What animal societies can teach us about ageing

University of Leeds

Red deer may become less sociable as they grow old to reduce the risk of picking up diseases, while older house sparrows seem to have fewer social interactions as their peers die off, according to new research which shows humans are not the only animals to change our social behaviour as we age. 

A collection of 16 studies, including six from the University of Leeds, have been published today as part of a special issue of the Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society, investigating ageing and society across the natural world.   

One study into red deer shows that as older female deer become less and less social with age, cutting down on competition and reducing their risk of parasite infection. The study used data from a long-running project tracking a wild herd on the Scottish island of Rum. 

Dr Josh Firth from the University of Leeds’ School of Biology, an editor of the Special Issue, said that while previous research has often considered the process of becoming less social with age, known as “social ageing,” as potentially negative, these studies show changing habits could in fact bring benefits. 

Dr Firth said: “These kinds of effects might be expected across societies, where individuals might avoid social interactions as they become more vulnerable to the costs of infection. 

“Animal populations are a great way of considering the fundamental rules of how ageing may shape societies.” 

Like older humans who cut down their social interactions to avoid infections like Covid-19 – “shielding” during the pandemic in 2020 and 2021 – the less sociable older does are less likely to pick up certain parasite infections. 

“Wild animals provide a good model system for considering the costs and benefits of changing social behaviour with age, and in this case may provide an example of ageing individuals reducing their social connections to avoid disease,” Dr Firth added. 

The special edition is an international collaboration and looks at how individuals of different species age, how this shapes their social interactions, and what this means for their societies. 

Dr Greg Albery from Trinity College Dublin, a co-editor on the Special Issue, said: "Because ageing is a universal process, and all animals live in some sort of social context, the topics that we discuss in detail can have really far-ranging implications. The hope is that in understanding the diversity of ageing and sociality across lots of different species, we can shine a light on the processes governing our own society in a time when understanding ageing is particularly important.” 

Even the common garden bird the house sparrow changes its social behaviour as it ages, according to another paper in the collection. Co-author of this research, Dr Jamie Dunning said: 

“Our study is one of the first to suggest that birds, like mammals, also reduce the size of their social network as they age. Specifically, the number of friendships, and how central a bird is to the wider social network, declined with age.” 

The results may be driven by existing friends of same cohort groups dying as they age, and because it takes more effort for older birds to make friendships with fewer same-age individuals available to bond with. Conversely, the benefits of social connections may be lower than they are for younger individuals, who may come to rely on those connections for things like reproduction or information later in life, Dr Dunning added.  

The house sparrow study was led by Dr Julia Schroeder at Imperial College London, the academic lead of the long-term house sparrow study on the English island of Lundy. With no sparrows either arriving in the remote island population or leaving it, researchers can monitor the whole population from birth to death and everything in between in exceptional detail. In future, Dr Schroeder said they are interested in investigating how and when individual friendships are formed. 

The research collection shows that the social effects of ageing are a very general biological phenomenon, extending even to fruit flies. 

The new Special Issue also considers the social lives of insects. Research leader Professor Amanda Bretman3 said: “In humans, a poor social environment can have the same level of impact as smoking or obesity on healthy ageing. We also know that the same is true for other animals, but most of the work is focussed on animals we think have complex societies like chimps or bees. We systematically reviewed evidence that even in insects we don’t usually think of as having complex social lives, their social environment has some big impacts on their lifespan and ageing.” 

The studies reveal interesting patterns, she added, showing that sexes can respond differently, that the social environment during development or adulthood can have different impacts, and that the age of social partners is important. 

The subjects Prof Bretman’s team worked with, Drosophila fruit flies, were easy to manipulate in the laboratory meaning they could get a much more detailed and mechanistic understanding of why social ageing happens, which could eventually lead to new interventions to support healthy ageing in humans. 

Animal systems are now widely considered as well placed for developing our fundamental understanding of ageing societies, Dr Firth added. 

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Journal

Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society of London

DOI

10.1098/rstb.2022.0469 

Method of Research

Literature review

Subject of Research

Animals

Article Title

Understanding age and society using natural populations

Article Publication Date

28-Oct-2024

Dinosaurs thrived after ice, not fire, says a new study of ancient volcanism

The Triassic-Jurassic extinction was a very sudden event, researchers assert

Columbia Climate School

 

image: 

Deposits in Morocco associated with the Triassic-Jurassic mass extinction, 201.6 million years ago. Red sediments in many locations around the world contain Triassic-era fossils. The white band on top of them is where the sediments were altered by massive volcanism, as evidenced by the gray/black basalt layers topping the assemblage.

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Credit: Paul Olsen/Lamont-Doherty Earth Observatory

201.6 million years ago, one of the Earth's five great mass extinctions took place, when three-quarters of all living species suddenly disappeared. The wipeout coincided with massive volcanic eruptions that split apart Pangaea, a giant continent then comprising almost all the planet's land. Millions of cubic miles of lava erupted over some 600,000 years, separating what are now the Americas, Europe and North Africa. It marked the end of the Triassic period and the beginning of the Jurassic, the period when dinosaurs arose to take the place of Triassic creatures and dominate the planet.

