It’s possible that I shall make an ass of myself. But in that case one can always get out of it with a little dialectic. I have, of course, so worded my proposition as to be right either way (K.Marx, Letter to F.Engels on the Indian Mutiny)
Wednesday, June 07, 2023
USU professor’s smart antenna will revolutionize telecommunications industry
IMAGE: BEDRI CETINER, A PROFESSOR OF ELECTRICAL ENGINEERING, PATENTED A NEW ANTENNA CALLED A MULTIFUNCTIONAL RECONFIGURABLE ANTENNA THAT CAN ADAPT TO LOCATE A SIGNAL’S DIRECTION AND FREQUENCY.view more
CREDIT: MATT JENSEN/UTAH STATE UNIVERISTY
A new antenna technology developed at Utah State University will soon be tested by a national wireless provider for a pilot study that could revolutionize the telecommunications industry.
Bedri Cetiner, a professor of electrical engineering, patented a new antenna called a multifunctional reconfigurable antenna that can adapt to locate a signal’s direction and frequency.
For more than a century, conventional antenna equipment was only capable of broadcasting and receiving signals in all directions. Cetiner’s design is more efficient because it sends and receives signals in a particular direction, shape and frequency, which saves energy and better utilizes the electromagnetic spectrum. Improved antenna designs are critical to keep up with the increasing demands users expect from their mobile devices.
“Moving from 4G to 5G is not simply a matter of retrofitting existing technology,” said Cetiner. “5G is an entirely new paradigm.”
Massachusetts based Verana Networks, licensee of Cetiner’s patented antenna, announced plans earlier this year that Verizon will trial its 5G base station equipped with the antenna module in large metro areas.
“5G allows for higher frequency and more bandwidth, which translates to more data and more users on a network,” said Cetiner. “We are no longer in the Marconi era, but one of directive and steerable communication.”
In 2014, Cetiner launched i5 Technologies, a USU spinoff company focused on innovative telecommunications equipment. The licensing deal is a major success for Cetiner and his company which employs three of his former students.
“At i5 we specialize in innovation, and we are always learning,” he added. “Innovation allows me as a teacher to educate my students with the skills they need to work as the next generation of engineers. My research gives me the chance to bring my experience into the classroom. It’s all connected.”
Cetiner says his antenna technology helps reduce delay in sending and receiving data and creates new opportunities with applications in education, medicine and more.
“Imagine a surgeon using a robot to perform surgery miles away; or teaching a classroom of students across the globe,” he said. “You don’t want delays when you’re doing that kind of work. With improved antenna design and higher data transfer rates, we can do things we never thought possible before.”
cetiner 2
UTAH STATE UNIVERSITY
Massachusetts based Verana Networks, licensee of Cetiner’s patented antenna, announced plans earlier this year that Verizon will trial its 5G base station equipped with the antenna module in large metro areas.
CREDIT
Matthew Jensen/Utah State University
Significant citizen participation: Study examines the fate of plastic particles
Research project "Macroplastics in the Southern North Sea" presents its results
IMAGE: NEARLY A DOZEN OF THE BARREL-SHAPED DRIFTERS FLOAT AS A LOOSE GROUP IN THE CALM SEAWATER. USING ADVANCED SATELLITE-TRACKED SURFACE DRIFTERS, THE RESEARCH TEAM WAS ABLE TO INVESTIGATE THE DISTRIBUTION PATHWAYS OF THE PLASTIC DEBRIS.view more
CREDIT: UNIVERSITY OF OLDENBURG/JENS MEYERJÜRGENS
Where do large plastic items such as shopping bags and disposable bottles which end up in the German Bight come from, and how do they get there? This was the key question addressed by a multidisciplinary team of the University of Oldenburg, Germany. In the research project "Macroplastics in the Southern North Sea – Sources, Sinks and Abatement Strategies", the team conducted a comprehensive study to gain a better understanding of the problem and examine strategies for dealing with it. The researchers also relied on the participation of local citizens to help track the distribution pathways of the plastic debris. An overview of the results has now been published in the journal Frontiers in Marine Science. Two key findings are that there are no areas in the North Sea or the Skagerrak where plastic waste accumulates permanently and that a large proportion of the particles are quickly washed ashore.
