SMART-BARN – a cutting-edge technology lab to study animal groups

A new large-scale research facility close by Konstanz allows the complex behaviour of animal groups to be studied in unprecedented detail

Peer-Reviewed Publication

UNIVERSITY OF KONSTANZ

Researchers from the Cluster of Excellence Centre for the Advanced Study of Collective Behaviour (CASCB) and the Max Planck Institute of Animal Behavior have converted a former barn into a cutting-edge technology lab for complex behavioral analysis. In it, they can now study the intricate behaviour of animal groups. The barn also served as a prototype for the largest swarm behaviour lab at the University of Konstanz: the Imaging Hangar.

A major limitation in behavioural research is that scientists can either study animals under highly-controlled, yet often unrealistically simplified and small, environments in the lab, or in largely uncontrolled conditions in the wild. This has limited our ability to study many facets of behaviour, including collective behaviour—the movements and interactions among animals that underlie their complex social lives. What is needed to address this? First, a place with lots of space. Second, state of the art technology.

Both are available in an 18th-century barn at the Max Planck Institute of Animal Behavior in Möggingen near Konstanz and now in the Imaging Hangar, a hall the size of a gymnasium at the University of Konstanz. Both labs are used to closely examine the group behaviour of animals. To do so in a multidimensional way, researchers from the Cluster of Excellence Centre for the Advanced Study of Collective Behaviour at the University of Konstanz and the Max Planck Institute of Animal Behavior have developed a tool called SMART-BARN.

SMART-BARN is an acronym for Scalable Multimodal Arena for Real-time Tracking Behaviour of Animals in large numbers. “It is a new tool that allows studying complex behaviour traits of an individual or interactions between groups of animals like insects, birds, or mammals”, says Hemal Naik. Together with Máté Nagy, Co-Speaker of the Cluster, Iain Couzin, and colleagues developed SMART-BARN. The team was very interdisciplinary: Biologists, physicists, engineers and computer scientists developed it together.

Máté Nagy explains the tool further: “We are using high throughput measurement techniques like optical and acoustic tracking, with which we can study the exact 3D position and posture of animals and calculate their field of view”. Users of the new facility will have the flexibility to perform different experimental paradigms by leveraging the modular nature of the system.

Why scale matters
“SMART-BARN is designed to enhance the scale of typical indoor behavioural experiments in terms of experimental volume and measured behaviour traits and group sizes”, computer scientist Hemal Naik says and adds: “This means that users can measure previously unseen behaviour repertoire because animals have more space.” The facility can – depending on the size of the animals – host 100s of animals simultaneously and extend the possibility of experiments to novel species typically not studied in indoor environments. “In fact, we have now scaled this to work with many thousands of animals”, adds Couzin, “We recently conducted a study in the Imaging Hangar where we tracked 10,000 plague locusts. This would have been impossible without our SMART-BARN technology.”

How SMART-BARN can be used
So far, SMART-BARN was used within different experimental use cases involving subjects as diverse as pigeons, starlings, moth, bats, and humans. Naik is delighted because: “The facility is shaping important new interdisciplinary collaborations.” He continues: “For example, SMART-BARN offers the ability to track 3D gaze and posture of birds in a group of ten or more while maintaining their identity. This technique is being used by researchers to explore the role of gaze in decision making.” The same technique is used by computer scientists to design novel computer vision and AI based algorithms facilitating 3D tracking of animals without attaching any markers to them. “Our method has resulted in an even larger system in the Imaging Hangar at the University of Konstanz to track swarms of robots or thousands of insects”, says Iain Couzin.  

Máté Nagy says: “In a nutshell, the scope of its applications is only limited by our ability to come up with ideas of experimentation.” The team imagines the facility to be a collaborative space where researchers from all over the globe can contribute to the exploration of behavioural questions. Therefore, the team invites researchers across the world to connect with them and plan experiments.

