New study: Plastics pollution worsen the impacts of all Planetary Boundaries

Stockholm University

 

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Patricia Villarrubia Gomez. Photo: Johannes Ernstberger

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Credit: Johannes Ernstberger.

“It’s necessary to consider the full life cycle of plastics, starting from the extraction of fossil fuel and the primary plastic polymer production” says lead article writer Patricia Villarrubia-Gómez at Stockholm Resilience Centre.

Plastics are not as safe and inert as previously thought. The new research article written by an international team of researchers uses the planetary boundaries framework to structure the rapidly mounting evidence of the effects of plastics on the environment, health and human wellbeing.

500 million tons of plastics are now produced yearly but only nine percent get recycled globally. Plastics are everywhere: from the top of Mount Everest to the deepest part of the Mariana Trench.

Through a synthesis review of the scientific literature on impacts of plastics in the natural environment, the research team shows that plastics pollution is changing the processes of the entire Earth system, and affects all pressing global environmental problems, including climate change, biodiversity loss, ocean acidification, and the use of freshwater and land.

The paper “Plastics pollution exacerbates the impacts of all planetary boundaries” emphasizes the need to consider the complexity of plastics. As synthetic polymer-based materials associated with thousands of other chemicals, their impacts occur throughout the full life cycle of these products and materials.

“Plastics are seen as those inert products that protect our favorite products, or that make our lives easier that can be “easily cleaned-up” once they become waste. But this is far from reality. Plastics are made out of the combination of thousands of chemicals. Many of them, such as endocrine disruptors and forever chemicals, which pose toxicity and harm to ecosystems and human health. We should see plastics as the combination of these chemicals with which we interact on a daily basis,” says PhD Candidate Patricia Villarrubia-Gómez at Stockholm Resilience Centre at Stockholm University.

Until recently, the scientific community has mostly studied these impacts separately, without addressing interactions between them. Also, public discourse and policy tend to address plastics as mainly a waste problem.

“The impacts of plastics in the Earth system are complex and interconnected, and this work clearly demonstrates how plastics are acting to destabilize the system,” says co-author associate professor Sarah Cornell, at Stockholm Resilience Centre at Stockholm University.

The team suggests a set of control variables that can be used together to include plastics pollution in the operational use of the Planetary Boundaries framework. Their impact pathway approach considers impacts and indicators at three main stages in the full life cycle of plastics: raw material extraction, plastics production and use; environmental release and fate; and Earth system effects.

“We emphasize the need to account for impacts at all stages along the life cycle of plastics, rather than looking for a single quantified planetary boundary threshold. We propose a set of control variables that together allow us to better understand and control plastics pollution,” says Patricia Villarrubia-Gómez.

The researchers examined the publicly available data on plastics production. In 2022 (the most recent data), at least 506 million tons of plastics were produced worldwide, with an accumulative 11 090 million tons of plastics produced from 1950 to 2022. The researchers note that there are major challenges in obtaining data on plastics production and use to make these calculations.

Data reporting relates to different polymer types, with insufficient standardization, lacking methodological detail and metadata about their sources and assumptions. Transparent and consistent aggregation and uncertainty assessments are not possible, hindering research and policy responses alike.

However, the available evidence shows clearly how plastics contribute to environmental problems up to the planetary scale, both directly and via knock-on biophysical interactions and cumulative effects.

Many people worldwide already face crisis conditions due to the breached planetary boundaries. Understanding the systemic interactions of plastics in the planetary boundaries framework can inform strategies for more sustainable responses, as an integrative part of climate change, biodiversity and natural resource-use policy.

“We now find plastics in the most remote regions of the planet and in the most intimate, within human bodies. And we know that plastics are complex materials, released to the environment throughout the plastics life cycle, resulting in harm in many systems. The solutions we strive to develop must be considered with this complexity in mind, addressing the full spectra of safety and sustainability to protect people and the planet,” says co-author of the paper, professor Bethanie Carney Almroth at University of Gothenburg.

