THIRD WORLD U$A

Cervical cancer rates rising in low-income U.S. counties

Study reveals staggering rise in cervical cancer incidence and mortality rates among women living in America’s lowest-income counties

Reports and Proceedings

UNIVERSITY OF TEXAS M. D. ANDERSON CANCER CENTER

 

IMAGE: 

TRISHA AMBOREE, PH.D.

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CREDIT: THE UNIVERSITY OF TEXAS MD ANDERSON CANCER CENTER

HOUSTON ― Women in low-income areas of the U.S. face a stark rise in cervical cancer incidence and mortality, according to a new study led by researchers from The University of Texas MD Anderson Cancer Center.  

The results, published in the International Journal of Cancer, demonstrate that the incidence rate for distant-stage cervical cancer has increased most among white women living in low-income counties, at 4.4% annually since 2007. The largest increase in cervical cancer mortality rates occurred in Black women in low-income counties, at 2.9% annually since 2013, despite cancer incidence in this group declining. 

“The findings are quite concerning,” said lead author Trisha Amboree, Ph.D., postdoctoral fellow in Behavioral Science. “Despite decades of improvement due to the widespread implementation of cervical cancer prevention programs in the U.S., our study shows women may be facing disruptions along the screening and treatment continuum that are leading to more distant-stage cancers and, potentially, more deaths.” 

In 2019, across all racial and ethnic groups, cervical cancer incidence was greater among women living in low-income counties in the U.S. with the highest absolute incidence observed among Hispanic women.  

"These data add to a growing body of evidence indicating widening disparities driven by socioeconomic status,” said co-senior author Jane Montealegre, Ph.D., associate professor of Behavioral Science. “Cervical cancer is almost entirely preventable through vaccination against human papillomavirus (HPV), screening and early detection. This continued upward trend calls for scaled-up efforts to eliminate disparities in cervical cancer prevention.” 

Researchers used Surveillance, Epidemiology, and End Results-22 (SEER-22) data between 2000-2019 to examine occurrences of cervical cancer diagnoses and deaths. They also analyzed race, ethnicity and county-level median household income with the low-income counties ranging from $19,330 to $38,820. 

The study was done in collaboration with Ashish Deshmukh, Ph.D., co-leader of the Cancer Control research program at The Medical University of South Carolina Hollings Cancer Center and was supported through grants from the National Institute on Minority Health and Health Disparities (R01MD013715, K01MD016440, 3R01MD013715-04S1) and the National Cancer Institute (R01CA232888). A full list of collaborating authors and their disclosures can be found listed in the study. 

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DOI

10.1002/ijc.34846 

ARTICLE PUBLICATION DATE

25-Jan-2024

 

Analysis of US Census survey data reveals uptick in anxiety and depression among women in states with trigger laws post-Dobbs abortion decision 

June 2022 Supreme Court ruling overturned federal right to abortion, triggering laws in 13 states that banned or restricted abortion  

Peer-Reviewed Publication

JOHNS HOPKINS BLOOMBERG SCHOOL OF PUBLIC HEALTH

An analysis of national survey data conducted by researchers at the Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health found a small but statistically significant increase in self-reported anxiety and depression symptoms among respondents in states that banned abortion after the U.S. Supreme Court’s reversal of Roe v. Wade in June 2022 compared to respondents in states that did not enact bans. 

The Dobbs decision, handed down on June 24, 2022, overturned the 1973 Roe v. Wade decision that made abortion a constitutionally protected right and returned the question of abortion regulation to individual states. The Dobbs decision triggered laws banning abortion that had been passed earlier in 13 states in anticipation of Roe being overturned.

The analysis found that the increase in self-reports of anxiety and depression in the six months following the Dobbs decision announcement was most pronounced among females ages 18 to 45. The increase among males in that age range during this time period was small and not statistically significant. While scores increased in trigger states, the authors note that, on average, the scores remained in the mild range.

The study was published online January 23 in JAMA.

“These findings suggest that changes in abortion policy can impact mental health at the population level,” says study senior author Matthew Eisenberg, PhD, an associate professor in the Bloomberg School’s Department of Health Policy and Management, and director of the Center for Mental Health and Addiction Policy, also at the Bloomberg School. “Policymakers should, of course, be aware of the first-order impacts of policies, but studies such as this suggest that they should also consider downstream policy effects on mental health, even when a policy is not specifically targeting mental health.” 

