Migration patterns reveal an Eden for ancient humans and animals

UNIVERSITY OF COLORADO DENVER

 

IMAGE: ANTELOPE IN SOUTH AFRICA view more 

CREDIT: N/A

Pinnacle Point, a series of archaeological sites that overlook a now submerged section of South Africa's coastline and one of the world's most important localities for the study of modern human origins, was as much of an Eden for animals as it was for early humans. Jamie Hodgkins, PhD, assistant professor of anthropology at University of Colorado Denver, and her team drilled ancient herbivore teeth to find that many local animals stayed put in the ecologically rich ecosystem, which may explain why humans flourished there, too.

Their study was published in a Quaternary Science Reviews special issue: The Palaeo-Agulhas Plain: a lost world and extinct ecosystem this month.

Home to the Earliest Modern Humans

Home to some of the richest evidence for the behavior and culture of the earliest clearly modern humans, the submerged shelf called the Palaeo-Agulhas Plain (PAP) once formed its own ecosystem. Co-author Curtis Marean, PhD, Arizona State University, has worked with teams of scientists for decades to reconstruct the locale back into the Pleistocene, the time period that spanned from 2.6 million to 11,700 years ago.

In this study, the researchers looked specifically at antelope migratory patterns at Pinnacle Point. This series of cave sites that sit on the modern South African coast offers archaeological materials from humans who were living and hunting there back to 170,000 years ago.

"During glacial cycles, the coastal shelf was exposed," said Hodgkins. "There would have been a huge amount of land in front of the cave sites. We thought it was likely that humans and carnivores were hunting animals as they migrated east and west over the exposed shelve."

A Lack of Migratory Pattern

Hodgkins and her team wanted to understand those migratory patterns. They studied the carbon and oxygen isotopes within the tooth enamel of many large herbivores, including Redunca, or reedbuck, a nonmigratory antelope. Tooth enamel can reveal a pattern of migration by tracking changing levels of carbon from the plants an animal eats as its teeth grow.

In general, wetter, cooler environments are home to C3 plants; hotter, drier environments are home to C4 plants. Animals like lush vegetation, which means they tend to follow the rain patterns: in this case east for summer rain (C4 grasses), and west for winter rain (C3 grasses). If animals were migrating between summer and winter rainfall zones, their tooth enamel would register that annual C3 and C4 plant rotation as a sinusoidal curve as their teeth grew.

A) Map of South Africa (SA) showing the distribution of C4 grasses associated with the percentage of summer rain from east to west along the coast, and with the winter rainfall zone in the west (modified from Vogel, 1978); B) A map of SA showing the area of the Greater Cape Floristic Region with the expanded PAP and hypothesized animals migration (i.e. It is hypothesized that animals would have been undertaking long-distance migrations between the east coast in summer rainfall zone and west coast in the winter rainfall zone)

But when Hodgkins and her team used the nonmigratory reedbuck as their control animal, they found that the enamel from its typically migratory pals--like the wildebeest, hartebeest, and springbok--showed no discernible migratory pattern. Most animals seemed happy right where they were.

"They weren't struggling at Pinnacle Point," says Hodgkins. "We now know that powerful river systems supplied the expanded coast, thus animals didn't have to be migratory. It was a great location, resource-wise. During interglacials when the coast moved closer to the caves humans had shellfish and other marine resources, and when the coast expanded in glacial times hunters had access to a rich, terrestrial environment. Hunters wouldn't need to be as mobile with all of these herbivores wandering around."

Thriving in an Ecogeological Haven

Hodgkins' team's findings of this prehistoric Eden echoed another recent discovery. Seventy-four-thousand years ago, one of Earth's largest known eruptions at Mount Toba in Sumatra, Indonesia, created a global winter, causing population crashes. In 2018, researchers from Marean's group found that humans at Pinnacle Point not only survived, but thrived in the haven.

Hodgkins says this is just a first attempt at using isotopic data to test the hypothesis of east and west migration patterns at these sites and further research will be done.

"It is quite possible that animal migration patterns changed as the coastline moved in and out during glacial and interglacial cycles," said Hodgkins.

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Funders for this project include the National Science Foundation, the Hyde Family Foundations, and the John Templeton Foundation at the Institute of Human Origins (IHO) at Arizona State University.

Earliest evidence of Italians' genetic diversity dates back to end of last glacial period

UNIVERSITÀ DI BOLOGNA

 

In Europe, Italians are the richest population in terms of genetic wealth. This is now common knowledge. The gradient of their genetic variability, scattered all over the peninsula, encloses on a small scale the whole genetic variance between southern and continental Europeans. This amazing diversity started to accumulate soon after the Late Glacial Maximum, which ended approximately 19,000 years ago.

This is what some researchers of the University of Bologna report in a paper published in the BMC Biology journal. It is the first time that a group of scientists is able to go so back in time in retracing Italians' genetic history. Results also show that there are some genetic peculiarities characterising people living in the north and south of Italy, that evolved in response to different environments. These peculiarities contribute to reducing, on the one hand, the risk of kidney inflammation and skin cancers, and, on the other hand, the risk of diabetes and obesity, favouring sometimes a longer lifespan.

"Gaining an understanding of the evolutionary history of the ancestors of Italians allows us to better grasp the demographic processes and those of environmental interactions that shaped the complex mosaic of ancestry components of today's European populations", explains Marco Sazzini, one of the principal investigators of this study and professor of Molecular Anthropology at the University of Bologna. "This investigation provides valuable information in order to fully appreciate the biological characteristics of the current Italian population. Moreover, it let us understand the deep causes that can impact on this population's health or on its predisposition to a number of diseases".

AN UNEXPECTED OUTCOME

To carry out this study, researchers sequenced the entire genome of forty participants, who were selected as representatives of the biological variability of the Italian population with a good approximation. The analysis brought to the fore more than 17 million genetic variants. Scientists then made a twofold comparison. First, they compared these data against the genetic variants observed in other 35 populations from Europe and from the Mediterranean. Second, they compared the same data against the genetic variants found in studies on almost 600 human remains dating from the Upper Palaeolithic (approx. 40,000 years ago) to the Bronze Age (approx. 4,000 years ago).

These comparisons reached such high levels of precision that it was possible, for the first time, to go way back in time in Italians' genetic history, extending the investigation to very remote time periods with respect to what achieved by previous studies. Eventually, this led to the identification of traces left in Italians' gene pool by events that just followed the last glaciation, which ended more or less 19,000 years ago.

