NASA supercomputing study breaks ground for tree mapping, carbon research

NASA/GODDARD SPACE FLIGHT CENTER

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VIDEO: SCIENTISTS FROM NASA'S GODDARD SPACE FLIGHT CENTER IN GREENBELT, MARYLAND, AND INTERNATIONAL COLLABORATORS DEMONSTRATED A NEW METHOD FOR MAPPING THE LOCATION AND SIZE OF TREES GROWING OUTSIDE OF FORESTS, DISCOVERING... view more 

CREDIT: NASA'S GODDARD SPACE FLIGHT CENTER

Scientists from NASA's Goddard Space Flight Center in Greenbelt, Maryland, and international collaborators demonstrated a new method for mapping the location and size of trees growing outside of forests, discovering billions of trees in arid and semi-arid regions and laying the groundwork for more accurate global measurement of carbon storage on land.

Using powerful supercomputers and machine learning algorithms, the team mapped the crown diameter - the width of a tree when viewed from above - of more than 1.8 billion trees across an area of more than 500,000 square miles, or 1,300,000 square kilometers. The team mapped how tree crown diameter, coverage, and density varied depending on rainfall and land use.

Mapping non-forest trees at this level of detail would take months or years with traditional analysis methods, the team said, compared to a few weeks for this study. The use of very high-resolution imagery and powerful artificial intelligence represents a technology breakthrough for mapping and measuring these trees. This study is intended to be the first in a series of papers whose goal is not only to map non-forest trees across a wide area, but also to calculate how much carbon they store - vital information for understanding the Earth's carbon cycle and how it is changing over time.

Measuring carbon in trees

Carbon is one of the primary building blocks for all life on Earth, and this element circulates among the land, atmosphere, and oceans via the carbon cycle. Some natural processes and human activities release carbon into the atmosphere, while other processes draw it out of the atmosphere and store it on land or in the ocean. Trees and other green vegetation are carbon "sinks," meaning they use carbon for growth and store it out of the atmosphere in their trunks, branches, leaves and roots. Human activities, like burning trees and fossil fuels or clearing forested land, release carbon into the atmosphere as carbon dioxide, and rising concentrations of atmospheric carbon dioxide are a main cause of climate change.

Conservation experts working to mitigate climate change and other environmental threats have targeted deforestation for years, but these efforts do not always include trees that grow outside forests, said Compton Tucker, senior biospheric scientist in the Earth Sciences Division at NASA Goddard. Not only could these trees be significant carbon sinks, but they also contribute to the ecosystems and economies of nearby human, animal and plant populations. However, many current methods for studying trees' carbon content only include forests, not trees that grow individually or in small clusters.

Tucker and his NASA colleagues, together with an international team, used commercial satellite images from DigitalGlobe, which were high-resolution enough to spot individual trees and measure their crown size. The images came from the commercial QuickBird-2, GeoEye-1, WorldView-2, and WorldView-3 satellites. The team focused on the dryland regions - areas that receive less precipitation than what evaporates from plants each year - including the arid south side of the Sahara Desert, that stretches through the semi-arid Sahel Zone and into the humid sub-tropics of West Africa. By studying a variety of landscapes from few trees to nearly forested conditions, the team trained their computing algorithms to recognize trees across diverse terrain types, from deserts in the north to tree savannas in the south.

The team focused on the dryland regions of West Africa, including the arid south side of the Sahara Desert, stretching through the semi-arid Sahel Zone and into the humid sub-tropics. By studying a variety of landscapes from few trees to nearly forested conditions, the team trained their computing algorithms to recognize trees across diverse terrain types, from deserts in the north to tree savannas in the south. Download related video in HD formats: https://svs.gsfc.nasa.gov/4865

Learning on the job

The team ran a powerful computing algorithm called a fully convolutional neural network ("deep learning") on the University of Illinois' Blue Waters, one of the world's fastest supercomputers. The team trained the model by manually marking nearly 90,000 individual trees across a variety of terrain, then allowing it to "learn" which shapes and shadows indicated the presence of trees.

The process of coding the training data took more than a year, said Martin Brandt, an assistant professor of geography at the University of Copenhagen and the study's lead author. Brandt marked all 89,899 trees by himself and helped supervise training and running the model. Ankit Kariryaa of the University of Bremen led the development of the deep learning computer processing.

"In one kilometer of terrain, say it's a desert, many times there are no trees, but the program wants to find a tree," Brandt said. "It will find a stone, and think it's a tree. Further south, it will find houses that look like trees. It sounds easy, you'd think - there's a tree, why shouldn't the model know it's a tree? But the challenges come with this level of detail. The more detail there is, the more challenges come."