The study’s first author was Benjamin Thornburg, a PhD candidate in the same department.

For their analysis, the researchers used de-identified data from the Household Pulse Survey, an online survey the U.S. Census Bureau started conducting in April 2020, early in the COVID-19 pandemic. The survey gathers data from respondents ages 18 and up in U.S. households approximately every two weeks to provide snapshots of households’ health and socioeconomic situations. 

The survey includes the Patient Health Questionnaire-4 (PHQ-4), a four-question screening tool often used in primary care settings to assess anxiety and depression. PHQ-4 scores range from zero to 12. A score of zero to 2 indicates no symptoms of depression/anxiety, scores from 3 to 5 are considered mild, and scores of 6 to 12 are considered moderate to severe. A score above 5 suggests a high probability of depression or anxiety, meriting further evaluation and/or treatment. The study covered 13 waves of data from the survey’s public use files, spanning December 29, 2021, to January 19, 2023. 

There were 718,753 respondents during the study period—159,854 in trigger states and 558,899 in non-trigger states. For their study, the researchers analyzed responses from females ages 18 to 45 years (153,108) and from males ages 18 to 45 (102,581). (Forty-five is the age researchers often use to compute lifetime abortion incidence. The estimates were representative of the general population.)

The researchers calculated average PHQ-4 scores across the survey sample during a “baseline” interval from December 29, 2021, to May 2, 2022, the date a draft of the Dobbs decision was leaked to the media, and an “opinion” interval following June 24, 2022, the date the Supreme Court publicly announced its Dobbs decision.

The researchers found that PHQ-4 anxiety/depression scores were 8.5 percent higher for all ages in trigger states than in non-trigger states in the six months after the opinion (3.51 versus 3.81). In non-trigger states, scores for all ages increased 5.4 percent after the opinion (3.31 versus 3.49). The increase among women ages 18 to 45 in trigger states was 3.03 percent (4.62 vs. 4.76), while scores in non-trigger stages decreased by 1.75 percent (4.57 vs. 4.49). 

The 13 states that had trigger laws in place at the time the Dobbs decision was announced were Arkansas, Idaho, Kentucky, Louisiana, Mississippi, Missouri, North Dakota, Oklahoma, South Dakota, Tennessee, Texas, Utah, and Wyoming.

The authors note that the study has several limitations. Most notably, the data were pooled cross-sections of different individuals over time, not a panel of the same sample repeatedly measured, which makes it more difficult to adjust for individual characteristics. They note that large sample size, population representativeness, and state-level analyses help to ameliorate this concern. 

 

The researchers now plan to examine other potential impacts of Dobbs, for example, on the supply of new physicians in certain specialties in states where abortion is now unlawful or heavily restricted. 

The authors note that their findings build on emerging literature. “Prior to Dobbs, research established that denial to abortion access was associated with adverse outcomes, including symptoms of anxiety,” says Thornburg. “Emerging research has suggested that a similar trend may emerge at the national level as states enact more restrictive abortion policies following Dobbs, which is precisely what our study reveals.”

“Anxiety and Depression Symptoms After the Dobbs Abortion Rights Decision” was co-authored by Benjamin Thornburg, Alene Kennedy-Hendricks, Joanne Rosen, and Matthew Eisenberg.

Support for the research was provided by the Agency for Healthcare Research and Quality (T32HS000029) and the National Institute of Mental Health (T32MH109436).

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When lab-trained AI meets the real world, ‘mistakes can happen’

Tissue contamination distracts AI models from making accurate real-world diagnoses

Peer-Reviewed Publication

NORTHWESTERN UNIVERSITY

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• First study to examine the impact of tissue contamination on AI models

• ‘If it’s paying attention to the tissue contaminants, it’s paying less attention to the patient’s tissue that is being examined’

• ‘Pathologists fear — and AI companies hope — that the computers are coming for our jobs. Not yet.’

 

Human pathologists are extensively trained to detect when tissue samples from one patient mistakenly end up on another patient’s microscope slides (a problem known as tissue contamination). But such contamination can easily confuse artificial intelligence (AI) models, which are often trained in pristine, simulated environments, reports a new Northwestern Medicine study. 