Local citizen scientists played a vital part
The team, which was made up of 15 scientists from the fields of marine science, geography and environmental planning began the project in 2016. The researchers employed an interdisciplinary approach to investigate how plastic items with a diameter of more than five millimetres are dispersed in the North Sea, the shallow, northeastern arm of the Atlantic Ocean. They conducted field experiments and calculated the pathways of virtual litter particles using numerical models. The team also recorded the plastic waste deposited on coastlines, in estuaries and on the seabed and deployed satellite-tracked surface drifters which floated on the sea surface, mimicking plastic debris. In addition, approximately 63,000 biodegradable wooden plates of around 8 by 10 centimetres in size were released from off-shore locations and land-based sites along the coast. Local citizens who came across beached drifters were encouraged to report their find on a dedicated website. An analysis of the various stakeholders including the tourism sector, fisheries, industry and ports was also conducted as part of the study.
By combining their observations and model calculations the team obtained an overview of both the spatial distribution of the litter sources and the role played by different sectors such as tourism and industry. The results confirm that fisheries and municipal solid waste are the main sources of the litter, as previous studies had already shown. A significant portion of the debris comes from the larger municipalities along the North Sea coastline and at the mouths of the Elbe, Weser and Ems rivers. Most of the wooden plates released in rivers was washed ashore while still in the waterways – just under half in the Elbe and almost 90 percent in the Ems. Moreover, the litter that washes up on the coast mainly comes from nearby sources. In the coastal areas of the North Sea the main sources of litter were Germany and the Netherlands, whereas in the open sea most of the plastic particles came from the UK, France and the Netherlands.
The analyses of the dispersal pathways showed that two thirds of the wooden plates released from coastal and riverine locations were washed ashore again within 25 kilometres of the release site. Drifters released off-shore, however, travelled longer distances, with 30 percent floating across more than 250 kilometres before being beached. Members of the public reported finding more than 27,000 drifters via the website – accounting for around 43 percent of those released. "This result underlines the significant role that citizen science can play in generating large data sets," the principal investigator Professor Dr Jörg-Olaf Wolff stresses.
No permanent garbage patches found
Another key finding was that litter particles can remain trapped for extended periods at oceanographic fronts. "These are zones where, for example, freshwater from a river meets salty seawater. Things can often get very turbulent there," explains oceanographer Dr Jens Meyerjürgens from the University of Oldenburg's Institute for Chemistry and Biology of the Marine Environment (ICBM). Together with Dr Marcel Ricker from the Helmholtz-Zentrum Hereon in Geesthacht, he was the lead author of the recently published study. The data from the advanced satellite-tracked drifters showed that the devices often got stuck at these fronts for several days or even weeks, until the wind gained enough force to dislodge them. This meant that more plastic particles were found on the seabed below these fronts than elsewhere. However, the researchers did not detect any permanent garbage patches in the North Sea like those that exist in the Pacific or the Atlantic.
The scientists also examined various strategies for reducing plastic litter inputs. According to the study the most promising step would be for municipalities to ban the use of disposable plastics such as plastic cups and cutlery at large events. Stricter storage regulations at ports would also be a sensible measure since port operations account for around eight percent of the plastic waste in the North Sea. The researchers also see campaigns to raise awareness of the problem as important and emphasize that these efforts should focus on the fishing sector as a major source of marine litter.
Study creates „inceased awareness of the problem”
Overall, the team is happy with the results of the study: "We received a lot of positive feedback on the wooden plates and surface drifters and observed an increased awareness of the problem among the population," says Dr Thomas Badewien, a scientist at the ICBM and one of the lead researchers in the project. These are positive developments that give hope for the future, he added.
The interdisciplinary project team was made up of researchers from the ICBM and the Institute for Biology and Environmental Sciences (IBU) at the University of Oldenburg. The Helmholtz-Zentrum Hereon was among the scientific partners. The project leader was Oldenburg oceanographer Prof. Dr. Jörg-Olaf Wolff. The project received a total of 1.4 million euros in funding over four years from the Lower Saxony Ministry of Science and Culture.