As the international Plastics Treaty negotiations approach closure, the research team calls for experts and policymakers to shift away from considering plastics pollution as merely a waste management problem, and instead to tackle material flows through the whole impact pathway. This approach lets Earth system effects of plastics be detected, attributed and mitigated in a timely and effective way.

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Journal

One Earth

DOI

10.1016/j.oneear.2024.10.017 

Method of Research

Literature review

Subject of Research

Not applicable

Article Title

Plastics pollution exacerbates the impacts of all planetary boundaries

Article Publication Date

7-Nov-2024

COI Statement

Interest disclaimer: Patricia Villarrubia-Gómez and Bethanie Carney Almroth are Steering Committee Members of the Scientists Coalition for an Effective Plastics Treaty. Marcus Eriksen is an observer-member of the Scientists Coalition for an Effective Plastics Treaty.

 

New PFAS removal process aims to stamp out pollution ahead of semiconductor industry growth

University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, News Bureau

 

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With the construction of semiconductor factories expected to rise, researchers at the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign are working to get ahead of the PFAS pollution issues associated with the fabrication process.

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Credit: Photo courtesy Lehava Center Qiryat Gat

CHAMPAIGN, Ill. — A University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign study is the first to describe an electrochemical strategy to capture, concentrate and destroy mixtures of diverse chemicals known as PFAS — including the increasingly prevalent ultra-short-chain PFAS — from water in a single process. This new development is poised to address the growing industrial problem of contamination with per- and polyfluoroalkyl substances, particularly in semiconductor manufacturing.

A previous U. of I. study showed that short- and long-chain PFAS can be removed from water using electrochemically driven adsorption, referred to as electrosorption, but this method is ineffective for ultra-short-chain molecules because of their small size and different chemical properties. The new study, led by Illinois chemical and biomolecular engineering professor Xiao Su, combines a desalination filtration technology, called redox electrodialysis, with electrosorption in a single device to address the problems associated with capturing the complete PFAS size spectrum.

The study findings are published in the journal Nature Communications.

“We decided upon redox electrodialysis because the very short-chain PFAS behave a lot like salt ions in water,” Su said. “The challenge was to produce an efficient, effective electrodialysis system to capture the ultra-short-chain PFAS, have it work in tandem with the electrosorption process for the longer-chain PFAS, destroy them with electrochemical oxidation, and make it happen within a single device.”

Su’s team has previously demonstrated highly efficient electrodialysis devices that remove various non-PFAS contaminants. However, the process requires ion-exchange membranes, which are expensive and quickly fouled by PFAS molecules.

To clear the membrane hurdle, Su’s team introduced an inexpensive nanofiltration membrane that enables the electric-field-driven removal of PFAS without becoming fouled. This technology is based on prior advances made by their group in combining redox polymers with these nanofiltration membranes to enable energy-efficient desalination.

For PFAS removal, having the right material for the job is one thing, but finding the most effective configuration is a significant challenge on its own.

“After experimenting with a variety of device configurations, we finally settled on a system that desalinates the PFAS-contaminated water to remove the ultra-short-chain molecules, then at the same time, carbon electrodes remove the remaining short- and long-chain molecules,” Su said. “This process also concentrates all the PFAS, making them easier to destroy once captured.”

Finally, the electrochemical oxidation process inherent to redox electrodialysis destroys the captured PFAS by converting them to fluoride ions, a key step towards eliminating these persistent contaminants from the environment.

Su said that the team is excited about the prospect of scaling up the process so they can take it out of the lab and into the field not only to address wastewater applications but also to incorporate the system on-site into industrial wastewater streams.

“This work is very timely due to interest from the U.S. government, wastewater treatment facilities and the semiconductor industry,” Su said. “Semiconductor production is expected to rise over the coming years, and PFAS abatement for sustainable production will become a major issue moving forward.”

Illinois researchers Nayeong Kim, Johannes Elbert and Ekaterina Shchukina contributed to this study. The National Science Foundation ERASE-PFAS program supported this research. Su also is affiliated with civil and environmental engineering, chemistry and the Beckman Institute for Advanced Science and Technology at the U. of I.