The exact mechanisms of the End Triassic Extinction have long been debated, but most prominent: Carbon dioxide surfaced by the eruptions built up over many millennia, raising temperatures to unsustainable levels for many creatures, and acidifying the oceans. But a new study says the opposite: cold, not warmth was the main culprit. The study presents evidence that instead of stretching over hundreds of thousands of years, the first pulses of lava that ended the Triassic were stupendous events lasting less than a century each. In this condensed time frame, sunlight-reflecting sulfate particles were spewed into the atmosphere, cooling the planet and freezing many of its inhabitants. Gradually rising temperatures in an environment that was hot to begin with—atmospheric carbon dioxide in the late Triassic was already three times today's level—may have finished the job later on, but it was volcanic winters that did the most damage, say the researchers.

"Carbon dioxide and sulfates act not just in opposite ways, but opposite time frames," said lead author Dennis Kent of the Columbia Climate School's Lamont-Doherty Earth Observatory. "It takes a long time for carbon dioxide to build up and heat things, but the effect of sulfates is pretty much instant. It brings us into the realm of what humans can grasp. These events happened in the span of a lifetime."

The study was just published in the journal Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.

The Triassic-Jurassic extinction has long been thought tied to the eruption of the so-called Central Atlantic Magmatic Province, or CAMP. In a groundbreaking 2013 study, Kent and colleagues provided perhaps the most definitive link. Kent, who studies paleomagnetism, identified a consistent polarity reversal in sediments just below the initial CAMP eruptions, which showed they all happened at the same time across what are now widespread parts of the world. Colleagues then used radioactive isotopes to date the start of volcanism to 201,564,000 years ago, give or take a few tens of thousands of years. Scientists were unable to say how big the initial eruptions were, but it was assumed by many that the massive CAMP deposits must have taken many millennia to build up.

In the new study, Kent and colleagues correlated data from CAMP deposits in the mountains of Morocco, along Nova Scotia's Bay of Fundy, and New Jersey's Newark Basin. Their key evidence: the alignments of magnetic particles in the rocks that recorded the past drifting of Earth's magnetic pole at the time of the eruptions. Due to a complex set of processes, this pole is offset from the planet's unchanging axis of rotation—true north—and to boot, changes position by a few tenths of a degree each year. (The reason that compasses do not point exactly north.) Because of this phenomenon, magnetic particles in lavas that were emplaced within a few decades of each other will all point in the same direction, while ones emplaced, say, thousands of years later will point 20 or 30 degrees in a different direction.

What the researchers found was five successive initial CAMP lava pulses spread over about 40,000 years—each with the magnetic particles aligned in a single direction, indicating the lava pulse had emerged in less than 100 years, before drift of the magnetic pole could manifest itself. They say that these huge eruptions released so many sulfates so quickly that the sun was largely blocked out, causing temperatures to plunge. Unlike carbon dioxide, which hangs around for centuries, volcanic sulfate aerosols tend to rain out of the atmosphere within years, so resulting cold spells don't last very long. But due to the rapidity and size of the eruptions, these volcanic winters were devastating. The researchers compared the CAMP series to sulfates from the 1783 eruption of Iceland's Laki volcano, which caused widespread crop failures; just the initial CAMP pulses were hundreds of times greater, they say.

In sediments just below the CAMP layers lie Triassic-era fossils: large terrestrial and semiaquatic relatives of crocodiles, strange tree lizards, giant, flat-headed amphibians, and many tropical plants. Then they disappear with the CAMP eruptions. Small feathered dinosaurs had been around for tens of millions of years before this, and survived, eventually to thrive and get much larger, along with turtles, true lizards, and mammals, possibly because they were small and could survive in burrows.

"The magnitude of the environmental effects are related to how concentrated the events are," said study coauthor Paul Olsen, a paleontologist at Lamont-Doherty. "Small events spread out over [tens of thousands of years] produce much less of an effect than the same total volume of volcanism concentrated in less than a century. The overarching implication being that the CAMP lavas represent extraordinarily concentrated events."

* * * * *

The study was coauthored by Huapei Wang of China University of Geosciences, Morgan Schaller of Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute and Mohammed Et-Touhami of Morocco's Université Mohamed Premier.

 

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Journal

Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences

Method of Research

Meta-analysis

Subject of Research

Not applicable

Article Title

Correlation of sub-centennial-scale pulses of initial Central Atlantic Magmatic Province lavas and the End-Triassic extinctions

Article Publication Date

28-Oct-2024

PhD student discovers lost Maya city with pyramids in Campeche, Mexico jungle

Interesting Engineering
Tue, October 29, 2024 

Archaeologists have uncovered over 6,500 previously unknown Maya structures, including a hidden city with grand pyramids, within southeast Mexico. This major discovery highlights the impressive and populous ancient Maya landscape that had long been hidden beneath dense forests and modern settlements.

Lead author Luke Auld-Thomas, a PhD student from Northern Arizona University noted the significance of the find, saying, “We didn’t just find rural areas and smaller settlements… We also found a large city with pyramids right next to the area’s only highway, near a town where people have been actively farming among the ruins for years.”

