Researchers survey rural residents’ Internet usage in Aotearoa New Zealand’s North Island

Survey observes how well rural residents are making use of new broadband connections

Peer-Reviewed Publication

TSINGHUA UNIVERSITY PRESS

 

IMAGE: CRITICAL LEVEL OF THE INTERNET TO THE SURVEY RESPONDENTS’ EVERYDAY LIFE IN AOTEAROA NEW ZEALAND. view more 

CREDIT: INTELLIGENT AND CONVERGED NETWORKS, TSINGHUA UNIVERSITY PRESS

Several years ago, the government of Aotearoa New Zealand undertook an initiative to provide Internet access throughout the country. To observe the status of broadband adoption and usage in the rural areas, a group of final year research and development (R&D) undergraduate students with their supervisors conducted a statistical survey of broadband availability, quality and adoption.

 

The study first appeared online in September 2022 in Intelligent and Converged Network, and then published in the journal’s print version  on December 22, 2022.

 

The Aotearoa New Zealand government’s Rural Broadband Initiative was investing 400 million New Zealand dollars to provide 99 percent of the country with access to 50 Mbps peak broadband speed, with the remaining 1 percent of the country at 10 Mbps, by the year 2025. By 2017, the stage 1 of the initiative was completed. The research team sets out to study and observe the level of usage, proficiency, and productivity achieved with the broadband installation the initiative had completed.

 

The research team conducted a survey to learn whether the rural residents and their communities are making good use of the new fast broadband connections. The survey was conducted between February and July 2018, with the data collected from 217 rural residents from New Zealand’s North Island. The team conducted the hybrid face-to-face and online questionaries with rural Internet users to gather the survey information.

 

Their survey results showed that while providing the technology infrastructure is the first step, the technology alone is not enough. “Internet skills in-depth training and education need to catch up with the infrastructure deployment, which is useful to fuel the digital productivity and inclusion for booming rural economies,” said Dr Ming (Simon) Xiang, who is the graduate of Auckland University of Technology, New Zealand and had mainly finalized the survey technical report. He is now with the South China University of Technology, and also with the Ministry of Natural Resources, People's Republic of China.

 

The rural Internet users surveyed is age ranged from 16 to over 70 years old. The majority of the people surveyed (70.83 percent) had never received any form of lessons or training on Internet skills. When the people were asked if they were interested in learning more ways to make better use of the Internet, the majority of answers were neutral (40.63 percent), suggesting that these users are not sure what additional benefits they can get from receiving instruction on Internet skills.

 

The results shows that about half the people surveyed are satisfied with the speed and reliability of their Internet connections provided by the government initiative. However, the remaining half of the people surveyed are unsatisfied. The people surveyed use the Internet mainly for information and news, online entertainment, and banking. A large proportion of the people are unsure how else the Internet can help them in their day-to-day activities.

 

In order for people living in rural areas to take full advantage of the Internet being installed, they need to learn how to use the technology effectively. For example, the majority of school teachers say they are not equipped to maximize the educational opportunities provided through fast broadband. Among farmers, only a minority are willing to change practices they have been using for decades, even though the Internet could help them in a variety of ways from managing their accounts and budgets to measuring the yields of their herds. To make broadband Internet beneficial, people must use the connection effectively. If rural residents do not know how to use the technologies, they cannot see the opportunities and potential benefits that may come from their use. The survey findings suggest that if these users were provided with training to help them catch up with the faster internet being installed, it could result in enhanced digital productivity and inclusion for rural businesses and the residents’ well-being.

 

Looking ahead, the team hopes to effectively communicate their findings to the government and related agencies to steer the actions and activities in order to address the problems that have been identified. “The survey data-driven findings presented in this paper could serve as a reference to inform government policymakers and those who wish to create, invest, and take actions to speed up the economic and social growth of rural communities in Aotearoa New Zealand through the Internet,” said Dr Xiang.

 

The research team includes Dr Ming (Simon) Xiang, with the South China University of Technology and also with the South China Sea Institute of Planning and Environmental Research, Ministry of Natural Resources, People's Republic of China; Dr William Liu, Professor Edmund Lai, and Professor Jairo Gutierrez are with Auckland University of Technology, New Zealand; Associate Professor Luca Chiaraviglio is with the University of Rome “Tor Vergata” and also with Consorzio Nazionale Interuniversitario per le Telecomunicazioni, Italy; and Professor Jinsong Wu is with the Guilin University of Electronic Technology, China, and the University of Chile, Chile.

 

It is also acknowledged that the survey data collection work had been done by the final year undergraduate students: Rory Knight, Louie Faundo, Chung But, Keli Liu and  Khodesh Temita, as well as this research is fully funded by InternetNZ (https://internetnz.nz/)  which is officially Internet New Zealand Inc., formerly the Internet Society of New Zealand. It is a not-for-profit open membership organization and the designated manager for the .nz country code top-level Internet domain. It also supports the development of New Zealand's Internet through policy, community grants, research, and events.

 

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About Intelligent and Converged Networks 

 

Intelligent and Converged Networks is an international specialized journal that focuses on the latest developments in communication technology. The journal is co-published by Tsinghua University Press and the International Telecommunication Union (ITU), the United Nations specialized agency for information and communication technology (ICT). Intelligent and Converged Networks draws its name from the accelerating convergence of different fields of communication technology and the growing influence of artificial intelligence and machine learning.