 

Editor’s notes: 

To reach Xiao Su, call 217-300-0134; email x2su@illinois.edu.

The paper “Integrating redox-electrodialysis and electrosorption for the removal of ultra-short- to long-chain PFAS” is available online. DOI: 10.1038/s41467-024-52630-w.

Chemical and biomolecular engineering is part of the College of Liberal Arts and Sciences and The Grainger College of Engineering.

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Journal

Nature Communications

DOI

10.1038/s41467-024-52630-w 

Method of Research

Experimental study

 

Astrophysicists use echoes of light to illuminate black holes

Institute for Advanced Study

 

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Due to gravitational lensing, the photons from a single flash of light near a black hole follow winding paths. Some follow the trajectory of the blue line, where they take a direct path to the observer. Others orbit around the black hole once, following the path of the red dashed line. Others still orbit the black hole twice following the green dashed line. Because the different paths all have different time delays, the photons arrive one after another in sequence, and the original flash of light will appear to echo.

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Credit: George N. Wong

A team of astrophysicists, led by scholars from the Institute for Advanced Study, has developed an innovative technique to search for black hole light echoes. Their novel method, which will make it easier for the mass and the spin of black holes to be measured, represents a major step forward, since it operates independently of many of the other ways in which scientists have probed these parameters in the past.

The research, published today in The Astrophysical Journal Letters, introduces a method that could provide direct evidence of photons circling black holes due to an effect known as “gravitational lensing.”

Gravitational lensing occurs when light passes near a black hole and its path is bent by the black hole’s strong gravitational field. The effect allows the light to take multiple paths from a source to an observer on Earth: some light rays might follow a direct route while others could loop around the black hole once—or multiple times—before reaching us. This means that light from the same source can arrive at different times, resulting in an “echo.”

“That light circles around black holes, causing echoes, has been theorized for years, but such echoes have not yet been measured,” says the study's lead author, George N. Wong, Frank and Peggy Taplin Member in the Institute’s School of Natural Sciences and Associate Research Scholar at the Princeton Gravity Initiative at Princeton University. “Our method offers a blueprint for making these measurements, which could potentially revolutionize our understanding of black hole physics.”

The technique allows the faint echo signatures to be isolated from the stronger direct light captured by well-known interferometric telescopes, such as the Event Horizon Telescope. Both Wong and one of his co-authors, Lia Medeiros, Visitor in the Institute’s School of Natural Sciences and NASA Einstein Fellow at Princeton University, have worked extensively as part of the Event Horizon Telescope Collaboration. 

To test their technique, Wong and Medeiros, working alongside James Stone, Professor in the School of Natural Sciences, and Alejandro Cárdenas-Avendaño, Feynman Fellow at Los Alamos National Laboratory and former Associate Research Scholar at Princeton University, ran high-resolution simulations which took tens of thousands of “snapshots” of light traveling around a supermassive black hole akin to that at the center of the M87 galaxy (M87*), which is located around 55 million light-years away from Earth. Using these simulations, the team demonstrated that their method could directly infer the echo delay period in the simulated data. They believe that their technique will be applicable to other black holes, in addition to M87*.

“This method will not only be able to confirm when light orbiting a black hole has been measured, but will also provide a new tool for measuring the black hole’s fundamental properties,” explains Medeiros.

Understanding these properties is important. “Black holes play a significant role in shaping the evolution of the universe,” says Wong. “Even though we often focus on how black holes pull things in, they also eject large amounts of energy into their surroundings. They play a major role in the development of galaxies, affecting how, when, and where stars form, and helping to determine how the structure of the galaxy itself evolves. Knowing the distribution of black hole masses and spins, and how the distribution changes over time, greatly enhances our understanding of the universe.”

Measuring the mass or spin of a black hole is tricky. The nature of the accretion disk, namely the rotating structure of hot gas and other matter spiraling inward towards a black hole, can “confuse” the measurement, Wong notes. Light echoes provide an independent measurement of the mass and spin, however, and having multiple measurements allows us to produce an estimate for those parameters “that we can really believe in,” states Medeiros.