The bulk of the scholarship in this field has so far suggested that the oldest events leaving a trace in Italians' DNA were the migrations that had taken place in the Neolithic and the Bronze Ages, between 7,000 and 4,000 years ago. The results of this study show, on the contrary, that the earliest biological adaptations to the environment and migrations underlying Italians' extraordinary genetic diversity are much older than previously thought.

CLIMATE CHANGES AND POST-GLACIAL MIGRATIONS

Researchers traced the evolutionary history of the two groups at the opposite ends of Italians' gradient of genetic variability. This means that they evaluated and measured differences between the gene pools of participants from southern and northern Italy and observed when these differences became evident.

"We observe some partially overlapping demographic trends among the ancestors of these two groups from 30,000 years ago and for the remaining years of the Upper Palaeolithic", illustrates Stefania Sarno, a researcher at the University of Bologna and one of the co-first authors of the paper. "However, we witness to a significant variation between their gene pools from the Late Glacial period, thus some thousands of years before those great migrations that happened in Italy from the Neolithic onwards".

Here, the main hypothesis is that with temperatures rising and, as a consequence, glaciers shrinking, some groups of people who made it through the glaciation period thanks to "glacial refugia" in central Italy, moved north and drifted away, and thus progressively isolating themselves, from the inhabitants of southern Italy.

The DNA of people living in northern Italy shows traces of these post-glacial migrations. If compared to individuals from southern Italy, Italians from the north present a close genetic relation to human remains attributed to ancient European cultures such as the Magdalenian and the Epigravettian cultures and dated respectively between 19,000 and 14,000 years ago and between 14,000 and 9,000 years ago. Moreover, in northern Italians' gene pool ancestry components even more ancient were observed, such as those proper of Eastearn European hunter-gatherers, which are thought to characterize all European populations between 36,000 and 26,000 years ago and that later on spread again to western Europe with migratory movements from "glacial refugia" during the Late Glacial period.

Conversely, in southern Italians, these post-glacial migrations traces seem to vanish, as more recent events significantly reshaped their gene pool. This is confirmed by their closer genetic relation with Neolithic human remains from Anatolia and the Middle East, and with Bronze-Age remains from the South Caucasus. Differently from the north of Italy, the south was the main hub for migratory movements, which firstly spread agriculture to the Mediterranean area during the Neolithic transition, and then, during Bronze Age, fostered a new ancestry component. The latter differs from the ancestry component associated with populations of the Eurasian steppe that spread during the same time across continental Europe and northern Italy.

GENETIC ADAPTATIONS: DIFFERENCES AND PECULIARITIES ACROSS ITALY

19,000 years ago, after the end of the Last Glacial Maximum, ancestors of northern and southern Italians started living in increasingly different environmental and ecological contexts, which gradually led to the emergence of differences and peculiarities in their gene pools.

For millennia, the populations resettling in northern Italy endured abrupt climate changes and environmental pressures similar to those of the Last Glacial Maximum. These circumstances brought to the evolution of specific biological adaptations. For instance, populations in northern Italy developed a metabolism optimized for a diet rich in calories and animal fat, which are essential to survive in cold climates. "In the subjects from northern Italy, we observed changes in the gene networks regulating insulin and body-heat production as well as in those responsible for fat tissue metabolism", says Paolo Garagnani, professor of Experimental Medicine and Pathophysiology at the University of Bologna. "These changes could have developed, today, in key factors reducing the susceptibility to diseases like diabetes and obesity".

While this was happening in northern Italy, in the south, a warmer climate exposed its populations to a different kind of environmental pressures. The genomes of people from southern Italy show changes in the genes encoding for mucins, which are proteins to be found in the mucous membranes of the respiratory and gastro-intestinal systems and that prevent pathogens to attack the tissues. "These genetic adaptations may have evolved in response to ancient micro-organisms", says Paolo Abondio, Ph.D. student at the University of Bologna and another co-first author of this study. "Some scholars have linked some of these genetic variants with a reduced susceptibility to Berger's disease, which is a common inflammation affecting the kidneys and is indeed less frequent in the south than in the north of Italy".

Researchers identified also other peculiarities in the genome of southern Italians. For example, there are some modifications in the genes regulating the production of melanin, the pigment that provides colour to the skin. Most probably, these alterations developed in response to more intense sun-light and to a higher number of sunny days that characterise the Mediterranean regions. In turn, these alterations may also have contributed to a lower incidence of skin cancers among southern Italians. "We observed that some of these genetic variants have been also linked to a longer lifespan. This is also true for other genetic modifications which are characteristic of southern Italians. These are found on genes involved in the arachidonic acid metabolism and on those encoding for FoxO transcription factors", according to Claudio Franceschi, Emeritus Professor of the University of Bologna.

THE AUTHORS OF THE STUDY

The study was led by professors of the University of Bologna, Marco Sazzini, Claudio Franceschi and Paolo Garagnani, in collaboration with Patrick Descombes (Nestlé Research Center, Lausanne, Switzerland) and Massimo Delledonne (University of Verona). A paper entitled "Genomic history of the Italian population recapitulates key evolutionary dynamics of both Continental and Southern Europeans" was then published in the BMC Biology journal.

The study featured researchers of the Molecular Anthropology Lab and the Centre for Genome Biology of the Department of Biological, Geological and Environmental Sciences at the University of Bologna: Marco Sazzini, Paolo Abondio, Stefania Sarno, co-first authors of the paper, and also Sara De Fanti, Claudia Ojeda-Granados, Cristina Giuliani, Alessio Boattini and Davide Pettener. Moreover, researchers at the Department of Experimental, Diagnostic and Specialty Medicine also took part in the study: Chiara Pirazzini, Elena Marasco, Gastone Castellani, Claudio Franceschi and Paolo Garagnani. Researchers of these two departments worked together within the framework of the activities of the Interdepartmental Center "Alma Mater Research Institute on Global Challenges and Climate Change".

Donata Luiselli from the Department of Cultural Heritage of the University of Bologna also participated in this study. Finally, Guido Alberto Gnecchi Ruscone (Max Planck Institute for the Science of Human History in Jena, Germany), Massimo Delledonne (University of Verona), Luciano Xumerle (University of Verona), Alberto Ferrarini (University of Verona) and researchers of the Nestlé Research Center in Lausanne (Switzerland), of the Policlinico of Milan, of the University of Florence and of the University of Calabria took part in the study.

