World can now breathe easier

Further air pollution mitigation still needed, say WashU researchers who quantified changes from 1998-2019

Peer-Reviewed Publication

WASHINGTON UNIVERSITY IN ST. LOUIS

 

IMAGE: RANDALL MARTIN AND CHI LI FOUND A GENERAL REVERSAL OF TRENDS IN PM2.5 AIR POLLUTION AROUND THE WORLD. THESE MAPS SHOW TRENDS IN POPULATION-WEIGHTED PM2.5 FOR 204 TERRITORIES FROM 1998-2011 AND 2011-2019. view more 

CREDIT: MARTIN LAB, WASHINGTON UNIVERSITY IN ST. LOUIS

Ambient fine particulate matter (PM2.5) is the world’s leading environmental health risk factor. At only 2.5 micrometers or smaller, these particles are small enough to be inhaled and cause respiratory problems, such as asthma and bronchitis, and cardiovascular issues, including heart attacks and high blood pressure. For children, PM2.5 can cause lifelong developmental issues, and for the general population, PM2.5 is associated with premature death.

To ameliorate these wide-ranging negative impacts resulting from exposure to PM2.5, which is produced largely through traditional energy sources such as burning fossil fuels or wood, several countries have taken steps to reduce exposure to PM2.5. But how effective have these mitigation efforts been, and what region or regions are most responsible for driving global PM2.5 reduction?

Researchers working with Randall Martin, the Raymond R. Tucker Distinguished Professor in the McKelvey School of Engineering at Washington University in St. Louis, examined PM2.5 data from 1998-2019 to find out.

“The importance of PM2.5 as a leading risk factor for human health motivates assessment of its long-term changes,” Martin said. “We sought to analyze our satellite-derived PM2.5 estimates for insight into global and regional changes in PM2.5 exposure and its health effects.”

The team’s analysis, published Sept. 2 in Nature Communications, showed that global, population-weighted PM2.5 exposure, related to both pollution levels and population size, increased from 1998 to a peak in 2011, then decreased steadily from 2011 to 2019, largely driven by exposure reduction in China and slower growth in other regions.

“Before this work, there was a knowledge gap regarding quantitative local/regional contributions to global population exposure to PM2.5 and its changes,” said Chi Li, first author on the study and a staff scientist in Martin’s research group. “We developed a new regional decomposition approach that jointly considered pollution level and population size, and from that we depicted the first-ever time series of regional contributions to global PM2.5 air pollution.”

Li found that many regions exhibited decreasing exposure since 2011, including continuous reductions in North America and western Europe. He described recent emerging decreases in China as particularly striking.

“Rigorous air quality management in China, which has been most pronounced since 2013, turned out to be the biggest contributor to this global reversal,” Li said. “More than 90% of the reduction of global mean exposure from 2011 to 2019 is from China, according to our regional attribution. This result was astonishing when it was derived, but it could be explained well by the rapid reduction of PM2.5 concentrations due to China’s mitigation efforts, which benefit nearly one-fifth of the global population.”

Benefits from PM2.5 exposure reduction include 1.1 million fewer premature deaths in China alone between 2011 and 2019, as well as improved health more generally. Future interventions to reduce PM2.5 exposure will have even greater impacts for an aging and growing global population, Li said.

“By combining PM2.5 data with health data and exposure-response models, we also revealed that, despite the recent sustained reduction of global PM2.5 pollution, population aging and growth are now the main challenges in alleviating PM2.5 health impacts,” Li said. “Reducing the same amount of PM2.5 now will have stronger health benefits than it would have 20 years ago, a globally prevalent phenomenon highlighted in our study.”

The team calculated that in 2019, there were still millions of premature deaths worldwide that could be attributed to PM2.5, highlighting the urgent need for continued reduction to PM2.5 exposure. Careful monitoring, especially in regions that are currently poorly monitored but highly populated, including South Asia and the Middle East, will be critical to ongoing improvements in air quality and to evaluate the effectiveness of mitigation efforts, Martin said.