Detecting light echoes might also enable scientists to better test Albert Einstein’s theories of gravity. “Using this technique, we might find things that make us think ‘hey, this is weird!’” adds Medeiros. “The analysis of such data could help us to verify whether black holes are indeed consistent with general relativity.”

The team’s results suggest that it may be possible to detect echoes with a pair of telescopes—one on Earth and one in space—working together to perform what can be described as “very long baseline interferometry.” Such an interferometric mission need only be “modest,” states Wong. Their technique provides a tractable, practical method to gather important, reliable information about black holes.

About the Institute

The Institute for Advanced Study has served as one of the leading independent centers for theoretical research and intellectual inquiry since its establishment in 1930, advancing the frontiers of knowledge across the sciences and humanities. From founding IAS Faculty Albert Einstein, Erwin Panofsky, and John von Neumann to influential figures Emmy Noether, George Kennan, and J. Robert Oppenheimer to the foremost thinkers of the present, IAS is dedicated to enabling independent inquiry and fundamental discovery.

Each year, the Institute welcomes more than 250 of the world’s most promising post-doctoral researchers and scholars who are selected and mentored by a permanent Faculty, all of whom are preeminent leaders in their fields. Among present and past Faculty and Members, there have been 36 Nobel Laureates, 46 of the 64 Fields Medalists, and 23 of the 27 Abel Prize Laureates, as well as winners of the Turing Award; the Pulitzer Prize in History; the Wolf, Holberg, and Kluge prizes; and many MacArthur and Guggenheim fellows, among other honors.

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Journal

The Astrophysical Journal Letters

DOI

10.3847/2041-8213/ad8650 

Article Title

Measuring Black Hole Light Echoes with Very Long Baseline Interferometry

Article Publication Date

7-Nov-2024

 

Survey: Kentucky children’s dental decay rates surpass national average

Grant and Award Announcement

University of Kentucky

 

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From left, Reuben Adatorwovor, Courtney Brown, Jennifer Harrison, Lindsey James, Julie Watts McKee, Cynthia Beebou, Malini Kirakodu and Pamela Stein.

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Credit: University of Kentucky College of Dentistry

The University of Kentucky College of Dentistry’s 2023 Kentucky Early Learners’ Oral Health Surveillance Project survey found dental decay rates for Kentucky children ages 2 through 5 are significantly higher than the national average. 

The survey, funded by the Kentucky Department of Public Health, evaluated the prevalence of dental decay and treatment needs among children and identified populations most at-risk in the Commonwealth.  This is one of the largest state-level oral health surveys of children in Pre-K and Head Start programs ever conducted. 

Pamela Stein, D.M.D., M.P.H., a professor in the Division of Public Health Dentistry, served as a co-investigator on the surveillance project. 

“The oral health of young children is essential to health equity as it not only sets the trajectory for oral health across the lifespan but also influences an individual’s overall health and development,” Stein said.  

Project team members screened 6,660 kids across 106 Kentucky counties. Local dental hygienists were hired to serve as screeners and coordinate project efforts at the regional levels. Screeners contacted daycares and Head Start programs in their area. If the daycare or Head Start facilities agreed, screenings were scheduled for the children.    

The screeners were trained to standardize their identification of treated decay (cavities that already had fillings) and untreated decay. If a child was identified to have untreated decay the screener classified the severity of decay and determined the urgency of when the child should receive treatment.  

Each child’s screening results were documented on a report card and sent to their parents/guardians. All report cards contained referral information for local dentists and contact information for the regional coordinator for parents to contact for assistance if their child was identified as needing dental care.  

The project team concluded that dental decay rates for Kentucky children ages 2 through 5 are considerably higher than the national average and were comparable to the highest risk group in the U.S. which is children living at or below 100% poverty.  

Multiple, interconnected demographic, geographic and social factors influence tooth decay rates among the children screened. Region was the strongest association for untreated decay followed by age, facility type and rural location.   

Additional findings show race, ethnicity and fewer economic resources compounded risk for dental decay. Higher decay rates were found in children attending rural Head Start facilities and Black children in poor ZIP codes in Jefferson County. 