 

About Tsinghua University Press

 

Established in 1980, belonging to Tsinghua University, Tsinghua University Press (TUP) is a leading comprehensive higher education and professional publisher in China. Committed to building a top-level global cultural brand, after 41 years of development, TUP has established an outstanding managerial system and enterprise structure, and delivered multimedia and multi-dimensional publications covering books, audio, video, electronic products, journals and digital publications. In addition, TUP actively carries out its strategic transformation from educational publishing to content development and service for teaching & learning and was named First-class National Publisher for achieving remarkable results.

 

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JOURNAL

Intelligent and Converged Networks

DOI

10.23919/ICN.2022.0021 

ARTICLE TITLE

Broadband usage for rural communities in the North Island of Aotearoa New Zealand

ARTICLE PUBLICATION DATE

22-Dec-2022

Uneven wetting under climate change is causing diverse variations in the thawing of frozen ground on the Tibetan Plateau

Peer-Reviewed Publication

INSTITUTE OF ATMOSPHERIC PHYSICS, CHINESE ACADEMY OF SCIENCES

 

IMAGE: THIS CHAIN OF MOUNTAINS IS LOCATED AT THE NORTHERN EDGE OF THE TIBETAN PLATEAU, HAS AN ALTITUDE OF MORE THAN 4600 M, AND IS CLASSIFIED AS A PERMAFROST REGION. THE GEOLOGY IS COMPLEX AND THE NATURAL CONDITIONS ARE HARSH. view more 

CREDIT: CHEN CHENG

The Tibetan Plateau has experienced prominent warming and wetting since the mid-1990s that has altered the thermal and hydrological properties of its frozen ground. In a new study, published in Advances in Atmospheric Sciences, scientists used the Community Land Surface Model to uncover that the dual effect of this wetting and the projected increase in precipitation over the Tibetan Plateau in the future is becoming a critical factor in determining the thermodynamics of the frozen ground.

 

The lead author of the study, Dr Xuewei Fang from the School of Atmospheric Sciences at Chengdu University of Information Technology in China, explains that, “In the face of the greatest increase in the occurrence frequency of heavy precipitation over the entire Tibetan Plateau, we need to address how warming and wetting might be jointly influencing the thermal responses of the permafrost and seasonally frozen ground to climate change.”

Dr Fang and her colleagues used the average annual precipitation as a criterion to divide the Tibetan Plateau into an arid zone (annual precipitation: < 200 mm), a semi-arid zone (annual precipitation: 200–400 mm), a semi-humid zone (annual precipitation: 400–800 mm), and a humid zone (annual precipitation: > 800 mm). Results showed that, compared with 1961–1990, the average annual air temperature and precipitation over the Tibetan Plateau during 1991–2010 increased by 0.72℃ and 75.64 mm, respectively. Spatially, the arid and semi-arid zones became warmer and wetter, while the humid and semi-humid zones became warmer but drier.

 

The team also compared the freezing and thawing durations of the ground surface in the two periods, and found that the wetting in drier regions before the 1990s prolonged the duration of freezing of the frozen ground and that the continuously wetting after the 1990s reduced the thawing period. This implies that the substantial wetting in arid areas has exerted the opposite warming effect on the permafrost body since the 1990s, with the permafrost area having shrunk by 28%.

 

This finding lies in contrast to the frozen ground presented in wetter regions, i.e., the decline in precipitation in the humid zones has prolonged the thawing duration in seasonally frozen ground significantly since the start of the 1990s. A drying and warming environment tends to enhance heat loss at the ground surface, thereby decreasing the heat supply for the melting of ice and extending the thawing process.

 

“Next, we plan to investigate how energy and water fluxes in the frozen ground interact with wetting and warming conditions,” concludes Dr Fang.

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JOURNAL

Advances in Atmospheric Sciences

DOI

10.1007/s00376-022-2109-z 

ARTICLE TITLE

Response of Freezing/Thawing Indexes to the Wetting Trend under Warming Climate Conditions over the Qinghai -Tibetan Plateau during 1961–2010: A Numerical Simulation

IU researchers discover “Humpty-Dumpty” water-based mechanism of human sex reversal at edge of developmental ambiguity

Peer-Reviewed Publication

INDIANA UNIVERSITY SCHOOL OF MEDICINE

INDIANAPOLIS—Researchers from Indiana University School of Medicine have discovered a molecular “clamping” mechanism within a male-specific protein-DNA complex whose mutation causes sex reversal: children with XY chromosomes but female bodies, a condition called Swyer Syndrome. The clamp exploits a water molecule bridging the male factor (designated SRY) and DNA control sites at the tenuous beginnings of male development.

The study focuses on the subtle substitution of a conserved aromatic residue in SRY (tyrosine) by a closely related aromatic residue (phenylalanine). The clinical mutation, shared by a fertile XY father and his sterile XY daughter, positions the embryonic male switch at the borderline of genetic function. The two aromatic rings are seemingly interchangeable in the structure of the protein, but differ in their ability to anchor a bridging water molecule in the protein-DNA complex.

“Loss of a single atom in SRY, an oxygen atom in a critical tyrosine, impairs the robustness of male development,” said Michael Weiss, MD, PhD, chair of the Department of Biochemistry and Molecular Biology. “Normally, the father has XY chromosomes and the daughter has XX chromosomes but in some families, the daughters can have XY chromosomes because there is a mutation in SRY. Sex chromosomes can degenerate over evolutionary time scales, leading to new upstream switches being recruited as male-determining pathways grow backwards. Such initial steps can be tenuous in biochemical terms.”