“There is need to continue to sustain and develop global monitoring capabilities for PM2.5 both from satellite, but also from ground-based measurements,” Martin said. “The successes in PM2.5 reductions serve to demonstrate the benefits of PM2.5 mitigation efforts, and to motivate further mitigation.”

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Li C, van Donkelaar V, Hammer MS, McDuffie EE, Burnett RT, Spadaro JV, Chatterjee D, Cohen AJ, Apte JS, Southerland VA, Anenberg SC, Brauer M, Martin RV. Reversal of trends in global fine particulate matter air pollution. Nature Communications, Sept. 2, 2023. DOI: https://doi.org/10.1038/s41467-023-41086-z

This work was supported by NASA (80NSSC21K0508, 80NSSC22K0200, and 80NSSC21K0511). All data and codes used for analyses and visualizations in this work are available at 10.5281/zenodo.7618789 along with detailed supporting documentation.

Originally published on the McKelvey School of Engineering website.

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JOURNAL

Nature Communications

DOI

10.1038/s41467-023-41086-z 

ARTICLE TITLE

Reversal of trends in global fine particulate matter air pollution

 BOURGEOIS ECONOMIST

Rotman School economist elected as a fellow of the Royal Society of Canada

Grant and Award Announcement

UNIVERSITY OF TORONTO, ROTMAN SCHOOL OF MANAGEMENT

 

IMAGE: A RENOWNED TRADE ECONOMIST AT THE UNIVERSITY OF TORONTO’S ROTMAN SCHOOL OF MANAGEMENT HAS BEEN ELECTED A FELLOW OF THE ROYAL SOCIETY OF CANADA (RSC) FOR HIS RESEARCH ON INTERNATIONAL TRADE, INNOVATION, INEQUALITY, AND ARTIFICIAL INTELLIGENCE. view more 

CREDIT: ROTMAN SCHOOL

Toronto – A renowned trade economist at the University of Toronto’s Rotman School of Management has been elected a fellow of the Royal Society of Canada (RSC) for his research on international trade, innovation, inequality, and artificial intelligence.

Prof. Daniel Trefler is one of the new fellows in the Class of 2023 for the Academies of Arts and Humanities, Social Sciences, and Science who have been elected by their peers for their outstanding scholarly, scientific, or artistic achievement. Recognition by the RSC is the highest honour an individual can achieve in the Arts, Social Sciences and Sciences in Canada. The class will be inducted at a ceremony in November.

“It is delightful to see Professor Trefler’s immense contributions to his field receive this highest level of recognition. Dan is not only a remarkable academic but is also a wonderful colleague with numerous contributions to the Rotman School and the entire University including the mentoring of countless PhD students as well as junior faculty,” says Dean Susan Christoffersen of the Rotman School, who also holds the William A. Downe BMO Chair in Finance.

Prof. Trefler holds the J. Douglas and Ruth Canada Research Chair in Competitiveness and Prosperity at the Rotman School. His research looks notably at the effects of shifting global value chains, the consequences of China’s rise, and the potential impacts of digitalization on trade in financial and other services. His has been instrumental in the design and pursuit of trade agreements that promote productivity, innovation and investment while minimizing the harmful effects on workers and the most disadvantaged. As an advisor to Global Affairs Canada, he helped inform the department's work on the Canada-EU trade agreement and consulted on the NAFTA renegotiations. He previously received the Killam Prize for his exceptional career achievement in the field of social sciences in 2016, his first Bank of Canada Fellowship Award in the same year, which was renewed in 2021, a Canada Research Chair, and all three major awards from the Canadian Economics Association.

Founded in 1882, the Royal Society of Canada (RSC) comprises the Academies of Arts, Humanities and Sciences, and The College of New Scholars, Artists and Scientists. The RSC recognizes excellence, advises the government and the larger society, and promotes a culture of knowledge and innovation in Canada and with other national academies around the world.