The data from this survey should impact the dental care of young Kentucky children in the future. At a state-wide conference to discuss survey findings on Nov. 1, community and health leaders from across the state discussed strategies to reduce the level of dental decay in our youngest Kentuckians. 

“The University of Kentucky College of Dentistry has a statewide mission to increase oral health care access for all Kentuckians,” said Jeff Okeson, D.M.D., professor and dean of the College of Dentistry. “The survey’s findings can help guide and refine our continued efforts in reducing dental disease in children as a part of that mission. It’s just as important to educate everyone about good oral health practices as it is to improve access to oral health care.” 

The American Academy of Pediatric Dentistry (AAPD) recommends that children see a pediatric dentist and get established when the first tooth appears, or no later than their first birthday, and continue every six months with preventive care.  

However, most children start going to the dentist too late, and it usually is due to complaints of pain associated with decay. Although dental decay is a preventable disease, it remains the most common chronic childhood disease, approximately four times more prevalent than childhood asthma.  

Other data collected from UK Dentistry’s mobile programs for preschool-aged and school-aged children have seen tooth decay rates decline over the years and could be an effective early intervention toward improved oral health that necessitates further examination.

UK HealthCare is the hospitals and clinics of the University of Kentucky. But it is so much more. It is more than 10,000 dedicated health care professionals committed to providing advanced subspecialty care for the most critically injured and ill patients from the Commonwealth and beyond. It also is the home of the state’s only National Cancer Institute (NCI)-designated Comprehensive Cancer Center, a Level IV Neonatal Intensive Care Unit that cares for the tiniest and sickest newborns, the region’s only Level 1 trauma center and Kentucky’s top hospital ranked by U.S. News & World Report.

As an academic research institution, we are continuously pursuing the next generation of cures, treatments, protocols and policies. Our discoveries have the potential to change what’s medically possible within our lifetimes. Our educators and thought leaders are transforming the health care landscape as our six health professions colleges teach the next generation of doctors, nurses, pharmacists and other health care professionals, spreading the highest standards of care. UK HealthCare is the power of advanced medicine committed to creating a healthier Kentucky, now and for generations to come.

 

Hurricane Helene’s gravity waves revealed by NASA’s AWE

On Sept. 26, 2024, as Hurricane Helene slammed into the Gulf Coast of Florida, NASA’s Atmospheric Waves Experiment, or AWE, recorded enormous swells in the atmosphere that the hurricane produced roughly 55 miles above the ground

NASA/Goddard Space Flight Center

 

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As the International Space Station traveled over the southeastern United States on Sept. 26, 2024, AWE observed atmospheric gravity waves generated by Hurricane Helene as the storm slammed into the gulf coast of Florida. The curved bands extending to the northwest of Florida, artificially colored red, yellow, and blue, show changes in brightness (or radiance) in a wavelength of infrared light produced by airglow in Earth’s mesosphere. The small black circles on the continent mark the locations of cities. 

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Credit: Utah State University

On Sept. 26, 2024, Hurricane Helene slammed into the Gulf Coast of Florida, inducing storm surges and widespread impacts on communities in its path. At the same time, NASA’s Atmospheric Waves Experiment, or AWE, recorded enormous swells in the atmosphere that the hurricane produced roughly 55 miles above the ground. Such information helps us better understand how terrestrial weather can affect space weather, part of the research NASA does to understand how our space environment can disrupt satellites, communication signals, and other technology.

These massive ripples through the upper atmosphere, known as atmospheric gravity waves, appear in AWE’s images as concentric bands (artificially colored here in red, yellow, and blue) extending away from northern Florida.

“Like rings of water spreading from a drop in a pond, circular waves from Helene are seen billowing westward from Florida’s northwest coast,” said Ludger Scherliess, who is the AWE principal investigator at Utah State University in Logan.

Launched in November 2023 and mounted on the outside of the International Space Station, the AWE instrument looks down at Earth, scanning for atmospheric gravity waves, ripple-like patterns in the air generated by atmospheric disturbances such as violent thunderstorms, tornadoes, tsunamis, wind bursts over mountain ranges, and hurricanes. It does this by looking for brightness fluctuations in colorful bands of light called airglow in Earth’s mesosphere. AWE’s study of these gravity waves created by terrestrial weather helps NASA pinpoint how they affect space weather.

