Mount Sinai researchers enhance screening methods to prevent spread of drug-resistant fungal infections in hospitals

HOSPITALS ARE. THE SOURCE OF ANTIBIOTIC RESISTANT BACTERIA, NO P,ACE TO BE SICK

The Mount Sinai Hospital / Mount Sinai School of Medicine

 

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Aaron Cheng, MPH, CIC, Infection Surveillance Officer at Mount Sinai Brooklyn, conducts Glo Germ testing to audit cleanliness in patient room.

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Credit: The Mount Sinai Health System

Mount Sinai researchers have enhanced hospital screening protocols for Candida auris, an often-drug-resistant fungal pathogen the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention considers an urgent global health threat. These new guidelines, published in an analysis in the American Journal of Infection Control on October 31, could promote early detection of the harmful fungus in high-risk patients and prevent hospital outbreaks.

C. auris, which emerged in New York City in 2016, is a fungus that can cause serious bloodstream, wound, and ear infections. It can affect the entire body and lead to severe complications, particularly in patients with weakened immune systems. The fungal pathogen can also spread easily in health care settings since it can survive on contaminated surfaces or medical devices for several weeks.

Experts at Mount Sinai have implemented expanded hospital admission screening protocols to identify patients with C. auris by screening all admitted patients who had lived in a nursing home within a month before admission, regardless of their specific risk factors. This enhanced screening was a shift from previous approaches that often vary across health care facilities and only screen people with more obvious risk factors, such as patients with a tracheostomy or those on a ventilator.

“Our findings demonstrate a significant advancement in infection prevention and patient safety, particularly within skilled nursing facility transfers,” said corresponding author Waleed Javaid, MD, MBA, MS, Professor of Medicine (Infectious Diseases) at the Icahn School of Medicine at Mount Sinai and Director of Infection Prevention and Control at Mount Sinai Downtown. “Response to Candida auris requires vigilance, rapid diagnosis, appropriate treatment, and stringent infection control protocols to limit its spread in health care facilities.”

In the retrospective review, the researchers screened all 591 patients for C. auris who were admitted to Mount Sinai Brooklyn from a nursing home from January 2022 to September 2023. They used these expanded screening protocols for one year and compared outcomes for that year to the nine-month period prior to the screening change. The experts found that 14 cases, or 2.4 percent, of the cohort tested positive for C. auris. Nine cases were considered high risk, while five cases were considered low risk at the time of screening. Ultimately, the new expanded screening identified eight cases that would have gone undiagnosed under the prior protocol. More cases were caught early, enabling the Mount Sinai team to quickly implement appropriate isolation, contact, and disinfection precautions to prevent further outbreaks.

“Our study supports the need for hospitals to adopt expanded screening protocols to enhance infection control practices,” said study co-author Scott Lorin, MD, MBA, President of Mount Sinai Brooklyn and Associate Professor of Medicine (Pulmonary, Critical Care and Sleep Medicine) at Icahn Mount Sinai. “Broader screening not only identifies cases early, but also allows for targeted precautions, reducing the risk of hospital-based outbreaks. The implementation of proactive protocols, based on community prevalence rates, can be a key tool in controlling the spread of this emerging global health threat.”

About the Mount Sinai Health System
Mount Sinai Health System is one of the largest academic medical systems in the New York metro area, with 48,000 employees working across eight hospitals, more than 400 outpatient practices, more than 600 research and clinical labs, a school of nursing, and a leading school of medicine and graduate education. Mount Sinai advances health for all people, everywhere, by taking on the most complex health care challenges of our time—discovering and applying new scientific learning and knowledge; developing safer, more effective treatments; educating the next generation of medical leaders and innovators; and supporting local communities by delivering high-quality care to all who need it. Through the integration of its hospitals, labs, and schools, Mount Sinai offers comprehensive health care solutions from birth through geriatrics, leveraging innovative approaches such as artificial intelligence and informatics while keeping patients’ medical and emotional needs at the center of all treatment. The Health System includes approximately 9,000 primary and specialty care physicians and 11 free-standing joint-venture centers throughout the five boroughs of New York City, Westchester, Long Island, and Florida. Hospitals within the System are consistently ranked by Newsweek’s® “The World’s Best Smart Hospitals, Best in State Hospitals, World Best Hospitals and Best Specialty Hospitals” and by U.S. News & World Report’s® “Best Hospitals” and “Best Children’s Hospitals.” The Mount Sinai Hospital is on the U.S. News & World Report® “Best Hospitals” Honor Roll for 2023-2024.

