It’s possible that I shall make an ass of myself. But in that case one can always get out of it with a little dialectic. I have, of course, so worded my proposition as to be right either way (K.Marx, Letter to F.Engels on the Indian Mutiny)
Monday, April 27, 2020
Big data reveals we're running out of time to save environment and ourselves
Technological advances will not help the world unless they lead to action UNIVERSITY OF MELBOURNE IMAGE: EARTH DAY 2020 THIS YEAR WAS NOT JUST ABOUT ENVIRONMENTAL DECLINE BUT THE ADDITIONAL THREAT OF A PANDEMIC. view more CREDIT: GLOBAL FOREST WATCH TIMELINE PHOTOS The use of big data can help scientists' chart not only the degradation of the environment but can be part of the solution to achieve sustainability, according to a new commentary paper.
The paper, 'Opportunities for big data in conservation and sustainability', published today in Nature Communications, said increased computing speeds and data storage had grown the volume of big data in the last 40 years, but the planet was still facing serious decline.
Lead author Dr Rebecca Runting from the University of Melbourne's School of Geography says that while we currently have an unprecedented ability to generate, store, access and analyse data about the environment, these technological advances will not help the world unless they lead to action.
"Big data analyses must be closely linked to environmental policy and management," Dr Runting said. "For example, many large companies already possess the methodological, technical, and computational capacity to develop solutions, so it is paramount that new developments and resources are shared timely with government, and in the spirit of 'open data'."
Commentators noted that 2.3 million km2 of forest was lost over the years 2000 to 2012 and that dynamic marine and coastal ecosystems have revealed similar declines. An analysis of over 700,000 satellite images shows that Earth has lost more than 20,000 km2 of tidal flats since 1984.
"In light of the COVID-19 pandemic, we are currently seeing governments making rapid (health) decisions based on fairly sophisticated data analysis," Dr Runting said. "There may be opportunities to learn from this and achieve a similarly tight coupling of analysis and decision-making in the environmental sector."
Co-author Professor James Watson from the University of Queensland said with platforms like Google Earth Engine and the capacity of satellites to track and send information quickly to computers, big data was capable of identifying eco-health risks globally.
"What the big data revolution has helped us understand is the environment is often doing worse than what we thought it was. The more we map and analyse, the more we find the state of the environment, albeit Antarctic ice sheets, wetlands, or forests, is dire. Big data tells us we are running out of time," Professor Watson said.
"The good news is the big data revolution can help us better understand risk. For example, we can use data to better understand where future ecosystem degradation will take place and where these interact with wildlife trade, so as to map pandemic risk."
Dr Runting said big data has been pivotal in quantifying alarming spatial and temporal trends across Earth. For example, an automated vessel tracking and monitoring system is being used to predict illegal fishing activity in real-time.
"This has allowed governments quickly investigate particular vessels that may be undertaking illegal fishing activity within their jurisdiction, including within Australian waters," she said. Similarly, Queensland's Statewide Landcover and Trees Study uses satellite imagery to monitor woody vegetation clearing, including the detection of illegal clearing.
Professor Watson cited a similar example. "Global forest watch has been a game change for monitoring the state of the world forests in near real time. This can help identify illegal activities and informed active enforcement of forest conservation around the world," Professor Watson said.
The paper also noted positive environmental changes due to human intervention such as greening seen in large expanses in China, which was driven by large scale national policies, including forest conservation and payments for restoration.
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Three years of monitoring of Oregon's gray whales shows changes in health
OREGON STATE UNIVERSITY
IMAGE: RESEARCHERS USING DRONES CAPTURE IMAGES LIKE THIS TO HELP THEM CALCULATE WHALE HEALTH USING THE BODY AREA INDEX, WHICH IS SIMILAR TO THE BODY MASS INDEX, OR BMI, IN PEOPLE,... view more
CREDIT: GEMM LAB, OREGON STATE UNIVERSITY
NEWPORT, Ore. - Three years of "health check-ups" on Oregon's summer resident gray whales shows a compelling relationship between whales' overall body condition and changing ocean conditions that likely limited availability of prey for the mammals, a new study from Oregon State University indicates.
