• Single lane closure scheduled for Highway 187 across Beaver Dam

    The U.S. Army Corps of Engineers will be closing one lane of the Highway 187 bridge across Beaver Dam from 8 a.m. until 5 p.m. June 26, 2025, for a routine bridge inspection.
  • Single lane closure scheduled for Highway 32 across Millwood Dam

    The U.S. Army Corps of Engineers will be closing one lane of the Highway 32 bridge across Millwood Dam from 8 a.m. until 5 p.m. on June 24, 2025, for a routine bridge inspection.
  • Norfolk District Schedules Aerial Mosquito Treatment at Craney Island on June 18

    The Norfolk District, U.S. Army Corps of Engineers, has scheduled aerial mosquito treatment on June 18th, over the federal property on Craney Island.
  • From delamination to durability: How Fiber-Reinforced Polymer is fortifying Albeni Falls Dam's Gate 3

    Discovered in April 2024 during routine maintenance, Gate 3, one of Albeni Falls Dam’s 10 spillway gates revealed defective steel, likely a consequence of the original 1950s fabrication process. While a long-term plan for complete gate replacement is underway, the immediate need was for a robust, interim solution to bring Gate 3 back into service and restore the dam's full operational flexibility. Fiber-Reinforced Polymer (FRP) offers a technically superior Band-Aid, providing significant structural enhancement, a glimpse into the future of dam maintenance and a testament to modern engineering ingenuity.
  • Corps of Engineers makes adjustments to Lac qui Parle Dam

    The U.S. Army Corps of Engineers, St. Paul District, is adjusting its flood gates at the Lac qui Parle Lake Dam, near Watson, Minnesota, due to ongoing rain within the basin.
  • MKARNS Nav Notice No. SWL 25-46 SAILING INSTRUCTION NM 221.2 to NM 221.7

    Due to shoaling, mariners are advised that until further notice, both upbound and downbound tows should run the green line from NM 221.2 to 221.7.
  • MKARNS Nav Notice No. SWL 25-45 Lock 9 Closure - High flows

    Due to high flows on the McClellan-Kerr Arkansas River Navigation System, the Arthur V. Ormond Lock (No. 9) NM 176.9 is closed to traffic. The lock will reopen as the flows drop to safe navigation levels.
  • Evaluating Permanganate Oxidizable Carbon (POXC)’s Potential for Differentiating Carbon Pools in Wetland Soils

    Abstract: Soil carbon (C) storage is a globally important ecosystem service with potential to contribute to climate change mitigation. Wetlands are heavily researched for this. Most studies focus on total C quantification; there is limited methods that evaluate differences in C stability and vulnerability to mineralization within the C pool. Permanganate oxidizable C (POXC) is a well-established soil health indicator shown to be sensitive to changing conditions or management regimes and may prove equally informative. This research quantified POXC in six diverse wetland soils, then evaluated the relationship between POXC and basic soil C properties, microbial indicators, and physical and chemical fractionation metrics. POXC averaged ~ 37 times greater in wetlands than upland agricultural soils, but was less robust in differentiating between individual wetlands than total C or organic matter content. Rather, the ratio of POXC to soil organic C may be a more informative metric for evaluating the proportion of slightly processed C in wetland soils. Significant correlations were found between POXC and almost all soil properties measured, suggesting POXC could be a rapid, reliable, and economical proxy for other analyses. Overall, POXC shows potential for providing novel information about wetland soil C stability, but requires additional research.
  • Remaining Phase 3 options awarded for New Lock at the Soo

    U.S. Army Corps of Engineers, Detroit District’s New Lock at the Soo project in Sault Ste. Marie, Michigan, awards a total of $95.3 million for remaining Phase 3 options to Kokosing Alberici Traylor, LLC (KAT) of Westerville, Ohio. The remaining Phase 3 options include Option 4: Downstream Work ($44.9 million), Option 5: Hands Free Mooring ($24.2 million), and Option 6: Downstream Ship Arrestors ($26.2 million). Negotiated pricing on the remaining Phase 3 options was set to expire in September 2025.
  • Entropy-Based Guidance of Deep Neural Networks for Accelerated Convergence and Improved Performance

    Abstract: Neural networks have dramatically increased our capacity to learn from large, high-dimensional datasets across innumerable disciplines. However, their decisions are not easily interpretable, their computational costs are high, and building and training them are not straightforward processes. To add structure to these efforts, we derive new mathematical results to efficiently measure the changes in entropy as fully-connected and convolutional neural networks process data. By measuring the change in entropy as networks process data effectively, patterns critical to a well-performing network can be visualized and identified. Entropy-based loss terms are developed to improve dense and convolutional model accuracy and efficiency by promoting the ideal entropy patterns. Experiments in image compression, image classification, and image segmentation on benchmark datasets demonstrate these losses guide neural networks to learn rich latent data representations in fewer dimensions, converge in fewer training epochs, and achieve higher accuracy.