The Rotman School of Management is part of the University of Toronto, a global centre of research and teaching excellence at the heart of Canada’s commercial capital. Rotman is a catalyst for transformative learning, insights and public engagement, bringing together diverse views and initiatives around a defining purpose: to create value for business and society. For more information, visit www.rotman.utoronto.ca

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The António Champalimaud Vision Award 2023 distinguishes St John of Jerusalem Eye Hospital for their fight against blindness in Palestine

Grant and Award Announcement

CHAMPALIMAUD CENTRE FOR THE UNKNOWN

The 2023 edition of the António Champalimaud Vision Award recognizes the St John of Jerusalem Eye Hospital Group (SJEHG) for its work supporting hundreds of thousands of people living in the Gaza Strip, West Bank and East Jerusalem, helping in the fight against blindness while providing access to essential health services in a region marked by conflict and instability.

The SJEHG has been developing its activity at the centre of three major world religions. The ongoing conflict in the region has had a severe impact on health care access and delivery. Without the intervention of the SJEHG, the rate of blindness would be rampant, increasing the heavy economic burden already suffered by people in the region.

The SJEHG continues to innovate through research on the causes and risk factors for eye issues unique to the region, training of eye care providers from the local population, and delivering state-of-the art services to even the most isolated and vulnerable people in the West Bank and Gaza.

The SJEHG is the only hospital specialized in eye care in the Palestinian territories, where it has been present for 140 years. Over the past decade, it has treated the eyesight of hundreds of thousands of people. In 2022, 143,000 patients were reached, and 6,900 major surgeries were performed.

An epidemiological study carried out by SJEHG showed that the rate of blindness in Palestine is ten times higher than in the West. This is due to mobility issues, unemployment and poverty rates, as well as high levels of genetic eye diseases.

In addition to providing health care, the SJEHG has trained teams of Palestinian doctors and nurses specializing in ophthalmology. In total, the SJEHG is composed of six hospitals and three mobile outreach services, with 277 health professionals spread across the various territories of Palestine.

About the António Champalimaud Vision Award

The António Champalimaud Vision Award is supported by "Vision 2020 - The Right to Sight", a global initiative for the prevention of blindness launched in collaboration with the World Health Organization and the International Agency for the Prevention of Blindness. The Prize is awarded annually, distinguishing contributions to generic research in the field of vision and contributions to the alleviation of vision problems, mainly in developing countries. Among the candidates there are laboratories/productive organizations or collaborative efforts that, in this way, can involve groups coming from more than one institution or discipline.

 

CityU’s novel AI system enhances the predictive accuracy of autonomous driving

Meeting Announcement

CITY UNIVERSITY OF HONG KONG

 

IMAGE: QCNET CAN CAPTURE THE INTENTIONS OF ROAD USERS, ACCURATELY PREDICTING MULTIPLE POSSIBLE MOVEMENTS OF SURROUNDING VEHICLES. view more 

CREDIT: PROFESSOR WANG’S RESEARCH GROUP / CITY UNIVERSITY OF HONG KONG

Precisive real-time prediction of the movement of nearby vehicles or the future trajectory of pedestrians is essential for safe autonomous driving. A research team led by City University of Hong Kong (CityU) recently developed a novel AI system that improves predictive accuracy amid dense traffic and increases computational efficiency by over 85%, offering great potential for enhancing the safety of autonomous vehicles.

Professor Wang Jianping, in the Department of Computer Science (CS) at CityU, who led the study, explained the critical importance of precise, real-time prediction in autonomous driving, highlighting that even minimal delays and errors can lead to catastrophic accidents. 

However, existing solutions for behaviour prediction often struggle to correctly understand driving scenarios or lack efficiency in their predictions. These solutions usually involve re-normalising and re-encoding the latest positional data of surrounding objects and the environment whenever the vehicle and its observation window move forward, even though the latest position data substantially overlaps the preceding data. This leads to redundant computations and latency in real-time online predictions.