Establishing an accurate count of trees in this area provides vital information for researchers, policymakers and conservationists. Additionally, measuring how tree size and density vary by rainfall - with wetter and more populated regions supporting more and larger trees - provides important data for on-the-ground conservation efforts.

"There are important ecological processes, not only inside, but outside forests too," said Jesse Meyer, a programmer at NASA Goddard who led the processing on Blue Waters. "For preservation, restoration, climate change, and other purposes, data like these are very important to establish a baseline. In a year or two or ten, the study could be repeated with new data and compared to data from today, to see if efforts to revitalize and reduce deforestation are effective or not. It has quite practical implications."

After gauging the program's accuracy by comparing it to both manually coded data and field data from the region, the team ran the program across the full study area. The neural network identified more than 1.8 billion trees - surprising numbers for a region often assumed to support little vegetation, said Meyer and Tucker.

"Future papers in the series will build on the foundation of counting trees, extend the areas studied, and look ways to calculate their carbon content," said Tucker. NASA missions like the Global Ecosystem Dynamics Investigation mission, or GEDI, and ICESat-2, or the Ice, Cloud, and Land Elevation Satellite-2, are already collecting data that will be used to measure the height and biomass of forests. In the future, combining these data sources with the power of artificial intelligence could open up new research possibilities.

"Our objective is to see how much carbon is in isolated trees in the vast arid and semi-arid portions of the world," Tucker said. "Then we need to understand the mechanism which drives carbon storage in arid and semi-arid areas. Perhaps this information can be utilized to store more carbon in vegetation by taking more carbon dioxide out of the atmosphere."

"From a carbon cycle perspective, these dry areas are not well mapped, in terms of what density of trees and carbon is there," Brandt said. "It's a white area on maps. These dry areas are basically masked out. This is because normal satellites just don't see the trees - they see a forest, but if the tree is isolated, they can't see it. Now we're on the way to filling these white spots on the maps. And that's quite exciting."

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USask scientists develop model to identify best lentils for climate change impacts

UNIVERSITY OF SASKATCHEWAN

Research News

 

IMAGE: USASK PLANT SCIENTIST KIRSTIN BETT. view more 

CREDIT: DEBRA MARSHALL PHOTOGRAPHY

With demand for lentils growing globally and climate change driving temperatures higher, a University of Saskatchewan-led international research team has developed a model for predicting which varieties of the pulse crop are most likely to thrive in new production environments.

An inexpensive plant-based source of protein that can be cooked quickly, lentil is a globally important crop for combatting food and nutritional insecurity.

But increased production to meet this global demand will have to come from either boosting yields in traditional growing areas or shifting production to new locations, said USask plant scientist Kirstin Bett.

"By understanding how different lentil lines will interact with the new environment, we can perhaps get a leg up in developing varieties likely to do well in new growing locations," said Bett.

Working with universities and organizations around the globe, the team planted 324 lentil varieties in nine lentil production hotspots, including two in Saskatchewan and one in the U.S., as well as sites in South Asia (Nepal, Bangladesh, and India) and the Mediterranean (Morocco, Spain, and Italy).

The findings, published in the journal Plants, People, Planet, will help producers and breeders identify existing varieties or develop new lines likely to flourish in new growing environments--valuable intelligence in the quest to feed the world's growing appetite for inexpensive plant-based protein.

The new mathematical model is based on a key predictor of crop yield--days to flowering (DTF) which is determined by two factors: day length (hours of sunshine or "photoperiod") and the mean temperature of the growing environment. Using detailed information about each variety's interaction with temperature and photoperiod, the simple model can be used to predict the number of days it takes each variety to flower in a specific environment.

"With this model, we can predict which lines they (producers) should be looking at that will do well in new regions, how they should work, and whether they'll work," Bett said.

For example, lentil producers in Nepal--which is already experiencing higher mean temperatures as a result of climate change--can use the model to identify which lines will produce high yields if they're grown at higher altitudes.

Closer to home in Western Canada, the model could be used to predict which varieties should do well in what are currently considered to be marginal production areas.

The project also involved USask plant researchers Sandesh Neupane, Derek Wright, Crystal Chan, and Bert Vandenberg.

The next step is putting the new model to work in lentil breeding programs to identify the genes that are controlling lentil lines' interactions with temperature and day length, said Bett.

Once breeders determine the genes involved, they can develop molecular markers that will enable breeders to pre-screen seeds. That way they'll know how crosses between different lentil varieties are likely to perform in different production locations.