Using LiDAR technology, which stands for Light Detection and Ranging, researchers were able to peer beneath the forest canopy in eastern Campeche, a lesser-studied region of the Maya civilization.

This powerful remote-sensing technique, which fires laser pulses to generate highly accurate 3D models of the landscape, revealed intricate details of Maya urbanism in an area that had remained unexplored by archaeologists until now.
A lush, urbanized landscape

The study focused on a roughly 50-square-mile area in east-central Campeche, an “unmapped” zone in Maya archaeology. By analyzing LiDAR data initially gathered in 2013 to monitor carbon in Mexico’s forests, researchers discovered the hidden expanse of Maya settlements.

The Maya civilization thrived during the Classic Period (A.D. 250–900), and areas like the central Maya Lowlands—covering parts of Guatemala, Belize, and the Mexican states of Campeche and Quintana Roo—were hubs of advanced urbanism.

“Our analysis not only revealed a picture of a region that was dense with settlements, but it also revealed a lot of variability,” explained Auld-Thomas. Many of the newly found sites, including the urban area called Valeriana, showcase the diversity and scale of Maya settlements.

A map shows details of the Valeriana site's core in Campeche state, Mexico. Image Credit: Antiquity 2024

This “major urban area” includes two main hubs of monumental structures connected by continuous settlements, along with evidence of sophisticated landscape engineering that supported such a large population.

The Valeriana site contains multiple plazas, grand pyramids, a ball court, and a large reservoir created by damming an arroyo, or dry creek bed—a design common in Maya cities to capture seasonal rainwater for use in arid months.

The findings shed light on the Classic Maya’s ability to transform their natural surroundings into a highly organized, urban landscape. This discovery reshapes our understanding of Maya cities, showing that much of the central Maya Lowlands was as densely populated and urban as other ancient civilizations.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=k1TO7-iG8Jw
Unseen depths of the Maya civilization

The study challenges previous assumptions about the Maya civilization by unveiling a picture of a more interconnected and urbanized society than previously known. While archaeologists have long understood that the Maya occupied and engineered vast tracts of land in the region, certain areas like east-central Campeche had largely escaped scientific attention.

By focusing on this “blank spot” in Maya archaeology, Auld-Thomas’s team has opened new doors to understanding the scope and organization of the ancient Maya.

LiDAR technology has become essential in modern archaeology, especially for exploring dense forests like those covering the Maya Lowlands. “Scientists in ecology, forestry and civil engineering have been using LiDAR surveys to study some of these areas for totally separate purposes,” Auld-Thomas added.

However, the technology is uniquely suited to archaeology, as it can reveal hidden structures buried under vegetation, exposing sites that would otherwise remain unknown.

The Valeriana site is a stark example of just how much more there is to uncover. The researchers wrote in the study, “The discovery of Valeriana highlights the fact that there are still major gaps in our knowledge of the existence or absence of large sites within as-yet unmapped areas of the Maya Lowlands.”



They concluded that the latest findings, when added to current knowledge, indicate that dense cities and extensive settlements were common across large portions of the central Maya Lowlands.

The findings are detailed in the journal Antiquity.

PhD student finds lost city in Mexico jungle by accident

Georgina Rannard -BBC  Science reporter
Tue, October 29, 2024

A huge Maya city has been discovered centuries after it disappeared under jungle canopy in Mexico.

Archaeologists found pyramids, sports fields, causeways connecting districts and amphitheatres in the southeastern state of Campeche.

They uncovered the hidden complex - which they have called Valeriana - using Lidar, a type of laser survey that maps structures buried under vegetation.

They believe it is second in density only to Calakmul, thought to be the largest Maya site in ancient Latin America.

The team discovered three sites in total, in a survey area the size of Scotland's capital Edinburgh, “by accident” when one archaeologist browsed data on the internet.

“I was on something like page 16 of Google search and found a laser survey done by a Mexican organisation for environmental monitoring,” explains Luke Auld-Thomas, a PhD student at Tulane university in the US.

It was a Lidar survey, a remote sensing technique which fires thousands of laser pulses from a plane and maps objects below using the time the signal takes to return.

But when Mr Auld-Thomas processed the data with methods used by archaeologists, he saw what others had missed - a huge ancient city which may have been home to 30-50,000 people at its peak from 750 to 850 AD.

That is more than the number of people who live in the region today, the researchers say.

Mr Auld-Thomas and his colleagues named the city Valeriana after a nearby lagoon.

The find helps change an idea in Western thinking that the Tropics was where “civilisations went to die”, says Professor Marcello Canuto, a co-author in the research.

Instead, this part of the world was home to rich and complex cultures, he explains.

We can’t be sure what led to the demise and eventual abandonment of the city, but the archaeologists say climate change was a major factor.

There are no pictures of the city but it had pyramid temples similar to this one in nearby Calakmul [Getty Images]

Valeriana has the “hallmarks of a capital city” and was second only in density of buildings to the spectacular Calakmul site, around 100km away (62 miles).