“We train AIs to tell ‘A’ versus ‘B’ in a very clean, artificial environment, but, in real life, the AI will see a variety of materials that it hasn’t trained on. When it does, mistakes can happen,” said corresponding author Dr. Jeffery Goldstein, director of perinatal pathology and an assistant professor of perinatal pathology and autopsy at Northwestern University Feinberg School of Medicine. 

“Our findings serve as a reminder that AI that works incredibly well in the lab may fall on its face in the real world. Patients should continue to expect that a human expert is the final decider on diagnoses made on biopsies and other tissue samples. Pathologists fear — and AI companies hope — that the computers are coming for our jobs. Not yet.”

In the new study, scientists trained three AI models to scan microscope slides of placenta tissue to (1) detect blood vessel damage; (2) estimate gestational age; and (3) classify macroscopic lesions. They trained a fourth AI model to detect prostate cancer in tissues collected from needle biopsies. When the models were ready, the scientists exposed each one to small portions of contaminant tissue (e.g. bladder, blood, etc.) that were randomly sampled from other slides. Finally, they tested the AIs’ reactions. 

Each of the four AI models paid too much attention to the tissue contamination, which resulted in errors when diagnosing or detecting vessel damage, gestational age, lesions and prostate cancer, the study found. 

The findings were published earlier this month in the journal Modern Pathology. It marks the first study to examine how tissue contamination affects machine-learning models.

‘For a human, we’d call it a distraction, like a bright, shiny object’

Tissue contamination is a well-known problem for pathologists, but it often comes as a surprise to non-pathologist researchers or doctors, the study points out. A pathologist examining 80 to 100 slides per day can expect to see two to three with contaminants, but they’ve been trained to ignore them.

When humans examine tissue on slides, they can only look at a limited field within the microscope, then move to a new field and so on. After examining the entire sample, they combine all the information they’ve gathered to make a diagnosis. An AI model performs in the same way, but the study found AI was easily misled by contaminants. 

"The AI model has to decide which pieces to pay attention to and which ones not to, and that’s zero sum,” Goldstein said. “If it’s paying attention to tissue contaminants, then it’s paying less attention to the tissue from the patient that is being examined. For a human, we’d call it a distraction, like a bright, shiny object.”

The AI models gave a high level of attention to contaminants, indicating an inability to encode biological impurities. Practitioners should work to quantify and improve upon this problem, the study authors said.

Previous AI scientists in pathology have studied different kinds of image artifacts, such as blurriness, debris on the slide, folds or bubbles, but this is the first time they’ve examined tissue contamination. 

‘Confident that AI for placenta is doable’

Perinatal pathologists, such as Goldstein, are incredibly rare. In fact, there are only 50 to 100 in the entire U.S., mostly located in big academic centers, Goldstein said. This means only 5% of placentas in the U.S. are examined by human experts. Worldwide, that number is even lower. Embedding this type of expertise into AI models can help pathologists across the country do their jobs better and faster, Goldstein said. 

“I'm actually very excited about how well we were able to build the models and how well they performed before we deliberately broke them for the study,” Goldstein said. “Our results make me confident that AI evaluations of placenta are doable. We ran into a real-world problem, but hitting that speedbump means we're on the road to better integrating the use of machine learning in pathology.” 

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JOURNAL

Modern Pathology

DOI

10.1016/j.modpat.2024.100422 

ARTICLE TITLE

Tissue contamination challenges the credibility of machine learning models in real world digital pathology

 

New video camera system captures the colored world that animals see, in motion

Open-source camera and software system records natural animal-view videos with over 90% accuracy

Peer-Reviewed Publication

PLOS

 

IMAGE: 

VASAS ET AL. (2024) UNVEIL A NEW CAMERA SYSTEM AND SOFTWARE PACKAGE THAT ALLOWS BOTH RESEARCHERS AND FILMMAKERS TO CAPTURE AND DISPLAY ANIMAL-VIEW VIDEOS. THIS IMAGE OF THREE MALE ORANGE SULPHURS COLIAS EURYTHEME IS AN EXAMPLE OF ONE SUCH DEPICTION.