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This research project was part of the Application of Genomics to Innovation in the Lentil Economy (AGILE) project funded by Genome Canada and managed by Genome Prairie. Matching financial support was provided by partners that include the Saskatchewan Pulse Growers, Western Grains Research Foundation, and USask.

BROADBAND 

Internet connectivity is oxygen for research and development work

UNIVERSITY OF ILLINOIS COLLEGE OF AGRICULTURAL, CONSUMER AND ENVIRONMENTAL SCIENCES

Research News

 

IMAGE: EMMANUEL TOGO, IT ARCHITECT FOR THE UNIVERSITY OF GHANA, GAVE A TOUR OF THE UNIVERSITY'S CAMPUS NETWORK OPERATIONS CENTER DURING AN ICT HEALTH CHECKUP CONDUCTED BY PAUL HIXSON, UNIVERSITY OF... view more 

CREDIT: COLLEGE OF ACES, UNIVERSITY OF ILLINOIS.

URBANA, Ill. - Fast and reliable internet access is fundamental for research and development activity around the world. Seamless connectivity is a privilege we often take for granted. But in developing nations, technological limitations can become stumbling blocks to efficient communication and cause significant disadvantages.

Pete Goldsmith, director of the Soybean Innovation Lab at University of Illinois, works closely with partner organizations in several African countries. He noticed that his African colleagues were often dealing with technological problems that made communication very challenging. For example, sometimes they had to rely on their cell phones because their institution's internet access was unreliable.

Goldsmith teamed up with two IT experts at U of I, former Chief Information Officer Paul Hixson and Director of Research IT and Innovation Tracy Smith, to investigate technological challenges facing institutions in developing countries.

"Connectivity is the oxygen organizations run on," Hixson says. "It's such a basic requirement that it's often not even recognized as an issue. But lack of connectivity severely hinders an organization's ability to perform simple functions, conduct research, and compete for grants."

Goldsmith, Hixson, and Smith conducted an in-depth case study of information communication technology (ICT) infrastructure at the Savannah Agricultural Research Institute (SARI), a leading research station in Ghana and a close collaborator of SIL.

The case study included focus groups, interviews, and a technological analysis of SARI's equipment and connectivity. Based on this study, the research team developed the ICT Health Checkup, an assessment procedure for IT administrators to methodically assess the current state of their system, identify gaps affecting performance, and document steps for remediation.

The ICT Health Checkup tool systematically evaluates four key elements of ICT infrastructure. The first step focuses on connectivity and bandwidth, identifying the required bandwidth to accommodate the institution's needs and whether the institution has an uninterrupted fiber-based connection to the global internet. The second step analyzes core physical infrastructure, including dependable electricity, local network design, and both wired and wireless connectivity capabilities.

The third step looks at available intranet service offerings for researchers such as local storage, data backup procedures, access control, security procedures, email service, and cloud access. Finally, the fourth step deals with the human resources and technical support requirements for planning and managing the institution's IT infrastructure.

"With this tool, institutions can go through a checklist, and at each point there is a 'stoplight'. If it's red, you know there is something that needs to be fixed, because there are conditions that will act as a block and you can't go on until they are fixed - until there's a green light. So turning things from red to green at each step is crucial; methodically going through each step at a time and making sure it's fixed before moving on to the next one," Hixson explains.

The researchers compare the ICT Health Checkup to a medical health exam; it measures the current conditions and can be used as a benchmarking tool to measure improvements.

Goldsmith says the tool can be used to empower organizations so they can be self-sufficient. "With proper connectivity you can manage and store research data, compete for grants, and manage awards," he notes. "It's the foundation that allows institutions to participate fully in a global context."

The research team is currently expanding the study, collecting data from nine institutions and five networking organizations operating in three countries, in order to create a more robust picture of internet connectivity challenges and potential solutions across Africa.

They are also collaborating with the National Research and Education Networks (NRENs) in each of the sub-Saharan African countries that SIL operates in. These African NRENs are comparable to Internet2, which has been an instrumental partner in the expansion and adoption of advanced computing technologies at U of I and is one of the leading NRENs in the U.S., serving the country's research and higher-education communities.

"With the ICT health checkup, our partner African NRENs now have an actual assessment tool they can use with their member institutions. It's becoming a continent-wide approach as they are starting to adopt this new instrument created at the U of I to be their benchmark and measurement tool," Goldsmith says.

"The U of I is ideally positioned to provide this knowledge, because of the university's continued leadership in the computational and network administration space," he adds. "Now we are extending that to have real impact overseas."