It is “hidden in plain sight”, the archaeologists say, as it is just 15 minutes hike from a major road near Xpujil where mostly Maya people now live.

There are no known pictures of the lost city because “no-one has ever been there”, the researchers say, although local people may have suspected there were ruins under the mounds of earth.

The city, which was about 16.6 sq km, had two major centres with large buildings around 2km (1.2 miles) apart, linked by dense houses and causeways.

It has two plazas with temple pyramids, where Maya people would have worshipped, hidden treasures like jade masks and buried their dead.

It also had a court where people would have played an ancient ball game.

How ancient Maya cities have withstood the ravages of time

There was also evidence of a reservoir, indicating that people used the landscape to support a large population.

In total, Mr Auld-Thomas and Prof Canuto surveyed three different sites in the jungle. They found 6,764 buildings of various sizes.

The ruins were found in eastern Mexico, in Campeche [BBC]

Professor Elizabeth Graham from University College London, who was not involved in the research, says it supports claims that Maya lived in complex cities or towns, not in isolated villages.

"The point is that the landscape is definitely settled - that is, settled in the past - and not, as it appears to the naked eye, uninhabited or ‘wild’," she says.

The research suggests that when Maya civilisations collapsed from 800AD onwards, it was partly because they were so densely populated and could not survive climate problems.

"It's suggesting that the landscape was just completely full of people at the onset of drought conditions and it didn't have a lot of flexibility left. And so maybe the entire system basically unravelled as people moved farther away," says Mr Auld-Thomas.

Warfare and the conquest of the region by Spanish invaders in the 16th century also contributed to eradication of Maya city states.

Evidence of the ruins were found by a plane using laser remote sensing to map beneath the jungle canopy [Getty Images]

Many more cities could be found

Lidar technology has revolutionised how archaeologists survey areas covered in vegetation, like the Tropics, opening up a world of lost civilisations, explains Prof Canuto.

In the early years of his career, surveys were done by foot and hand, using simple instruments to check the ground inch by inch.

But in the decade since Lidar was used in the Mesoamerican region, he says it’s mapped around 10 times the area that archaeologists managed in about a century of work.

Mr Auld-Thomas says his work suggests there are many sites out there that archaeologists have no idea about.

In fact so many sites have been found that researchers cannot hope to excavate them all.

"I've got to go to Valeriana at some point. It's so close to the road, how could you not? But I can't say we will do a project there," says Mr Auld-Thomas.



"One of the downsides of discovering lots of new Maya cities in the era of Lidar is that there are more of them than we can ever hope to study," he adds.

The research is published in the academic journal Antiquity.


Lost Mayan city discovered under Mexican jungle by accident

Sarah Knapton
Tue, October 29, 2024

The city, which has been named Valeriana by archaeologists, was found by studying laser scans

A lost Mayan city, complete with pyramids and a ball court, has been discovered buried deep under the Mexican jungle.

The city, which has been named Valeriana by archaeologists, was found by studying laser scans that had been taken in 2013 as part of a forest monitoring project in the southeastern state of Campeche.

The scans unveiled the outlines of multiple enclosed plazas, temple pyramids, a reservoir and several curved amphitheatre-like patios in the city, which is thought to be the second-largest of its kind in Latin America.



The team said Valeriana had “all the hallmarks of a Classical Maya political capital” and, at its peak, may have been home to up to 50,000 people between AD 750 and 850.

The find was initially made by Luke Auld-Thomas, a doctoral student at Tulane University in New Orleans, who was browsing Google to find out if anyone had carried out a Lidar (light detecting and ranging) survey of the area.

“Scientists in ecology, forestry and civil engineering have been using Lidar surveys to study some of these areas for totally separate purposes,” said Mr Auld-Thomas. “So what if a lidar survey of this area already existed?”

Lidar works by firing a short laser pulse from a plane or satellite and recording the time it takes for the signal to bounce back.

Mr Auld-Thomas discovered a laser survey of around 50 square miles of dense Mexican forest which was rarely visited, even by locals.

While there are no pictures of the city, it may have looked similar to ruins in Calakmul

Working with colleagues, he studied the maps and found a dense, vast array of totally unstudied Maya settlements dotted throughout the region, comprising 6,674 undiscovered Mayan structures.

“Our analysis not only revealed a picture of a region that was dense with settlements, but it also revealed a lot of variability,” said Mr Auld-Thomas. “We didn’t just find rural areas and smaller settlements.

“We also found a large city with pyramids right next to the area’s only highway, near a town where people have been actively farming among the ruins for years.



“The government never knew about it; the scientific community never knew about it. That really puts an exclamation point behind the statement that, no, we have not found everything, and yes, there’s a lot more to be discovered.”

Scans unveil more sites discovered in the lost Mayan city

Valeriana comprised two major hubs of monumental architecture 1.2 miles apart, which were linked by continuous dense settlement and landscape engineering and watercourses. It also appears to have pyramids like those at the famous sites of Chichén Itzá or Tikal.