Around 27,000 of 63,000 released wooden plates were found – mostly by beach walkers – and reported on a dedicated website.
ST. LOUIS, MO, June 6, 2023 – In collaboration with researchers at Purdue and Hamline Universities, Ivan Baxter, PhD, member, at the Donald Danforth Plant Science Center will lead a four-year, $2.5 million project to expand scientific understanding of the genetic processes that allow plants to absorb and make use of elements. This information could help scientists understand what plants need to thrive and thus improve the nutrition value of food crops, strengthen plants’ ability to grow on marginal lands, or reduce the amount of fertilizer required for successful crop yields.
Plants’ ability to obtain and utilize elements is an essential function of life. It affects how and where they are able to grow as well as how nourishing they are for those who consume them. Little is currently known about the genes that facilitate that process. Baxter’s project sets out to change that.
The proposal tests the hypothesis that the genes responsible for elemental acquisition can be detected by using their evolutionary conservation. The research will use datasets from diverse populations of the model plant Arabidopsis and crop plants maize, sorghum, soybean, and rice to identify regions of the genome that are responsible for elemental accumulation. By looking for genes that are found within those regions in all of the species, the researchers hope to find novel genes controlling elemental uptake in an unbiased way. If successful, this approach is extendable to other traits and any species that can be sequenced.
“We only know a small number of the genes that drive elemental accumulation,” Baxter said. “We need unbiased ways of identifying the other genes so that we can understand how plants adapt to the environments in which they grow. Knowing what genes are involved could enable improved nutrient content of food crops and reduce the need for fertilizer in agriculture.”
This research will all be performed in a way that cultivates growth in the scientific community. The bioinformatics and genetics research will be integrated in undergraduate classrooms at Hamline University. The team will conduct after-school activities for middle school students at the Jackie Joyner-Kersee Food, Agriculture and Nutrition Innovation Center. Baxter will continue to produce The Taproot, a podcast that tries to demystify science and scientific culture for trainees and their research community.
The project is funded by a grant from the National Science Foundation.
About the Donald Danforth Plant Science Center Founded in 1998, the Donald Danforth Plant Science Center is a not-for-profit research institute with a mission to improve the human condition through plant science. Research, education, and outreach aim to have an impact at the nexus of food security and the environment and position the St. Louis region as a world center for plant science. The Center’s work is funded through competitive grants from many sources, including the National Science Foundation, National Institutes of Health, U.S. Department of Energy, U.S. Agency for International Development, and the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation, and through the generosity of individual, corporate, and foundation donors. Follow us on Twitter at @DanforthCenter.
For more information contact: Karla Roeber, Vice President, Public and Government Affairs, kroeber@danforthcenter.org
Brazilian algorithm aims to project future of Amazon Rainforest and predict changes in carbon capture
The computer program was developed at the State University of Campinas to include more vegetation diversity in the analysis of climate change impacts.
FUNDAÇÃO DE AMPARO À PESQUISA DO ESTADO DE SÃO PAULO
IMAGE: THE COMPUTER PROGRAM WAS DEVELOPED AT THE STATE UNIVERSITY OF CAMPINAS TO INCLUDE MORE VEGETATION DIVERSITY IN THE ANALYSIS OF CLIMATE CHANGE IMPACTSview more
CREDIT: TIAGO LATESTA/PROJETO BRASIL DAS ÁGUAS
A group of researchers at the State University of Campinas (UNICAMP), in São Paulo state, Brazil, has developed an algorithm that projects the future of vegetation in the Amazon, presenting scenarios for transformation of the forest driven by climate change.
One of the results shows that a drier climate in the region, with a 50% drop in precipitation, could increase diversity but lower the level of carbon storage. Storage of carbon dioxide (CO2) in roots would increase, but absorption of CO2 in leaves, stems and trunks, which have more storage capacity, would decrease. Taking different situations into account, the scientists calculate that carbon absorption could drop between 57.48% and 57.75% compared with regular climate conditions.
The algorithm, which is the first of its kind designed exclusively for Brazil, is called CAETÊ, which means “virgin forest” in Tupi-Guarani and is an acronym of CArbon and Ecosystem functional Trait Evaluation model. Its first results are described in an article published in the journal Ecological Modelling.