In the study, researchers focused on position 72 in the DNA-binding domain of SRY, which was not previously considered of special interest. However, the researchers discovered that tyrosine at this position enables operation of a water-mediated kinetic clamp, extending the lifetime of the protein-DNA complex. This mechanism is conserved in all mammalian SRY factors and is broadly observed in a related family of switch factors in multicellular (and some unicellular) animals. The latter family, designated “SOX” (SRY-related HMG box) is fundamental to patterning and development in metazoans.

Researchers published two recent papers about their work in Frontiers in Endocrinology. The first describes their findings related to focusing on box 72, and the second describes how the water-mediated clamp mechanism works. Weiss said they call it a “humpty-dumpty” model because of accelerated disassembly of the male-determining protein-DNA complex in the absence of the water-mediated clamp.

“Because the normal and mutant version of SRY are so similar in standard experimental assays,” said Joseph D. Racca, PhD, Assistant Research Professor in the Department of Biochemistry and Molecular Biology and first author of the new study. “Uncovering the water-mediated mechanism took several years. Critical insight was provided by molecular dynamics (MD) simulations of boundary water molecules in this system.”

“In the MD simulations a distinctive water molecule is anchored by the tyrosine as a bridge to the DNA: this special site of hydration is occupied for thousands of picoseconds, and then it will leave,” Weiss said. “But then another water molecule in the bulk solvent will almost immediately hop in its place, restoring the bridge.”

The subtle change from tyrosine to phenylalanine alters such hydration, a perturbation that propagates from position 72 predicted to destabilize successive protein-DNA contacts in the tail of the domain. Detachment of the tail would hasten dissociation of the protein-DNA complex and presumably male-specific gene-regulatory assemblies at target genes.

XY female children with differences in sexual differentiation due to Swyer Syndrome lack functional ovaries and are at risk for rare forms of early-onset gonadal cancer. Recognition of this syndrome is important allowing surgical removal of the gonads before cancer begins. The affected woman otherwise has a normal uterus and birth canal, and so they may bear children following in vitro fertilization of a donated egg.

Weiss said analogous mutations can occur in SOX genes, causing a variety of birth defects or diseases.

“Swyer mutations provide clues to help us understand a broad range of SOX diseases and may give rise to much improved protocols for different areas of medicine, such as regenerative medicine or cancer,” Weiss said. “This discovery thus goes way beyond sex determination because SRY is a prototype switch.”

In addition to Weiss, other study authors from IU include Yen-Shan Chen, PhD, Joseph Racca, PhD, Deepak Chatterjee, PhD, Ratan Rai, PhD, Yanwu Yang, PhD and Millie Georgiadis, PhD. Elisha Haas, PhD of Bar Ilan University in Israel was also a coauthor.

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IU School of Medicine is the largest medical school in the U.S. and is annually ranked among the top medical schools in the nation by U.S. News & World Report. The school offers high-quality medical education, access to leading medical research and rich campus life in nine Indiana cities, including rural and urban locations consistently recognized for livability.

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JOURNAL

Frontiers in Endocrinology

DOI

10.3389/fendo.2022.1029177 

ARTICLE TITLE

Tenuous transcriptional threshold of human sex determination. II. SRY exploits water-mediated clamp at the edge of ambiguity

New activity trackers for dolphin conservation

Experiments with custom-made biologging devices offer new insight into dolphin swimming and energy requirements

Peer-Reviewed Publication

UNIVERSITY OF MICHIGAN

Images

Just like a smartwatch can tell its wearer how many calories they consume during exercise, data from dolphin wearables can now be used to estimate how much energy dolphins use when they swim. 

University of Michigan engineers, in collaboration with marine mammal specialists at Dolphin Quest Oahu, have led the development of wearable sensors for marine mammals to monitor movement and behavior in order to enhance marine conservation efforts for these animals.

Dolphins and other sea creatures are affected by human disturbances in their habitat, including climate change, overfishing, noise pollution from shipping, construction, oil exploration and navy sonar activity. These types of disturbances can interrupt important animal behavior like foraging for fish and socializing, but measuring disturbance is difficult because the animals live under water.

Devices very similar to fitness trackers used by humans—known as biologging tags—are used in biology research, but estimating the energetic cost of swimming has been challenging. Now, with custom biologging tags made in collaboration with Loggerhead Instruments, the Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution in Massachusetts and Aarhus University in Denmark, Michigan engineers are able to measure animal movement during thousands of strokes as they swim.

"Our goal is to use tag data to estimate foraging events, how many fish were consumed during a day, and connect that to estimates of how much energy dolphins use during the movement required to catch those fish," said Alex Shorter, U-M assistant professor of mechanical engineering and senior author of a paper in the Journal of Experimental Biology. "This is important for conservation because we can then use our approach to estimate energetic costs when these animals are disturbed."

In their new work, the researchers were able to develop estimates of energetic cost from tag data by working with their human and animal collaborators at Dolphin Quest. In this unique environment, the researchers were able conduct repeatable swimming trials over a range of speeds from multiple animals to generate the data needed to estimate how much energy the animals were using as they swam. Marine mammal specialists trained the dolphins to wear the tracker during lap trials and periods of free swimming.

The tag sits between the blowhole and dorsal fin of the dolphin, attached with suction cups, where it noninvasively measures speed, temperature, pressure and movement. Six dolphins participated in the work, and just like data collection with humans, the animals were free to decline to participate in the work at any time.

