discussions that move too quickly between physics, consciousness, and free will. To this end, the paper introduces a restricted notion of particle-level Computational Description of Dispositional Properties, defined as locally instantiated lawful state-evolution and interaction responsiveness, and explicitly distinguished from phenomenal consciousness. Through a state-space formalization, the paper argues that human agency is more coherently treated as an emergent higher-order capacity involving representation, evaluation, and selfregulation, rather than as a suspension of physical law. The framework is situated within an emergentist-compatibilist interpretation of free will, offering a disciplined interdisciplinary vocabulary for distinguishing local lawfulness, emergent organization, and agential capacities without collapsing them into one another.

This dataset compiles puncture mechanics data from the soft matter and biomechanics literature, aggregating results across a wide range of biological tissues and synthetic hydrogels. For each material, the database records material name/type, probe geometry (tip radius, shape, and angle), sample geometry (width/radius, length, thickness), puncture descriptors (puncture force, puncture depth, etc.), probe velocity, and elastic modulus, along with associated standard deviations where reported. The dataset is intended to support the development and validation of scaling relationships governing soft material puncture, and to serve as a reference for researchers working on the mechanical characterization of soft tissues and hydrogels or related applications.