A ball court, where the ancient Mayan game of Pitz may have been played, was also found. The game could last two weeks, and its aim was to get the ball to the other side of the court without dropping it using only the hip, knee or elbow.

The team are now planning to conduct fieldwork in the areas identified on the survey.

The findings are published in the journal Antiquity.

Ancient lost Mayan city with pyramids discovered accidentally by student

Vishwam Sankaran
Wed, October 30, 2024 


Ancient lost Mayan city with pyramids discovered accidentally by student

An American student analysing publicly available data found a sprawling Mayan city with thousands of undiscovered structures, including pyramids, under a Mexican forest.

The data came from laser scans of the Campeche region and revealed a buried world, since named “Valeriana”, with nearly 6,700 undiscovered structures.

Archeologists have been using laser scanning lidar technology to assess anomalies in landscapes across the Yucatan peninsula in Central America and stumbling upon pyramids, family houses and other Mayan infrastructure.

For a long time, surveys to find ancient structures sampled just a couple of hundred square kilometres. “That sample was hard won by archaeologists who painstakingly walked over every square metre, hacking away at the vegetation with machetes, to see if they were standing on a pile of rocks that might have been someone’s home 1,500 years ago,” said Luke Auld-Thomas, PhD candidate at the Northern Arizona University who made the discovery.

In recent years, researchers have been analysing data from lidar scans taken for unrelated purposes to look for evidence of Mayan structures.

Ancient buildings and landscape modifications, including public plazas, agricultural terraces and field walls, discovered under Mexican forest (Auld-Thomas et al, Antiquity)

Mr Auld-Thomas analysed data from one such lidar project from 2013, focused on measuring and monitoring carbon in Mexico’s forests, to see what lay underneath 50 square miles of Campeche. “I was on something like page 16 of Google search and found a laser survey done by a Mexican organisation for environmental monitoring,” he told the BBC.

Analysing the data using modern archaeological methods revealed a dense and diverse array of Mayan settlements, including one sprawling city dating to between 250 to 900AD.

“The government never knew about it, the scientific community never knew about it. That really puts an exclamation point behind the statement that, no, we have not found everything, and yes, there’s a lot more to be discovered,” Mr Auld-Thomas said.

His study was recently published in the journal Antiquity.

The lost city has “all the hallmarks of a Classic Maya political capital”, Mr Auld-Thomas noted. “We did not just find rural areas and smaller settlements. We also found a large city with pyramids right next to the area’s only highway, near a town where people have been actively farming among the ruins for years.”

Studying such ancient cities could help solve modern problems facing urban development, researchers said. “There were cities that were sprawling agricultural patchworks and hyperdense,” Mr Auld-Thomas said. “Given the environmental and social challenges we are facing from rapid population growth, it can only help to study ancient cities and expand our view of what urban living can look like.”

Laser archeology finds lost Maya cities hidden under forests

Saul Elbein
Tue, October 29, 2024


Laser imaging of the rainforests of Mexico’s Yucatan peninsula have turned up thousands of ancient Maya structures — and an entire previously unknown city, a new study has found.

By flying aircraft over jungle in the Mexican state of Campeche and pummeling the trees with laser pulses, scientists have shown that beneath the forest lie the ruins of both a dense city and its crowded suburban hinterlands, according to results published on Tuesday in Antiquity.

The Yucatan is remarkable for being an essentially post-apocalyptic landscape, where over the past millennium forests returned to fill in the parks and boulevards of once-powerful Maya cities like Tikal and El Mirador after their inhabitants left them around 900 CE.

On the east side of the peninsula, for example, the Sian Ka’an Biosphere Reserve sprawls over the ruins of the ancient city of Muyil — where crocodiles swim through straight-line creeks that were once urban canals and howler monkeys swing through the trees above lakes that were once city reservoirs.

That combination of dense forest atop the long-vanished cities of what was once a dense urban region has meant a succession of surprising finds for archeologists. Last year, for example, Slovenian archeologist Ivan Šprajc found a significant regional hub — which he called Ocomtun — in the “black hole” of the Balamku Biosphere Reserve, in the center of Campeche.

As it did for Šprajc, the lack of easy road access forced the Antiquity researchers to turn to a high-tech solution to penetrate the trees: aircraft using LiDAR (light detection and ranging) to scan the forest, looking for obstructed and impermeable stone structures.

The new sites described in Antiquity are a combination of rural farming villages, regional market towns and “a large city with pyramids,”coathor Luke Auld-Thomas said in a statement.



LiDAR, he added, “allows us to map large areas very quickly, and at really high precision and levels of detail, that made us react, ‘Oh wow, there are so many buildings out there we didn’t know about, the population must have been huge.’”

Those surprising findings — indicating huge populations in places where the conventional historical record suggests they should not have been — represent part of the promise of LiDAR‘s use in archeology. The technology has also been used to find lost cities beneath the Amazon rainforest in Bolivia and Ecuador, upending established narratives that the region lacked a deep history of dense urban life — and suggesting that vast Amazonian metropolises of the present day like Manaus and Iquitos might be less modern innovation than a return to an ancient pattern.