CAETÊ simulates natural phenomena using mathematical equations fed with environmental data such as rainfall, solar radiation and CO2 levels. It predicts photosynthesis rates under specific conditions, for example, or says which plant parts will store more carbon (roots, leaves, stems or trunks), calculating carbon storage capacity in a given area and the point at which native vegetation can no longer recover.
“The main finding of the study was that including diversity in vegetation models improves their ability to project ecosystem responses to climate change and enhances their credibility. A second point, which was unexpected, was that when a 50% drop in precipitation was applied, plant strategy diversity increased but carbon removal from the atmosphere decreased. This can have a different impact on climate change mitigation. In this case, the increase in diversity isn’t necessarily a good thing,” said Bianca Fazio Rius, first author of the article and a PhD candidate at UNICAMP’s Institute of Biology (IB).
Rius is supported by FAPESP, which also funded the study via a scholarship awarded to João Paulo Darela Filho, and via AmazonFACE, a research program involving field experiments to find out how the rise in atmospheric carbon dioxide affects the Amazon Rainforest, especially its biodiversity and ecosystem services. FACE stands for Free-Air Carbon dioxide Enrichment (more at: amazonface.unicamp.br/#).
“CAETÊ accurately represents the huge biological diversity of the world’s largest tropical forest, while at the same time stimulating field data collection, which is still necessary for this kind of model,” Lapola told Agência FAPESP.
Lapola was one of the Brazilians who, with 34 other scientists affiliated with institutions here and abroad, signed an article featured on the cover of Science early this year, showing that 38% of the Amazon’s current area suffers degradation due to fire, illegal logging, edge effects (fragmentation due to changes in habitats adjacent to deforested areas) and extreme drought. As a result, carbon emissions deriving from gradual loss of vegetation are equivalent to or even greater than emissions due to deforestation.
Pros and cons
Vegetation models are widely used to analyze the carbon balance in the Amazon under projected future climate conditions. Previous research showed that the Amazon’s average temperature has risen 1 °C in the last 40 years and that rainfall has decreased 36% in some areas. CO2 storage capacity has also fallen owing to deforestation, vegetation degradation and global warming.
Moreover, according to a report published on May 17 by the World Meteorological Organization (WMO), global temperatures are likely to surge to record levels in the next five years because of greenhouse gas emissions and El Niño, and rainfall is set to decrease in the Amazon.
However, most existing algorithms are based on a small number of plant functional types (PFTs), which are adopted by modelers to represent broad groupings of plant species that share similar characteristics and ecosystem functions. As a result, diversity is underrepresented and the combination of traits found in model ecosystems is far simpler than warranted by the complexity of the world’s largest tropical forest, leading to scenarios that are limited or overestimate the impact of environmental change. They include dynamic global vegetation models (DGVMs), which simulate changes in vegetation and the associated biogeochemical and hydrological cycles in response to climate change (e.g. Jena Diversity, or JeDi). If these are the cons, the pros include not depending on logistics and major investments, as do large-scale field experiments.
Tipping point
According to Rius, the study did not focus on species. “We used the idea that every individual, even individuals in the same species, can be considered a type of strategy for dealing with the environment. Computationally created strategies don’t necessarily belong to any particular species,” she said.
For a plant or any living being, she explained, a strategy represents a set of traits that determine how it responds to or affects the environment. A plant that adapts root depth in order to access water depending on the height of the water table could be a good example. Strategies profoundly influence the ability to survive and reproduce, and they are associated with ecosystem services such as carbon storage or production of moisture for precipitation.
“As the climate becomes drier, we’re seeing a change in types of life strategy in the Amazon. Strategies increasingly resemble those of the Cerrado [Brazil’s savanna-like biome]. It’s as if the Cerrado had begun to penetrate into the forest. Other researchers have noted this as well,” Rius said.
The study using CAETÊ provided more evidence that the inclusion of variability and diversity can have implications for modeling the Amazon’s tipping point, when natural vegetation will no longer be able to recover, the scientists explained. One of the first articles to address this topic was signed by Thomas Lovejoy (1941-2021), the biologist who coined the term “biological diversity”, and Carlos Nobre, Co-Chair of the Science Panel for the Amazon. The paper highlighted the importance of the forest’s water cycle not just for Brazil but for all of South America and other regions.