Researchers from the Geospatial Ecology of Marine Megafauna Laboratory at OSU's Marine Mammal Institute used drones to monitor 171 whales off the Oregon Coast during the foraging season between June and October in 2016, 2017 and 2018.
They found that the whales' health declined following a period of relatively poor upwelling - an ocean condition that brings colder, nutrient-rich water closer to the surface - compared to previous years.
"What we see is this compelling relationship between the oceanographic processes that control the quality and quantity of available prey and whale health," said Leigh Torres, an assistant professor with the Marine Mammal Institute and the lab's director. "This research gives us an inclination that changes in ocean conditions might be causing skinny whales."
The findings may also provide insight into the unusual gray whale die-off event that occurred in 2019 along the Pacific Coast, Torres said. More than 200 gray whales were reported dead between Mexico and Alaska last year, including six in Oregon. Many of the deceased whales appeared to be in poor body condition, meaning they looked skinny.
The study was just published in the journal Ecosphere. The paper's lead author is Leila Soledade Lemos, who recently completed her doctorate at Oregon State and worked with Torres in the GEMM Lab.
Most gray whales migrate from breeding grounds in Mexico to feeding grounds in the Bering and Chukchi seas between Alaska and Russia, where they spend the summer. The Pacific Coast Feeding Group, as Oregon's gray whales are known, spend the summer months feeding in coastal waters of Oregon, as well as northern California, Washington and southern Canada.
Torres and her team conduct "health check-ups" on the whales using drones to capture images and nets to capture fecal samples - two methods that provide researchers a lot of information in a noninvasive way, reducing stress on the whales.
Lemos used images captured by the drones to calculate the whales' Body Area Index. The BAI is similar to the Body Mass Index, or BMI, in humans, because both allow for comparisons among individuals despite differences in length and height.
The Body Area Index is a measurement that allows researchers to compare changes in individual whales as well as the population as a whole during the course of the feeding season and from year to year. The fecal samples help researchers determine a whale's hormones, sex and diet.
Gray whales typically arrive on the foraging grounds on the skinny side, then in ideal conditions will bulk up over the course of the summer in preparation for migration and breeding.
"With this research, we're trying to understand more about the health of the whales and how it varies throughout the foraging season and from year to year," Torres said. "Once we establish a baseline for whale body condition, we can start to see what is healthy and what is not and why."
The researchers often encounter the same whales multiple times in a season, or from one year to another, and have gotten to know their markings and features well enough to spot the whales by the names they've been assigned, such as Spray, Knife and Clouds.
"The first year the whales looked really fat and healthy. But after 2016, the whales were really skinny. You could see their skeletons," Lemos said. "For these whales, body condition is strongly related to food availability. It is also related to when they invest in reproduction."
The researchers noted nine pairs of mothers and calves in 2016, but only one pair each in the two following years. Calves had the highest Body Area Index numbers, followed by pregnant females. Lactating females had the lowest BAI and the most depleted body condition.
Overall, the whales' body condition deteriorated after poor upwelling conditions between 2016 and mid-2018. In 2016, the whales' mean BAI was 40.82, while in 2017 it was 38.67; 2018 was similar to 2017, at 38.62.
The poor upwelling may have caused a shift in the availability or quality of zooplankton, the whales' primary prey. But the impact of the changing food supply really became noticeable a year after the poor upwelling condition began.
"There was a one-year lag, or carry-over, between the lack of prey in 2016 and the whales' body condition the next year," Torres said.
One of the whales that died during the 2019 event had been observed and catalogued in previous years by Oregon State researchers.
The study highlights the value of monitoring whale health over time, Torres said. The researchers now have four years of data on Oregon's resident whales and hope to continue monitoring them to better understand health patterns in the population and how they connect to changing ocean conditions.