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The article, "The ICT Health Checkup Tool: Assessing Connectivity of the National Agriculture Research System (NARS)," is published in African Journal of Food, Agriculture, Nutrition and Development.

Funding was provided by the Feed the Future Innovation Lab for Soybean Value Chain Research (Soybean Innovation Lab (SIL)) under the U.S. Government's global hunger and food security initiative, Feed the Future.

The Soybean Innovation Lab is in the Department of Agricultural and Consumer Economics, College of Agricultural, Consumer and Environmental Sciences, University of Illinois.

 

Those funky cheese smells allow microbes to 'talk' to and feed each other

Researchers discover that bacteria that ripen cheese respond to the volatile gases produced by cheese fungi

TUFTS UNIVERSITY

Research News

 

IMAGE: FUNGI AND BACTERIA KEY TO RIPENING CHEESE COMMUNICATE WITH AND FEED EACH OTHER USING VOLATILE COMPOUNDS view more 

CREDIT: ADAM DETOUR

MEDFORD/SOMERVILLE, Mass. (October 16, 2020)-- Researchers at Tufts University have found that those distinctly funky smells from cheese are one way that fungi communicate with bacteria, and what they are saying has a lot to do with the delicious variety of flavors that cheese has to offer. The research team found that common bacteria essential to ripening cheese can sense and respond to compounds produced by fungi in the rind and released into the air, enhancing the growth of some species of bacteria over others. The composition of bacteria, yeast and fungi that make up the cheese microbiome is critical to flavor and quality of the cheese, so figuring out how that can be controlled or modified adds science to the art of cheese making.

The discovery, published in Environmental Microbiology, also provides a model for the understanding and modification of other economically and clinically important microbiomes, such as in soil or the gastrointestinal tract.

"Humans have appreciated the diverse aromas of cheeses for hundreds of years, but how these aromas impact the biology of the cheese microbiome had not been studied," said Benjamin Wolfe, professor of biology in the School of Arts and Science at Tufts University and corresponding author of the study. "Our latest findings show that cheese microbes can use these aromas to dramatically change their biology, and the findings' importance extends beyond cheese making to other fields as well."

Many microbes produce airborne chemical compounds called volatile organic compounds, or VOCs, as they interact with their environment. A widely recognized microbial VOC is geosmin, which is emitted by soil microbes and can often be smelled after a heavy rain in forests. As bacteria and fungi grow on ripening cheeses, they secrete enzymes that break down amino acids to produce acids, alcohols, aldehydes, amines, and various sulfur compounds, while other enzymes break down fatty acids to produce esters, methyl ketones, and secondary alcohols. All of those biological products contribute to the flavor and aroma of cheese and they are the reason why Camembert, Blue cheese and Limburger have their signature smells.

The Tufts researchers found that VOCs don't just contribute to the sensory experience of cheese, but also provide a way for fungi to communicate with and "feed" bacteria in the cheese microbiome. By pairing 16 different common cheese bacteria with 5 common cheese rind fungi, the researchers found that the fungi caused responses in the bacteria ranging from strong stimulation to strong inhibition. One bacteria species, Vibrio casei, responded by growing rapidly in the presence of VOCs emitted by all five of the fungi. Other bacteria, such as Psychrobacter, only grew in response to one of the fungi (Galactomyces), and two common cheese bacteria decreased significantly in number when exposed to VOCs produced by Galactomyces.

The researchers found that the VOCs altered the expression of many genes in the bacteria, including genes that affect the way they metabolize nutrients. One metabolic mechanism that was enhanced, called the glyoxylate shunt, allows the bacteria to utilize more simple compounds as "food" when more complex sources such as glucose are unavailable. In effect, they enabled the bacteria to better "eat" some of the VOCs and use them as sources for energy and growth.

"The bacteria are able to actually eat what we perceive as smells," said Casey Cosetta, post-doctoral scholar in the department of biology at Tufts University and first author of the study. "That's important because the cheese itself provides little in the way of easily metabolized sugars such as glucose. With VOCs, the fungi are really providing a useful assist to the bacteria to help them thrive."

There are direct implications of this research for cheese producers around the world. When you walk into a cheese cave there are many VOCs released into the air as the cheeses age. These VOCs may impact how neighboring cheeses develop by promoting or inhibiting the growth of specific microbes, or by changing how the bacteria produce other biological products that add to the flavor. A better understanding of this process could enable cheese producers to manipulate the VOC environment to improve the quality and variety of flavors.