Through evapotranspiration, the forest guarantees throughout the year the moisture that contributes, for example, to rainfall in parts of the La Plata River basin, especially in southern Paraguay, South Brazil, Uruguay and eastern Argentina.
More diversity
Development of CAETÊ began in 2015. It was based on the potential vegetation model CPTEC-PVM2 developed by Lapola and Nobre, with Marcos D. Oyama.
“Most vegetation models represent the Amazon with two or three types of strategy. We set out to include more diversity. We’ll continue to develop our model because good models are never finished,” Rius said.
In this direction, Bárbara Cardeli, a PhD candidate at IB-UNICAMP, joined the group and is working on the model to include a module that will calculate ecosystem services.
“This tool will be easy to use and will show whether specific ecosystem services are assured via processes such as how plant strategies allocate carbon. We want to include numerical values for the provision of these services,” Cardeli said.
The researchers envisage CAETÊ as supplying data-based input for decision-making and for the formulation of public policy for the carbon market. At the 2021 UN Climate Change Conference (COP26), Brazil announced a commitment to halve its carbon emissions from the 2005 level by 2030 and achieve carbon neutrality by 2050.
About São Paulo Research Foundation (FAPESP)
The São Paulo Research Foundation (FAPESP) is a public institution with the mission of supporting scientific research in all fields of knowledge by awarding scholarships, fellowships and grants to investigators linked with higher education and research institutions in the State of São Paulo, Brazil. FAPESP is aware that the very best research can only be done by working with the best researchers internationally. Therefore, it has established partnerships with funding agencies, higher education, private companies, and research organizations in other countries known for the quality of their research and has been encouraging scientists funded by its grants to further develop their international collaboration. You can learn more about FAPESP at www.fapesp.br/en and visit FAPESP news agency at www.agencia.fapesp.br/en to keep updated with the latest scientific breakthroughs FAPESP helps achieve through its many programs, awards and research centers. You may also subscribe to FAPESP news agency at http://agencia.fapesp.br/subscribe.
BOSTON—Currently there are no contraceptives capable of producing permanent sterilization in companion animals. Spaying, the surgical removal of the ovaries and uterus, is the most widely used strategy to control unwanted reproduction in female cats.
For the first time, researchers at Massachusetts General Hospital (MGH), a founding member of Mass General Brigham (MGB), and their collaborators have demonstrated that a single dose of anti-Müllerian hormone (AMH) gene therapy can induce long-term contraception in the domestic cat, potentially providing a safe and effective alternative to surgical spaying. The research is published in the latest issue of Nature Communications.
During previous research to evaluate AMH (also known as Müllerian inhibiting substance, or MIS) as a method to protect ovarian reserve in women undergoing chemotherapy, senior author David Pépin, PhD, Associate Director of the Pediatric Surgical Research Laboratories at Massachusetts General Hospital, and an Associate Professor at Harvard Medical School discovered that raising the level of AMH beyond a certain threshold suppressed the growth of ovarian follicles, effectively preventing ovulation and conception.
“AMH is a naturally occurring non-steroidal hormone produced by the ovaries in human females and other mammals, and in the testes in males.” says Patricia K. Donahoe, MD, a co-author of this study and the Director of Pediatric Surgical Research Laboratories and Chief Emerita of Pediatric Surgical Services at Massachusetts General Hospital.
In 2017, Pépin and his collaborators were the first to publish the contraceptive potential of AMH in rodents.
The team then turned their attention to felines. To raise AMH levels in female domestic cats, the researchers created an adeno-associated viral (AAV) gene therapy vector with a slightly altered version of the feline AMH gene. Human therapies using similar AAV vectors to deliver various therapeutic genes have proven to be safe and effective and have been approved by the FDA.
“A single injection of the gene therapy vector causes the cat’s muscles to produce AMH, which is normally only produced in the ovaries, and raises the overall level of AMH about 100 times higher than normal,” says Pépin.