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The research was supported in part by the NOAA National Marine Fisheries Service Office of Science and Technology Ocean Acoustics Program; Oregon Sea Grant; and the OSU Marine Mammal Institute. Lemos received funding from Brazil's Science Without Borders Program and its National Council for Scientific and Technological Developme Marine Mammal Institute. Lemos received funding from Brazil's Science Without Borders Program and its National Council for Scientific and Technological Developme
Honey bees could help monitor fertility loss in insects due to climate change
Research could help track how heat impacts sperm cells
New research from the University of British Columbia and North Carolina State University could help scientists track how climate change is impacting the birds and the bees... of honey bees.
Heat can kill sperm cells across the animal kingdom, yet there are few ways to monitor the impact of heat on pollinators like honey bees, who are vital to ecosystems and agriculture around the world.
In a study published in Nature Sustainability, researchers used a technique called mass spectrometry to analyse sperm stored in honey bee queens and found five proteins that are activated when the queens are exposed to extreme temperatures.
The proteins could be used as a tool to monitor heat stress in queen bees, and serve as a bellwether for wider insect fertility losses due to climate change.
"Just like cholesterol levels are used to indicate the risk of heart disease in humans, these proteins could indicate whether a queen bee has experienced heat stress," said lead author Alison McAfee, a biochemist at the Michael Smith Labs at UBC and postdoc at NC State. "If we start to see patterns of heat shock emerging among bees, that's when we really need to start worrying about other insects."
Although honey bees are quite resilient compared to other non-social insects, they are a useful proxy because they are managed by humans all over the world and are easy to sample.
The researchers were particularly interested in queen bees because their reproductive capacity is directly linked to the productivity of a colony. If the sperm stored by a queen is damaged, she can "fail" when she no longer has enough live sperm to produce enough drones and worker bees to maintain a colony.
"We wanted to find out what 'safe' temperatures are for queen bees and explore two potential routes to heat exposure: during routine shipping and inside colonies," said McAfee. "This information is really important for beekeepers, who often have no way to tell what condition the queens they receive are in. That can have a really dramatic impact on their quality and quality of their colonies."
First McAfee established what the threshold for queen "failure" was, and how much heat they could withstand by exposing them to a range of temperatures and durations.
"Our data suggests that temperatures between 15 to 38 degrees Celsius are safe for queens," said McAfee. "Above 38 degrees, the percentage of live sperm dropped to or below the level we see in failed queens compared to healthy queens, which is an 11.5 per cent decrease from the normal 90 per cent."
The researchers then placed temperature loggers in seven domestic queen shipments via ground and one by air. They found that one package experienced a temperature spike to 38 degrees Celsius, while one dropped to four degrees Celsius.
"These findings can help create better guidelines for safe queen bee transportation and help buyers and sellers track the quality of queens," said co-author Leonard Foster, a professor at the Michael Smith Labs at UBC.
While bee colonies are generally thought to be good at regulating the temperature inside hives, the researchers wanted to know how much the temperature actually fluctuated. They recorded the temperatures in three hives in August in El Centro, California, when the ambient temperature in the shade below each hive reached up to 45 degrees Celsius.
They found that in all three hives, the temperatures at the two outermost frames spiked upwards of 40 degrees Celsius for two to five hours, while in two of the hives, temperatures exceeded 38 degrees Celsius one or two frames closer to the core.
"This tells us that a colony's ability to thermoregulate begins to break down in extreme heat, and queens can be vulnerable to heat stress even inside the hive," said co-author Jeff Pettis, an independent research consultant and former USDA-ARS scientist.
Having established these key parameters, the researchers will continue to refine the use of the protein signature to monitor heat stress among queen bees.
"Proteins can change quite easily, so we want to figure out how long these signatures last and how that might affect our ability to detect these heat stress events," said McAfee. "I also want to figure out if we can identify similar markers for cold and pesticide exposure, so we can make more evidence-based management decisions. If we can use the same markers as part of a wider biomonitoring program, then that's twice as useful."