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CREDIT: DANIEL HANLEY (CC BY 4.0, HTTPS://CREATIVECOMMONS.ORG/LICENSES/BY/4.0/)

A new camera system allows ecologists and filmmakers to produce videos that accurately replicate the colors that different animals see in natural settings, Vera Vasas at the University of Sussex, UK, and colleagues from the Hanley Color Lab at George Mason University, US, report in the open access journal PLOS Biology, publishing January 23rd.

Different animals perceive the world differently because of the capabilities of the photoreceptors in their eyes. For example, animals like honeybees and some birds can see UV light, which are outside the range of human perception. Reconstructing the colors that animals actually see can help scientists better understand how they communicate and navigate the world around them. False color images give us a glimpse into this dynamic world, but traditional methods such as spectrophotometry are often time consuming, require specific lighting conditions, and cannot capture moving images.

To address these limitations, researchers developed a novel camera and software system that captures animal-view videos of moving objects under natural lighting conditions. The camera simultaneously records video in four color channels: blue, green, red and UV. This data can be processed into “perceptual units” to produce an accurate video of how those colors are perceived by animals, based on existing knowledge of the photoreceptors in their eyes. The team tested the system against a traditional method that uses spectrophotometry and found that the new system predicted perceived colors with an accuracy of over 92%.

This novel camera system will open new avenues of research for scientists, and allow filmmakers to produce dynamic, accurate depictions of how animals see the world around them, the authors say. The system is built from commercially available cameras, housed in a modular, 3D-printed casing, and the software is available open-source, allowing other researchers to use and build on the technology in the future.

Senior author Daniel Hanley adds, “We’ve long been fascinated by how animals see the world. Modern techniques in sensory ecology allow us to infer how static scenes might appear to an animal; however, animals often make crucial decisions on moving targets (e.g., detecting food items, evaluating a potential mate’s display, etc.). Here, we introduce hardware and software tools for ecologists and filmmakers that can capture and display animal-perceived colors in motion.”

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In your coverage, please use this URL to provide access to the freely available paper in PLOS Biology: http://journals.plos.org/plosbiology/article?id=10.1371/journal.pbio.3002444

Supplementary Videos URL: https://plos.io/4a9pRxS

Citation: Vasas V, Lowell MC, Villa J, Jamison QD, Siegle AG, Katta PKR, et al. (2024) Recording animal-view videos of the natural world using a novel camera system and software package. PLoS Biol 22(1): e3002444. https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pbio.3002444

Author Countries: United Kingdom, United States, Canada

Funding: see manuscript

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JOURNAL

PLoS Biology

DOI

10.1371/journal.pbio.3002444 

METHOD OF RESEARCH

Computational simulation/modeling

 

Mind the (green) gap

Peer-Reviewed Publication

UNIVERSITY OF ILLINOIS GRAINGER COLLEGE OF ENGINEERING

 

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LED LIGHT GREEN

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CREDIT: THE GRAINGER COLLEGE OF ENGINEERING AT UNIVERSITY OF ILLINOIS URBANA-CHAMPAIGN

Color mixing is the process of combining two or more colors: red and green make yellow, blue and red make purple, red and green and blue make white. This process of mixing colors is the basis for the future of solid-state lighting. While currently white light is achieved by phosphor down-conversion, LED color mixing actually has a higher theoretical maximum efficiency, which is needed in order to achieve the 2035 DOE energy efficiency goals. Despite the potential efficiency of color-mixed LED sources, there exists one significant challenge: green. The “green gap” is described as the lack of suitable green LEDs. Current green LEDs are made from state-of-the-art hexagonal III-nitride but only reach one third of the efficiency goals laid out in the 2035 DOE roadmap.

In a new study, researchers at the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign have found a potential path to fill the green gap and report a green-emitting cubic III-nitride active layer with 32% internal quantum efficiency (IQE), which is more than 6 times higher efficiency than what is reported in the literature for conventional cubic active layers.

“The ultimate goal is to triple the efficiency of today’s white light emitting diodes. And to do that, we need to fill the green gap in the spectrum, which is no easy task. You need innovation. And we show the innovation from the materials side by using cubic nitrides,” says electrical and computer engineering professor Can Bayram, who led this work alongside graduate student Jaekwon Lee.