The researchers treated six female cats with the gene therapy at two different doses, and three cats served as controls. A male cat was brought into the female colony for two four-month-long mating trials. The researchers followed the female cats for more than two years, assessing the effect of the treatment on reproductive hormones, ovarian cycles, and fertility.
All the control cats produced kittens, but none of the cats treated with the gene therapy got pregnant. Suppressing ovarian follicle development and ovulation did not affect important hormones such as estrogen. There were no adverse effects observed in any of the treated female cats, demonstrating that at the doses tested, the gene therapy was safe and well tolerated.
“The treatment maintained high AMH levels for over two years, and we’re confident that those contraceptive levels will be sustained in the animals for much longer,” says veterinarian Philippe Godin, DVM, PhD, co-author and research fellow at MGH. Additional studies in a larger number of cats are needed to confirm these promising findings, he adds.
The collaborative research team, which includes investigators from MGH, the Center for Conservation and Research of Endangered Wildlife at the Cincinnati Zoo and Botanical Garden, and at the Horae Gene Therapy Center at the University of Massachusetts Medical School, received funding from The Michelson Found Animals Foundation, which is offering a $25-million prize to scientists to develop a single-treatment nonsurgical sterilization method for cats and dogs. The foundation also provides grant funding to support research that could lead to a practical solution that meets all the prize criteria.
“A non-surgical sterilant for community and companion animals is long overdue and will transform animal welfare,” said Gary K. Michelson, MD, founder and co-chair of Michelson Philanthropies and the Michelson Found Animals Foundation. “This breakthrough discovery is a major milestone in our quest to provide pet owners with an alternative to surgical spay and neuter.”
“This technology may be a little ahead of its time,” acknowledges Pépin, noting that the infrastructure needed to produce enough doses to sterilize millions of cats via gene therapy does not yet exist. “Our goal is to show that safe and effective permanent contraception in companion animals can be achieved using gene therapy. And we hope that as the manufacturing capability of producing viral vectors increases with the rise of gene therapy in humans, delivering this contraceptive in the field to control unowned outdoor cat populations will become feasible.”
Co-authors include Lindsey M. Vansandt, Marie-Charlotte Meinsohn, Guangping Gao, Dan Wang, and William F. Swanson.
About the Massachusetts General Hospital
Massachusetts General Hospital, founded in 1811, is the original and largest teaching hospital of Harvard Medical School. The Mass General Research Institute conducts the largest hospital-based research program in the nation, with annual research operations of more than $1 billion and comprises more than 9,500 researchers working across more than 30 institutes, centers and departments. In July 2022, Mass General was named #8 in the U.S. News & World Report list of "America’s Best Hospitals." MGH is a founding member of the Mass General Brigham healthcare system.
IMAGE: METALLIC SOLID-STATE REFRIGERANT TUBES USED FOR ELASTOCALORIC COOLING, AN ENVIRONMENTALLY FRIENDLY REFRIGERATION TECHNOLOGY.view more
CREDIT: JIAQI DAI/MARYLAND ENGINEERING
College Park, Md. — Air conditioning, refrigeration, and other cooling technologies account for more than 20 percent of today’s global energy consumption, while the refrigerants they use have a global warming potential thousands of times greater than carbon dioxide. In a recent study in the journal Science, a team led by Maryland Engineering Professors Ichiro Takeuchi, Reinhard Radermacher, and Yunho Hwang introduced a high-performance elastocaloric cooling system that could represent the next generation of cooling devices.
Takeuchi calls it “a completely different, completely green, environmentally friendly cooling technology, which bypasses chemical refrigerants to essentially rely on pushing and pulling pieces of metal to create cooling.” Caloric materials—including magnetocaloric, electrocaloric, and elastocaloric materials—can undergo phase transition and release, and absorb heat upon application of various fields and mechanical forces. The key feature is the compression and release of fatigue-resistant nickel-titanium (NiTi) tubes configured in a versatile, multimode heat exchange architecture.
“More than a decade ago, we were just playing with a NiTi wire,” Takeuchi said. “By stretching it, you could get a substantial cooling effect one could feel by hand. That was when we started thinking about applying the concept to a cooling device.” The lab’s subsequent work has been funded by the U.S. Department of Energy for more than a decade.