During the prescribed lap trials, the animals started from rest at a floating dock and swam an 80-meter lap underwater around one of the marine mammal specialists and back to the dock at speeds of up to 21 kilometers per hour. During free swimming, in which the dolphins received no instructions, tags tracked movement for periods that ranged from 9.5 to 24 hours. One of the dolphins tracked for a 24-hour period swam over 70 kilometers, and these data were used for a case study of daily activity and energetic cost for a bottlenose dolphin. Importantly, these findings can be extended to tag data from animals in the wild.

"Our tag-based method is universally applicable to both animals in managed and wild settings, and can lead to a host of new research in monitoring the physical well-being of dolphin populations, which in turn will inform how we as humans are affecting their travel patterns, feeding requirements and lives in general," said Joaquin Gabaldon, a postdoctoral researcher in robotics and first author of the study.

"From a technological perspective, it is our hope that other researchers see the potential of dedicated on-tag speed sensing, and pursue the development of more adaptable speed sensors to enable energetics monitoring for a wider variety of marine animals," Gabaldon said.

This work dovetails with two of Shorter's other projects related to dolphin conservation. He and Bogdan Popa, U-M assistant professor of mechanical engineering, are studying how dolphins use echolocation to capture fish and image their environments. In addition, current work led by researchers at Duke University and the Oceanogràfic Foundation of Valencia, in collaboration with Dolphin Quest, seeks to estimate energy used during swimming by measuring movement and oxygen consumption.

The study was supported by the Office of Naval Research, the National Science Foundation, the Department of Fisheries and Oceans Canada, and the University of Michigan.

Study: Tag-based estimates of bottlenose dolphin swimming behavior and energetics. (DOI: 10.1242/jeb.244599)

Written by Makenzie Schlessman, College of Engineering

JOURNAL

Journal of Experimental Biology

Overshooting climate targets could significantly increase risk for tipping cascades

Peer-Reviewed Publication

POTSDAM INSTITUTE FOR CLIMATE IMPACT RESEARCH (PIK)

“We show that the risk for some tipping events could increase very substantially under certain global warming overshoot scenarios,” explains Nico Wunderling, scientist at the Potsdam Institute for Climate Impact Research and lead-author of the study to be published in Nature Climate Change. “Even if we would manage to limit global warming to 1.5 degrees after an overshoot of more than two degrees, this would not be enough as the risk of triggering one or more global tipping points would still be more than 50 percent. With more warming in the long-term, the risks increase dramatically.”

“To effectively prevent all tipping risks, the global mean temperature increase would need to be limited to no more than one degree – we are currently already at about 1.2 degrees,“ Jonathan Donges, Co-Lead of the FutureLab on Earth Resilience in the Anthropocene at PIK adds. “The latest IPCC report is showing that we’re most likely on a path to temporarily overshoot the 1.5 degrees Celsius temperature threshold.”

Emergence of at least one tipping event increases with rising peak temperatures

To arrive at these results, the scientists, together with co-authors from the Earth Commission – a group of leading scientists convened by Future Earth – used different global warming overshoot scenarios with peak temperatures from two to four degrees and applied these to a set of four interacting tipping elements: the Greenland Ice Sheet, the West Antarctic Ice Sheet, the Atlantic Meridional Overturning Circulation AMOC, and the Amazon rainforest. The researchers applied a risk analysis approach based on millions of model simulations to reflect the uncertainties in relevant parameters such as the uncertainty in critical temperature thresholds as well as interaction strengths and interaction structure. Such an amount of simulations would be computationally too expensive to do based on fully coupled Earth System Model simulations. For the different overshoot scenarios, the research team then analyzed the risk of crossing critical thresholds and the potential for triggering cascading interactions between the four elements, depending on the magnitude and duration of the overshoot as well as the warming remaining on the long-term.

“We found that the risk for the emergence of at least one tipping event increases with rising peak temperatures – already at a peak temperature of three degrees Celsius, more than one third of all simulations showed a tipping event even when overshoot durations were limited strongly. At four degrees Celsius peak temperature, this risk extends to more than half of all simulations,” explains Nico Wunderling.

Tipping mechanisms under warming overshoots

“Especially the Greenland and the West Antarctic ice sheet are at risk of tipping even for small overshoots, underlining that they are among the most vulnerable tipping elements. While it would take a long time for the ice loss to fully unfold, the temperature levels at which such changes are triggered could already be reached soon,” says Ricarda Winkelmann, Earth Commissioner and Co-Lead of the FutureLab on Earth Resilience in the Anthropocene. “Our action in the coming years can thus decide the future trajectory of the ice sheets for centuries or even millennia to come.” The other two tipping elements considered in the study, the AMOC and Amazon rainforest, have higher critical temperature thresholds. Yet, they would react much faster once the tipping process has started. Therefore, it is much more difficult to stop their tipping process once initiated by a temporary global warming overshoot.

Current mitigation policies are expected to lead to 2-3.6 degrees Celsius of global warming by the end of this century. “This is not enough. Even though a temporary temperature overshoot would definitely be better than reaching a peak temperature and remaining there, some of the overshoot impacts may lead to irreversible damages in a high climate risk zone and this is why low-temperature overshoots are key here,” explains Jonathan Donges. Ricarda Winkelmann adds: “Every tenth of a degree counts. We must do what we can to limit global warming as quickly as possible.”
 