For more information, visit https://www.mountsinai.org or find Mount Sinai on Facebook, Twitter and YouTube.

 

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Journal

American Journal of Infection Control

Article Title

Analysis of an expanded admission screening protocol for Candida auris at a New York City hospital

Article Publication Date

31-Oct-2024

 

Research uses lasers to detect landmines, underground objects

Vyacheslav Aranchuk presents research at international conference in Osaka, Japan

University of Mississippi

 

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Vyacheslav Aranchuk, principal scientist in the National Center for Physical Acoustics.

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Credit: Photo by Kevin Bain/Ole Miss Digital Imaging Services

OXFORD, Miss. – Enough landmines are buried underground worldwide to circle Earth twice at the equator, but the identification and removal of these explosives is costly and time-consuming.  

New University of Mississippi research could help solve the problem.  

Vyacheslav Aranchuk, principal scientist in the National Center for Physical Acoustics, presented his research on laser multibeam vibration sensor technology at the Optica Laser Congress and Exhibition, held last week in Osaka, Japan. Aranchuk’s laser vibration sensing technology can detect landmines in the ground much faster than previous techniques.  

“There are tens of millions of landmines buried around the world, and more every day as conflicts continue,” Aranchuk said. “There are military applications for this technology in ongoing conflicts and humanitarian applications after the conflicts are over.” 

There are more than 110 million active landmines worldwide and landmines or other s left behind from previous wars injured or killed 4,710 people in 2022. More than 85% of landmine casualties were civilians, and half of the civilian casualties were children. Seventy countries worldwide still live with the risk of active landmines each day, including current and former war zones.  

Landmines are easy to make and can cost as little as $3 apiece, but identification and disposal can cost up to $1,000 per mine to remove.  

Current landmine detection mostly relies on handheld metal detectors, a technique that is dangerous and time-consuming, Aranchuk said. Metal detectors and ground-penetrating radar are not effective in finding plastic landmines.   

Aranchuk’s research team developed a laser vibration sensor in 2019 that could find buried objects at a safe distance from a moving vehicle with 30 laser beams formed in a line.  

The researchers’ latest technology can form a vibration map of the ground in less than a second. It uses a 34 x 23 matrix array of beams – which roughly forms the shape of a rectangle.  

“Most of the modern mines are made of plastic, so they are harder targets for traditional methods of detection that look for metal,” he said. “That's why the NCPA developed this method of detection.” 

Like the 2019 technology, Aranchuk’s laser multi-beam differential interferometric sensor, or LAMBDIS, can be used from a moving vehicle, further increasing the speed at which buried landmines can be detected. 

Boyang Zhang, a former postdoctoral researcher at the NCPA from Nantong, China, co-authored the report. 

“Metal detectors often generate false positives by detecting any metallic object, and (ground-penetrating radar) can be hindered by certain soil conditions or materials,” Zhang said. “In contrast, laser-acoustic detection uses a combination of laser and acoustic sensing, which allows it to detect landmines from a distance with greater accuracy.  

“It reduces false positives and enhances safety by keeping operators farther from the detection zone.” 

To find buried objects – explosive or otherwise – the researchers create ground vibration and then cast a two-dimensional array of laser beams at the ground. Ground vibration induces small variations to the frequency of reflected laser light which are used to create a vibration image of the area.  A buried landmine vibrates differently than the surrounding soil and appears as a red blob in the vibration image.   

“The working principle is based on inference of light," Aranchuk said. “We send beams to the ground and the interference of light scattered back from different points on the ground produces signals which processing reveals vibration magnitude at each point of the ground surface.” 

While the technology is intended to detect landmines, its applications could be numerous, the researchers said.  

“Beyond landmine detection, LAMBDIS technology can be adapted for other purposes, such as assessment of bridges and other engineering structures, vibration testing and non-destructive inspection of materials in automotive and aerospace industry, and in biomedical applications,” he said.   

The next phase of Aranchuk’s research aims to investigate LAMBDIS’s performance for different buried objects and in different soil conditions.  

This material is based on work supported by the U.S. Department of the Navy’s Office of Naval Research under award No. N00014-18-2489.  