 

Key facts:

• PUBLICATION DETAILS: Máté Nagy, Hemal Naik, Fumihiro Kano, Nora V. Carlson, Jens C. Koblitz, Martin Wikelski, Iain D. Couzin: SMART-BARN: Scalable Multimodal Arena for Real-time Tracking Behavior of Animals in large Numbers, Science Advances. DOI: 10.1126/sciadv.adf8068
• An interdisciplinary team from the Cluster of Excellence Centre for the Advanced Study of Collective Behaviour (CASCB) at the University of Konstanz, and the Max Planck Institute of Animal Behavior, with biologists, physicists, engineers, and computer scientists developed the tool together. Máté Nagy and Hemal Naik are both first authors of the publication, Iain Couzin is senior author.
• To explore animal behaviour closely and multidimensionally, researchers from the Cluster of Excellence Centre for the Advanced Study of Collective Behaviour have developed a new tool called SMART-BARN
• The study was among others funded by the Cluster of Excellence Centre for the Advanced Study of Collective Behaviour at the University of Konstanz, the Max Planck Institute of Animal Behavior, and the ERC, Horizon 2020 Framework Programme.

 

 

Note to editors:
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Bildunterschrift: SMART-BARN
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Copyright: Christian Ziegler

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Bildunterschrift: Maté Nagy
Copyright: Anna Zafeiris

 

 

 

 

 

 

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JOURNAL

Science Advances

DOI

10.1126/sciadv.adf8068 

ARTICLE TITLE

SMART-BARN: Scalable Multimodal Arena for Real-time Tracking Behavior of Animals in large Numbers

 

Groundwater depletion rates in India could triple in coming decades as climate warms, study shows

Peer-Reviewed Publication

UNIVERSITY OF MICHIGAN

Photos

ANN ARBOR—A new University of Michigan-led study finds that farmers in India have adapted to warming temperatures by intensifying the withdrawal of groundwater used for irrigation. If the trend continues, the rate of groundwater loss could triple by 2080, further threatening India's food and water security.

Reduced water availability in India due to groundwater depletion and climate change could threaten the livelihoods of more than one-third of the country's 1.4 billion residents  and has global implications. India recently overtook China to become the world's most populous nation and is the second-largest global producer of common cereal grains including rice and wheat.

"We find that farmers are already increasing irrigation use in response to warming temperatures, an adaptation strategy that has not been accounted for in previous projections of groundwater depletion in India," said study senior author Meha Jain, assistant professor at U-M's School for Environment and Sustainability. "This is of concern, given that India is the world's largest consumer of groundwater and is a critical resource for the regional and global food supply."

The lead author is Nishan Bhattarai of the Department of Geography and Environmental Sustainability at the University of Oklahoma, formerly a postdoctoral researcher in Jain's U-M lab.

The study, scheduled for online publication Sept. 1 in the journal Science Advances, analyzed historical data on groundwater levels, climate and crop water stress to look for recent changes in withdrawal rates due to warming. The researchers also used temperature and precipitation projections from 10 climate models to estimate future rates of groundwater loss across India.

Previous studies have focused on the individual effects of climate change and groundwater depletion on crop production in India. Those studies did not account for farmer decision-making, including how farmers may adapt to changing climate through changes in irrigation decisions.

The new study takes into account the fact that warmer temperatures may increase water demand from stressed crops, which in turn may lead to increased irrigation by farmers.

"Using our model estimates, we project that under a business-as-usual scenario, warming temperatures may triple groundwater depletion rates in the future and expand groundwater depletion hotspots to include south and central India," Bhattarai said.

"Without policies and interventions to conserve groundwater, we find that warming temperatures will likely amplify India's already existing groundwater depletion problem, further challenging India's food and water security in the face of climate change."

Previous studies found that climate change could decrease the yield of staple Indian crops by up to 20% by mid-century. At the same time, the country's groundwater is being depleted at an alarming rate, primarily because of water withdrawal for irrigation.

For the newly published study, the researchers developed a dataset that contains groundwater depths from thousands of wells across India, high-resolution satellite observations that measured crop water stress, and temperature and precipitation records.

Most climate models call for increased temperature, increased monsoon (June through September) precipitation and decreased winter precipitation in India over the coming decades. The U-M-led research team found that warming temperatures coupled with declining winter precipitation more than offset added groundwater recharge from increased monsoon precipitation, resulting in accelerated groundwater declines.