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Stress in parents of children with autism: Pets may help
MU researcher examines impact of pet dogs, cats on families with autism
UNIVERSITY OF MISSOURI-COLUMBIA
IMAGE: DR. GRETCHEN CARLISLE IS A RESEARCH SCIENTIST WITH THE RESEARCH CENTER FOR HUMAN-ANIMAL INTERACTION IN THE MU COLLEGE OF VETERINARY MEDICINE. view more
CREDIT: MU COLLEGE OF VETERINARY MEDICINE
COLUMBIA, Mo. - While current events have increased stress for all families, parents of children with autism report higher levels of stress on average than parents of typically developing kids. Feeling overwhelmed and overburdened by various responsibilities, some parents turn to pets as a source of comfort and support.
Now, research from the University of Missouri has found that pets lead to strong bonds and reduced stress for both children with autism and their parents.
Gretchen Carlisle, a research scientist with the Research Center for Human-Animal Interaction in the MU College of Veterinary Medicine, surveyed more than 700 families from the Interactive Autism Network on the benefits and burdens of having a dog or cat in the family. She found that despite the responsibility of pet care, both children with autism and their parents reported strong bonds with their pets. Pet ownership was not related to parent stress, and parents with multiple pets reported more benefits.
"Given that the characteristics of autism spectrum disorder are so broad, it can be difficult to identify interventions that are widely beneficial," Carlisle said. "Some of the core challenges that children with autism face include anxiety and difficulty communicating. As pets can help increase social interaction and decrease anxiety, we found that they are not only helpful in providing comfort and support to children with autism, but to their parents as well."
For parents considering adding a pet into their family, Carlisle recommends including the child in the decision and making sure the pet's activity level is a good match with the child's.
"Some kids with autism have specific sensitivities, so a big, loud dog that is highly active might cause sensory overload for a particular child, while a quiet cat may be a better fit," Carlisle said. "My goal is to provide parents with evidence-based information so they can make informed choices for their families."
ARC CENTRE OF EXCELLENCE FOR TRANSLATIONAL PHOTOSYNTHESIS
DURING THE PAST FEW WEEKS, EMPTY SUPERMARKET SHELVES, WITHOUT PASTA, RICE AND FLOUR DUE TO PANIC BUYING, HAS CAUSED PUBLIC CONCERNS ABOUT THE POSSIBILITY OF RUNNING OUT OF FOOD. AUSTRALIAN FARMERS HAVE REASSURED CONSUMERS SAYING THAT THE COUNTRY PRODUCES ENOUGH FOOD TO FEED THREE TIMES ITS POPULATION. HOWEVER, WILL THIS STATEMENT REMAIN TRUE IN TEN TO TWENTY YEARS IN A COUNTRY SEVERELY AFFECTED BY CLIMATE CHANGE? THE ANSWER IS YES, IF WE ARE PREPARED FOR THIS AND IF THERE IS CONTINUOUS FUNDING TOWARDS CREATING SOLUTIONS TO INCREASE CROP PRODUCTION.
"Plant scientists are punching above their weight by participating in global, interdisciplinary efforts to find ways to increase crop production under future climate change conditions. We essentially need to double the production of major cereals before 2050 to secure food availability for the rapidly growing world population," says ANU Professor Robert Furbank from the ARC Centre of Excellence for Translational Photosynthesis (CoETP).
"It is similar to finding a virus vaccine to solve a pandemic, it doesn't happen overnight. We know that Australia's agriculture is going to be one area of the world that is most affected by climate extremes, so we are preparing to have a toolbox of plant innovations ready to ensure global food security in a decade or so, but to do this we need research funding to continue," Professor Furbank says.
Several examples of these innovative solutions were published recently in a special issue on Food Security Innovations in Agriculture in the Journal of Experimental Botany, including five reviews and five research articles.
Co-editor of the Special Issue, ANU Professor John Evans, says that this publication highlights the now widely accepted view that improving photosynthesis - the process by which plants convert sunlight, water and CO2 into organic matter - is a new way to increase crop production that is being developed.
"We are working on improving photosynthesis on different fronts, as the articles included in this special issue show, from finding crop varieties that need less water, to tweaking parts of the process in order to capture more carbon dioxide and sunlight. We know that there is a delay of at least a decade to get these solutions to the breeders and farmers, so we need to start developing new opportunities now before we run out of options," says Professor Evans, CoETP Chief Investigator.