Article: Nico Wunderling, Ricarda Winkelmann, Johan Rockström, Sina Loriani, David I. Armstrong McKay, Paul D. L. Ritchie, Boris Sakschewski, Jonathan F. Donges: Global warming overshoots increase risks of climate tipping cascades in a network model. Nature Climate Change. [DOI: 10.1038/s41558-022-01545-9]

Weblink to the article once published: https://doi.org/10.1038/s41558-022-01545-9

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JOURNAL

Nature Climate Change

DOI

10.1038/s41558-022-01545-9 

METHOD OF RESEARCH

Computational simulation/modeling

SUBJECT OF RESEARCH

Not applicable

ARTICLE TITLE

Global warming overshoots increase risks of climate tipping cascades in a network model.

ARTICLE PUBLICATION DATE

22-Dec-2022

GUN NUT NATION

In some US zip codes, young men face more risk of firearm death than those deployed in recent wars

A study led by Brown University researchers puts the risk of firearm-related death in perspective and calls attention to the urgent need for violence reduction interventions in the U.S.

Peer-Reviewed Publication

BROWN UNIVERSITY

PROVIDENCE, R.I. [Brown University] — The risk of firearm death in the U.S. is on the rise: in 2020, firearms became the leading cause of death for children, adolescents and young adults. Yet the risk is far from even — young men in some U.S. zip codes face disproportionately higher risks of firearm-related injuries and deaths.

To better understand the magnitude of the gun violence crisis and put it in perspective, researchers at Brown University and the University of Pennsylvania compared the risk of firearm-related death for young adult men living in the most violent areas in four major U.S. cities with the risks of combat death and injury faced by U.S. military personnel who served in Afghanistan and Iraq during active periods of war.

The results were mixed: The study, published in JAMA Network Open, found that young men from zip codes with the most firearm violence in Chicago and Philadelphia faced a notably higher risk of firearm-related death than U.S. military personnel deployed to wartime service in Afghanistan and Iraq. But the opposite was true in two other cities: The most violent areas in New York and Los Angeles were associated with much less risk for young men than those in the two wars.

In all zip codes studied, risks were overwhelmingly borne by young men from minority racial and ethnic groups, the study found.

“These results are an urgent wake-up call for understanding, appreciating and responding to the risks and attendant traumas faced by this demographic of young men,” said Brandon del Pozo, an assistant professor of medicine (research) at Brown’s Warren Alpert Medical School and an assistant professor of health services, policy and practice (research) at the University’s School of Public Health.

Del Pozo conducts research at the intersection of public health, public safety and justice, focusing on substance use, the overdose crisis, and violence. His recently released book, “The Police and the State: Security, Social Cooperation, and the Public Good,” is based on his academic research as well as his 23 years of experience as a police officer in New York City and as chief of police of Burlington, Vermont.

“Working as a police officer, I witnessed the toll of gun violence, and how disruptive it was for families and communities,” del Pozo said. “It stood out to me that the burden was not distributed evenly by geography or demographic. Some communities felt the brunt of gun violence much more acutely than others. By analyzing publicly available data on firearm fatalities in cities and in war, we sought to place that burden in sharp relief.”

At the same time, del Pozo said, he and the other study authors were responding to oft-repeated inflammatory claims about gun violence in American cities.  

“We often hear opposing claims about gun violence that fall along partisan lines: One is that big cities are war zones that require a severe crackdown on crime, and the other is that our fears about homicides are greatly exaggerated and don’t require drastic action,” del Pozo said. “We wanted to use data to explore these claims — and it turns out both are wrong. While most city residents are relatively safe from gun violence, the risks are more severe than war for some demographics.”

Illustrating the magnitude of the firearm crisis

To conduct their analysis, the researchers obtained information on all fatal and nonfatal shootings of 18- to 29-year-old men recorded as crimes in 2020 and 2021 in Chicago; Los Angeles; New York; and Philadelphia — the four largest U.S. cities for which public data on those who were shot were available. For New York, Chicago and Philadelphia, they used shooting death and injury data sets made public by each city; for Los Angeles, they extracted firearm death and injury data from a larger public data set of recorded crimes. Data were aggregated to the zip code level and linked to corresponding demographic characteristics from the U.S. Census Bureau’s 2019 American Community Survey.

The researchers acquired wartime combat-related mortality and injury counts for the conflicts in Iraq and Afghanistan from peer-reviewed analyses of U.S. military data covering the years 2001 to 2014 for the war in Afghanistan and 2003 to 2009 for the war in Iraq, both of which were periods of active combat. Because there is limited data about the risks of serving in different military units at different times during the Afghanistan and Iraq wars, the researchers considered the mortality and injury data of a single, de-identified Army brigade combat team engaged in combat during a 15-month period of the Iraq War that involved notably above-average combat death and injury rates at a time considered to be the height of the conflict.

The analysis included 129,826 young men residing in the four cities considered in the study.

The researchers found that compared to the risk of combat death faced by U.S. soldiers who were deployed to Afghanistan, the more dangerous of the two wars, young men living in the most violent zip code of Chicago (2,585 individuals) had a 3.23 times higher average risk of firearm-related homicide, and those in Philadelphia (2,448 people) faced a 1.9 times higher average risk of firearm-related homicide. Singling out the elevated dangers faced by the U.S. Army combat brigade in Iraq, the young men studied in Chicago still faced notably greater risks, and the ones faced in Philadelphia were comparable.