Across various climate-change scenarios, their estimates of groundwater-level declines between 2041 and 2080 were more than three times current depletion rates, on average.

In addition to Jain and Bhattarai, authors of the Science Advances study are David Lobell of Stanford University, Balwinder Singh of the International Maize and Wheat Improvement Center in India and the Department of Primary Industries and Regional Development in Western Australia, Ram Fishman of Tel Aviv University, William Kustas of the U.S. Department of Agriculture and Yadu Pokhrel of Michigan State University.

The research was funded by a NASA Land-Cover Land-Use Change Grant and a NASA new investigator program award to Jain. It was supported in part by the U.S. Department of Agriculture's Agricultural Research Service.

Study: Warming temperatures exacerbate groundwater depletion rates in India (available when embargo lifts)

 

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JOURNAL

Science Advances

METHOD OF RESEARCH

Data/statistical analysis

SUBJECT OF RESEARCH

Not applicable

ARTICLE TITLE

Warming temperatures exacerbate groundwater depletion rates in India

 

Invasive spotted lanternfly may not damage hardwood trees as previously thought

Peer-Reviewed Publication

PENN STATE

 

IMAGE: SPOTTED LANTERNFLIES HAVE PIERCING/SUCKING MOUTHPARTS THAT THEY USE TO SUCK THE PHLOEM SAP OUT OF PLANTS. view more 

CREDIT: JOE KELLER

UNIVERSITY PARK, Pa. — In 2012, when the spotted lanternfly (Lycorma delicatula) arrived in the U.S. from its home in China, scientists, land managers, and growers were understandably concerned that the sap-feeding insect would damage native and commercial trees. New long-term research led by Penn State has discovered that hardwood trees, such as maple, willow and birch, may be less vulnerable than initially thought.

“Since the lanternfly was first introduced to the northeastern U.S., the question has been, ‘How at-risk are our forests?’ said Kelli Hoover, professor of entomology at Penn State. “So far, we haven't had a good answer. Our study is the first to look at the long-term impacts of feeding pressure on northeastern hardwoods, and our results suggest that we are unlikely to see big impacts on the growth of trees.”

The findings published in the journal Environmental Entomology on August 29.

To determine the long-term effects of spotted lanternfly (SLF) feeding on hardwood trees, the team built large enclosures containing multiple species of tree, including the insect’s favorite food, the non-native tree-of-heaven (Ailanthus altissima), as well as native trees, including silver maple (Acer saccharinum), weeping willow (Salix babylonica) and river birch (Betula nigra). The team included tree-of-heaven in half of the enclosures to determine whether its presence would influence the feeding pressure on the native hardwoods.

Within the enclosures, the researchers reared different densities of spotted lanternflies for all or most of their lifecycle, from eggs through adults, to see if the number of insects feeding on a tree would impact its growth and survival. After the first two years, they reduced the density of the insects to see if trees would recover. They monitored leaf gas exchange and concentrations of nutrients that are important for photosynthesis and growth for the first two years and tree diameter growth for the full four years.

The team found that increased feeding pressure by spotted lanternfly resulted in reductions in key nutrients, which in turn, markedly impacted tree diameter growth during the first two years when feeding pressure was the most intense. However, in year three when the feeding pressure was reduced, the native trees recovered while tree-of-heaven’s growth remained flat. Leaf gas exchange did not differ significantly among the treatments.

“In the wild, we have seen that spotted lanternfly population numbers vary greatly from year to year on individual trees, and they move frequently among host trees,” Hoover said. “Our study represents a worst-case scenario in which the spotted lanternfly fed on the same trees for four consecutive growing seasons. While we did see reduced growth after two years of intense feeding, the native trees recovered when feeding was less intense. Importantly, over the four years, none of the trees died. Therefore, in a natural setting where the insects are constantly on the move, we would not expect significant negative impacts on forest or ornamental trees.”

Other authors on the paper include Lidiia Lavorivska, postdoctoral fellow, Penn State; Emily Lavely, tree fruit educator, Michigan State University; Osariyekemwen Uyi, research scientist, University of Georgia; Brian Walsh, extension educator, Penn State; Emelie Swackhamer, extension educator, Penn State; Anne Johnson, graduate student in entomology, Penn State; and David Eissenstat, professor emeritus of woody plant physiology, Penn State.