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World can likely capture and store enough carbon dioxide to meet climate targets

IMPERIAL COLLEGE LONDON

The capture and storage of carbon dioxide (CO2) underground is one of the key components of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change's (IPCC) reports on how to keep global warming to less than 2°C above pre-industrial levels by 2100.

Carbon capture and storage (CCS) would be used alongside other interventions such as renewable energy, energy efficiency, and electrification of the transportation sector.

The IPCC used models to create around 1,200 technology scenarios whereby climate change targets are met using a mix of these interventions, most of which require the use of CCS.

Now a new analysis from Imperial College London, published today in Energy & Environmental Science, suggests that no more than 2,700 Gigatonnes (Gt) of carbon dioxide (CO2) would be sufficient to meet the IPCC's global warming targets. This is far less than leading estimates by academic and industry groups of what is available, which suggest there is more than 10,000 Gt of CO2 storage space globally.

It also found that that the current rate of growth in the installed capacity of CCS is on track to meet some of the targets identified in IPCC reports, but that research and commercial efforts should focus on maintaining this growth while identifying enough underground space to store this much CO2.

CCS involves trapping CO2 at its emission source, such as fossil-fuel power stations, and storing it underground to keep it from entering the atmosphere. Together with other climate change mitigation strategies, CCS could help the world reach the climate change mitigation goals set out by the IPCC.

However, until now the amount of storage needed has not been specifically quantified.

The study has shown for the first time that the maximum storage space needed is only around 2,700 Gt, but that this amount will grow if CCS deployment is delayed. The researchers worked this out by combining data on the past 20 years of growth in CCS, information on historical rates of growth in energy infrastructure, and models commonly used to monitor the depletion of natural resources.

The research team, led by Dr Christopher Zahasky at Imperial's Department of Earth Science and Engineering, found that worldwide, there has been 8.6 per cent growth in CCS capacity over the past 20 years, putting us on a trajectory to meet many climate change mitigation scenarios that include CCS as part of the mix.

Dr Zahasky, who is now an assistant professor at the University of Wisconsin-Madison but conducted the work at Imperial, said: "Nearly all IPCC pathways to limit warming to 2°C require tens of gigatons of CO2 stored per year by mid-century. However, until now, we didn't know if these targets were achievable given historic data, or how these targets related to subsurface storage space requirements.

"We found that even the most ambitious scenarios are unlikely to need more than 2,700 Gt of CO2 storage resource globally, much less than the 10,000 Gt of storage resource that leading reports suggest is possible.?Our study shows that if climate change targets are not met by 2100, it won't be for a lack of carbon capture and storage space."

Study co-author Dr Samuel Krevor, also from the Department of Earth Science and Engineering, said: "Rather than focus our attention on looking at how much storage space is available, we decided for the first time to evaluate how much subsurface storage resource is actually needed, and how quickly it must be developed, to meet climate change mitigation targets."

The researchers say that the rate at which CO2 is stored is important in its success in climate change mitigation. The faster CO2 is stored, the less total subsurface storage resource is needed to meet storage targets. This is because it becomes harder to find new reservoirs or make further use of existing reservoirs as they become full.

They found that storing faster and sooner than current deployment might be needed to help governments meet the most ambitious climate change mitigation scenarios identified by the IPCC.

The study also demonstrates how using growth models, a common tool in resource assessment, can help industry and governments to monitor short-term CCS deployment progress and long-term resource requirements.

However, the researchers point out that meeting CCS storage requirements will not be sufficient on its own to meet the IPCC climate change mitigation targets.

Dr Krevor said: "Our analysis shows good news for CCS if we keep up with this trajectory - but there are many other factors in mitigating climate change and its catastrophic effects, like using cleaner energy and transport as well as significantly increasing the efficiency of energy use."

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Funding for this work was provided by ACT ELEGANCY, Project No 271498, has received funding from DETEC (CH), BMWi (DE), RVO (NL), Gassnova (NO), BEIS (UK), Gassco, Equinor and Total, and is cofunded by the European Commission under the Horizon 2020 programme, ACT Grant Agreement No 691712. Funding was also provided by the UK CCS Research Centre 2017 EPSRC Grant EP/P026214/1'

SEE MY CCS NEITHER CLEAN NOR GREEN

https://plawiuk.blogspot.com/2014/10/the-myth-of-carbon-capture-and-storage.html

https://plawiuk.blogspot.com/search?q=CCS

Selfie stick and fishing rod shed first light on ancient reptile 

ANOTHER FIND IN THE MUSEUM STORAGE ROOM

UNIVERSITY OF PORTSMOUTH

IMAGE: THIS IS AN ARTISTIC LIFE RECONSTRUCTION OF NANNOPTERYGIUS. view more 

CREDIT: ANDREY-ATUCHIN

The skeleton of an extinct 'fish lizard' locked in a glass case over 16ft from the ground for the last 100 years has finally been studied, thanks to a selfie stick on a fishing rod.

The 145 million year old Nannopterygius is a species of ichthyosaur, which swam the seas of our planet for about 76 million years. It is on display in the Natural History Museum, London, but its glass cabinet is hung too high for easy examination.

Russian palaeontologist Nikolay Zverkov was desperate to see the London specimen as he thought some of the Russian ichthyosaurs might be similar.

It turns out he was right and that this particular species of swimming prehistoric reptile was common in its day, the Jurassic period.

To photograph and assess the skeleton, Nikolay attached a digital camera on a selfie stick to a fishing rod and connected it to a PC via a very long USB cable. He passed the photos on to University of Portsmouth palaeontologist Megan Jacobs who was working on Ichthyosaurs for her Master's Degree.

Megan and Nikolay have now published a paper on the findings in the Zoological Journal of the Linnean Society.

Megan said: "Nicolay obtained excellent detailed photographs which significantly expand our knowledge of Nannoptergyius enthekiodon.

"I realised that fossil expert Dr Steve Etches had also discovered examples of Nannoptergyius near to where the original specimen was found and he'd also discovered other examples across the UK.

"Finally being able to study this enigmatic animal has shown that it was actually very common and widespread in the Late Jurassic occurring not only in England, but also in European Russia and in the Arctic."