“LiDAR is teaching us that, like many other ancient civilizations, the lowland Maya built a diverse tapestry of towns and communities over their tropical landscape,” coauthor Marcello Canuto, a professor of anthropology at Tulane, said in a statement.

Some newly discovered areas are Maya fields and farming villages, which offer insight about ancient rural life, Canuto said, while others once sported “dense populations.”

In 2018, Canuto and his team used LiDAR to uncover 60,000 previously unknown Maya structures beneath the Maya Biosphere Reserve in Northern Guatemala, a park that also houses the well-known site of Tikal, according to National Geographic.

“LiDAR is revolutionizing archaeology the way the Hubble Space Telescope revolutionized astronomy,” Francisco Estrada-Belli, a colleague of Canuto’s at Tulane, told National Geographic at the time. “We’ll need 100 years to go through all [the data] and really understand what we’re seeing.”

Whether the settlements discovered are big or small, in all cases, Canuto noted the new sites hidden beneath the forest show how the Maya managed their environment “to support a long-lived complex society” — urban structures that still shape the movement of animals through the forests that covered them.

The sites announced on Tuesday are, at least by the standards of the Yucatan, in plain sight. They were “right next to the area’s only highway, near a town where people have been actively farming among the ruins for years,” Auld-Thomas said.

But despite that local knowledge, Auld-Thomas said, “the government never knew about it; the scientific community never knew about it.”

The discovery, he added, “really puts an exclamation point behind the statement that, no, we have not found everything, and yes, there’s a lot more to be discovered.”

Copyright 2024 Nexstar Media, Inc. All rights reserved. This material may not be published, broadcast, rewritten, or redistributed.

 

Have we found all the major Maya cities? Not even close, new research suggests

Tulane University

Using laser-guided imaging to peer through dense jungle forests, Tulane University researchers have uncovered vast unexplored Maya settlements in Mexico and a better understanding of the ancient civilization's extent and complexity.

The new research, published in the journal Antiquity, was led by Tulane University anthropology doctoral student Luke Auld-Thomas and his advisor, Professor Marcello A. Canuto.

The team used lidar, a laser-based detection system, to survey 50 square miles of land in Campeche, Mexico, an area largely overlooked by archaeologists. Their findings included evidence of more than 6,500 pre-Hispanic structures, including a previously unknown large city complete with iconic stone pyramids.

“Our analysis not only revealed a picture of a region that was dense with settlements, but it also revealed a lot of variability,” said Auld-Thomas, a doctoral student in Tulane’s Anthropology Department and instructor at Northern Arizona University. “We didn’t just find rural areas and smaller settlements. We also found a large city with pyramids right next to the area’s only highway, near a town where people have been actively farming among the ruins for years. The government never knew about it; the scientific community never knew about it. That really puts an exclamation point behind the statement that, no, we have not found everything, and yes, there’s a lot more to be discovered.”

The Middle American Research Institute (MARI) at Tulane University has been pioneering the use of lidar technology in archaeological research. Over the past decade, the MARI has built a state-of-the art Geographic Information Systems (GIS) lab, managed by Francisco Estrada-Belli, to analyze remote sensing data, such as lidar.

Lidar technology uses laser pulses to measure distances and create three-dimensional models of specific areas. It has allowed scientists to scan large swaths of land from the comfort of a computer lab, uncovering anomalies in the landscape that often prove to be pyramids, family houses and other examples Maya infrastructure.

“Thanks to generous funding from the Hitz Foundation, MARI has been at the forefront of the use of lidar technology in archaeological research over the past decade,” said Canuto, director of the MARI. “Now our efforts are expanding from data analysis to data collection and acquisition. The work conducted on these data from Campeche represent how MARI’s ‘lidar footprint’ is expanding.”

This research may also help resolve ongoing debates about the true extent of Maya settlements.

"Because lidar allows us to map large areas very quickly, and at really high precision and levels of detail, that made us react, 'Oh wow, there are so many buildings out there we didn't know about, the population must have been huge,’” Auld-Thomas said. “The counterargument was that lidar surveys were still too tethered to known, large sites, such as Tikal, and therefore had developed a distorted image of the Maya lowlands. What if the rest of the Maya area was far more rural and what we had mapped so far was the exception instead of the rule?"

The study highlights the transformative power of lidar technology in unveiling the secrets of ancient civilizations. It also provides compelling evidence of a more complex and varied Maya landscape than previously thought.

"Lidar is teaching us that, like many other ancient civilizations, the lowland Maya built a diverse tapestry of towns and communities over their tropical landscape,” Canuto said. “While some areas are replete with vast agricultural patches and dense populations, others have only small communities. Nonetheless, we can now see how much the ancient Maya changed their environment to support a long-lived complex society."