The special issue includes research solutions that range from traditional breeding approaches to ambitious genetic engineering projects using completely different ends of the technological spectrum; from robot tractors, to synthetic biology. All these efforts are focused on finding ways to make crops more resistant to drought and extreme climate conditions and being more efficient in the use of land and fertilisers.
"Our research is contributing to providing food security in a global context, and people often ask what that has to do with Australian farmers and my answer is everything. Aside from the fact that economy and agriculture are globally inter-connected, if Australian farmers have a more productive resilient and stable crop variety, they are able to plan for the future, which turns into a better agribusiness and at the same time, ensures global security across the world," says Professor Furbank.
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This research has been funded by the Australian Research Council (ARC) Centre of Excellence for Translational Photosynthesis (CoETP), led by the Australian National University, which aims to improve the process of photosynthesis to increase the production of major food crops such as sorghum, wheat and rice.
This research is published in the Journal of Experimental Botany Special issue on Innovations in Agriculture for Food Security (Volume 71, Issue 7, April 2020)
Journalists who want to link to the Journal of Experimental Special issue and associated papers in their stories can use the following link: https://academic.oup.com/jxb/issue/71/7
RUSSIA
What comes after COVID-19? Special issue in the journal Population and Economics
PENSOFT PUBLISHERS
Today is still too early to draw any final conclusions, with too many things yet to happen. Nevertheless, the time is right to start a discussion on how to soften the possible consequences of the pandemic.
In the first published papers, united by the special issue, various teams of economists assess the uneasy dilemma - saving lives now or saving the economy to preserve lives in the future; demographers draw parallels with previous pandemics and its impact on demographic development; and sociologists analyse the state of various strata throughout the crisis.
The coronavirus pandemic came to Russia in mid-March - two months after China, two weeks after Spain, Italy, France, and about the same time as the United States.
As of 24th April, according to the data available at the Center for System Science and Engineering at John Hopkins University, Russia is amongst the top 10 countries by number of recorded cases. International comparability of national data on COVID-19 is a separate issue; it will be addressed in one of the special issue articles.
"Now I just want to state that Russia is affected by the pandemic, and it disturbs population and society. Moreover, a number of anti-epidemic measures taken in the country can bite the economy. In this context, the search for specific Russian consequences of the pandemic initiated by our authors along with the global consequences is particularly interesting", shares Editor-in-Chief of Population and Economics, Prof. Irina E. Kalabikhina.
All economists, demographers and sociologists are invited to consider the impact of the pandemic and its attendant recession on the population and economy in Russia and the global world. Research papers are welcome to the special issue, which will remain open for submissions until the end of June 2020.
What could the pandemic cost to globalisation, what could be the consequences of the crisis? In his paper, Dean of the Faculty of Economics of Lomonosov Moscow State University, Prof. Alexander Auzan calls to take it as a chance to change the path dependency and proposes a tax system revision. He also suggests that the reform is to be made by the law enforcement agencies.
The possible consequences of the crisis, including a technological shift and a change in the direction and volumes of trade flows, are discussed in the paper by Dr. Oleg Buklemishev from Lomonosov Moscow State University. He also examines the likelihood of the role of the State to strengthen in line with the expected deglobalisation in the face of epidemiological uncertainty.
Meanwhile, the pandemic remains "a global social drama" for the global society, as the world faces a step back to the basic needs as outlined in the Maslow pyramid. Income and wealth inequality appears to be increasing in the future, and when it all ends - we will have no choice but to establish the International Victory Day over Coronavirus, suggested in his paper Prof. Leonid Grigoryev of the Higher School of Economics (Moscow).
Every second Russian worker can be considered as a vulnerable employee, suggests the latest analysis by researchers from the Russian Academy of National Economy and Public Administration (RANEPA). The highest risks are faced by young people, workers with a low level of education and the residents of the regional centers in Russia.