The results of this research were recently published in Applied Physics Letters as an issue cover article.

Today, the most efficient white LEDs use blue light emitting diodes with a rare-earth phosphor coating that converts the blue light into yellow, green and/or red which enables white lighting. This process is called phosphor down-conversion. The phosphors are luminescent materials that can absorb and convert high energy photons (like blue light) into lower energy/longer wavelength light (such as green, yellow and red, respectively).

This process of phosphor down-conversion, however, has limitations. The down-conversion process is inherently inefficient because the high energy photons must lose energy (in the form of heat) to be converted into photons of other energies. Currently, white LEDs used in SSL generate seven times more heat than light output. Further, phosphors are chemically unstable and add significant raw material and packaging costs (by about 20%) to the LED device. Despite the increase in blue LED efficiency in recent years, SSL using phosphors only has a theoretical maximum luminous efficacy of 255 lumens/watt (lm/W) whereas LED color mixing can achieve a theoretical maximum luminous efficacy of 408 lm/W.

However, many established approaches for green LEDs are plagued with “efficiency droop” at high current densities. Achieving high-efficiency green emission has been difficult with traditional hexagonal III-nitride even with increasing the indium content—a costly element required for green emission—which leads to higher defect densities and efficiency droop. This presents a fundamental challenge for the widespread adoption of SSL.

“We found a way to synthesize low defect density, high quality, single phase cubic gallium nitride by using an aspect ratio phase trapping technique that the Bayram group has invented,” explains Lee. In aspect ratio phase trapping, defects, as well as the undesirable hexagonal phase, are "trapped" inside the grooves so that the surface of the active layer is a perfect cubic-phase material. The cubic and hexagonal phase refers to the way atoms in the materials organize themselves.

Here, the researchers developed a cubic III-nitride system that can enable highly efficient, droop-free green LEDs with a 32% IQE and only 16% indium content. This is the highest reported IQE for cubic wells with ~30% less indium than the amount needed in a traditional hexagonal well.

Bayram says that the green gap can be closed by using cubic III-nitride, as the advantages of these materials for SSL are well documented both theoretically and experimentally. Actual efficiencies of cubic devices have been hampered by the quality and purity of the cubic phase, but the novel aspect ratio phase trapping technique used in this research enables high-quality, pure cubic III-nitride.

Research in the Bayram group builds on Illinois' legacy in LED technologies, which began with longtime Illinois professor Nick Holonyak, Jr., who invented the light-emitting diode (LED) which he demonstrated on October 9, 1962.

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Can Bayram is also an affiliate of the Holonyak Micro and Nano Technology Laboratory at UIUC.

This research was funded by the Advanced Research Projects Agency-Energy (ARPA-E), the U.S. Department of Energy (under the OPEN Program), and the Office of Naval Research.

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JOURNAL

Applied Physics Letters

DOI

10.1063/5.0179477 

ARTICLE TITLE

Green-emitting cubic GaN/In0.16Ga0.84N/GaN quantum well with 32% internal quantum efficiency at room temperature

 

Learning for life: The higher the level of education, the lower the risk of dying

Scientists estimate every year of education reduces mortality by 2 per cent

Peer-Reviewed Publication

NORWEGIAN UNIVERSITY OF SCIENCE AND TECHNOLOGY

 

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“EFFECTS OF EDUCATION ON ADULT MORTALITY: A GLOBAL SYSTEMATIC REVIEW AND META-ANALYSIS”  (THE LANCET PUBLIC HEALTH, 2024) PROVIDES THE MOST COMPREHENSIVE EVIDENCE TO DATE OF THE REDUCTION IN ALL-CAUSE MORTALITY ASSOCIATED WITH EACH YEAR OF SCHOOLING.  THE STUDY WAS CONDUCTED BY THE CENTRE FOR GLOBAL HEALTH  INEQUALITIES RESEARCH (CHAIN),  IN COLLABORATION WITH THE INSTITUTE FOR HEALTH METRICS AND EVALUATION (IHME).

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CREDIT: EUROHEALTHNET.EU

Education saves lives regardless of age, sex, location, and social and demographic backgrounds. That’s according to the latest and largest study of its kind published today in The Lancet Public Health.