Microplastics increasing in freshwater, directly related to plastic production

 News Release 1-Nov-2024

Penn State

 

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Jill Arriola, left, and Daniel Guarin collecting cores at the inlet to the John Heinz National Wildlife Refuge at Tinicum, which houses the largest remaining freshwater tidal marsh in Pennsylvania. 

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Credit: Lisa Emili/Penn State

UNIVERSITY PARK, Pa. — Microplastics have been steadily increasing in freshwater environments for decades and are directly tied to rising global plastic production since the 1950s, according to a new study by an interdisciplinary team of Penn State researchers. The findings provide insight into how microplastics move and spread in freshwater environments, which could be important for creating long-term solutions to reduce pollution, the researchers said. 

The work is available online now and will be published in the December issue of Science of the Total Environment.  

“Few studies examine how microplastics change over time,” said Nathaniel Warner, associate professor of civil and environmental engineering and the corresponding author on the paper. “Ours is one of the first to track microplastic levels in freshwater sediment from before the 1950s to today, showing that concentrations rise in line with plastic production.” 

Microplastics are tiny plastic particles that range in size from one micrometer, or 1/100 of the width of a human hair, to five millimeters, which is about the size of a pencil eraser. They can come from larger plastics that break down into smaller pieces or be made directly by manufacturers. For this study, the team examined freshwater sediment cores from four watersheds in Pennsylvania: Kiskiminetas River, Blacklick Creek, Raystown Lake and Darby Creek. 

Contrary to the team's expectations, the study found no correlation between population density or land use and high levels of microplastics.  

“Based on other findings in the literature, what we thought would be important turned out not to be driving forces in microplastic variation across sites, notably the percentage of microplastics related to developed area and population density,” said Lisa Emili, associate professor of physical geography and environmental studies at Penn State Altoona and a co-author on the paper. 

The researchers also said they were surprised to discover that while microplastic accumulation increased each decade through 2010, it decreased from 2010 to 2020.  

“Although this is a preliminary finding that requires further study, this decrease could be related to increased recycling efforts,” Emili said. 

According to the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency, recycling efforts for plastic increased significantly between 1980 and 2010. Although plastic production also increased, the percentage of recycled plastic increased from less than 0.3% in 1980 to nearly 8% in 2010. 

Additionally, Raymond Najjar, a professor of oceanography and a co-author on the paper, said that this study could shed light on the "missing plastics" paradox. This paradox challenges researchers' understanding of plastic waste in the ocean because, while estimates suggest that 7,000 to 25,000 kilotons of plastic enter the ocean each year, only about 250 kilotons are believed to be floating on the surface.  

“This suggests that estuaries, especially tidal marshes, may trap river-borne plastics before they reach the ocean,” said Najjar, who previously published in Frontiers in Marine Science on simulations of filter estuaries. “This could explain why there is far less plastic floating around in the surface ocean compared to how much is expected to be there given the input to the ocean from rivers.” 

Warner said these findings suggest that there will continue to be increasing amounts of microplastics in both water and sediment as people use more plastic.  

"Humans are ingesting plastic when they eat and drink and inhaling it when they breathe, and the long-term impacts are just beginning to be studied," Warner said. “However, we need to figure out how to release less plastic into the environment and how to reduce consumption and exposure.”

According to Emili, making a study like this one successful requires an interdisciplinary team. 

“This research shows Penn State’s broad expertise, bringing together a team from three campuses, five colleges and five disciplines,” Emili said. “We brought together complementary skillsets from our fields of chemistry, engineering, hydrology, oceanography and soil science.” 

This research project was initially funded with an Institute of Energy and the Environment seed grant. 

“That funded project really served as an ‘incubator’ for a continuation and expansion of our work exploring the fate and transport of microplastics in freshwater environments, with a particular focus on coastal locations,” Emili said. 

Najjar agreed and said he would like to get a more comprehensive assessment of the trapping of river-borne plastics in estuaries.  

“We have known for a long time that estuaries heavily process river borne materials, like carbon, sediment and nutrients, and this processing has a big impact on what eventually reaches the ocean,” Najjar said. “I think estuaries could be functioning in a similar way for plastics, but we need more than just a modeling study and a single core. We need to consider the likely sources and sinks of plastics for a given system, such as rivers, atmosphere, estuarine sediment and marshes.” 

Warner added that he hopes to examine how the composition and types of microplastics have changed over time and assess how the associated health risks have evolved. 