To overcome these limitations, Professor Wang and her team presented a breakthrough trajectory prediction model, called “QCNet”, which can theoretically support streaming processing. It is based on the principle of relative spacetime for positioning, which gives the prediction model excellent properties, such as the “roto-translation invariance in the space dimension” and “translation invariance in the time dimension”. 

These two properties enable the position information extracted from a driving scenario to be unique and fixed, regardless of the viewer’s space-time coordinate system when viewing the driving scenario. This approach allows for caching and reusing previously computed encodings of the coordinates, enabling the prediction model to theoretically operate in real time. 

The team also incorporated the relative positions of road users, lanes and crosswalks into the AI model to capture their relationships and interactions in driving scenarios. This enhanced understanding of the rules of the road and the interactions among multiple road users enables the model to generate collision-free predictions while accounting for uncertainty in the future behaviour of road users.

To evaluate the efficacy of QCNet, the team utilised “Argoverse 1” and “Argoverse 2”, two large-scale collections of open-source autonomous driving data and high-definition maps from different U.S. cities. These datasets are considered the most challenging benchmarks for behaviour prediction, comprising over 320,000 sequences of data and 250,000 scenarios.

In testing, QCNet demonstrated both speed and accuracy in predicting road users’ future movements, even with a long-term prediction of up to six seconds. It ranked first among 333 prediction approaches on Argoverse 1 and 44 approaches on Argoverse 2. Moreover, QCNet significantly reduced online inference latency from 8ms to 1ms, and increased the efficiency by over 85% in the densest traffic scene involving 190 road users and 169 map polygons, such as lanes and crosswalks. 

“By integrating this technology into autonomous driving systems, the autonomous vehicles can effectively understand their surroundings, predict the future behaviour of other users more accurately, and make safer and more human-like decisions, paving the way for safe autonomous driving,” said Professor Wang. “We plan to apply this technology to more applications in autonomous driving, including traffic simulations and human-like decision-making.” 

CAPTION

QCNet can understand the rules of the road and the interactions among multiple road users, predicting map-compliant and collision-free future trajectories.

CREDIT

Professor Wang’s research group / City University of Hong Kong

QCNet achieved the best performance among the approaches on Argoverse 1and Argoverse 2, and won the championship in Argoverse 2’s Multi-Agent Motion Forecasting Competition at CVPR 2023.

CREDIT

Professor Wang’s research group / City University of Hong Kong

The research findings were presented at the “IEEE / CVF Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition Conference” (CVPR 2023), an influential annual academic conference in computer vision, held in Canada this year, under the title “Query-Centric Trajectory Prediction”.

The first author is Mr Zhou Zikang, a PhD student in Professor Wang’s research group in the CS Department at CityU. The corresponding author is Professor Wang. Also contributing to the research were collaborators from the Hon Hai Research Institute, a research centre established by Hon Hai Technology Group (Foxconn®), and Carnegie Mellon University, in the U.S. The findings will be integrated into Hon Hai Technology Group’s autonomous driving system to enhance real-time prediction efficiency and self-driving safety.

The research was supported by various funding sources, including Hon Hai Research Institute, the Hong Kong Research Grant Council and the Shenzhen Science and Technology Innovation Commission.

https://www.cityu.edu.hk/research/stories/2023/09/06/cityus-novel-ai-system-enhances-predictive-accuracy-autonomous-driving

 

How sleep deprivation can harm the brain

Peer-Reviewed Publication

AMERICAN CHEMICAL SOCIETY

Not only does a lack of sleep make you feel awful, research has shown it impairs the brain. What’s more, sleep loss over long periods can even increase risk for Alzheimer’s and other neurological diseases. Researchers want to understand how sleep deprivation causes this harm. In a new study in ACS’ Journal of Proteome Research, a team working with mice has identified a protective protein whose level declines with sleep deprivation, leading to neuronal death.