The U.S. Department of Agriculture and Pennsylvania Department of Agriculture supported this research.

To determine the long-term effects of spotted lanternfly (SLF) feeding on hardwood trees, the team built large enclosures containing multiple species of tree, including the insect’s favorite food, the non-native tree-of-heaven (Ailanthus altissima), as well as native trees.

CREDIT

Kelli Hoover, Penn State

New long-term research led by Penn State has discovered that hardwood trees, such as maple, willow and birch, may be less vulnerable to spotted lanternflies than initially thought.

CREDIT

Joe Keller

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JOURNAL

Environmental Entomology

DOI

10.1093/ee/nvad084 

Native American patients were sicker and more likely to die during the COVID-19 pandemic, UNM researchers find

Peer-Reviewed Publication

UNIVERSITY OF NEW MEXICO HEALTH SCIENCES CENTER

When the COVID-19 pandemic swept into New Mexico in the spring of 2020, seriously ill patients from all over the state were brought to The University of New Mexico Hospital in Albuquerque, where many wound up in intensive care, breathing with the help of ventilators.

Early on, researchers from the UNM Center for Global Health launched a study of hospitalized patients to gauge the severity of symptoms from the infection, gathering data on 475 patients from April 2020 through December 2021.

In paper published this week in PNAS Nexus, they reported that patients who identified as American Indian/Alaska Native (AI/AN) were sicker and more likely to die in the hospital than Hispanic and non-Hispanic white patients, even though they had fewer pre-existing conditions.

The study was led by Center Director D.J. Perkins, PhD, Professor of Medicine, and Research Associate Professor Ivy Hurwitz, PhD, both of whom donned protective gear to visit the ICU and obtain consent from patients willing to participate in the study.

“There was never an original plan based on race and ethnicity,” Perkins said. “We literally didn’t know about whether there would be disproportionate levels of hospitalization or severe disease.”

Hurwitz added that as they began recruiting patients in the hospital, “We saw a lot of people who were really, really sick in the ICU, and a lot of those people unfortunately were American Indian. It was really sad. They were really suffering disproportionately.”

The researchers collected data on patient demographics, infection duration, blood test results, comorbidities (underlying health risks), treatments that the patients received, major clinical events and in-hospital deaths.

In the patient pool, 47% self-identified as Hispanic, 31% were AI/AN and 19% were non-Hispanic white (the remainder, including Black and Asian American, were excluded from analysis for statistical reasons).

The scientists also assessed comorbid conditions known to worsen outcomes for COVID-19. “COPD, sleep apnea, hyperlipidemia, hypothyroidism, and history of past smoking differed among the groups and was lowest in AI/AN patients,” they wrote. In fact, non-Hispanic whites scored highest overall in comorbidities.

The American Indian patients were also younger on average, but more likely to need ventilators and have blood results indicating more severe disease. They were also more prone to shock and brain injury from the infection and were hospitalized longer.

A similar pattern of relatively severe disease in Native Americans was seen during the 1918 influenza pandemic, historical tuberculosis outbreaks, and the 2009 H1N1 influenza pandemic, the authors noted.

The explanation for the disproportionate burden of severe disease and death in the AI/AN people likely involves multiple factors, the authors wrote, “and may include social determinants of health, as well as potential immunological responses to the virus, among many other non-medical and medical factors.”

An earlier phase of the research prior to emergence of the Delta variant showed that AI/AN patients had significantly higher and protracted SARS-CoV-2 viral loads in their blood.

“In a large group of people, be it pre-Delta or Delta, the strongest predictor of severe disease is virus in the blood and, what travels along with that, because they’re intertwined with their co-variants, is being self-identified American Indian,” Perkins said.