These views of gravity waves from Hurricane Helene are among the first publicly released images from AWE, confirming that the instrument has the sensitivity to reveal the impacts hurricanes have on Earth’s upper atmosphere.

 

Could crowdsourcing hold the key to early wildfire detection?

USC researchers develop low-cost wildfire detection system to accurately detect wildfires minutes—even seconds—after they ignite

University of Southern California

The 2023 blaze in Lahaina, Hawaii, which claimed more than 100 lives and burned 6,500 acres of land across Maui, is a tragic example of how rapid wildfire spread can make effective response efforts impossible, resulting in the loss of life and property.

What if technology could help people detect wildfires earlier? The solution could already be in your pocket: a mobile phone.

USC computer science researchers have developed a new crowdsourcing system that dramatically slashes wildfire mapping time from hours to seconds using a network of low-cost mobile phones mounted on properties in high fire threat areas. In computer simulations, the system, FireLoc, detected blazes igniting up to 3,000 feet away and successfully mapped wilderness fires to within 180 feet of their origin.

Detecting wildfires within seconds of ignition

Presented at ACM SenSys on Nov. 5, the paper, titled “FireLoc: Low-latency Multi-modal Wildfire Geolocation,” serves as a proof of concept, according to the researchers. But how would it function in the real world?

“It’s a stepping stone towards broader wildfire mitigation efforts in the future.” Xiao Fu

For the user, it’s simple. Residents and businesses near high-risk areas would install an affordable, weatherproof mobile phone in their backyard or on their building, connect it to a power source, and point the camera toward nearby trees and brush.

Behind the scenes, complex multi-modal analysis and computer vision models process the data, gathered from the phone’s basic cameras and sensors, rapidly detect wildfires, often within minutes—even seconds—of ignition.

The system prioritizes privacy by focusing on areas with minimal human activity and primarily captures images of vegetation and wilderness. Adapted object localization techniques also ensure the system zeroes in on fire risks without inadvertently capturing images of people or homes.

Sustainable co-existence with extreme climate

For people who live and work on the periphery of open spaces that traditionally teem with parched fuel sources such as grass, shrubs, and timber, such a rapid response could mean the difference between life and death—or having a home or losing it.

In Southern California, the technology could serve as a model for how to best protect people and homes in wildland-urban interface (WUI) locations such as the Hollywood Hills, the Santa Monica Mountains, and the San Gabriel Valley.  What’s more, the entire set-up would cost less than $100, said lead author Xiao Fu, a computer science PhD student.

“FireLoc envisions a future that we will provide a more effective wildfire response, providing better support in the WUI, and more sustainable co-existence with an extreme climate,” Fu said. “It’s a stepping stone towards broader wildfire mitigation efforts in the future.”

The paper is co-authored by Barath Raghavan, Fu’s advisor and an assistant professor of computer science, Peter Bereel, a professor of electrical and computer engineering, and students Yue Hu and Prashanth Sutrave.

Robust testing of wildfire environments

Traditional wildfire detection methods—such as lookouts, satellites, and drones—each have their drawbacks, including high costs, inconvenience, slow response times, and limited battery life. Consequently, firefighters often depend on human observation to spot new fires, which makes it difficult to pinpoint a fire’s exact location.

“This is also very overwhelming for the fire departments, especially in rapidly developing fires like the one in Paradise,” said Fu, referring to the deadly 2018 Camp Fire in Northern California, which killed 85 people.

The team evaluated the effectiveness of their mapping tool by running a simulator based on data from the 2019 Getty Fire, which burned 745 acres in Los Angeles. By adopting a real-world 3D model of the terrain and simulating realistic wildfire scenarios, they assessed the system’s overall performance, including its ability to accurately localize wildfires and its scalability.