Studies indicate that lack of sleep leads to neurological damage in the hippocampus, a part of the brain involved in learning and memory. To better understand the changes responsible for this effect, scientists have begun examining shifts in the abundance of proteins and RNA, which contains genetically encoded instructions derived from DNA. In this way, previous studies have identified some factors linking sleep loss to damage; however, researchers haven’t generally confirmed they play a role in cognitive function within larger animal populations. So, Fuyi Xu, Jia Mi and their colleagues set out to further explore how sleep loss damages the brain and to corroborate their findings.

To start off, the researchers evaluated how well mice navigated a simple maze and learned to recognize new objects after having been sleep deprived for two days. They then extracted the proteins in the animals’ hippocampi and identified those whose abundance changed. Then, to further narrow the possibilities, they looked at data linking these proteins to maze performance in related strains of mice that had not experienced sleep deprivation.

This approach led the researchers to pleiotrophin (PTN), which declined in the sleep-deprived mice. Through an analysis of RNA, the team identified the molecular pathway by which a loss of PTN causes cells in the hippocampus to die. When they looked at genetic studies in humans, they found that PTN is implicated in Alzheimer’s and other neurodegenerative diseases. This research has uncovered a new mechanism by which sleep protects brain function, according to the researchers, who also note that PTN levels could serve as an indicator of cognitive impairment resulting from insomnia.

The authors acknowledge funding from Taishan Scholars Construction Engineering, National Natural Science Foundation of China, Special Project of Central Government for Local Science and Technology Development of Shandong Province, Major Basic Research Project of Shandong Provincial Natural Science Foundation, Shandong Province Higher Educational Youth Innovation Science and Technology Program, Natural Science Foundation of Shandong Province and the Binzhou Medical University Research Start-up Fund.

The American Chemical Society (ACS) is a nonprofit organization chartered by the U.S. Congress. ACS’ mission is to advance the broader chemistry enterprise and its practitioners for the benefit of Earth and all its people. The Society is a global leader in promoting excellence in science education and providing access to chemistry-related information and research through its multiple research solutions, peer-reviewed journals, scientific conferences, eBooks and weekly news periodical Chemical & Engineering News. ACS journals are among the most cited, most trusted and most read within the scientific literature; however, ACS itself does not conduct chemical research. As a leader in scientific information solutions, its CAS division partners with global innovators to accelerate breakthroughs by curating, connecting and analyzing the world’s scientific knowledge. ACS’ main offices are in Washington, D.C., and Columbus, Ohio.

To automatically receive news releases from the American Chemical Society, contact newsroom@acs.org.

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JOURNAL

Journal of Proteome Research

DOI

10.1021/acs.jproteome.3c00269 

ARTICLE TITLE

The Combination of Quantitative Proteomics and Systems Genetics Analysis Reveals that PTN Is Associated with Sleep-Loss-Induced Cognitive Impairment

 

Paving the way for better recommendations for how biodiversity may be leveraged to promote delivery of ecosystem services

Peer-Reviewed Publication

UNIVERSITY OF CHICAGO PRESS JOURNALS

Thousands of studies examine how plant diversity structures predator communities and shapes herbivore pressure. This body of evidence has led to at least 23 separate quantitative syntheses encompassing a wide range of approaches to understanding plant diversity effects. Yet the sheer quantity of primary literature and inconsistency among these syntheses prevents a confident understanding of consensus in plant diversity outcomes.

"A Guide to 23 Global Syntheses of Plant Diversity Effects: Unpacking Consensus and Incongruence across Tropic Levels," a new paper published in The Quarterly Review of Biology, scrutinizes these 23 quantitative syntheses published over three decades on how plant diversity impacts both natural enemies and herbivores in arthropod communities and scrutinizes their divergent patterns to identify key drivers of herbivory.

Amid the 23 syntheses, robust patterns have stood the test of time: divergent outcomes frequently result from insect diet breadth, spatial scale, and plant relatedness variation. “Clarifying these persistent drivers enables us to identify and explore remaining sources of variation in plant diversity effects across trophic levels,” note authors K. D. Holmes and C. K. Blubaugh.