However, these findings were not observed in the most violent zip codes of Los Angeles and New York, where young men faced a 70% to 91% lower risk than soldiers in the Afghanistan war across fatal and nonfatal categories.

When the researchers looked at the demographics of the young men in the zip codes studied, they determined that the risk of violent death and injury observed in the zip codes studied was almost entirely borne by individuals from minority racial and ethnic groups: Black and Hispanic males represented 96.2% of those who were fatally shot and 97.3% of those who experienced nonfatal injury across all four cities.

In the study, the researchers make the point that the risk of firearm death is not the only thing that young men living in violent U.S. zip codes have in common with young men at war.

“Exposure to combat has been associated with stress-inducing hypervigilance and elevated rates of homelessness, alcohol use, mental illness and substance use, which, in turn, are associated with a steep discounting of future rewards,” they write. “Our findings — which show that young men in some of the communities we studied were subject to annual firearm homicide and violent injury rates in excess of 3.0% and as high as 5.8% — lend support to the hypothesis that beyond the deaths and injuries of firearm violence, ongoing exposure to these violent events and their risks are a significant contributor to other health problems and risk behaviors in many U.S. communities.”

Del Pozo added that the health risks are likely even higher for people in cities, because they need to face their “battles” every day over a lifetime, as opposed to military personnel in a tour of duty in Afghanistan, which typically lasted 12 months. The study results, del Pozo said, help illustrate the magnitude of the firearms crisis, a necessary understanding to municipalities seeking to formulate an effective public health response.

“The findings suggest that urban health strategies should prioritize violence reduction and take a trauma-informed approach to addressing the health needs of these communities,” del Pozo said.

Other Brown contributors included Dr. Michael J. Mello, a physician and researcher at the Warren Alpert Medical School and the Injury Prevention Center at Rhode Island Hospital.

The study was supported by the National Institute on Drug Abuse (K01DA056654) and the National Institute of General Medical Sciences (P20GM139664).

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JOURNAL

JAMA Network Open

DOI

10.1001/jamanetworkopen.2022.48132 

METHOD OF RESEARCH

Observational study

SUBJECT OF RESEARCH

People

ARTICLE TITLE

Comparing Risks of Firearm-Related Death and Injury Among Young Adult Males in Selected US Cities With Wartime Service in Iraq and Afghanistan

ARTICLE PUBLICATION DATE

22-Dec-2022

COI STATEMENT

Conflict of Interest Disclosures: None reported.

Rwandan tree carbon stock mapped from above

Breakthrough in climate change mitigation: Researchers at University of Copenhagen have developed accurate nation-wide mapping of the carbon content of trees based on aerial images

Peer-Reviewed Publication

UNIVERSITY OF COPENHAGEN - FACULTY OF SCIENCE

As the first country, Rwanda can now present a national inventory based on a mapping of the carbon stock of each individual tree. Researchers at University of Copenhagen have developed a method to achieve this task in collaboration with Rwandan authorities and researchers.

“Large uncertainties exist for the current forest assessments internationally. By mapping the carbon stock of all individual trees, accuracy is greatly improved. Further, the way different countries make their inventories is not consistent due to different contexts, goals, and available datasets. We hope that this method will establish itself as a standard, thereby enabling better comparisons between countries," says PhD Researcher Maurice Mugabowindekwe, Department of Geosciences and Natural Resources Management (IGN), University of Copenhagen. He is first author on the scientific article presenting the new method. The article has been accepted for publication by Nature Climate Change, one of the most prominent journals for the field.

Maurice Mugabowindekwe being Rwandan himself is helpful during the work, but the choice of Rwanda for development of the method was scientifically based, he emphasizes:

“The country has a rich landscape variation including savannas, woodlands, sub-humid and humid forests, shrubland, agro-ecosystem mosaics, and urban tree ecosystems which are representative of most tropical countries. We wanted to prove the method for all these landscape types. Moreover, Rwanda is a signatory to several international agreements on forest preservation and climate change mitigation. For instance, Rwanda has pledged to restore about 80 % of its surface area by 2030 under the Bonn Challenge. So, it is highly relevant to have a reliable method for monitoring tree carbon.”

 

First method for mapping individual trees

Preservation of natural forests and planting of new trees are recognized as vital routes to limiting climate change. However, large uncertainties regarding the carbon content of the trees have made it hard to assess the efficiency of concrete initiatives. The University of Copenhagen researchers have overcome this problem.

The new method benefits from databases which give the relationship between the extent of the crown and the total carbon content of an individual tree.

“Mapping individual trees and calculating their carbon stocks has traditionally been done in forestry, albeit at a much smaller scale. Basically, what we do equals scaling up these approaches from a very local to a national level," says Researcher Ankit Kariryaa, working 50:50 at IGN and at the Department of Computer Sciences (DIKU). Scientists from these two University of Copenhagen departments have developed the method with IGN as lead, in collaboration with other international scientists.

The new method will support Rwanda in verifying fulfilment of commitments under schemes such as the global forestry climate change mitigation scheme REDD+ or the African Forest Landscape Restoration Initiative, AFR 100.

 

Many trees are found outside forests

Manually mapping the trees of an entire country would be a huge endeavor and excessively costly. Thus, the new method constitutes a breakthrough since no other method would realistically be able to provide the same information at the level of individual trees.

“It is important to take a holistic approach and also include trees which are outside forests,” says Ankit Kariryaa, noting that 72 % of the mapped trees were in farmlands and savannas, and 17 % in plantations.