The implications of the research can even extend much further. "Now that we know that airborne chemicals can control the composition of microbiomes, we can start to think about how to control the composition of other microbiomes, for example in agriculture to improve soil quality and crop production and in medicine to help manage diseases affected by the hundreds of species of bacteria in the body," said Wolfe.

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Other authors of this study include Nicole Kfoury, former postdoctoral scholar at Tufts and currently applications scientist at Gerstel, Inc., and Albert Robbat Jr., associate professor of chemistry at Tufts.

This research was supported by a grant from the National Science Foundation (#1715553).

Cosetta, C.M., Kfoury, N., Robbat, A., and Wolfe, B.E. "Fungal volatiles mediate cheese rind microbiome assembly" Environmental Microbiology, 9 September 2020; DOI: 10.1111/1462-2920.15223

About Tufts University

Tufts University, located on campuses in Boston, Medford/Somerville and Grafton, Massachusetts, and in Talloires, France, is recognized among the premier research universities in the United States. Tufts enjoys a global reputation for academic excellence and for the preparation of students as leaders in a wide range of professions. A growing number of innovative teaching and research initiatives span all Tufts campuses, and collaboration among the faculty and students in the undergraduate, graduate and professional programs across the university's schools is widely encouraged.

 

New research comparing HIV medications set to change international recommendations

UNIVERSITY OF BRITISH COLUMBIA

Research News

 

IMAGE: THE STUDY'S LEAD AUTHOR, DR. STEVE KANTERS, WHO COMPLETED THE RESEARCH AS A PHD CANDIDATE IN UBC'S SCHOOL OF POPULATION AND PUBLIC HEALTH. view more 

CREDIT: UNIVERSITY OF BRITISH COLUMBIA

A new study by UBC researchers is set to change international treatment recommendations for people who are newly diagnosed with HIV--an update that could affect nearly two million people per year worldwide.

The study, published today by The Lancet in the journal EClinicalMedicine, was commissioned by the World Health Organization (WHO) as part of a planned update to its guidelines for HIV antiretroviral treatment (ART). The study found that dolutegravir is the optimal medication for first-line treatment for people newly diagnosed with HIV, a choice that has not been clear over the past several years.

"Research supporting the 2016 WHO guidelines suggested that dolutegravir was effective and well tolerated, but its efficacy and safety among key populations, such as pregnant women and people living with both HIV and tuberculosis (TB), remained unclear," said the study's lead author, Dr. Steve Kanters, who completed the research as a PhD candidate in UBC's School of Population and Public Health (SPPH). "In 2018, new research warned of a potentially serious increase in risk of neural tube defects in the children of women who became pregnant while taking this treatment."

The risk of adverse reaction meant that, although dolutegravir was found to be favourable compared to other options, it was only recommended as an alternative, with an antiretroviral called efavirenz recommended as the primary treatment.

The study team, which included Dr. Nick Bansback, associate professor at SPPH, Dr. Aslam Anis, professor at SPPH and director of the Centre for Health Evaluation and Outcome Sciences (CHÉOS), and Dr. Ehsan Karim, assistant professor at SPPH, completed a network meta-analysis of research stemming from 68 available antiretroviral therapy (ART) clinical trials.

They found dolutegravir was superior to efavirenz in most outcomes, including viral suppression, tolerability, and safety. According to Kanters, the increased odds of viral suppression with dolutegravir could have a significant impact on achieving international goals for HIV treatment.

"We found about a five per cent increase in the probability of viral suppression, which means that more people who start treatment will be able to successfully control their HIV," he said.

Another key attribute of dolutegravir is that it is effective in people who are resistant to NNRTI-class antiretrovirals, like efavirenz, a problem that is becoming increasingly common.

The analysis also showed that dolutegravir and efavirenz had similar rates of adverse events for pregnant women -- the increased risk of neural tube defects for dolutegravir was estimated to be less than 0.3 per cent.

"The new evidence on neural tube defects show that the risk with dolutegravir is much more tolerable than previously thought and should quell the initial worry about this drug," said Kanters.

"Dolutegravir appears to be here to stay as the preferred treatment for people newly diagnosed with HIV," he said. "However, it is important to recognize the good that efavirenz has done over the past two decades, as it helped lead the ART scale-up around the world."

Despite the many benefits of dolutegravir, dolutegravir use was associated with increased weight gain, a side effect that could increase the risk of aging-associated comorbidities, like heart attack or stroke.

"In many places, well-treated HIV has become a chronic condition and we are now seeing people living long lives with HIV," said Kanters. "The research community will continue to monitor the effects dolutegravir may have on the healthy aging process."