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JOURNAL

PNAS Nexus

DOI

10.1093/pnasnexus/pgad259 

METHOD OF RESEARCH

Observational study

SUBJECT OF RESEARCH

People

ARTICLE TITLE

Disproportionate impact of COVID-19 severity and mortality on hospitalized American Indian/Alaska Native patients

 

Precarious employment conditions can increase risk of early death

Causal effect of shifting from precarious to standard employment on all-cause mortality in Sweden: an emulation of a target trial

Peer-Reviewed Publication

KAROLINSKA INSTITUTET

 

IMAGE: NURIA MATILLA-SANTANDER, ASSISTANT PROFESSOR AT KI view more 

CREDIT: N/A

People without a secure job contract can reduce their risk of premature death by 20 per cent if they gain permanent employment, a study from Karolinska Institutet published in The Journal of Epidemiology and Community reports. According to the researchers, the results indicate that job security on the Swedish labour market needs to improve.

Precarious employment is a term that is used to describe jobs with short contracts (e.g. temping), low wages and a lack of influence and rights, all of which lead to a working life without predictability and security.

In the present study, the researchers have examined how this affects the risk of death.

“This is the first study to show that changing from precarious employment to secure employment can reduce the risk of death,” says the paper’s last author Theo Bodin, assistant professor at the Institute of Environmental Medicine, Karolinska Institutet. “It’s the same as saying that the risk of early death is higher if one keeps working in jobs without a secure employment contract.”

The researchers used registry data from over 250,000 workers in Sweden between the ages of 20 and 55 gathered over a period from 2005 to 2017. The study included people who worked under insecure working conditions and who then shifted to secure working conditions.

Those who switched from precarious to secure employment had a 20 percent lower risk of death, regardless of what happened afterward, compared to those who remained in precarious employment. If they remained in secure employment for 12 years, the risk of death decreased by 30 percent.

“Using this large population database allowed us to take account of many factors that could influence mortality, such as age, other diseases that workers can suffer from or life changes like divorce,” explains Nuria Matilla-Santander, assistant professor at the same institute and the study’s first author. “Because of the methods we used, we can be relatively certain that the difference in mortality is due to the precariousness of employment rather than individual factors.”

She continues: “The results are important since they show that the elevated mortality rate observed in workers can be avoided. If we reduce precariousness in the labour market, we can avoid premature deaths in Sweden.”

Dr Matilla-Santander says that the next stage of the research is to examine the specific causes of mortality in this regard.

The study was mainly financed by the Swedish Research Council for Health, Working Life and Welfare (Forte). The researchers report no conflicts of interest.

Publication: “Causal effect of shifting from precarious to standard employment on all-cause mortality in Sweden: an emulation of a target trial”, Nuria Matilla-Santander, Anthony A Matthews, Virginia Gunn, Carles Muntaner, Bertina Kreshpaj, David H Wegman,  Néstor Sánchez-Martínez, Julio C Hernando-Rodriguez, Maria Albin, Rebeka Balogh, Letitia Davis, Theo Bodin, Journal of Epidemiology and Community Health, online 23 August 2023, doi: 10.1136/jech-2023-220734

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JOURNAL

Journal of Epidemiology & Community Health

DOI

10.1136/jech-2023-220734 

METHOD OF RESEARCH

Observational study

SUBJECT OF RESEARCH

People

ARTICLE TITLE

Causal effect of shifting from precarious to standard employment on all-cause mortality in Sweden: an emulation of a target trial

 

Could insights from ants help people build better transportation networks?

UCLA study finds the insects’ nests reflect the way they work together – or don’t – to forage for food

Peer-Reviewed Publication

UNIVERSITY OF CALIFORNIA - LOS ANGELES

Key takeaways

• Ants can either forage for food as individuals or recruit other members of their colonies to help search for or carry food back to their nests.
• UCLA biologists found that the strategies ants use to forage play a bigger role in how they build their nests than innate, evolutionary “blueprints” do.
• When building nests, ants strike a balance between transportation efficiency and architectural constraints. Researchers say that observation could help humans design more efficient transportation systems tailored to specific needs.

Could ants’ nests hold the secret to reducing traffic congestion on the 405 Freeway?

In a new study, UCLA biologists discovered insights about how ants build their nests that could be useful for designing more efficient human transportation systems.