At the same time, the relatively small proportion of trees which are found in natural forests – 11 % of the total tree count – comprise about 51 % of the national carbon stock of Rwanda. This is possible mainly because natural forests have a very high carbon content per tree volume, thanks to the very low human disturbance secured through national legislation.

“This suggests that conservation, regeneration, and sustainable management of natural forests is more effective at mitigating climate change than plantation,” Maurice Mugabowindekwe comments.

 

Rainforest appears to be “a huge green blanket”

It is paramount that the computer can distinguish the individual trees. This is because the relationship between the extent of the crown and the total carbon content of a tree is very different depending on the size of a tree. One very large tree will have a much higher carbon content than a group of trees with the same joint crown extent. So, if the group was mistaken for one tree, the carbon content would be significantly overestimated. A deep neural network is used for detecting the individual trees.

“Especially for the rainforest, it is highly challenging to determine how many different trees are present in an image. At first glance, the forest just appears to be one huge green blanket. But by using methods from Machine Learning and Computer Vision, our system can also be applied to identify the individual trees in overstory of dense forests,” explains Christian Igel, Professor of Machine Learning at DIKU.

Training the computer on verified samples is at the core of Machine Learning. In the Rwandan study, the computer was trained on a set of some 97,500 manually delineated tree crowns representing the full range of biogeographical conditions across the country.

The study used publicly available aerial and satellite images of Rwanda at 0.25 x 0.25 m resolution. These images were collected in June-August 2008 and 2009 and were provided by the Rwanda Land Management and Use Authority and the University of Rwanda. More than 350 million trees were mapped.

 

Applications beyond Rwanda

Nine researchers from University of Copenhagen visited Rwanda in July 2022 with a dual purpose of field work and presenting results from the first nation-wide mapping to the Rwandan authorities and other stakeholders in the country’s forestry sector.

“The presentation was well received,” reports Maurice Mugabowindekwe. He was immediately tasked by the Rwandan authorities with an updated mapping based on newer aerial images acquired in 2019. This work is now ongoing.

Further, the method has already been tested for a handful of countries besides Rwanda. These include Tanzania, Burundi, Uganda, and Kenya.

“We hope countrywide high-resolution satellite imagery can also be acquired for these and more countries, to enable the application of the same approach. Also, we advocate the inclusion of funding for regular high-resolution imagery along with localized field inventory databases in development packages to enable similar works across the globe," says Maurice Mugabowindekwe, adding:

“The method has yielded good results when applied directly to a new country or region. If the model is further trained on a local set of samples, the accuracy becomes even higher. In my opinion, inventory of the available woody plants, their location, size, and carbon stock, is the first step towards monitoring the impact of landscape restoration efforts as well as conservation. If you are not able to create an accurate and reliable inventory, there is a risk of lacking a framework to track the impact of landscape restoration. This could make the conservation and sustainable management of both forests and other tree-dominated landscapes impossible. Therefore, this is science which is likely to have an impact.”

The scientific article “Nation-wide mapping of tree level carbon stocks in Rwanda” will be published in the prestigious journal Nature Climate Change [date], 2023.

 

Contacts:

Maurice Mugabowindekwe

PhD Researcher

Department of Geosciences and Natural Resources Management (IGN)

University of Copenhagen

mmu@ign.ku.dk

Phone +45 91 85 73 51

 

Ankit Kariryaa

Researcher

Department of Geosciences and Natural Resources Management (IGN)

Department of Computer Science (DIKU)

University of Copenhagen

ak@di.ku.dk

Phone +45 71 31 10 21

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JOURNAL

Nature Climate Change

DOI

10.1038/s41558-022-01544-w 

ARTICLE TITLE

'Nation-wide mapping of tree-level aboveground carbon stocks in Rwanda'

ARTICLE PUBLICATION DATE

22-Dec-2022

Bird diversity increased in severely burned forests of Southern Appalachian mountains

Peer-Reviewed Publication

NORTH CAROLINA STATE UNIVERSITY

A new study found bird diversity increased in North Carolina mountain forest areas severely burned by wildfire in 2016, reinforcing that while wildfire can pose risks to safety and property, it can be beneficial to wildlife. The study results could help forest managers better predict bird responses to wildfire, and manage forests to benefit birds.

“It’s important for us to understand the relationships between animals and wildfire dynamics as the climate changes because predictions show more of these high-severity wildfires across the landscape in the future,” said study co-author Chris Moorman, professor of forestry and environmental resources at North Carolina State University.

Wildfires burned more than 235 square miles of forest in the southern Appalachians in the fall of 2016, following a period of dry conditions and acts of arson. In the study published in the journal Forest Ecology and Management, researchers tracked different levels of burn severity in three forest regions of the Nantahala National Forest in western North Carolina.

Researchers counted the abundance and diversity of birds during the breeding season in those forest regions across five years. They used that data to compare bird communities in patches burned to different degrees of severity.

“Birds and other animals are well known to respond to forest vegetation structure, which is the distribution of plants vertically in a forest,” Moorman said. “When wildfire changes the vegetation structure, it has an impact on the animals that live there.”

In severely burned areas, researchers documented loss of most of the canopy trees, followed by the regrowth of dense shrubs and the re-sprouting of trees. In areas impacted by high severity fire, 44% of the trees died in the first year, and 71% had died by the fifth year. That compared to 7% tree mortality in unburned areas.

“After the high-severity wildfires, everything was brown and black and appeared dead,” Moorman said. “But changes happen fast in the southeastern U.S., and vegetation grew back rapidly.”