Thanks to this new study, several more specimens of Nannopterygius have been found in museum collections across the UK - in Oxford, Cambridge and in the Etches Collection in Kimmeridge, Dorset, as well as in Russia and Norway, showing this animal to be much more common than previously thought, and making it one of the most widespread of any similar swimming reptile.

University of Portsmouth Professor of Palaeobiology, Dave Martill, a world leading expert who supervised Megan's research, said: "We previously only had detailed knowledge of a type of ichthyosaur called Ophthalmosaurus, which was known from hundreds of specimens, including well-preserved skeletons from the Middle Jurassic Oxford Clay Formation of England.

"The excellent data available for Ophthalmosaurus contrasted with the impoverished record of other Middle and Late Jurassic ichthyosaurs, so being able to access the Nannopterygius - a formerly inaccessible specimen - has given us fascinating new insight into a particular species of ichthyosaur we knew very little about."

Nikolay added: "For decades the scientific community thought that Nannopterygius was the rarest and most poorly known ichthyosaur of England. Finally we can say that we know nearly every skeletal detail of these small ichthyosaurs, and that these animals were widespread. The answer was very close - we just needed a fishing rod."

Nikolay Zverkov capturing the ichthyosaur in the Marine Reptile Gallery of the Natural History Museum, London UK.

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First ancient cultivated rice discovered in Central Asia

SCIENCE CHINA PRESS

 

IMAGE: SATELLITE IMAGERY OF KHALCHAYAN AND SURFACE REMAINS WITHIN THE SITE. CREDIT: CHEN GUANHAN AND ZHOU XINYING, IVPP view more 

CREDIT: ©SCIENCE CHINA PRESS

Rice has always been the most important food in Asia and the world. About half of the population on earth use rice as their main food source. The origin, spread, evolution, and ecological adaptation of cultivated rice are still one of the most important issues which currently concerned by global archaeologists, biologists, and agricultural scientists.

In recent years, archaeobotany and molecular biology studies have shown the originally cultivated rice was domesticated into japonica rice (Oryza sativa japonica) in the lower Yangtze region, China, 10000 years ago, then spread to Japan, South and Southeast Asia. About 5000-4000 years ago, the cultivated japonica rice spread to South Asia, hybridized with the native wild rice, gradually form the indica rice (Oryza sativa indica) and become the main crop in South Asia today.

However, in recent years, research on the origin and spread of rice have mainly focused on East Asia, Southeast Asia, and South Asia. At present, we still know very little about when and how rice spread into West Asia, Europe, and Africa. The Central Asia region, as an important node in the ancient Silk Road cannot be ignored, because it is the "crossroad" of world civilization. Therefore, studying the time and location of rice emergence in Central Asia can help us restore the spread process about of rice agriculture and add an important part for the early crop globalization research.

Recently, Li Xiaoqiang research group in Institute of Vertebrate Paleontology and Paleoanthropology, Chinese Academy of Sciences (IVPP, CAS) and other researchers in College of Cultural Heritage, Northwest University, China, Institute of Archaeology, Uzbekistan Academy of Sciences reported their latest research about the agricultural remain in Khalchayan site, Uzbekistan, which published in the Science China: Earth Science. Researchers investigated 11 sites on the northern bank of the Amu Darya from Bronze Age to Arabian period and found carbonized rice remain at Kalchayan site. With archaeobotany, chronology method and other local archaeological records, researchers provide a new physical evidence for the spread of rice to western Asia and the exchange of eastern and western civilizations along the ancient Silk Road.

Khalchayan site is a city site in southeastern Uzbekistan. Researchers use flotation method obtain large amount of botanical materials at a cultural layer in southwest part of the site. The AMS 14C dating results showed that the age of the rice remains in the site are 1714-1756 cal. B.P., which in Kushan period. In addition to the rice remains, carbonized wheat, 2-row barley, pea, millet, grapes, flax and other crops were recovered at the site. These crops include both West Asian and East Asian origin, which illustrates a diverse and complex oasis farming system. Because rice cultivation requires a lot of heat and water then wheat and millet, make it difficult to cultivate in arid regions in early times. But combining the carbonized rice remains with the records of the irrigation system existing in other local oases agricultural archeological sites during Kushan period, researchers believe it has the possibility of cultivation rice locally during that time.

Morphological studies show that the carbonized rice remains are japonica rice, and their morphology is similar to the remains found in some sites in southern China and northwestern India during the same period. That indicating the possibility of rice in Central Asia was spread from South Asia. Meanwhile, when rice appeared in Central Asia, Kushan Empire has already established in northwest India and conquered most part of Central Asia and South Asia. The imperial expansion and political unrest may have further fueled the dispersal of crops across Inner Asia. The emergence of rice may also indicate the beginning of the rice-based diet culture gradual integration with the local wheat-based diet system in Central Asia and finally form Central Asia diet system today, like baked dough (Naan), pilaf and barbecue.

The rice remains in Khalchayan site is the first well reported rice remain in Central Asia. It is also one of the few ancient cultivated rice found without in East Asia, South Asia and Southeast Asia. It has a great value for further understanding the exchange process of the early agricultural activities in the Southern Himalayan route, and also provided a new evidence to explain how rice further spreads westward to Iran, Europe, and Africa, where rice cultivation activities exist today.

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This study was supported by the joint archaeological work of China-Uzbekistan (Project leaders: Pro. Wang Jianxin, Northwest University, China); Institute of Vertebrate Paleontology and Paleoanthropology, CAS/CAS Center for Excellence in Life and Paleoenvironment; National Natural Science Foundation of China (Grant No. 41572161, 41730319); Strategic Pilot Science and Technology Projects of Chinese Academy of Sciences (Grant No. XDB26000000) and the Youth Innovation Promotion Association, CAS.