Researchers have known that those who reach higher levels of schooling live longer than others, but they didn’t know to what extent until now. What they found was that the risk of death drops by two per cent with every additional year of education. That means those who completed six years of primary school had a lower risk of death by an average of 13 per cent. After graduating from secondary school, the risk of dying was cut by nearly 25 per cent, and 18 years of education lowered the risk by 34 per cent.

Researchers also compared the effects of education to other risk factors such as eating a healthy diet, smoking, and drinking too much alcohol, and they found the health outcome to be similar. For example, the benefit of 18 years of education can be compared to that of eating the ideal amount of vegetables, as opposed to not eating vegetables at all. Not going to school at all is as bad for you as drinking five or more alcoholic drinks per day or smoking ten cigarettes a day for 10 years.

“Education is important in its own right, not just for its benefits on health, but now being able to quantify the magnitude of this benefit is a significant development,” said Dr. Terje Andreas Eikemo, co-author and head of Centre for Global Health Inequalities Research (CHAIN) at the Norwegian University of Science and Technology (NTNU).

While the benefits of education are greatest for young people, those older than 50 and even 70 years still benefit from the protective effects of education.

Researchers found no significant difference in the effects of education between countries that have reached different stages of development. This means that more years of education is just as effective in rich countries as in poor countries.

“We need to increase social investments to enable access to better and more education around the globe to stop the persistent inequalities that are costing lives,” said Mirza Balaj, co-lead author and postdoctoral fellow at NTNU’s Department of Sociology and Political Science. “More education leads to better employment and higher income, better access to healthcare, and helps us take care of our own health. Highly educated people also tend to develop a larger set of social and psychological resources that contribute to their health and the length of their lives.”

“Closing the education gap means closing the mortality gap, and we need to interrupt the cycle of poverty and preventable deaths with the help of international commitment,” said Claire Henson, co-lead author and researcher at Institute for Health Metrics and Evaluation (IHME) at the University of Washington’s School of Medicine. “In order to reduce inequalities in mortality, it’s important to invest in areas that promote people’s opportunities to get an education. This can have a positive effect on population health in all countries.”

The study identified data from 59 countries and included over 10,000 data points collected from over 600 published articles. Most of the studies reviewed for this study were from high-income settings, highlighting the need for more research in low- and middle-income countries, particularly from sub-Saharan and north Africa where data are scarce.

“Our focus now should be on regions of the world where we know access to schooling is low, and where there is also limited research on education as a determinant of health,” said Dr. Emmanuela Gakidou, co-author and professor at IHME.

Each year of education reduces all-cause mortality risk 

Compared to zero years of education, completing six years of education (roughly primary school level in most areas) was associated with a 13.1% reduction in all-cause mortality risk when controlling for age, sex, and marital status.  This value increased to 24.5% after 12 years and 34.3% after 18 years of education. This translates to an average 1.9% reduction per year of education across the 18 years. 

CREDIT

eurohealthnet.eu

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JOURNAL

The Lancet Public Health

DOI

10.1016/S2468-2667(23)00306-7 

METHOD OF RESEARCH

Meta-analysis

SUBJECT OF RESEARCH

Not applicable

ARTICLE TITLE

Effects of education on adult mortality: a global systematic review and meta-analysis

ARTICLE PUBLICATION DATE

23-Jan-2024

 

Diverse forests are best at standing up to storms

Peer-Reviewed Publication

BRITISH ECOLOGICAL SOCIETY

 

IMAGE: 

MIXED FOREST STAND IN SOLBÖLE, SOUTHERN FINLAND, HOSTING BOTH BROADLEAF AND CONIFER SPECIES.

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CREDIT: J. BARRERE

European forests with a greater diversity of tree species are more resilient to storms, according to new research published in the British Ecological Society journal, Functional Ecology.

A new study by researchers at the French National Research Institute for Agriculture, Food and Environment (INRAE) reveals that in Europe, the forests that are most resilient to storms are those with a greater diversity of tree species and dominated by slow growing species with high wood density, like oaks.

The researchers also found that the positive effect of tree diversity on storm resistance was more pronounced under extreme climatic conditions, such as the hot-dry conditions of the Mediterranean region and the cold-wet conditions of northern Scandinavia.

The study used simulations to model how forests with different characteristics, such as tree species diversity, resist and recover from storm damage.