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Journal

Antiquity

DOI

10.15184/aqy.2024.148 

Subject of Research

Not applicable

Article Title

Running. out of empty space: environmental lidar and the crowded ancient landscape of Campeche, Mexico

Article Publication Date

29-Oct-2024

 

Researchers’ new outreach strategy succeeds, sets blueprint for detecting invasive species in Florida

University of Florida

 

image: 

Nile monitor in Florida

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Credit: UF Croc Docs

Invasive species in Florida like Nile monitors and Argentine black-and-white tegus pose a growing threat to the Sunshine State’s environment, economy and public safety. South Florida’s warm climate, disturbed habitats and bustling pet trade have made it a hotspot for these non-native, cryptic reptiles. However, finding these elusive creatures has always been a challenge – until now.

University of Florida researchers are showcasing how a focused outreach initiative in Palm Beach County has led to a successful increase in reports of invasive reptiles in Florida. The findings are documented in the latest study published in Scientific Reports and authored by researchers at UF/IFAS Fort Lauderdale Research and Education Center.

This initiative addresses the growing threat posed by non-native reptiles to the environment, economy and public health in South Florida.

 “When species are rare and hard to find, it helps to get a lot of eyes looking for them. Targeted outreach does that,” said Frank Mazzotti, professor of wildlife ecology and lead author of the study. “Community involvement not only proves to help us find invasive species but provides opportunities to increase awareness as well.”

Targeted outreach involves delivering specific messages to audiences in designated locations to achieve desired outcomes. In this case, the goal was to encourage residents and workers in the C-51 Basin and surrounding areas in Palm Beach County to report sightings of large invasive lizards, such as Nile monitors, to the Florida Fish and Wildlife Conservation Commission (FWC) IVE-GOT1 hotline or through EDDMapS.

EDDMapS is a website that maps the distribution of non-native species in the United States and Canada through documented reporting provided by experts and the general public throughout those two countries.

From 2018 to 2020, the project’s targeted outreach efforts reached over 112,000 people and households through various methods including in-person, online and virtual.

Subsequently, researchers engaged 53,657 people on social media, presented webinars to 229 individuals, sent email newsletters to 34,350 recipients, conducted an online survey with 520 participants and potentially reached up to 20,000 people through print media.

These efforts led to 55 reported sightings of Nile monitors and Argentine black and white tegus in Palm Beach County and the surrounding area, with 32 of these reports directly attributed to UF/IFAS’ outreach.

The data gathered by the project showed that newspapers brought in the most reports, helping UF/IFAS researchers identify more invasive reptiles. In-person methods, such as door hangers and presentations allowed for face-to-face engagement, making residents feel more confident in reporting what they spotted. Social media proved to be a time-efficient way to spread the message far and wide, allowing even more people to become part of the effort.

 “We learned valuable lessons regarding the effectiveness of different targeted outreach methods for detection of invasive wildlife,” said Mazzotti. “Targeted outreach can be done by a broad community of environmental educators. These methods can be replicated in other locations with different target species, which could lead to an increase in local understanding of the status and range of invasive species in Florida, and ultimately improved management and monitoring programs.”

Invasive species in Florida like Nile monitors and Argentine black-and-white tegus pose a growing threat to the Sunshine State’s environment, economy and public safety. South Florida’s warm climate, disturbed habitats and bustling pet trade have made it a hotspot for these non-native, cryptic reptiles. However, finding these elusive creatures has always been a challenge – until now.

University of Florida researchers are showcasing how a focused outreach initiative in Palm Beach County has led to a successful increase in reports of invasive reptiles in Florida. The findings are documented in the latest study published in Scientific Reports and authored by researchers at UF/IFAS Fort Lauderdale Research and Education Center.

This initiative addresses the growing threat posed by non-native reptiles to the environment, economy and public health in South Florida.

 “When species are rare and hard to find, it helps to get a lot of eyes looking for them. Targeted outreach does that,” said Frank Mazzotti, professor of wildlife ecology and lead author of the study. “Community involvement not only proves to help us find invasive species but provides opportunities to increase awareness as well.”

Targeted outreach involves delivering specific messages to audiences in designated locations to achieve desired outcomes. In this case, the goal was to encourage residents and workers in the C-51 Basin and surrounding areas in Palm Beach County to report sightings of large invasive lizards, such as Nile monitors, to the Florida Fish and Wildlife Conservation Commission (FWC) IVE-GOT1 hotline or through EDDMapS.

EDDMapS is a website that maps the distribution of non-native species in the United States and Canada through documented reporting provided by experts and the general public throughout those two countries.

From 2018 to 2020, the project’s targeted outreach efforts reached over 112,000 people and households through various methods including in-person, online and virtual.

Subsequently, researchers engaged 53,657 people on social media, presented webinars to 229 individuals, sent email newsletters to 34,350 recipients, conducted an online survey with 520 participants and potentially reached up to 20,000 people through print media.

These efforts led to 55 reported sightings of Nile monitors and Argentine black and white tegus in Palm Beach County and the surrounding area, with 32 of these reports directly attributed to UF/IFAS’ outreach.

The data gathered by the project showed that newspapers brought in the most reports, helping UF/IFAS researchers identify more invasive reptiles. In-person methods, such as door hangers and presentations allowed for face-to-face engagement, making residents feel more confident in reporting what they spotted. Social media proved to be a time-efficient way to spread the message far and wide, allowing even more people to become part of the effort.