In addition to Emili, Najjar and Warner, the other Penn State researchers who contributed to the study include, Jutamas Bussarakum, lead author and doctoral student in the Department of Civil and Environmental Engineering; William Burgos, professor in the Department of Civil and Environmental Engineering; Samual Cohen, who graduated with their master’s degree in geography earlier this year; Kimberly Van Meter, assistant professor in the Department of Geography; Jon Sweetman, assistant research professor in the Department of Ecosystem Science and Management; Patrick Drohan, professor in the Department of Ecosystem Science and Management; Jill Arriola, assistant research professor in the Department of Meteorology and Atmospheric Science; and Katharina Pankratz, who graduated with their doctorate in civil and environmental engineering earlier this year. 

The U.S. National Science Foundation and the Penn State’s Commonwealth Campus Center Nodes (C3N) Program and the Institute of Energy and the Environment supported this research.

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Journal

Science of The Total Environment

DOI

10.1016/j.scitotenv.2024.176619 

Method of Research

Observational study

Subject of Research

Not applicable

Article Title

Decadal changes in microplastic accumulation in freshwater sediments: Evaluating influencing factors

 

Water fern gains more evidence as safe potential global food insecurity solution

International research points to promise and safety of azolla, a plant that can double its biomass in two days and capture nitrogen from the air

Penn State

 

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Findings from this study suggest that azolla is food safe and has the potential to safely feed millions of people due to its rapid growth while free-floating on shallow fresh water without the need for nitrogen fertilizers. 

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Credit: Penn State

UNIVERSITY PARK, Pa. — Is the floating freshwater fern commonly called Carolina azolla the potential answer to global food insecurity or a possible threat to humanity? On the heels of a study published earlier this year by researchers at Penn State on the plant’s nutrition and digestibility, the team learned of concerns about the plant’s potential toxin content. The researchers joined an international effort to test Azolla and found that it does not contain cyanotoxins, potent toxins produced by a type of cyanobacteria, or blue-green algae, associated with the plant.

The team published their findings in a new study in Plants.

“That finding suggests that azolla is food safe and has the potential to safely feed millions of people due to its rapid growth while free-floating on shallow fresh water without the need for nitrogen fertilizers,” said Daniel Winstead, research technologist in Penn State’s College of Agricultural Sciences and lead author on the earlier study. He works in the labs of Michael Jacobson, professor of ecosystem science and management, and Francesco Di Gioia, assistant professor of vegetable crop science. “Azolla is an amazing plant that can double its biomass in two days and capture nitrogen from the air.”

After the original study published, Winstead said, it was brought to his attention that the cyanobacteria that live inside azolla could produce powerful cyanotoxins that dissuade animals from eating the plant. Cyanotoxins have been linked to neurodegenerative disorders including amyotrophic lateral sclerosis (ALS) and Parkinson’s disease, liver and kidney failure, muscle paralysis and other severe health issues. Despite the threat of the toxins and the use and study of azolla, he explained they learned that no scientists had definitively tested for the presence of these toxins in azolla.

“I felt a sense of responsibility to help answer this question because we had just published about azolla’s nutritional quality,” Winstead said. “I didn’t want to be promoting the consumption of a potentially harmful plant. As I was preparing an experimental design, I was contacted by the Azolla Foundation about that organization’s interest in our research. I reached out to them and asked if they knew anyone who was looking into azolla’s toxicity from cyanotoxins.”

Several weeks later he received an email saying a group of researchers was investigating the cyanobacteria-cyanotoxins in azolla question, and they invited Winstead to be a part of the study. 

“Together, we analyzed the results and concluded that azolla, and more specifically a cyanobacterium that lives in cavities in the leaves of azolla, do not produce any of the main cyanotoxins,” he said, explaining that the azolla’s cyanobacterium is Nostoc azollae, an endosymbiont or organism that lives within or on the surface of another organism in a mutually beneficial relationship. “More importantly, the known genes required to make these toxins are not even present within the genome of Nostoc azollae.” 

According to Winstead, this discovery adds to a growing body of evidence that azolla could be used broadly to solve several global challenges.

“It could help feed many people in need around the world as well as become a new source of biofertilizer and biodiesel,” he said.

Also on the research team were by Jonatha Bujak and Alexandra Bujak, the Azolla Foundation, Blackpool, United Kingdom; Ana Pereira, Joana Azevedo and Vitor Vasconcelos, University of Porto, Portugal; Victor Leshyk, Azolla Biodesign, Sedona, Arizona; Minh Pham Gia, independent researcher, Hanoi, Vietnam; and Timo Stadtlander, The Research Institute of Organic Agriculture, Frick, Switzerland.