In recent decades, Europe has experienced more frequent and severe windstorms that put forests and the ecosystem services they provide, such as habitat, carbon storage and timber, at risk. The researchers say their findings can aid in predicting the impact of increased storm frequency and intensity on forests and point to how we can make forests more resilient.

Dr Julien Barrere, researcher at INRAE and lead author of the study said: “An important takeaway from our study is that monocultures of fast growing species such as pine, although valuable from an economic point of view, are more susceptible to storm damage. In a context of increasing storm losses across the continent, our study therefore argues for forest management practices that promote diversity and slow growing tree species such as oak.”

In the study, the researchers created a model to simulate the dynamics of hundreds of forests after a storm, calibrating the model with data from 91,528 real-life forest plots in Europe. “Our simulated forests varied in both climate conditions, ranging from Mediterranean to Boreal, and in composition, i.e. in tree species diversity and identity.” explained Dr Barrere. “This allowed us to quantify the relationship between forest composition and resilience to storm disturbance, and how this relationship changes along the European climatic gradient.”

The researchers caution that because this is a modelling study, field work is still needed to support the findings. Dr Barrere said: “Although modelling studies like ours are essential for drawing conclusions about forest dynamics due to the long timescales in nature, the results must be interpreted with a clear understanding of the model hypotheses and complemented by field studies.”

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Belledone, a Mountain forest in autumn.

CREDIT

Credit G. Loucougary

Forested landscape at the tree line in the Belledone mountain range of the French Alps.

CREDIT

J. Barrere

JOURNAL

Functional Ecology

DOI

10.1111/1365-2435.14489 

METHOD OF RESEARCH

Computational simulation/modeling

SUBJECT OF RESEARCH

Not applicable

ARTICLE TITLE

Forest storm resilience depends on the interplay between functional composition and climate—Insights from European-scale simulations

ARTICLE PUBLICATION DATE

25-Jan-2024

 

More reporting needed to show progress on Ontario municipal climate and sustainability plans

University of Waterloo researchers will help Canadian municipalities monitor, measure and achieve climate mitigation goals

Peer-Reviewed Publication

UNIVERSITY OF WATERLOO

While sustainability reporting is a widespread practice in the private sector, new research shows that the same cannot be said for Ontario municipalities. 

Researchers at the University of Waterloo studied 38 municipalities in Ontario, representing more than two-thirds of the population, and discovered that almost all municipalities publish their sustainability and climate change goals, but under half are formally reporting on their progress. 

Municipalities are a key part of the equation for Canada to achieve its ambitious climate action targets, but the significant gap between planning and reporting makes it difficult for the public and stakeholders to stay up to date with performance, whether good or bad.

“Citizens can go online and see the financial performance of a municipality,” said Leah Feor, PhD candidate in the School of Environment, Enterprise and Development. “But they would have to dig around to see how the operations and policies of the municipality are contributing to sustainable development and climate action. It’s not always easy to find.” 

The researchers found that sustainability information is most commonly reported through annual reports, while separate sustainability reports are scarce and appear to be decreasing over time. The study further showed that provincial regulation does not guarantee that municipalities will publish Energy Conservation and Demand Management plans and reporting documents on their public websites.

“A regulation isn’t a silver bullet for ensuring municipalities adopt planning and reporting practices,” said Feor. “If we want to see province-wide adoption, then we will need to see more guidance, capacity building, and potentially funding from the top. Otherwise, it will be driven bottom-up, and some municipalities will excel, and others will lag.”

The next phase of this work is in progress under the Municipal Net-Zero Action Research Partnership (N-ZAP) to support Canadian municipalities in monitoring, measuring, and achieving their climate mitigation goals. Feor will interview municipalities across Canada identified as leaders in this space to provide insights for municipalities and other levels of government in Canada seeking to standardize practices, strengthen data, and support the achievement of climate commitments. 

The work to support Canadian municipalities in achieving net-zero greenhouse gas emissions goals is the latest in Waterloo’s efforts to promote environmental innovation, solutions and talent and be a leader in sustainability research and education. 

The study, Municipal Sustainability and Climate Planning: A Study of 38 Canadian Local Governments’ Plans and Reports, appears in the journal Environments. 

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JOURNAL

Environments