 “We learned valuable lessons regarding the effectiveness of different targeted outreach methods for detection of invasive wildlife,” said Mazzotti. “Targeted outreach can be done by a broad community of environmental educators. These methods can be replicated in other locations with different target species, which could lead to an increase in local understanding of the status and range of invasive species in Florida, and ultimately improved management and monitoring programs.”

  

A tegu captured in South Florida

Credit

UF/IFAS Cat Wofford

Eric Suarez, invasive species research program coordinator, holds a tegu

Credit

UF/IFAS Cat Wofford

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Journal

Scientific Reports

DOI

10.1038/s41598-024-73286-y 

Article Title

Employing targeted outreach to improve community involvement in detecting invasive Nile monitors (Varanus niloticus) in Florida

 

Study shows natural regrowth of tropical forests has immense potential to address environmental concerns

A potential regrowth area larger than Mexico could store 23.4 gigatons of carbon

University of Maryland Baltimore County

 

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Joshua Slaughter (left) and Matthew Fagan discuss a map of forest patches in Costa Rica. A global map of potential natural forest regrowth areas developed in a new Nature study led by Brooke Williams and Hawthorne Beyer and based on a global forest patch database developed by Fagan suggests that an area larger than the size of Mexico in the tropics has the potential to regrow and store 23.4 gigatons of carbon. (Marlayna Demond/UMBC)

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Credit: Marlayna Demond/UMBC

A new study in Nature finds that up to 215 million hectares of land (an area larger than Mexico) in humid tropical regions around the world has the potential to naturally regrow. That much forest could store 23.4 gigatons of carbon over 30 years and also have a significant impact on concerns like biodiversity loss and water quality. The study showed that more than half of the area with strong potential for regrowth was in five countries: Brazil, Mexico, Indonesia, China, and Colombia. 

“Tree planting in degraded landscapes can be costly. By leveraging natural regeneration techniques, nations can meet their restoration goals cost effectively,” says the study’s co-lead author, Brooke Williams, a researcher at  the Queensland University of Technology, Australia, and the Institute for Capacity Exchange in Environmental Decisions. “Our model can guide where these savings can best be taken advantage of,” she says. 

A culmination of decades of work

Matthew Fagan, associate professor of geography and environmental systems at University of Maryland, Baltimore County (UMBC) and second author on the new study, developed a data set the authors relied on.

In that work, “We used satellite images to identify millions of small areas where tree cover increased over time. We then excluded the areas planted by humans with machine learning, focusing on natural regrowth,” Fagan says. The study tracked regrowth between 2000 and 2012, and then checked if the regrowth was maintained through 2015. “Those natural patches were the input data for this novel study,” he says, “the first to predict where future forest regrowth will occur, given observed past regrowth.” 

The study, co-led by Hawthorne Beyer, head of geospatial science at Mombak, a Brazilian startup which aims to generate high-quality carbon credits through reforestation of the Amazon, and director of science at Institute for Capacity Exchange in Environmental Decisions, also pulled in global data sets describing factors like soil quality, slope, road and population density, local wealth, distance from urban centers and from healthy forest, and more. “Any time you build one of these global studies, you’re standing on the backs of so many other scientists,” Fagan says. “Each one of these studies represents years of work.”

The study found that the factors most strongly associated with high regrowth potential were a patch’s proximity to existing forest, the density of nearby forest, and the content of carbon in the soil. Those factors in particular “seem to do a really good job explaining the patterns of regrowth we see across the world,” Fagan says. Being close to existing forest, for example, is key to supplying a variety of seeds to the area to support diverse regrowth, Fagan explains. 

Keeping it local—by supplying a global map

The end product of the study is a digital map of the global tropics, where each pixel—representing 30 x 30 square meters of land—indicates the estimated potential for regrowth. That map, made possible by an extensive international collaboration of researchers, is a boon to environmentalists worldwide hoping to advocate locally for their efforts.

“Our goal and our hope is that this is used democratically by local people, organizations, and localities from the county level all the way up to the national level, to advocate for where restoration should happen,” Fagan says. “The people who live there should be in charge of what happens there—where and how to restore really depends on local conditions.”

Fagan points out that some of the potential regrowth areas the study identified are unlikely to be restored for a variety of reasons, such as being in active use for ranching or crops or located on prime real estate near roads and urban centers. However, a meaningful portion of the 215 million hectares is abandoned and degraded cattle pastures or previously logged forests, where encouraging natural regeneration would have minimal cost to local economies and a long list of benefits.

“If you restored that to rainforest, the benefit to water quality, water provision, local biodiversity, and to soil quality would be immense,” Fagan says. “It would also be an immense benefit for pulling carbon out of the atmosphere, so really it’s just a question of, ‘Where can we do this most efficiently?’ That’s what this paper is all about.”

 

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Journal

Nature

DOI

10.1038/s41586-024-08106-4 

Method of Research

Data/statistical analysis

Subject of Research

Not applicable

Article Title

Global potential for natural regeneration in deforested tropical regions

Article Publication Date

30-Oct-2024