They find that plant diversity consistently attracts more abundant and diverse communities of predators. Herbivore diversity tends to increase in response to plant diversity treatments, while herbivore abundance and plant damage generally decrease. However, these net effects often mask nuanced responses to plant diversity that depend on ecosystem, scale, and specialization. For instance, specialist herbivores often respond negatively to plant diversity, while generalists more often mount positive or neutral responses.

The authors conduct a historical review of the past three decades of syntheses, reporting their approaches, scopes, and findings across trophic levels. They examine core ecological variables that shape the varying outcomes across studies, identify consistent patterns across these ecological factors, and explore mechanisms that explain incongruence between syntheses. Finally, they discuss the complex species interactions and analytical approaches that will be key in resolving context dependency and improving the ability to predict reliably whether biodiversity functions or fails to deliver ecosystem services. 

The authors also present a chronological and conceptual history of the 23 meta-analyses and global syntheses of plant diversity effects, focusing on major developments in this literature, and interpret outcomes for the most commonly reported responses of arthropods and plants, principally, the abundance and species richness of herbivores and predators and productivity and damage in plants. 

Spatial context is key to understanding impacts of diversity at different trophic levels. Studies conducted at greater spatial scales often show a dilution of effects on herbivores but reveal conflicting effects on predators. Plant arrangement is also important, with agricultural studies showing that alternating rows of crops reduces pest populations, while surrounding crop fields with floral borders better supports predators. Meanwhile, research in forests has demonstrated that the arrangement of plant diversity interacts with other elements of plant and herbivore natural history, such as insect diet breadth and plant relatedness, to predict outcomes. Despite the complexity of outcomes, syntheses show that diversifying plant communities hold great promise for enhancing the resilience of managed ecosystems. 

The plethora of syntheses on plant diversity effects reflects the challenge of understanding relationships in complex multitrophic communities, an urgent need for improved predictability in biodiversity-based tools for pest control in agroecosystems, and the rapidly expanding literature. Despite achievements in research and synthesis, the sheer number of meta-analyses with conflicting results means that outcomes of plant diversity for herbivorous insects are not generalizable. “Scrutinizing potential mechanisms underlying variation in outcomes across meta-analyses is vital,” the authors write, “especially now as ‘meta-meta-analyses’ have begun to emerge from this explosive body of work that further pool and simplify results.”

By distilling the varied results of the 23 syntheses, the authors pave the way for stronger and more precise recommendations for how biodiversity may be most effectively leveraged to promote delivery of ecosystem services. “Fine-tuning management of biodiversity will be essential to meet the ever-growing global need to design sustainable agriculture solutions that support both high plant productivity and diverse plant-arthropod communities,” they note.

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JOURNAL

The Quarterly Review of Biology

DOI

10.1086/726687 

ARTICLE TITLE

A Guide to 23 Global Syntheses of Plant Diversity Effects: Unpacking Consensus and Incongruence across Trophic Levels

 

$1 million USDA grant to Purdue aims to boost efficiency at dairy farms

Grant and Award Announcement

PURDUE UNIVERSITY

 

IMAGE: JACQUELYN BOERMAN, ASSOCIATE PROFESSOR OF ANIMAL SCIENCES AT PURDUE UNIVERSITY, AND HER HUSBAND ARE DAIRY FARMERS, AS ARE HER PARENTS. “I WANT TO IMPROVE THE LIVES OF DAIRY FARMERS AND THE COWS THAT LIVE ON THEIR FARMS,” SHE SAID. view more 

CREDIT: PURDUE UNIVERSITY PHOTO/TOM CAMPBELL

WEST LAFAYETTE, Ind. – A team of Purdue University researchers has received a $1 million grant from the U.S. Department of Agriculture’s National Institute of Food and Agriculture to improve feed efficiency and consistency on dairy farms by using automated video analytics systems. The grant is among $9.6 million in recent NIFA investments supporting 12 projects in animal innovation systems. 