Open Philanthropy, Penn State — Research on Emergency Food Resilience project financially supported this research.

Daniel Winstead, research technologist in the College of Agricultural Sciences, was lead author on the earlier Penn State study on azolla's nutrition and digestibility, and is a co-author on the recently published study suggesting the plant does not contain cyanotoxins. 

Credit

Penn State

Journal

Plants

DOI

10.3390/plants13192707 

Method of Research

Experimental study

Subject of Research

Not applicable

Article Title

Azolla as a Safe Food: Suppression of Cyanotoxin-Related Genes and Cyanotoxin Production in Its Symbiont, Nostoc azollae

 

Scientists examine how wastewater practices in Florida Keys impact water quality

Penn State

 

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Pleistocene-aged fossil coral within the Key Largo Limestone bedrock. 

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Credit: Miquela Ingalls/Penn State

UNIVERSITY PARK, Pa. — Wastewater contains nutrients that can overfeed algae, leading to harmful algal blooms and pollution issues in the ocean and other waterways. A new study by researchers at Penn State tracked how these nutrients migrate from disposal sites in the Florida Keys, and the results have already informed wastewater practices in the region.

The scientists reported their findings, which summarize two years of wastewater and groundwater monitoring data, in the journal ACS ES&T Water. The data were made public as they were collected.

Many treatment facilities in the Florida Keys perform initial biological and chemical treatment of wastewater and then inject it into shallow wells, less than 100 feet underground. In theory, remaining nutrients like inorganic phosphate would adsorb or stick to the surface of the porous limestone bedrock as the wastewater plume travels in the subsurface before reaching coastal waters, the scientists said.

But Penn State researchers and other groups of scientists have detected potential wastewater contamination in groundwater and nearshore waters, suggesting current wastewater treatment and disposal techniques may be insufficient. Citing previous studies by other researchers and preliminary data from this study led by Penn State researchers, an environmental group sued the city of Marathon, Florida, in 2022, over alleged pollution from shallow wells. The city agreed to settle the lawsuit by transitioning away from the use of such wells.

In 2021, Penn State scientists installed monitoring wells around the injection site of a city of Marathon wastewater treatment facility, and gathered two years of data on nutrients, dissolved ions and human-produced compounds, such as the artificial sweetener sucralose and pharmaceuticals, in groundwater and nearshore waters.

They found the shallow injection process removed more than 90% of soluble reactive phosphorus (SRP), a type of inorganic phosphate. But SRP and sucralose were both detected in nearshore waters, indicating incomplete removal from wastewater, according to the researchers.

“Our findings suggest the use of shallow injection as a disposal mechanism for treated wastewater should be reevaluated at facilities with large discharge capacities,” said Miquela Ingalls, assistant professor of geosciences at Penn State and corresponding author on the study. “Further analytical and quantitative approaches like the ones we used here may help determine whether wastewater injection can be considered the direct equivalent of a point-source contaminant discharge.”

The Clean Water Act makes it illegal to directly discharge contaminants into fresh water — like sewage spilling from a pipe into a river. But whether something is considered the equivalent of direct discharge is complicated and involves factors like how far the water must travel and the path it takes, the researchers said. 

In the Florida Keys, the water travels through bedrock comprising a porous carbonate material made of ancient coral reefs that can bind phosphate to its surface through a process called adsorption.

“The idea is that any remaining phosphate that wasn’t remediated in the initial treatment steps, once they pump it into the ground, will be adsorbed onto the bedrock’s surface and taken out of the solution,” Ingalls said. “We studied how effective this remediation mechanism was by investigating the efficiency and permanence of phosphate adsorption.”

The scientists said about 75% of the SRP was removed from the plume in the first 10 days of transit by adsorption. A slower removal mechanism in which SRP is incorporated into calcium phosphate minerals, like those that make up our bones and teeth, brought the total phosphate removal efficiency above 90%.

The researchers also injected fluorescent green dye to trace the movement of wastewater from the injection well through the array of sampling well sites.

Groundwater in the Florida Keys has a high salinity due to its proximity to the ocean and is therefore very dense, the scientists said. When less dense wastewater is injected underground, it quickly buoys back up to the surface.