See the article: Chen G, Zhou X, Wang J, Ma J, Khasannov M, Khasanov N, Spengler R N, Berdimurodov A, Li X. 2020. Kushan Period rice in the Amu Darya Basin: Evidence for prehistoric exchange along the southern Himalaya. Science China Earth Sciences, 63, https://doi.org/10.1007/s11430-019-9585-2 http://engine.scichina.com/doi/10.1007/s11430-019-9585-2

Deep learning: A new engine for ecological resource research

SCIENCE CHINA PRESS

 

IMAGE: ECOLOGICAL RESOURCE AREAS THAT ARE IMPACTED AND OVERWHELMED BY DEEP LEARNING (WATER PART) AND THE AREAS NEED TO BE SOLVED (MOUNTAIN PART) view more 

CREDIT: ©SCIENCE CHINA PRESS

Ecological resources are an important material foundation for the survival, development, and self-realization of human beings. In-depth and comprehensive research and understanding of ecological resources are beneficial for the sustainable development of human society. Advances in observation technology have improved the ability to acquire long-term, cross-scale, massive, heterogeneous, and multi-source data. Ecological resource research is entering a new era driven by big data.

Deep learning is a big data driven machine learning method that can automatically extracting complex high-dimensional nonlinear features. Although deep leanring has achieved better performance for big data mining than traditional statistical learning and machine learning algorithms, there are still huge challenges when processing ecological resource data, including multi-source/multi-meta heterogeneity, spatial-temporal coupling, geographic correlation, high dimensional complexity, and low signal-to-noise ratio. A recent study clarified the aforementioned frontier issues.

The related research paper entitled "The Application of Deep Learning in the Field of Ecological Resources Research: Theory, Methods, and Challenges" has been published in "Science in China: Earth Science" . Prof. GUO Qinghua and Ph.D. student JIN Shichao from Institute of Botany, Chinese Academy of Sciences are co-first authors. GUO Qinghua is the corresponding author. Prof. LIU Yu from Peking University and Prof. XU Qiang from Chengdu University of Technology are co-authored research teams.

Deep learning has made significant progress in many fields with the accumulation of data, the improvement of computing power, and the progress of algorithms. This study focuses on the application of deep learning in the field of ecological resources. The main contents include:

1) An overview of the history, development and basic structure of deep learning (Figure 1). The relationships between ecological resource big data research and deep learning structures represented by convolutional neural networks, recurrent neural networks, and graph neural networks were analyzed (Figure 2)
2) The main tasks of deep learning, common public data sets, and tools in ecological resources were summarized (Figure 2).
3) The application of deep learning in plant image classification, crop phenotype, and vegetation mapping were demonstrated. The application ability and potential of deep learning in structured and unstructured ecological data were analyzed.
4) The challenges and prospects of deep learning in the application of ecological resources were analyzed (Figure 3), including standardization and sharing of data, construction of crowdsourcing collection platform, interpretability of deep neural network, hybrid deep learning with domain knowledge, small sample learning, data fusion, and enrichment and intelligence of applications.

This study explored the relationship between deep learning and ecological resource research. It is of great significance for connecting the technological frontier of computer science with the classical theoretical science in the field of ecological resources. This connection will contribute to the establishment of a new paradigm of theoretical discovery and scientific research in the era of ecological resources big data.

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This research was funded by the Strategic Priority Research Program of Chinese Academy of Sciences (Grant No. XDA19050401) and the National Science Foundation of China (Grant Nos. 31971575 & 41871332)

See the article: Guo, Q., Jin, S., Li, M., Yang, Q., Xu, K., Ju, Y., Zhang, J., Xuan, J., Liu, J., Su, Y., Xu, Q., & Liu, Y. (2020). "Application of deep learning in ecological resource research: Theories, methods, and challenges". Science China Earth Sciences. DOI: 10.1007/s11430-019-9584-9

http://engine.scichina.com/doi/10.1007/s11430-019-9584

This Young Man Spent His Twenties Imprisoned On A Pacific Island Before Finding Safety In Canada

Amir Sahragard hoped for safety in Australia but ended up in a brutal offshore camp. He is still dealing with the trauma as he starts a new life.

BUZZFEED NEWS Posted on May 20, 2020

Chloë Ellingson for BuzzFeed News
Amir Sahragard recently arrived in Canada after six years at the Papua New Guinea detention centre.

Amir Sahragard thinks he would be dead if it weren’t for the group of civilians who sponsored his passage to Canada after six long and brutal years in migrant detention centres in Papua New Guinea.

“The only thing that [kept] me alive in the last two years was this,” he told BuzzFeed News.

“I've been mentally and physically sick and the only reason that I didn't kill myself or that I'm still alive was this sponsorship process, because I didn't have another option.”

Sahragard is one of thousands who tried to claim refugee status in Australia but were instead routed to offshore detention centres in the Pacific because of their mode of transport: boat. Under this harsh regime, people like Sahragard who sought safety in Australia by sea were instead subjected to brutal conditions and years of limbo.

But Sahragard is also one of the lucky ones. He found a way out, and not just to another centre on the Australian mainland, but to Canada — where refugees shunned by Australia are increasingly placing their hopes of freedom.

Sahragard, now 28, began his long journey in 2013 when he fled his home country of Iran. Anxious about his family, who remain in Iran, he won’t talk about why he left the country.

His next stop was Indonesia, where he boarded a ship he hoped would bring him to Australia, where he could declare refugee status. The ship was filled with families and other single men, some that he got to know as they waited for the ship to leave.

They were at sea for four days. “The boat was like a scary movie,” Sahragard said.

When the ship arrived at the remote Australian territory of Christmas Island, it was intercepted by the Australian Navy. Officers brought them onto the island, taking everything the asylum seekers had with them, Sahragard said.

Sahragard and his shipmates were processed, given medical checkups and new clothes, and told they’d be sent to an offshore detention centre. After being bounced around to various compounds, Sahragard said he was asked to sign a paper that would transfer him to Manus Island in Papua New Guinea. At the time, Australia was paying the government of Papua New Guinea to take migrants and hold them in a facility on the island.

Sahragard didn’t sign the paper, but was sent “by force”, he said. Guards put him on a bus, then a plane, and half a day later he landed at the Manus Regional Processing Centre.

The scene there, Sahragard said, was “the worst thing that I [have] ever seen”. Some people were ill, others didn’t have clothes, and everyone was terrified.

“I was alone and like 21 years old and I'd never seen things like that and everything was by force, so I didn’t have any choice,” he said.

He was put in a small room with three other men and two bunk beds, in a compound called Foxtrot. Again, he was shuffled around, sometimes to tents, sometimes to facilities that lacked air conditioning and were sweltering in the tropical environment. Eventually, he landed at a compound called Mike. It would become his home for four years.