Each camera was positioned to mimic the typical height of a residential second story or rooftop, approximately 30 feet above ground level. The results were clear: By adopting FireLoc, the researchers successfully detected more than 40% of wildfires in the target area with only four cameras.

“The simulator allows us to have robust testing of wildfire environments. We’re able to control the scalability – like increasing the number of cameras—is accuracy going to improve? Is coverage going to improve?” Fu said.

Reframing the problem and coming up with a solution

While the location information from the cameras is incredibly important, crowdsourcing plays an equally pivotal role. Requiring only electricity, an Internet connection and the phone (in a weatherproof holder), the software would automatically take pictures every, say, 30 seconds.

“Given several locations, the system is able to optimize where would be the best location to set up additional cameras for wildfire monitoring," said Fu.

When several cameras detect possible smoke or a fire, they would transmit that information to a cloud server which stitches the multiple images together using digital elevation models, computer visions techniques, and other sophisticated computing tools.  This is a complex and critical process, Raghavan said, but you don’t need high-quality images. An algorithm would determine where the cameras should be placed to optimize coverage.

“We’re combining all the information from the images in a way that solves the problem,” Raghavan said. “That’s the solution part of our paper. But we also reframed the problem – that is, how can we map fires as quickly as possible? This paper does both: reframing the problem and coming up with a solution.”

As far as the researchers know, this is the first smart, low-cost crowdsourcing system specifically designed for wildfire detection.

Testing the system in real-world conditions would require community members to mount smartphones on their properties to act as wildfire sensors—the team plans future participatory studies to understand how people would engage with the technology. If deployed, would the researchers themselves join in?

For Fu, an outdoor enthusiast with a deep love for nature, it’s a no-brainer.

“My whole life, I have worked for green unions and environmental events,” said Fu, who grew up on her family’s fruit farm in the tropical region of Hainan, China. “Even when I can’t get outside because I’m working, I can still look at the photos of the trees and the vegetation, and that makes me happy. I hope this technology will help to protect our natural landscapes in the face of extreme climate change.”

 

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Subject of Research

Not applicable

Article Title

FireLoc: Low-latency Multi-modal Wildfire Geolocation

October research news from the Ecological Society of America

News Release 7-Nov-2024

Ecological Society of America

 

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A recent study in Ecosphere demonstrates a new artificial intelligence-based tool that recognizes individual bottlenose dolphins, humpback whales, harbor seals and western leopard toads through matching pairs of images.

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Credit: Happywhale.org; Sea Mammal Research Unit, University of St Andrews; and ToadNUTS

The Ecological Society of America (ESA) presents a roundup of five research articles recently published across its esteemed journals. Widely recognized for fostering innovation and advancing ecological knowledge, ESA’s journals consistently feature illuminating and impactful studies. This compilation of papers pokes holes in the “tens rule” of invasion ecology, reports that environmental reviews increasingly rely on crowdsourced science, uses artificial intelligence to identify individual animals, examines a counterintuitive outcome of reduced nitrogen pollution and uncovers how fungal partners limit trees’ ability to respond to climate change.

 

From Ecological Applications:

Invasive rule of thumb given the thumbs down
Author contact: William G. Pfadenhauer (wpfadenhauer@umass.edu)

The “tens rule” is a longstanding edict in invasion ecology stating that approximately 10% of introduced plant species will gain a toehold in their new range, and approximately 10% of those established species will become invasive. However, this rule of thumb is an unreliable indicator of real-world invasion rates, according to new research. Analysis of an extensive global database of thousands of non-native plants revealed that the rate at which established species went on to become invasive was in fact highly variable, ranging from 7.2% to 33.8%, and dependent on such factors as geographical scale and the natural characteristics of the invaded area. Islands, for instance, experienced higher invasion rates than mainland sites. What’s more, tropical regions were found to be far more susceptible to invasion than previously believed. The authors urge that the tens rule should be discarded and recommend instead that invasion estimates be based on the setting under consideration.