The most important directions of the current COVID-related crisis research are determined in Prof. Andrey Shastitko's (Lomonosov Moscow State University and Russian Academy of National Economy and Public Administration) research. He addresses such questions as how to collect, process and report information on the pandemic relevant with regards to the phenomenon of individual cognitive errors, as well as how this information is perceived by the mass consumer and the voter. Current situation can be considered as force majeure, but life does not stop because of force majeure, which requires micro- and meso-institutions also to find the options for a way out.
Another paper by Dr. Alexander Kurdin (Lomonosov Moscow State University and Russian Academy of National Economy and Public Administration) reveals that the pandemic has provoked the development of "intermediate" regulatory solutions in Russia and has led to the formation of a short-term "institutional continuum", which assumes the possibility of new combinations of norms. At the same time, there is some institutional uncertainty, which stems not only from the lack of legal rules that meet the new "hybrid" regimes, but also from the lack of accompanying informal rules, which often determine human behaviour. However, it is possible that extraordinary circumstances may also increase the flexibility of informal rules.
Within the circumstances of the pandemic, there are many messages across the media about its positive effect on the environment. Though, Prof. Sergey Bobylev (Lomonosov Moscow State University) shares in his research, that despite the short-term reduction in the environmental impact, over the upcoming years we can expect weakened attention from the state, business and the population to environmental issues, a decrease in environmentally oriented costs, redirection of cash flows to maintain or prevent a significant drop in the material standard of living.
Other papers still remain in the press, but we already can get some insights into the future works.
Another lesson we could learn is the one from the more recent outbreak of Ebola and the following crisis in Sierra Leone, suggests Dr. Ana Androsik (the New School for Social Research, New York and Feminist Data and Research Inc.) in her research paper. Back then, the population also had to assume extra caretaking responsibilities, while the imposed by the government restrictions negatively made it harder for the people to earn their incomes, which, in turn, hit the travel and local market industries. According to Dr. Androsik, we should use this type of evidence, taken from previous public health crises, to learn the mistakes of the past and design the most efficient program interventions.
Russian families also face new issues in the conditions of self-isolation, while "dachas" (countryside family houses) play an important role during the pandemic.
Effective mechanisms to support the population in a period of temporary, yet large-scale economic decline, which could be a solution for the Russian labour market, are suggested in the paper by Dr. Irina Denisova (University of Manchester and New Economic School, Moscow).
Population and Economics' Editor-in-Chief Irina Kalabikhina addresses in her paper the demographic and social issues of the pandemic.
"We are going through difficult times, and it is hardly possible to overestimate the role of science in the quickest passing through the crisis with the least human and economic losses. We hope that our Journal will contribute to the crucially important discussion on the impact of the pandemic on the economy and population", concludes Editor-in-Chief of Population and Economics, Irina E. Kalabikhina.
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Additional information
About Population and Economics
Population and Economics is a peer-reviewed, open-access journal, published by Lomonosov Moscow State University (Faculty of Economics). The journal covers basic and applied aspects of the relationship between population and economics in a broad sense.
The journal is running on the innovative scholarly publishing platform ARPHA, developed by scholarly publisher and technology provider Pensoft.
Original sources:
Kalabikhina IE (2020) What after? Essays on the expected consequences of the COVID-19 pandemics on the global and Russian economics and population. Population and Economics 4(2): 1-3. https://doi.org/10.3897/popecon.4.e53337
Kartseva MA, Kuznetsova PO (2020) The economic consequences of the coronavirus pandemic: which groups will suffer more in terms of loss of employment and income? Population and Economics 4(2): 26-33. https://doi.org/10.3897/popecon.4.e53194
Ivakhnyuk I (2020) Coronavirus pandemic challenges migrants worldwide and in Russia. Population and Economics 4(2): 49-55. https://doi.org/10.3897/popecon.4.e53201
Bobylev SN (2020) Environmental consequences of COVID-19 on the global and Russian economics. Population and Economics 4(2): 43-48. https://doi.org/10.3897/popecon.4.e53279
Contact:
Prof. Irina E. Kalabikhina
Editor-in-Chief of the "Population and Economics"
Email: niec@econ.msu.ru