Jonas Gratzer / Getty Images
Children bypassing the barracks where the asylum seekers are living on Manus Island, February 2018.

At Mike, detainees were permitted to use the internet once and have two 10-minute phone calls per week. They had access to laundry and a mess hall, but were also subject to abuse and violence by locals and guards, Sahragard said.

In February 2014 a riot broke out. A friend of Sahragard got hit in the face with a stone and his eyes were bleeding. With the lights out, Sahragard tried to take care of him and wait for a medical response. It was chaos. It was hard to tell who was in the fray — locals, police, guards — and he distinctly remembers the smell of the bullets being fired. Another friend was shot in the buttocks.

After the chaos, the detainees were gathered outside, he said, and beaten.

“They beat people with whatever they had. They had rods, iron, everything like that,” he said. “They were just assaulting and beat[ing] people and when they gather us in the yard they said ‘you can't remain in our country, this is our country, this we run it and you can't do something that we don't want you to do’.”

For a month after, the detainees lived in the mess hall without access to phones or the internet, according to Sahragard. When he finally returned to his room, he saw a bullet hole that went straight through two walls.

At this point, he wasn’t sleeping, and his days were filled with paranoia, stress and the agony of not being able to do anything or make any decisions for himself. He was also shedding pounds and getting dangerously underweight.

They were not being fed properly, he said, and nobody was cleaning the compound. Detainees were continuing to rebel with hunger strikes.

In 2016, the PNG Supreme Court declared the facility illegal. Detainees were suddenly able to sign out for the day and leave the compound. They could shop in Lorengau or swim in the ocean, but it wasn’t any safer outside. The locals were hostile to the migrants and would rob and assault them, leaving some people with long-term neurological injuries, he said.

Soon he was transferred to Hillside Haus, another facility on the island. This one had hot showers — a luxury Sahragard didn’t even realise he’d missed.

“It was like rich that I could have hot water for shower. It's really funny when I think about it but it was something that I really was missing,” he said.

In all this time, there had never been a glimmer of hope of getting out. Sahragard clearly wasn’t going to make it to Australia, and even the NGOs like UNHCR, Red Cross and Amnesty International that were on the ground in PNG hadn’t been able to help him get out. He had not applied for refugee status in PNG, for fear he would be stuck there forever if the claim was approved. But remaining as an asylum seeker presented a huge issue: he was not allowed to apply for resettlement in the United States under the refugee swap deal struck in 2016.

Finally, in 2017, Sahragard heard of a Syrian refugee who made it to Canada through a private sponsorship program. In Canada, a group of citizens can raise funds to bring a refugee to the country and provide settlement assistance when they arrive. He managed to connect with volunteer refugee advocates who were eager to help him.

In 2018 he submitted his application and began the long waiting process to get approved. At that time, talking to the volunteers helping him was the only thing keeping Sahragard going


Chloë Ellingson for BuzzFeed News

“The last year [in detention] was the hardest time for me,” he said. “I was really scared and I couldn't sleep [for] months, and can't eat, and it was the worst time.”

Fifteen months passed. Then, Sahragard was told he had to get a medical checkup, and he thought he might finally get out. He was approved for travel, landing in Brisbane before being escorted onto a Canada-bound plane by Australian immigration enforcement.

Even when Sahragard saw the travel documents, he still couldn’t believe it was happening. The disbelief lingered through the 14-hour flight, and through his arrival at the airport, where his sponsors greeted him by draping him in a Canadian flag.

It took weeks for him to truly accept what had happened. “I thought that I still might wake up and see that I'm in Manus or I’m still in Papua New Guinea in detention,” he said.

That was in November. When he spoke to BuzzFeed News in February, Sahragard had been settling into his new life in Toronto, first staying with an Iranian family who also came to Canada as refugees, and now renting his own room. He was attending college for English and making friends, but he was still plagued by the trauma of his time on Manus.

He has continued to sleep poorly, but was recently approved for Ontario’s public health care system, where he can access a family doctor.

Sounds are still a problem, too.

“There was a fire alarm in our building yesterday which really drove me crazy,” he said. “It was really scary for me because when I hear those things or the ambulance in downtown it really gives me stress and I get really paranoid about these things because of all the experience or the memories that I have.”

It’s getting better, day by day, but it’s still hard for Sahragard to imagine a future, of any kind, in any place, after spending most of his 20s scared, alone and detained.

“I live my life in a day for now,” he said. “[The present] is the only thing that I think of for now because I really don't want to think about something that I couldn't reach. That would be really hard for me, and I've lost like six years of my life for nothing.”


Chloë Ellingson for BuzzFeed News


For others — at one time Sahragard’s peers — Canada remains a dream.

Abdolah Sheikhypirkohy also fled Iran in 2013 only to be sent to Manus Island, and like Sahragard, the 2014 riot is one of his most traumatic memories. Local police arrested him and put him in a cell with almost 40 others, including six refugees.

“They beat me up, they punch me, they hurt me, cut my lips,” he said.

Over his six years in PNG, Sheikhypirkohy thinks he lost 12 teeth. For the first few years in detention there was no dentist at all. After three years, one arrived, but they had one solution for dental problems.

“They just pull it out. Not crown or filling or root canal, nothing. Just pull out. I don’t have many teeth now. I have problem with chewing,” Sheikhypirkohy said. It was his missing and infected teeth that brought him to Australia for medical treatment in July 2019. He has been detained in a hotel in Melbourne since then.

He applied for private resettlement in Canada over six months ago. Like Sahragard, he had never applied for refugee status in PNG and could not apply to go to the US, where more than 700 people have been successfully resettled.

Sheikhypirkohy has written to Canadian prime minister Justin Trudeau three times: to tell him about the situation on Manus, to send condolences about the Canadians killed when Iran shot down a plane flying to Ukraine, and to ask him to help get his application for resettlement approved.

Trudeau’s office replied each time to tell him there was nothing they could do. His latest request was forwarded to the Canadian immigration minister, and a representative emailed Sheikhypirkohy telling him where his application was up to and explaining the process.

Sheikhypirkohy was stoked to get the replies. “Even though he said he cannot interfere in the matter...at least someone answer, replied my letter,” he said.

“I said to myself, if my application get approval, I’m sure I’m going to be in the perfect country, that cares about people. Here they just call me, ‘go back to your freaking country, boat people’.”