The scientists were interested in learning whether the way ants build their nests is more influenced by the evolutionary history of each individual species or current ecological conditions. What they found was that evolution could not explain the variations they observed among different species’ nests. Rather, they found, the environments in which ants forage and the way they transport food are the main factors that dictate how each species builds its nests.

The lesson for humans? If roads were better tailored to the ways goods and people move through our cities, transportation networks could be more efficient. For example, congestion on Southern California’s freeways might be improved if there were dedicated lanes or roads for trucks traveling to and from major logistics hubs like ports, warehouses and distribution centers.

“Ants deal with the same issues we deal with when it comes to living in crowded spaces,” said Sean O’Fallon, a UCLA doctoral student in ecology and evolutionary biology, and the study’s first author. “We’re densely packed in cities, and ideally we should be densely connected, but there are constraints to how closely packed together we can be. There’s only so much space to construct buildings and roads.”

In the study, published in Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society B, scientists analyzed information from two sources — details about 397 ant nests came from previously published data and images, and the authors conducted new studies of 42 other nests, all located at the Archbold Biological Reserve near Venus, Florida. In total, the 439 nests represented 31 different species of ants.

They discovered that nest structures were largely determined by factors like whether ants foraged alone or in groups, as well as the methods they used to recruit other ants to help find and carry food. In a nutshell, the animals’ activity and behavior play bigger roles in nest construction than any innate evolutionary template.

“You can think of the nest itself as a transportation network — it’s where ants live, but it’s also a kind of highway network they move things in and out of,” said Noa Pinter-Wollman, a UCLA professor of ecology and evolutionary biology and the paper’s corresponding author.

The researchers examined four common foraging strategies used by ants. In some species, individual ants hunt for food. In others, an ant brings food to the nest as a means of recruiting other ants to accompany it to the food source. Ants can also form a continuous trail between the food source and the nest that can persist for months. Or they can leave a pheromone trail that members of the colony can follow in large numbers — a phenomenon the researchers called “mass recruitment.”

Ants’ nests consist of a tunnel leading down to an entrance chamber, where ants enlist other members of their colony to help them find or transport food. From the entrance chamber, tunnels lead down to other chambers, which are connected by tunnels to still deeper chambers. Chambers serve different purposes, such as food and waste storage and rearing young.

The researchers expected that in ant species that use the mass recruitment style of foraging, the nests’ entrance chambers would be larger than they are in other species’ nests, because those spaces would need to allow larger numbers of ants to interact. And indeed, they found that to be the case.

However, the scientists also expected that nests for the mass recruitment foragers would have greater “network density” — meaning larger numbers of connections among the chambers — than nests built by other species. Greater network density, the scientists reasoned, would help facilitate more movement of ants and resources throughout the nest.

But the research revealed that for ants representing all four foraging strategies, network density was relatively low — even for large nests with hundreds of chambers. In fact, the study revealed, across all foraging strategies, nests with the most chambers tended to have the lowest network density.

In the paper, the researchers write that finding could be simply a function of architecture: Too many tunnels between chambers could weaken the structural integrity of the nest, which could cause the entire system to collapse.

“Ants have to balance the efficiency of highly connected nests with architectural stability,” Pinter-Wollman said. “On one hand, they want transportation to be faster, but if they start making too many connections, the nest will crumble.

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JOURNAL

Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society B Biological Sciences

‘Broadband Prairie’ rural wireless project moves to public phase of researching, testing

Meeting Announcement

IOWA STATE UNIVERSITY

 

IMAGE: DOCTORAL STUDENT MD NADIM DEPLOYS HARDWARE AT AN IOWA STATE RESEARCH FARM FOR THE ARA RURAL BROADBAND PROJECT. view more 

CREDIT: PHOTOS COURTESY OF THE ARA PROJECT.

AMES, Iowa – A wireless tower at Iowa State University’s Ag Engineering/Agronomy Farm west of Ames is loaded with hardware sending radio waves across the countryside, creating wireless internet connections for rural users.

 

There are more poles, antennas and cabinets full of electronics on the roof of the Economic Development Core Facility at the Iowa State University Research Park. And bolted to the top of Wilson Hall, a 10-story residence hall. And hanging from the top of a wooden utility pole at Iowa State’s Curtiss Farm south of town.