When they compared the numbers of birds in areas of different fire severity, they found an increase over time in the number of birds, as well as greater bird diversity, in forest areas where wildfire severity was high. By the fifth year, the total abundance of birds and the species richness, or number of different species present, in areas of high-severity burns were twice as high as that in unburned areas.

While it seems counterintuitive that high-severity patches supported more bird species, researchers said that’s because few species avoided the high-severity patches, but several species were more abundant or occurred only in those patches. More specifically, the indigo bunting, chestnut-sided warbler and eastern towhee – all species that breed in shrubs in areas with few or no canopy trees – occurred almost exclusively in the high-severity burn patches.

“When we do low-intensity prescribed fire under an intact tree canopy, we don’t benefit these bird species that prefer to nest in shrubland,” Moorman said. “In fact, low-severity burns – whether by wildfire or prescribed fire – have little effect on breeding bird species or communities at all.”

One species, the ovenbird, showed a trend of lower abundance in severely burned areas. However, the abundance of seven species was greatest in higher severity areas, and 11 species didn’t differ among the areas.

“I think a lot of the forest birds are not as particular as the literature might have previously suggested, as long as there is some vertical structure – like some live trees or standing snags – and cover,” said the study’s lead author Cathryn Greenberg, a research ecologist with the U.S. Forest Service. “Other studies show that even mature forest birds bring their young into recently disturbed areas, where insects and fruits are abundant, to learn how to forage under thick shrub cover for protection.”

Moorman said it’s likely that high-severity patches were small enough, or incomplete enough on the landscape, that it didn’t impact birds that live in the canopy or otherwise rely on the canopy trees.

“Most of the western NC landscape contains continuously closed canopy forest, so you get this new structural condition associated with canopy removal from high-severity burns that benefit shrubland bird species, but you still have the canopy present nearby for other birds,” Moorman said.

Researchers said the findings have implications for managing forests to promote bird diversity.

“It’s not a practical or logical approach to manage for high-severity wildfires across the landscape because of the obvious risks to safety and the loss of timber revenue,” Moorman said. “However, there are types of timber harvest that could create similar structural conditions to that created by high-severity wildfires.”

The study “Breeding bird abundance and diversity greatest in high-severity wildfire patches in central hardwood forests,” was published in Forest Ecology and Management. Co-authors included Katherine J. Elliott, Katherine Martin, Mark Hopey, and Peter Caldwell. The study was funded by the USDA Forest Service Coweeta Hydrologic Laboratory Southern Research Station; Nantahala Ranger District Southern Region 8; the Water Resources Program Washington Office; the National Science Foundation Long-term Ecological Research program (award #DEB-0823293); the USDA Institute of Food and Agriculture, Agricultural and Food Research Initiative Competitive Program, Agro-Ecosystem Management (award #2017-67019-26544); the Nature Conservancy; and the U.S. Forest Service North Carolina Supervisor’s Office.

-oleniacz-

Note to editors: The abstract follows.

“Breeding bird abundance and diversity greatest in high-severity wildfire patches in eastern hardwood forests”

Authors: Cathryn Greenberg, Christopher E. Moorman, Katherine J. Elliott, Katherine Martin, Mark Hopey and Peter V. Caldwell.

Published online on Dec. 15 in Forest Ecology and Management.

DOI: 10.1016/j.foreco.2022.120715

Abstract: In 2016, mixed-severity wildfires in the southern Appalachians created a gradient of forest structures not typical following prescribed burns, providing a unique opportunity to study temporally dynamic conditions and breeding bird response. We measured forest structure and breeding bird communities across a fire-severity gradient in 3 burned and 3 unburned watersheds for 5 years (Y1-Y5). We categorized plots as unburned (NB), low- (L), moderate- (M), or high-severity (H) using a composite fire-severity index. Tree mortality increased with fire-severity category (FSC) and over time; by Y5, 7% of trees in NB, 11% in L, 38% in M, and 71% in H had died. Shrub recovery was rapid and most pronounced in H, exceeding other FSCs (70% vs 21%-44%) by Y5. Total bird abundance, species richness, and diversity increased over time in H (by Y3) and M (by Y4); by Y5, these metrics were highest in H and twice as high in H as in NB. Low-severity wildfires had no detectable effects on birds. Abundance of 7 species was greatest in higher-severity FSCs; 11 species did not differ among FSC, although ovenbirds (Seiurus aurocapilla) indicated a trend of lower abundance in H. No species was limited to NB, L, or M, whereas disturbance-dependent indigo bunting (Passerina cyanea), chestnut-sided warbler (Setophaga pensylvanica), and eastern towhee (Pipilo erythrophthalmus) were primarily associated with H. Increased richness and diversity were associated with heavy tree mortality and subsequent shrub recovery in H, accompanied by an influx of disturbance-dependent species and positive or neutral responses by most other species. Results highlight the interrelated roles of fire severity and time in driving forest structure and breeding bird response. Breeding birds responded to high-severity burns similarly to silvicultural treatments with heavy canopy reduction documented in other studies, offering possible alternatives when managing for breeding bird diversity in hardwood forests.

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JOURNAL

Forest Ecology and Management

DOI

10.1016/j.foreco.2022.120715 

SUBJECT OF RESEARCH

Animals

ARTICLE TITLE

Breeding bird abundance and species diversity greatest in high-severity wildfire patches in central hardwood forests