“Feed costs are the No. 1 cost for dairy farmers. In order to make improvements on feed efficiency, we have to provide feedback to farmers close to in real time,” said Jacquelyn Boerman, associate professor of animal sciences. “If we can improve the consistency of that feed and we know what individual cows are eating, we’re going to manage that feed better. That has economic implications for dairy farmers.”

The dairy industry aims to become carbon neutral by 2050 via various approaches, including modifying the environment of the cow rumen and managing manure to reduce methane emissions. Boerman’s team will focus on enhancing dairy cow efficiency by providing them with consistent feed and measuring how much they eat.

A cattle nutritionist, Boerman will assess feed composition for consistency, which improves their milk production. Amy Reibman, the Elmore Professor of Electrical and Computer Engineering, will handle the video recording logistics and data analytics.

The researchers will carry out the initial testing phase primarily at the Purdue Dairy Unit. “We hope that it will have applications for commercial farms afterward,” Boerman said. The project has letters of support from the Indiana Dairy Producers and from farm nutrition companies.

The collaboration began with an internal 2022 proposal that led to funding a project between faculty members in the College of Agriculture and the College of Engineering. The new project also extends the work of Matthew Rogers, who received a doctorate in agricultural and biological engineering from Purdue in 2022. Rogers used stereovision to measure the volume of granular agricultural materials.

If successful, the project will make it possible to measure feed intake on a per-animal basis in group settings. “To date, we have only measured output per animal and have inputs aggregated per group,” said Buckmaster, who is also the Dean’s Fellow for Digital Agriculture. 

Buckmaster is excited to blend early career work on forages, feeding, total mixed ration (TMR) for dairy cows, and particle size with his more recent work in digital architectural data pipelines.

“The ability to know that each batch is uniformly blended without tremendously tedious and expensive sampling will also be of great value in TMR situations,” he said. His role will include assisting with the TMR uniformity experiments and feed characterization.

“I expect there will be some analysis and modeling needed to go from raw bulk volume measurements to per-animal intake, too. That will involve density and moisture content aspects as well as appropriately dividing feed disappearance when cows are side by side,” he said. 

The project’s video analytics component will be designed to enhance understanding of the visual data that farmers depend upon for decision-making.

“Farmers are trained to make a lot of decisions based on things that they see,” said Reibman, who specializes in video analytics for animals. “I’m an engineer. I want to solve problems. We should be able to design a system that can augment their abilities.

“We would like the system to be effective in an operational farm, and operational farms sometimes have harsh visual environments: bad lighting, dust. I call it shmutz in the air that gets on your cameras.”

The team’s guiding principles are to obtain the data they need with placement of cameras and other equipment that dairy farmers will not have to work around.

“This notion that ‘it has to work the way it is’ instead of ‘can we change the environment so that it’ll work’ is fascinating to me,” Reibman said.

Pfeiffer, who leads the project’s social science team, specializes in upstream, dialogic and coproduction communication models. “That means we’re engaged upstream in research as the technology is being designed,” Pfeiffer said. “And coproduction means that we’re taking feedback from stakeholders.”

For this project, farmers, nutritionists, veterinarians and industry representatives will share feedback with the engineers and the scientists as they’re designing these camera systems to improve feed efficiency.

“We’re frequently seeing technologies that are being developed to improve life often introduce costs, risks and challenges to the end user that are not often anticipated,” Pfeiffer said. And that can result in resistance to the technologies.

The social science team also includes professor Mark Tucker and PhD candidate Rob Weiner, both in the Department of Agricultural Sciences Education and Communication.

Writer: Steve Koppes

Feed ranks as the highest cost in dairy farming. A team of Purdue University researchers will use video analytics systems to explore how to improve feed efficiency with a $1 million grant from the USDA National Institute of Food and Agriculture.

Purdue University researchers will conduct initial research on improving feed and dairy cow efficiency at the Purdue Dairy Unit. Further research will continue in cooperation with operational commercial farms.