Jonas Gratzer / Getty Image
Karam Zahirian, another refugee seeking asylum, is seen on Manus in February, 2018.
Jafar (a pseudonym to protect his identity) has been trying to go to Canada from Nauru for the last two years. He was sceptical the plan would work at all — “in seven years, we had many news, many rumour, but nothing happen” — before hearing about the first flight to Canada.

His US application rejected, he has high hopes for Canada. “I saw on the internet about the Canadian prime minister, he is very humble. I see also Canadians, very, very good people. They are welcome to refugees, very incredible,” he said.

Sheikhypirkohy and Jafar may be waiting a while. The volunteer efforts that helped Sahragard reach Canada have ramped up. There are now dozens of people in Canada, Australia and the US organising to fill out applications, fundraise and ultimately free the men from detention. But so far, only 11 people have made it to Canada: a handful in 2015 and 2017, then eight more last year.

The process is slow: each application requires sponsors to prove they have thousands of dollars to support the refugee, and the Canadian government offers limited sponsorship spots each year. Now the coronavirus pandemic has paused resettlement in Canada entirely, though applications are still being processed.

The arduous process also means the groups helping to file the applications — Ads-Up, an Australian-North American group dedicated to helping refugees stuck on Manus and Nauru; the volunteer group Operation Not Forgotten; Canadian non-profit MOSAIC; and UNHCR — have to figure out who to prioritise. At the moment, that’s people still held offshore, those with medical conditions, and people who have no other resettlement options.

Still, the volunteers working to make it happen are committed to ending Australia’s offshore detention program.

“To get everyone off would be hundreds of submissions and millions of dollars,” said Ben Winsor, the founder of Ads-Up. “But that’s our ultimate aim.”

The softly-spoken Sahragard feels safe in Canada. But now he is dealing with a new challenge: the pandemic. His classes have moved online and the social isolation is triggering traumatic memories.

“It reminds me of the time I’ve been in detention, because it’s the same situation, I can’t do anything.”

But he’s chosen to speak out — reliving memories he’d rather not — because he hopes his friends back in Manus can get out too.

“It's really hard for me to talk about all these memories, all these things, but the only reason that I'm doing this is because I get the help, and I want them to get the help also, to have their future and save their life.”


Chloë Ellingson For Buzzfeed News



MORE ON THIS
The US, Struggling Under The Pressure Of The Coronavirus, Is Still Taking Refugees From Australia

Hannah Ryan · May 8, 2020

Men Held Incommunicado In A PNG Detention Centre For Five Months Have Been Released

Hannah Ryan · Jan. 23, 2020

This Man On Nauru Hasn’t Eaten Fruit In More Than A YearHannah Ryan · Jan. 26, 2020
Australia Detained People On Islands For Years. Now It Wants To Ban Them From Ever Visiting.

Hannah Ryan · Aug. 22, 2019




Lauren Strapagiel is a reporter for BuzzFeed News and is based in Toronto, Canada.

Hannah Ryan is a reporter for BuzzFeed News and is based in Sydney.

A Doctor Told Lawmakers The Country Is Not "Prepared For A Second Wave" Of The Coronavirus

Nearly every essential worker who testified before lawmakers at a hearing on the coronavirus said the lack of personal protective equipment remains a huge problem.

Clarissa-Jan Lim BuzzFeed News Reporter Posted on May 21, 2020


Joe Raedle / Getty Images
A supermarket cashier in Miami, Florida.

A doctor testifying at a virtual congressional subcommittee briefing on the coronavirus on Thursday told lawmakers that the country is not prepared to handle a second wave of the virus should it come later this year.

"I do not think that we are currently prepared for a second wave," Dr. Megan Ranney, an emergency physician and researcher at Brown University, said in a stark warning to the public and members of Congress.

Ranney said the inconsistent public health messaging from authorities and the lack of scientific understanding of the novel coronavirus mean the country is not ready for another surge in infections, which public health experts have said will possibly hit in the fall.

"We still lack adequate science. I'm so thankful for the funding that you all have given to the NIH and CDC, but that's not enough, and we need more," she told lawmakers. "We also lack adequate public health messaging. We need consistency in our messaging to the public so that they can believe us. We need to give them accurate data, and we need to give them straightforward answers. We also need to be clear about when and why our answers change and how those depend on science."

But the most crucial barrier to preparing for another wave of the coronavirus, Ranney said, is the continued shortage of personal protective equipment (PPE) and testing for essential workers.

"Everyone who's out there facing the public needs to be safe. And to do that they need to be tested, and they need masks, and gowns, and gloves, and sanitizer," she said


Frontline workers have raised the alarm about inadequate access to testing and a lack of PPE since the first outbreaks in the country were reported. As state governments engaged in bidding wars with each other and the federal government in an attempt to obtain supplies, employees deemed essential — many of whom work minimum wage jobs — were forced to reuse masks over and over, all while fearing for their health and safety.


Trump, who himself has refused to wear a face mask around others, has repeatedly dismissed concerns about testing and PPE shortages, saying that "everyone who wants a test can get one."

Earlier this month, he disputed an account from a nurse he invited to the White House when she brought up the "sporadic" availability of PPE in some parts of the country.


Brendan Smialowski / Getty Images

The lack of PPE was an issue raised by nearly every frontline worker who gave testimony Thursday.

Diana Wilson, an EMT with the New York Fire Department, said that despite being one of the first people coming into contact with a potential COVID-19 patient in crisis, she has gone to work "not knowing if I was going to be provided a medical N95 mask."

"The government failed us by not protecting first responders by providing us with a plan and PPE," Wilson said.

Marcos Aranda, a janitor in San Francisco who lives with his wife, six children, his mom, his sister, and her two children, said he's lucky to have some protective gear, which not all custodians are afforded.

He wears latex gloves and dust masks while at work, "but nothing medical-grade," he said. "I'm not only worried about my health, but also worried about the health of my family."

Eric Colts, a Detroit bus driver whose colleague Jason Hargrove died days after talking about a woman coughing openly on his bus in a viral video, said though the city is now providing passengers with masks when they board the bus, it's not enough.

"But me, working in the inner city, we have a box of 50 masks that by the time I do a round trip, those masks are gone," Colts told lawmakers. "Personal protective equipment has been a constant, constant battle."