Read the article: Quantifying vulnerability to plant invasion across global ecosystems

 

From Frontiers in Ecology and the Environment:

Environmental assessments increasingly rely on crowdsourced science
Author contact: Corey T. Callaghan (c.callaghan@ufl.edu)

Planning to build a skyscraper, dig a mine or expand a residential area but need to know what the environmental impact will be? You might start by considering crowdsourced data, sometimes referred to as citizen science, suggest the authors of this study. Scrutiny of 1,300 environmental impact statements (EISs) mandated for new development projects by the U.S. National Environmental Policy Act revealed a sharp increase in the inclusion or mention of citizen science data in EISs over the past decade, surging from a mere 3% of reviews in 2012 to over 40% in 2022. Although the vast databases amassed by members of the public on platforms like eBird and iNaturalist represent a potential treasure trove of information, the authors caution that their use for environmental reviews comes with ethical and analytical challenges, like bias toward recording more charismatic organisms. The authors recommend that clear guidelines be developed to standardize the use of citizen science in IESs, ensuring that its potential is harnessed while maintaining rigorous scientific standards.

Read the article: Citizen science as a valuable tool for environmental review

 

From Ecosphere:

Can’t tell one seal or toad from another? Leave it to AI
Author contact: Emmanuel Kabuga (kabuga@aims.ac.za)

Animals of the same species often look alike, making it difficult to distinguish individuals even when they are caught on camera. This is where deep learning — a form of artificial intelligence (AI) machine learning — can come in handy, propose the authors of a recent study. Manual identification of individuals from photographs can be time-, labor- and cost-intensive, and requires a practiced eye; to overcome these limitations, the researchers developed a similarity learning network to determine whether pairs of images show the same or two different individuals. Surveying photos of bottlenose dolphins, harbor seals, leopard toads and humpback whales obtained from existing databases, models using this automated approach successfully identified individuals 83–96% of the time, even when photos of the same individual spanned multiple years. Application of deep learning can thus improve population size estimates, ultimately improving conservation and management strategies.    

Read the article: Similarity learning networks uniquely identify individuals of four marine and terrestrial species

 

From Ecology:

Battling air pollution may contribute to climate change
Author contact: Zachary B. Freedman (zfreedman@wisc.edu)

Decades-old policies aimed at improving air quality may also be accelerating global climate change, warns a new study. For generations, nitrogen pollution in the air has worked its way into ecosystems in a process called deposition, leading to greater carbon stores in soils around the world (among many other consequences). Since the 1970s, however, rates of nitrogen deposition have fallen as multinational agreements targeting air pollution took effect. Now, nearly 30 years of data from a long-running nitrogen deposition experiment in Michigan suggest that the improvements in air quality are rapidly reversing carbon gains in soils. With less nitrogen pollution coming from the atmosphere, soil microbial activity is picking up, ramping up decomposition and decreasing the amount of carbon retained and stored in soils. This reduction in soils’ capacity to serve as carbon sinks could compromise efforts to mitigate climate warming, say the authors, especially if similar patterns are repeated in forest systems across the planet.

Read the article: Gains in soil carbon storage under anthropogenic nitrogen deposition are rapidly lost following its cessation

 

From Ecological Monographs:

Missing mycorrhizae a barrier to tree migration in a warming climate
Author contact: Jordan C. Tourville (jtourville@outdoors.org)

Organisms throughout the world are on the march due to a rapidly changing climate, but the results of a new study indicate that trees’ ability to track changing conditions may be determined by an unlikely ally. In an effort to test whether trees will be able to shift their distributions upslope as temperatures warm, the research team established a series of greenhouse and field experiments on mountainsides across Vermont, transplanting seedlings and soils among sites. The experiments revealed that survival and growth of sugar maple and American beech seedlings were generally lower when the seedlings were raised in soils taken from beyond the trees’ current range. The authors attribute this difference to the absence of beneficial fungi called mycorrhizae — fungal partners that facilitate nutrient absorption by tree roots in exchange for carbon — in soils outside the trees’ historical home range. The study highlights the crucial role of species interactions, like those between trees and mycorrhizal fungi, in determining how species will shift their distributions as climate change reshapes ecosystems.

Read the article: Mycorrhizal fungi as critical biotic filters for tree seedling establishment during species range expansions

 

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