 

There are also electronics and lower-to-the ground antennas next to research fields and in a sheep barn. There’s equipment going through the roof of a dairy barn. There are even hardware cabinets on the roof of a CyRide bus.

 

The deployment of all this infrastructure in and around Ames means the $16 million ARA Wireless Living Lab for Smart and Connected Rural Communities is moving to a public testing phase. The project’s progress will be celebrated during a launch event Sept. 6-8 on the Iowa State campus, including field trips to ARA deployment sites.

 

The event will feature technical presentations, including:

 

• “ARA-Enabled Teleoperation of Automated PhenoBots,” by Lie Tang, an Iowa State professor of agricultural and biosystems engineering and a Plant Sciences Institute faculty scholar

 

• “ARA-Enabled Livestock Health Monitoring” by Joshua Peschel, an Iowa State associate professor of agricultural and biosystems engineering

 

• and, “ARA-Enabled Agriculture Automation” by Matthew Darr, the John Deere Endowed Chair in Agricultural Innovation and leader of Iowa State’s Digital Ag Innovation Lab.

 

Details and a program are here: https://arawireless.org/2023-public-launch/#overview.

 

A major goal for the ARA project is to address the broadband gap between rural and urban regions and to advance the frontiers of 5G and 6G technologies, said Hongwei Zhang, an Iowa State professor of electrical and computer engineering and the project leader.  

 

Researchers have installed ARA infrastructure for rural broadband testing on the roof of Iowa State's Wilson Hall.

CREDIT

Photos courtesy of the ARA Project

Toward a ‘Broadband Prairie’

The ARA project launched in June 2021, when the Platforms for Advanced Wireless Research (PAWR) program, which is supported by the National Science Foundation (NSF) and a consortium of 30 wireless companies and associations, announced $16 million in support for ARA (which stands for Agriculture and Rural Communities and has a logo featuring the Ara constellation of stars).

 

Over five years, the NSF is providing $7 million, the U.S. Department of Agriculture’s National Institute of Food and Agriculture is providing $1 million and PAWR industry partners are providing $8 million of cash and in-kind support.

 

In addition to Zhang, there are major contributors from Iowa State faculty, staff and students. The project is part of Iowa State’s Center for Wireless, Communities and Innovation.

 

Other project leaders are affiliated with the University of California, Irvine, Ohio State University and the International Computer Science Institute at the University of California, Berkeley.

 

“This two-year effort is coming to fruition,” Zhang said. “ARA phase one has been deployed for research, education and innovation in advanced wireless and its rural applications.”

 

While a project goal is to eventually improve wireless service to rural residents and communities, project researchers are now building a wireless platform using the latest technology and testing its performance in variety of applications, including precision agriculture and rural education.

 

As a wireless testbed, researchers write and talk of ARA’s technical details: AraHaul for multi-modal, long-distance and high-throughput wireless; AraRAN wireless access infrastructure for connecting to equipment such as tractors; many-antenna, multiple-input and multiple-output systems, x-haul radios operating in the 11 gigahertz and 80 gigahertz bands; the TV White Space spectrum and Open Radio Access Networks (O-RAN).

 

Successfully tie all that together and Zhang envisions ARA one day enabling a “Broadband Prairie” that connects rural residents, farms, schools and communities.

 

“We are on track,” Zhang said. “We are overcoming challenges. And I can’t wait for this to go public.”

– 30 –

Air pollution has decreased across the US, but new Yale research finds health burdens remain unequal among racial groups

Peer-Reviewed Publication

YALE UNIVERSITY

New Haven, Conn. — Health benefits that have resulted from reductions in fine particulate air pollution aren’t distributed equally among populations in the U.S., a new Yale-led study finds. Racial and ethnic minorities — and Black people in particular — still experience disproportionately high rates of cardiovascular disease-related deaths caused by exposure to fine particulate matter, according to the research.

The findings were published Aug. 31 in Nature Human Behavior.

Fine particulate matter, also known as PM2.5, consists of particles or droplets smaller than 2.5 micrometers in diameter, or 30 times smaller than the width of a human hair. While some PM2.5 in the environment comes from natural sources, such as wildfires, the majority of particulate matter pollution in the U.S. is the result of human activities, including emissions from vehicles, power plants, and factories.