As states around the country make the push to reopen businesses against the advice of experts, Ranney, who is part of a grassroots group helping frontline workers access protective gear, cautioned that there still isn't enough PPE for many hospitals at the moment.

"On a national level, we still are millions and millions and millions of pieces of PPE short from what hospitals need currently," she said, "much less what they need in order to build the normal stockpiles that we all keep in order to face pandemic situations."

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“We Are Desperate”: 10 Nurses And Doctors Explain What It's Like To Fight The Coronavirus Without Enough Face Masks 

Zahra Hirji · March 18, 2020

They Still Have Jobs At Grocery Stores And Pharmacies. Does That Mean They'll Catch The Coronavirus?

Julia Reinstein · March 18, 2020

Doctors And Nurses Fighting The Coronavirus Outbreak Are Getting Sick And Dying — And No One Is Keeping Track

Zahra Hirji · March 26, 2020

Clarissa-Jan Lim is a reporter and editor at BuzzFeed News. She is based in New York.

A New Study Says The Malaria Drug Touted (And Taken) By Trump Looks Deadly For Coronavirus Patients

“If there was ever hope for this drug, this is the death of it.

 May 22, 2020



The malaria drug that President Donald Trump has said he is taking as a coronavirus preventive, hydroxychloroquine, was linked to a higher rate of deaths and serious heart problems, according to a massive study of COVID-19 hospital patients released Friday.

The drug, also used to treat arthritis and lupus, has emerged as a medical flashpoint in the coronavirus pandemic, seeing the FDA issue a warning against its use outside of hospitals even as Trump said he was taking it.

The six-continent report released by the Lancet journal effectively slams the door on the suggestion that hydroxychloroquine helps COVID-19 patients, showing no signs of benefit among the 96,000 patients in the study.

Instead, it found the drug linked to an increased risk of dying — by over 35% — while also more than doubling the risk of heart arrhythmia.

"It's no longer that hydroxychloroquine has no sign of efficacy — it is associated with an increase in mortality," said cardiologist Eric Topol of the Scripps Research Institute in a tweet on the study.

“It’s one thing not to have benefit, but this shows distinct harm,” Topol told the Washington Post. “If there was ever hope for this drug, this is the death of it.”
To generate its statistical power, the study tallied the experience of nearly 15,000 hospital patients taking some combination of hydroxychloroquine drugs against more than 80,000 who didn't. More than 10,000 patients among the 96,000 in the study died.

Patients given a combination of hydroxychloroquine or chloroquine, taken with or without an antibiotic as some regimens suggested, died at a higher rate compared to the patients who didn't get the drug.
"Our findings suggest not only an absence of therapeutic benefit but also potential harm with the use of hydroxychloroquine or chloroquine drug regimens," concluded the study.

It's possible that the heart arrhythmias documented in the study aren't what killed the patients, noted a commentary led by Christian Funck-Brentano of France's Sorbonne University that the journal ran with the study. Instead, those might be due to a separate problem for people already on heart drugs, and hydroxychloroquine drugs, they suggested, simply "could worsen COVID-19 severity in some patients."

MORE ON THIS
Trump Said He's Taking Hydroxychloroquine To Try To Prevent COVID-19 In Spite Of An FDA Warning

Amber Jamieson · May 18, 2020

The FDA Is Warning That Drugs Promoted By Trump To Treat COVID-19 Pose Serious Heart Risks

Zahra Hirji · April 24, 2020

Dan Vergano is a science reporter for BuzzFeed News and is based in Washington, DC.
Contact Dan Vergano at dan.vergano@buzzfeed.com.

Explainer |

 What you need to know about the national security law for Hong Kong

• China’s legislators will discuss a new national security law specifically crafted for Hong Kong
• The issue has long been controversial in the city, despite the Basic Law requiring its enactment

The Chinese and Hong Kong flags. Photo: Shutterstock

Chinese legislators are expected to discuss a
new law concerning Hong Kong’s national security at the upcoming parliamentary session. The law would ban all seditious activities aimed at toppling the central government and external interference in the city’s affairs, as well as target terrorist acts in the special administrative region, sources say. Here is a rundown of the background of the issue.

Hong Kong democrats bash national security law from China’s two sessions, US also voices concern

What does Hong Kong need a national security law for and why does it not have one?
Under Article 23 of the Basic Law, or the city’s mini-constitution, the Hong Kong government must enact its own national security law prohibiting acts of “treason, secession, sedition, subversion against the central people’s government, or theft of state secrets … and to prohibit political organisations or bodies of the region from establishing ties with foreign political organisations or bodies”.
In 2003, the Hong Kong government was forced to shelve a national security bill after an estimated half a million people took to the streets to oppose the legislation, which they warned would curb their rights and freedoms.

A Causeway Bay rally against proposed Article 23 legislation on July 1, 2003. Photo: Dickson Lee


How has the issue developed since then?


The Hong Kong government has steered clear of introducing the legislation. After the 2014 Occupy Central protests, Hong Kong’s pro-Beijing politicians urged the city administration to consider reviving the Article 23 bill. National People’s Congress deputy Stanley Ng Chau-pei had suggested incorporating mainland China security laws into the Basic Law.

Since taking office as the city’s chief executive, Carrie Lam Cheng Yuet-ngor has repeatedly said that Article 23 legislation could only be enacted when the timing and the political atmosphere were right.

Pressure to bring in the legislation has been mounting since protests erupted in June last year, initially over the now-withdrawn extradition bill, but which morphed into a wider
anti-government movement.



What other options are available under the Basic Law?
Under Article 18,
national laws can only be applied in Hong Kong if they are listed in Annex III of the mini-constitution and relate to defence, foreign affairs and “other matters outside the limits” of the city’s autonomy. The national laws would then either be promulgated – taking effect automatically – or adopted through local legislation.


What happens next?
This week – A resolution paving the way for the legislation will be presented on Friday to
the National People’s Congress (NPC), the country’s legislature.

By the end of May – The NPC is expected to vote on th resolution at the end of the annual session, likely on May 28. The resolution will then be forwarded to the NPC Standing Committee to flesh out the details of the legislation.

By the end of June – The Standing Committee is expected to hold its next meeting as early as June. A draft law will be presented at the start of the gathering, which could last for about a week. That draft could be approved and promulgated in Hong Kong by the end of the meeting.

This article appeared in the South China Morning Post print edition as: looking back – and ahead