While this study is specifically focused on the optimal treatment for people newly diagnosed with HIV, an upcoming publication will review the evidence in support of switching to dolutegravir for people whose first treatment choice has been unsuccessful in controlling their infection. This recommendation could mean improved treatment for the many people living with HIV around the world who are unable to achieve viral suppression despite being on treatment.

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Deep sea coral time machines reveal ancient CO2 burps

UNIVERSITY OF BRISTOL

Research News

 

IMAGE: CORAL IMAGES: ANALYSIS OF THE FOSSIL REMAINS OF DEEP-SEA CORALS (PICTURED HERE) WERE USED TO EXAMINE THE HISTORY OF THE OCEANS AND CONNECTIONS TO GLOBAL CLIMATE. view more 

CREDIT: DANN BLACKWOOD, USGS.

The fossilised remains of ancient deep-sea corals may act as time machines providing new insights into the effect the ocean has on rising CO2 levels, according to new research carried out by the Universities of Bristol, St Andrews and Nanjing and published today [16 October] in Science Advances.

Rising CO2 levels helped end the last ice age, but the cause of this CO2 rise has puzzled scientists for decades. Using geochemical fingerprinting of fossil corals, an international team of scientists has found new evidence that this CO2 rise was linked to extremely rapid changes in ocean circulation around Antarctica.

The team collected fossil remains of deep-sea corals that lived thousands of metres beneath the waves. By studying the radioactive decay of the tiny amounts of uranium found in these skeletons, they identified corals that grew at the end of the ice age around 15,000 years ago.

Further geochemical fingerprinting of these specimens - including measurements of radiocarbon - allowed the team to reconstruct changes in ocean circulation and compare them to changes in global climate at an unprecedented time resolution.

Professor Laura Robinson, Professor of Geochemistry at Bristol's School of Earth Sciences who led the research team, said: "The data show that deep ocean circulation can change surprisingly rapidly, and that this can rapidly release CO2 to the atmosphere."

Dr James Rae at St Andrew's School of Earth and Environmental Sciences, added: "The corals act as a time machine, allowing us to see changes in ocean circulation that happened thousands of years ago.

"They show that the ocean round Antarctica can suddenly switch its circulation to deliver burps of CO2 to the atmosphere."

Scientists have suspected that the Southern Ocean played an important role in ending the last ice age and the team's findings add weight to this idea.

Dr Tao Li of Nanjing University, lead author of the new study, said: "There is no doubt that Southern Ocean processes must have played a critical role in these rapid climate shifts and the fossil corals provide the only possible way to examine Southern Ocean processes on these timescales."

In another study published in Nature Geoscience this week the same team ruled out recent speculation that the global increase in CO2 at the end of the ice age may have been related to release of geological carbon from deep sea sediments.

Andrea Burke at St Andrew's School of Earth and Environmental Sciences, added: "There have been some suggestions that reservoirs of carbon deep in marine mud might bubble up and add CO2 to the ocean and the atmosphere, but we found no evidence of this in our coral samples."

Dr Tianyu Chen of Nanjing University said: "Our robust reconstructions of radiocarbon at intermediate depths yields powerful constraints on mixing between the deep and upper ocean, which is important for modelling changes in circulation and carbon cycle during the last ice age termination.

Dr James Rae added: "Although the rise in CO2 at the end of the ice age was dramatic in geological terms, the recent rise in CO2 due to human activity is much bigger and faster. What the climate system will do in response is pretty scary."

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Paper

'Rapid shifts in circulation and biogeochemistry of the Southern Ocean during deglacial carbon cycle events' by L Robinson et al in Science Advances. https://advances.sciencemag.org/content/6/42/eabb3807

'Persistently well-ventilated intermediate-depth ocean through the last deglaciation' by L Robinson et al in Nature Geoscience

https://www.nature.com/articles/s41561-020-0638-6

 

Echo from the past makes rice paddies a good home for wetland plants

Geography before human land use impacts how well plant species are retained

TOKYO METROPOLITAN UNIVERSITY

Research News

 

IMAGE: RICE PADDIES WHICH WERE ORIGINALLY WETLAND ARE ABLE TO PROVIDE A NEW HOME FOR THE ORIGINAL WETLAND PLANT SPECIES THAT WERE PRESENT. CONVERSELY, PADDIES WHICH WERE NOT ORIGINALLY WETLAND ARE... view more 

CREDIT: TOKYO METROPOLITAN UNIVERSITY

Tokyo, Japan - Researchers from Tokyo Metropolitan University studied the biodiversity of wetland plants over time in rice paddies in the Tone River basin, Japan. They found that paddies which were more likely to have been wetland before agricultural use retained more wetland plant species. On the other hand, land consolidation and agricultural abandonment were both found to negatively impact biodiversity. Their findings may one day inform conservation efforts and promote sustainable agriculture.