This is an issue because contaminants or nutrients that were not removed in the initial treatment or adsorbed onto the bedrock may travel directly to nearshore waters along the coastline, the scientists said.  

“It’s sort of a confluence of issues because of the geography of the Keys,” Ingalls said. “You have this salty groundwater that causes the less dense wastewater to buoy to the surface. And the Keys themselves are such narrow land bodies that once it returns to the surface, there is very little transport distance before it’s back in the ocean.”

Ingalls said the team is continuing to analyze data collected from the shallow injection wells and is currently focusing on levels of nitrogen — another wastewater pollutant.

“With phosphate, it’s about the chemical binding to the carbonate bedrock,” she said. “With nitrogen, it’s entirely about the microbial communities that live in the subsurface and consume nitrate and other nitrogen species. The reason to study both is because both can have similar negative impacts on clean water. Both can cause eutrophication, which increases algae growth and low-oxygen conditions that are harmful to fragile shallow marine ecosystems.”

Lee Kump, the John Leone Dean in the College of Earth and Mineral Sciences and a professor of geosciences, and Kate Meyers and Megan Martin, who earned their master’s degrees from Penn State in 2023 and 2022, respectively, also contributed to this work.

The U.S. Environmental Protection Agency provided funding for this work.

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Journal

ACS ES&T Water

DOI

10.1021/acsestwater.4c00407 

Method of Research

Observational study

Subject of Research

Not applicable

Article Title

The Efficiency of Phosphate Removal via Shallow Wastewater Injection into a Saline Carbonate Aquifer

 

$1.3 million NSF grant to fund research into restoration of degraded ecosystems

Penn State

 

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Restoration of Miombo woodland, which includes tropical and subtropical grasslands, savannas and shrublands, in Malawi as a nature-based solution addressing biodiversity loss, climate change resiliency and supporting social benefits. 

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Credit: Ida Djenontin/Penn State

UNIVERSITY PARK, Pa. — Restoring degraded ecosystems has emerged as a global policy priority to address the interlinked concerns of deforestation and land degradation, biodiversity loss and climate change while delivering social benefits, according to the United Nations.

An international team of researchers led by Ida Djenontin, assistant professor of geography at Penn State, was recently awarded a $1.3 million grant from the U.S. National Science Foundation’s Dynamics of Integrated Socio-Environmental Systems program to investigate the socioecological outcomes of restoration in degraded woodlands ecosystems.

Ecosystem restoration, anchored in the United Nations’ (UN) Decade on Ecosystem Restoration 2021-2030, is understood as “the process of halting and reversing degradation, resulting in improved ecosystem services, and recovered biodiversity.”

“Ecosystem restoration is a clear international priority, and it is included in both the United Nations’ Framework Convention on Climate Change and the Convention on Biological Diversity,” said Djenontin, who also is a co-funded faculty member of the Institutes of Energy and the Environment and the Alliance for Education, Science, Engineering, and Design with Africa. “The U.N. Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change’s Sixth Assessment Report also endorses restoration as one of the possible solutions for carbon dioxide removal, especially given the potential for soil and biomass carbon removal and storage. Additionally, the Kunming-Montreal Global Biodiversity Framework refers to restoration as a way to achieve its targets.”

Ecosystem restoration encompasses a wide continuum of practices, depending on local conditions and societal choice, including ecological restoration but also forest landscape restoration approaches that aim to regain ecological integrity and enhance human well-being in deforested and degraded landscapes.

“Restoration actions are expected to recover biodiversity and ecosystem functions and services that support natural resource-based livelihoods and contribute to climate change mitigation and adaptation,” Djenontin said. “But it’s not about restoring to a pristine ideal landscape — rather it's about restoring to the objectives defined by the people living in those landscapes.”

Given the complexities of restoration, especially when considering woodland ecosystems, tradeoffs between social and ecological goals and local and global priorities are not well understood, according to Djenontin.

“So far, however, we know very little, especially from empirical evidence, about what the socio-environmental outcomes of restoration initiatives and their drivers are,” Djenontin said. “Differing interests and priorities from global to national to local scales exist in that some may want to focus on biodiversity conservation or climate mitigation, or others may want to focus on securing the livelihoods and broader human wellbeing of the local communities. We want to know the trade-offs between those different goals, how those trade-offs translate in the design and implementation of restoration programs, and how people are considered and integrated in the restoration processes.”