CREDIT

Purdue University Photo/Tom Campbell

Global food system could help achieve net negative emissions by 2050

Peer-Reviewed Publication

PLOS

Largescale changes to the global food system could enable people not only to reduce greenhouse gas emissions but to achieve net negative emissions by 2050. A team led by Maya Almaraz of Princeton University and Benjamin Houlton of Cornell University report these findings in a new study published September 6 in the open-access journal PLOS Climate.

Currently, the global food system is responsible for about one-third of greenhouse gas emissions. There are multiple opportunities within the food system to reduce emissions, and some have proposed that agriculture could act as a sink to remove carbon dioxide from the atmosphere and reach net negative emissions.

In the new study, researchers used a global food system model to explore how consumer choices, climate-smart technologies and reductions in food waste would each contribute to achieving net negative emissions by 2050. They estimate that, in a world of 10 billion people, a complete food system transformation could remove the equivalent of up to 33 gigatons of carbon dioxide each year. The greatest benefits would come from a shift toward a plant-based diet and the use of new technologies such as greener fertilizer production, advanced livestock feeds, agroforestry and sustainable seafood harvesting.

The study’s findings highlight the potential for future food systems to help countries meet their climate change emissions targets. This makes agriculture a unique economic sector that should be a key focus when discussing climate charge mitigation. For best effect, the researchers recommend that these approaches should be tailored to fit the local culture, economics, technology readiness and agricultural management capacities of each region.

The authors add: “We find evidence that dietary shifts cannot achieve negative emissions alone, whereas technology deployment and management can, absent dietary changes.”

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In your coverage please use this URL to provide access to the freely available article in PLOS Climate: https://journals.plos.org/climate/article?id=10.1371/journal.pclm.0000181

Citation: Almaraz M, Houlton BZ, Clark M, Holzer I, Zhou Y, Rasmussen L, et al. (2023) Model-based scenarios for achieving net negative emissions in the food system. PLOS Clim 2(9): e0000181. https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pclm.0000181

Author Countries: Denmark, Kenya, Malaysia, UK, USA

Funding: The Rockefeller Foundation provided funding to B.S.H. and M.H. support this research as well as salary for M.A. and E.M.. The World Wildlife Fund organized the research team in collaboration with the National Center for Ecological Analysis and Synthesis. M.C. received funding from the Wellcome Trust, Our Planet Our Health (Livestock, Environment and People - LEAP), award number 205212/Z/16/Z. The funders had no role in study design, data collection and analysis, decision to publish, or preparation of the manuscript.

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JOURNAL

PLOS Climate

DOI

10.1371/journal.pclm.0000181 

METHOD OF RESEARCH

Computational simulation/modeling

SUBJECT OF RESEARCH

People

ARTICLE TITLE

Model-based scenarios for achieving net negative emissions in the food system

ARTICLE PUBLICATION DATE

6-Sep-2023

 

US adults who don't trust university-based research are less likely to see climate change as an important problem, indicating a need to develop 'a culture of trust'

Peer-Reviewed Publication

PLOS

US adults who don't trust university-based research are less likely to see climate change as an important problem, indicating a need to develop 'a culture of trust'. 

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Article URL: https://journals.plos.org/climate/article?id=10.1371/journal.pclm.0000147

Article Title: Why don’t Americans trust university researchers and why it matters for climate change

Author Countries: UK, USA

Funding: RD’s work is supported by the Quadrature Climate Foundation [01-21-000149] and Keynes Fund [JHVH]. RMA and DE’s work is supported by Caltech’s Resnick Sustainability Institute. RD receives salary from the Quadrature Climate Foundation and the Keynes Fund. DE and RMA receive salary from Caltech’s Resnick Sustainability Institute. The funders had no role in study design, data collection and analysis, decision to publish, or preparation of the manuscript.

 

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JOURNAL

PLOS Climate

DOI

10.1371/journal.pclm.0000147 

ARTICLE TITLE

Why don’t Americans trust university researchers and why it matters for climate change

ARTICLE PUBLICATION DATE

6-Sep-2023