The team says it’s possible to improve the performance of its system enough to make the technology commercially viable within several years. A current prototype can produce 200 watts of cooling capacity, enough to power a compact wine fridge, with plans to expand to window units, whole-house cooling systems, and commercial HVACs eventually.
The A. James Clark School of Engineering at the University of Maryland serves as the catalyst for high-quality research, innovation, and learning, delivering on a promise that all graduates will leave ready to impact the Grand Challenges of the 21st century. The Clark School is dedicated to leading and transforming the engineering discipline and profession, to accelerating entrepreneurship, and to transforming research and learning activities into new innovations that benefit millions.
LAWRENCE — Over the past few decades, herbaria and museums worldwide have created digital data records documenting millions of specimens in their holdings. The benefits of digitizing the contents of natural history museums and research institutions flow to the public and researchers worldwide.
Now, through a group of related grants from the National Science Foundation, researchers are systemically digitizing more than a million specimens of plants from across tropical Africa held at 20 institutions throughout the United States. The tropical African plant specimens — documenting some of the richest elements of biodiversity in the world — will be digitally imaged, while associated data are captured and data records are georeferenced.
Some of the job of assembling and performing quality control on the related datasets is taking place at the University of Kansas Biodiversity Institute, with $1 million of National Science Foundation funds supporting data cleaning and improvement work led by Town Peterson, University Distinguished Professor of Ecology & Evolutionary Biology and senior curator with the KU Natural History Museum and Biodiversity Institute. Peterson also directs the overall projects, which includes the U.S. herbaria and four African partner institutions.
“Herbaria tend to have large-scale collections, so this is a big initiative,” Peterson said. “The herbarium community in the U.S. has made really good progress on U.S. data thanks to some big initiatives at NSF, so now you can access a lot of the herbarium data on U.S. plants online easily. Still, there's a lot of herbarium specimens from other parts of the world that nobody's gotten to yet. Tropical Africa is one of those places.”
Building on previous digitization collaborations with Alex Asase, professor at the University of Ghana, Peterson was involved in assembling the network of American herbaria to apply for the new NSF funds. Previously, Peterson and Asase partnered to organize digitization of more than 250,000 herbarium records for specimens from West Africa in work funded by the JRS Biodiversity Foundation. This new grant aims to move much of the specimen digitization enterprise to a new model, in which the people wanting and needing to use the data are major factors in capturing, improving and sharing the data.
“Alex is in charge of one of the larger herbaria in in West Africa,” Peterson said. “So, he digitized those data and got them online for the scientific community. Alex’s work has helped other herbaria in Benin, Togo, Liberia, Nigeria and Cameroon. But the biggest collections are held in herbaria and museums in Europe… you can't really have any control over collections priorities in those institutions. So how do you speed that up? Alex asked, ‘What if we were to find a solution where the people who need the data promote and essentially make the capture of the data happen?’”
The new NSF-funded project is larger in scope, involving essentially all U.S. institutions with important holdings from the region. Among the partners are the University of California-Berkeley, California Botanic Garden (formerly Rancho Santa Ana Botanic Garden), Missouri Botanical Garden, Harvard University and the New York Botanical Garden.
“The idea is that NSF funds U.S. herbaria to scan and capture data from all of their plant specimens from tropical Africa,” Peterson said. “The data are then improved via data-quality checking here at the University of Kansas and georeferenced by African partner teams located in Ghana, Rwanda, Malawi and Gabon. That is, a major part of the process of making these data come alive will be done by African scientists and students who are eager to access such a rich store of information.”
Peterson, an ornithologist by training, also is a leader in working with data generated by digitization projects. The KU Biodiversity Institute was an early pioneer in the field. In this capacity, his team at KU (including KU graduate students) will work with the huge datasets that the herbaria and African georeferencing teams will generate.
“The data come back here to KU, and my group will do a lot of the quality control,” Peterson said. “We’ll pick out possible problems. Then this big data pool — about 1.3 million new data records for tropical Africa — will be at the disposition of not just the network of herbaria, but the whole world community. The data will be there for scientific analyses to be done.”