The Asian monsoon region is home to a vast number of rice paddies. Not only have they fed its billions of inhabitants for centuries, they are also an important part of the ecosystem, home to a vast array of wetland plant species. But as the population grows and more agricultural land is required, their sheer scale and complexity beg an important question: what is their environmental impact?

A team from Tokyo Metropolitan University led by Associate Professor Takeshi Osawa and their collaborators have been studying how rice paddies affect local plant life. In their most recent work, they investigated the biodiversity of wetland plants in rice paddies around the Tone River basin Japan. The Tone River is Japan's second longest river, and runs through the 170,000 square kilometer expanse of the Kanto plains. Previous studies have looked at how a particular species or group of species fare in different conditions. Instead, the team turned their attention to the range of species that make up the plant community, with a particular focus on the number of wetland and non-wetland species present. Changes were tracked over time using extensive survey data from 2002, 2007 and 2012.

They found that not all rice paddies are equal when it comes to how well they support original wetland species. In fact, there was a correlation between how likely it was that the land was wetland before it was put to agricultural use, and the number of wetland species which were retained over time. Here, the team measured this using flow accumulation values (FAVs) for different plots of land, a simple metric which showed how easily water could accumulate. Importantly, this kind of approach might help us predict how amenable new rice paddies might be to the local wetland flora by calculating a simple number using the local terrain. However, they also found that things like land consolidation and agricultural abandonment could also have a negative impact. The emerging story is that both current human usage and original geographical conditions play an important role in deciding how 'friendly' rice paddies could be for the original wetland ecosystem.

The team believe that the same approach could be applied to different locations such as plantation forests which were (or were not) originally woodland. After all, many nations are turning to large scale tree planting to offset carbon emissions. The ability to systematically 'assign' how new land usage might impact local ecosystems is sure to greatly help restoration and conversation efforts.

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This work was supported by the Environment Research and Technology Development Fund (4-1805, 4-1705) of the Ministry of the Environment, Japan, the Research Institute for Humanity and Nature (RIHN: a constituent member of NIHU) Core Project No. 14200075, and JSPS KAKENHI Grant Number 20K06096.

 

Glimpse deep into Earth's crust finds heat source that may stabilize continents

PENN STATE

Research News

 

IMAGE: ROCKS COLLECTED FROM KILBOURNE HOLE CRATER IN NEW MEXICO REVEALED THE THINNING LITHOSPHERE IN THE RIO GRANDE CONTINENTAL RIFT PROVIDES HEAT NECESSARY TO STABILIZE CONTINENTS OVER BILLIONS OF YEARS. view more 

CREDIT: PENN STATE

Rocks from the Rio Grande continental rift have provided a rare snapshot of active geology deep inside Earth's crust, revealing new evidence for how continents remain stable over billions of years, according to a team of scientists.

"We tend to study rocks that are millions to billions of years old, but in this case we can show what's happening in the deep crust, nearly 19 miles below the surface of the Earth, in what geologically speaking is the modern day," said Jacob Cipar, a graduate student in geosciences at Penn State. "And we have linked what's preserved in these rocks with tectonic processes happening today that may represent an important step in the development of stable continents."

The team, led by Penn State scientists, found evidence that heat from the mantle is melting the lower crust at the rift, where tectonic forces are pulling apart and thinning the lithosphere, or the crust and upper mantle that make up the rigid outer layer of Earth.

Heating the continental crust is considered important to its development. But the process is often associated with crustal thickening, when continental plates collide and form mountains like the Himalayas, the scientists said.

"Our research suggests that these rocks that have been thought of as related to mountain building may have actually been cooked by a thinning lithosphere like what's happening in the modern-day Rio Grande rift," Cipar said. "And more broadly, thinning lithosphere may be more important than previously recognized for stabilizing continents and preventing them from sinking back into the mantle."

The researchers recently reported their findings in the journal Nature Geoscience.

Earth's continents feature a unique silicon-rich, buoyant crust that allows land to rise above sea level and host terrestrial life, the scientists said. The crust also contains heat-producing elements like uranium that could destabilize it over geological time.

Heating the crust creates molten rock that carries those elements toward the surface, resulting in a cooler and stronger lower crust that can protect continents from being absorbed into the mantle, the scientists said. But questions remain about the sources of that heat.