This project, “Socioecological Outcomes of Restoration in Forest-Grassland Ecosystems,” seeks to address critical knowledge gaps in restoration science that are of global importance. The researchers will focus on interactions and tradeoffs between farmer communities, multiple levels of governance and landscape functionalities — together, these areas form a multi-scalar socio-environmental system of mosaic dry forest-grassland restoration.

The researchers will investigate how restoration changes ecological and social conditions, identify what drives the ecological and social changes induced by restoration, and develop cost-effective indicators and tools to advance systematic assessment of socio-environmental benefits and tradeoffs of restoration interventions.

“We want to contribute to a broader understanding of how woodlands that are being transformed through restoration are achieving desirable social and ecological outcomes,” said Erica Smithwick, distinguished professor of geography and co-principal investigator on the project.

While focusing on Southern Africa as a regional case study, the findings will be applicable to other tropical mosaic dry forest-grassland landscapes, the researchers said.

“Our research has implications specifically for southern Africa but can be applied to other dryland ecosystems that we find widespread across Asia, Africa and the Americas as well as throughout the United States, reflecting a wide relevance,” Djenontin said.

The research will employ multiple methods, including remote sensing, field-based ecological measurements of biodiversity and carbon storage, household surveys, interviews and focus group discussions to address globally important critical knowledge gaps in restoration science.

“We will use interdisciplinary methods, drawing from both ecological and social science methods and governance theories, to assess the social and ecological outcomes,” Smithwick said. “By generating empirical evidence and insights about the socio-ecological outcomes of restoration processes, our research will advance understanding and application of restoration as a nature-based solution in critical ecosystems globally.”

Other investigators on the project include Tong Qiu, assistant professor of ecology at Duke University, and Forrest Fleischman, associate professor of environmental policy at the University of Minnesota. Project collaborators include Wayne Twine, associate professor in the School of Animal, Plant and Environmental Sciences at the University of the Witwatersrand in South Africa, and Judith Francesca Mangani Kamoto, professor of forestry and rural development at Lilongwe University of Agriculture and Natural Resources in Malawi.

Non-academic partners, including the Malawi’s Department of Forestry, Conservation South Africa and the African Union Development Agency’s African Forest Landscape Restoration Initiative (AUDA-NEPAD/AFR100 Secretariat), also will collaborate on the project.

 

Evolutionary paths vastly differ for birds, bats

Cornell University

ITHACA, N.Y. – New Cornell University research has found that, unlike birds, the evolution of bats’ wings and legs is tightly coupled, which may have prevented them from filling as many ecological niches as birds.

“We initially expected to confirm that bat evolution is similar to that of birds, and that their wings and legs evolve independently of one another. The fact we found the opposite was greatly surprising,” said Andrew Orkney, postdoctoral researcher in the laboratory of Brandon Hedrick, assistant professor biomedical sciences.

Both researchers are co-corresponding authors of research published on Nov. 1 in Nature Ecology and Evolution.

Because legs and wings perform different functions, researchers had previously thought that the origin of flight in vertebrates required forelimbs and hindlimbs to evolve independently, allowing them to adapt to their distinct tasks more easily. Comparing bats and birds allows for the testing of this idea because they do not share a common flying ancestor and, therefore, constitute independent replicates to study the evolution of flight.

The researchers observed in both bats and birds that the shapes of the bones within a species’ wing (handwing, radius, humerus), or within a species’ leg (femur and tibia) are correlated – meaning that within a limb, bones evolve together. However, when looking at the correlation across legs and wings, results are different: Bird species show little to no correlation, whereas bats show strong correlation.

This means that, contrary to birds, bats’ forelimbs and hindlimbs did not evolve independently: When the wing shape changes – either increases or shrinks, for example – the leg shape changes in the same direction.

“We suggest that the coupled evolution of wing and leg limits bats’ capability to adapt to new ecologies,” Hedrick said.

Following their discovery, the team began re-examining the evolution of bird skeletons in greater depth.

“While we showed that the evolution of birds’ wings and legs is independent, and it appears this is an important explanation for their evolutionary success,” Orkney said, “we still don’t know why birds are able to do this or when it began to occur in their evolutionary history.”

For additional information, see this Cornell Chronicle story.

Cornell University has dedicated television and audio studios available for media interviews. 

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Journal

Nature Ecology & Evolution

DOI

10.1038/s41559-024-02572-9