The small size makes PM2.5 harmful for human health, said Kai Chen, assistant professor of epidemiology at Yale School of Public Health and senior author of the study.

“When you inhale such small particles, they can get into your lungs and some smaller particles can even get into the blood stream and circulate around the body,” said Chen. “That can impact your heart, which leads to a lot of the cardiovascular disease we see today.”

Environmental efforts including the 1963 Clean Air Act and the Environmental Protection Agency’s (EPA) National Ambient Air Quality Standards for PM2.5, established in 1997, have helped bring down PM2.5 levels throughout the United States. This, in turn, has yielded benefits to human health. But it has remained unclear whether these health benefits are distributed equitably across racial and ethnic groups.

“We know that some minorities, especially Black and Hispanic people, are exposed to higher levels of PM2.5 than white people,” said Chen. “In our study, we wanted to go further and assess vulnerability to PM2.5 across different groups and see how that relates to mortality.”

For the study, the researchers collected data on cardiovascular disease deaths and monthly PM2.5 concentrations across 3,103 counties in the contiguous U.S. between 2001 and 2016. They then evaluated whether there was a link between increases in PM2.5 levels and changes in cardiovascular disease-related deaths.

Overall, an increase of one microgram per square meter in average PM2.5 levels was associated with 2.01 additional cardiovascular disease-related deaths per 1 million people. But when the researchers took a closer look at the data, they found that the human costs vary in different populations: the same increase in the average PM2.5 levels was associated with 1.76 additional deaths per 1 million white people, 2.66 additional deaths per 1 million Hispanic people, and 7.16 additional deaths per 1 million Black people.

The researchers also assessed mortality burden across race and ethnicity, evaluating the number of cardiovascular disease-related deaths that were attributable to long-term PM2.5exposure between 20o1 and 2016. On average, there were 202.70 deaths per 1 million white people, 279.24 deaths per 1 million Hispanic people, and 905.68 deaths per 1 million Black people each year.

“Black people experience the highest burden when it comes to mortality rate,” said Chen.

To determine whether mortality burden changed over time, the researchers then compared mortality rates between 2001 and 2016. In total, cardiovascular disease-related deaths attributable to long-term PM2.5 exposure decreased by more than 34% over that time period. And rates decreased within white, Hispanic, and Black populations. 

However, the ratio of mortality rates between white and Hispanic people and between white and Black people hardly changed between 2001 and 2016. Mortality rates for Hispanic people were 1.37 times higher than white people in 2001, increasing to 1.45 times higher by 2016. Mortality rates for Black people were 4.59 times higher than white people in 2001 and 4.47 times higher in 2016. 

“Air pollution reduced and that reduced exposure for everyone, which is very good news,” said Chen. “But Black people still experience a higher burden because they are more vulnerable and at higher risk of mortality.”

The findings, he says, underscore that the public health burden of air pollution differs across racial groups and that should help inform policy design going forward. The EPA, U.S. lawmakers, and local governments should consider not just the overall population as they develop policies to improve air quality, but also high-vulnerability groups in particular.

“Poor air quality imposes a substantial burden on Black Americans, with greater exposures and greater vulnerability,” said coauthor Harlan Krumholz, the Harold H. Hines, Jr. Professor of Medicine at Yale School of Medicine. “We have identified another way that the structure of our society contributes to cardiovascular health disparities. The study demonstrates that the excess mortality among Black people is not just derived from traditional risk factors, but likely also to the increased exposure to poor air quality based on where they live.”

Chen will continue to investigate this health burden disparity in a new project funded by a Yale Planetary Solutions Project seed grant. He and his colleagues will assess PM2.5 exposure, cardiovascular disease risk, and morbidity burden at the neighborhood level and design location-specific strategies to address inequalities.

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JOURNAL

Nature Human Behaviour

DOI

10.1038/s41562-023-01694-7 

ARTICLE TITLE

Racial/ethnic disparities in PM2.5-attributable cardiovascular mortality burden in the United States

ARTICLE PUBLICATION DATE

31-Aug-2023

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