"We are suggesting that thinning of the lithosphere is really the removal of a barrier that keeps that heat away from the crust," said Andrew Smye, assistant professor of geosciences at Penn State and Cipar's adviser. "Removing or thinning that barrier at the Rio Grande rift appears to be what is generating the heat needed to initiate this process of stabilizing continental crust. And this has been overlooked in our understanding of how continents become so stable."

The scientists tapped into rocks brought to the surface 20,000 years ago by volcanoes in New Mexico. The rocks are considered geologically young and are significant because they retain the context of the lower crust, the scientists said.

"In contrast, what we see in the rock record around the world is that oftentimes what it takes to get them up to the surface has disrupted their original relationship with the lower crust," said Joshua Garber, a postdoctoral researcher at Penn State. "This makes it really challenging to use older rocks to try to understand tectonics, and it makes the Rio Grande probably the best place to do this research."

The scientists used analytical techniques to link the age of minerals in the rocks to the pressure and temperature they faced as they made their way through the crust.

Similarities between the pressure and temperature path from the Rio Grande lower crust and rocks from other locations suggest that a thinning lithosphere is important for stabilizing Earth's continents, the scientists said.

"The snapshots of data we do have from other locations really nicely aligns with what we found in the Rio Grande rift," Garber said. "So that tells us this is not just happening now in the western United States. This shows the guts of continents have probably undergone this globally at least for the last billion years."

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Andrew Kylander-Clark, a senior development engineering at the University of California, Santa Barbara, also contributed to this work.

The National Science Foundation and the Slingerland Early Career Fellowship at Penn State supported the research.

 

Why school bullying prevention programs that involve peers may be harmful to victims

SOCIETY FOR RESEARCH IN CHILD DEVELOPMENT

Research News

 

School bullying has been identified as harmful to students' mental health. Many studies have evaluated the effectiveness of bullying prevention programs, finding mixed results in general and no benefits overall for secondary school students. Looking at the specific components of bullying prevention programs helps to explain the complicated pattern: Unlike intensive programs that include parent training, firm disciplinary methods or improved playground supervision, interventions that involve work with peers tend to lead to increases in bullying. A new review explores why encouraging peers to defend victims may actually cause more harm than good.

The analysis was written by a researcher at the QIMR Berghofer Medical Research Institute and the University of Queensland, Brisbane. It appears in Child Development Perspectives, a journal of the Society for Research in Child Development.

"Many school bullying prevention programs encourage and train peer bystanders (helpers) to get actively involved in assisting with possible instances of bullying," said Karyn L. Healy, research officer from QIMR Berghofer Medical Research Institute, who authored the analysis. "Although this approach is very common and well-intentioned, there is no evidence that it helps victims. Encouraging peers to actively defend victims of bullying may actually produce adverse outcomes for victims."

Most research on the effectiveness of bullying prevention programs assumes that each program affects bullying and victimization in a simple and unified way. But many programs combine a range of different strategies and participants, which are likely to produce differential effects.

Healy identified several mechanisms through which bystander interventions that involve peer defense of the victim could increase victimization and distress of victims: 1) by disempowering victims, 2) by reinforcing or provoking bullying, or 3) by eroding broader support for victims by the peer group.

"Having lots of peers involved makes the situation more public, which can be damaging to the social reputation of victims," said Healy. "Having a trained bystander step in also prevents the victim from handling a situation themselves and may make them look weak in the eyes of the bully. Training students to intervene in bullying also has the potential of leading to overuse of peer defense strategies because of benefits to helpers, such as making helpers feel they have higher status or increasing helpers' feelings of belonging in school."

Recent evidence suggests that even when programs are successful in reducing bullying, they may still be harmful to the individual students who are victimized the most. "This could potentially be the case for any program that aims to reduce overall bullying without taking into account the impacts on victims," explains Healy.

To lessen the risk to vulnerable students, Healy suggests that schools be wary of bullying prevention programs that lack evidence of effectiveness for reducing bullying and victimization. Schools should avoid using strategies that boost peer visibility of victimization (e.g., identifying a victim in a class meeting). In addition, evaluations of bullying prevention programs that look at the school as a whole should be cautious of hidden negative outcomes for individual students who remain victimized.

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Summarized from Child Development Perspectives, Hypotheses for Possible Iatrogenic Impacts of School Bullying Prevention Programs by Healy, KL (QIMR Berghofer Medical Research Institute and the University of Queensland, Brisbane). Copyright 2020 The Society for Research in Child Development, Inc. All rights reserved.