Protecting nature can safeguard cities from floods

University of British Columbia

 

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Recent photo showing Montreal's tiny islands almost flooded by the Saint-Lawrence (or the Prairies river, its side-arm) because of heavy rainfall

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Credit: Ágnes Vári

A new UBC-led study shows that safeguarding key natural ecosystems across Canada can help reduce flood risks for more than half of the country’s urban areas at high risk for flooding.

The research reveals that preserving the most important five per cent of watersheds—about 201,000 square kilometres or two per cent of Canada’s land—can significantly reduce rainwater runoff, protect homes and livelihoods, and safeguard croplands.

“This is the first national study to assess the role of Canadian ecosystems in flood prevention and to identify where conservation could have the greatest impact,” said Dr. Matthew Mitchell, an assistant professor in the faculty of forestry and the faculty of land and food systems.

Nature: the flood shield

Upstream watersheds near cities such as Vancouver and Toronto play an important role in protecting 3.7 million people living in floodplains and another 20.1 million nearby—more than half of Canada’s population.

Using global data, Dr. Mitchell and his colleagues analyzed how land types like forests, wetlands and riparian zones absorb water and reduce runoff.

These natural systems prevent downstream flooding, improve water quality and support wildlife, while reducing reliance on costly infrastructure like dams.

“Nature-based solutions are highly effective for managing flood risks, and this study shows exactly where conservation can make the biggest impact,” said Dr. Mitchell.

Conservation priorities across Canada

The study identified key ecosystems in B.C. that are critical for flood prevention:

• Alpine and subalpine ecosystems in the Coast and Columbia Mountains, which help regulate water flow and prevent downstream flooding.
• Wetlands in the Fraser River Delta, including Burns Bog and other peatlands, which are crucial for flood protection in the Lower Mainland.
• Forests and wetlands in the Okanagan and Similkameen valleys, which protect key agricultural areas and growing population centres.

Beyond B.C., the researchers recommend the following conservation priorities:

• Prairie Provinces (Alberta, Saskatchewan, Manitoba): Protect grasslands and wetlands in key river watersheds, such as the Red and Saskatchewan Rivers.
• Northern Regions: Prioritize conservation in northern wetlands and other ecosystems, including those in the Yukon and Northwest Territories.
• Southern Ontario: Safeguard wetlands around the Great Lakes and major rivers to reduce flood risks in cities like Toronto, Ottawa, and Hamilton.

Canada has committed to protect 30 per cent of its lands by 2030, yet only eight per cent of the most flood-critical ecosystems are currently protected. The researchers call for stronger conservation policies and funding to prioritize these high-impact areas.

“This research makes it clear that conserving nature isn’t just about biodiversity—it’s also about protecting communities and making cities more resilient to climate change,” said Dr. Mitchell.

The study, published recently in Ecosystem Services, offers a global roadmap for integrating nature-based solutions into urban planning and flood management.

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Journal

Ecosystem Services

DOI

10.1016/j.ecoser.2024.101670 

Method of Research

Data/statistical analysis

Subject of Research

Not applicable

Article Title

Flood prevention benefits provided by Canadian natural ecosystems

Article Publication Date

1-Dec-2024

New AI tool generates realistic satellite images of future flooding

The method could help communities visualize and prepare for approaching storms

Massachusetts Institute of Technology

Visualizing the potential impacts of a hurricane on people’s homes before it hits can help residents prepare and decide whether to evacuate. 

MIT scientists have developed a method that generates satellite imagery from the future to depict how a region would look after a potential flooding event. The method combines a generative artificial intelligence model with a physics-based flood model to create realistic, birds-eye-view images of a region, showing where flooding is likely to occur given the strength of an oncoming storm. 

As a test case, the team applied the method to Houston and generated satellite images depicting what certain locations around the city would look like after a storm comparable to Hurricane Harvey, which hit the region in 2017. The team compared these generated images with actual satellite images taken of the same regions after Harvey hit. They also compared AI-generated images that did not include a physics-based flood model. 

The team’s physics-reinforced method generated satellite images of future flooding that were more realistic and accurate. The AI-only method, in contrast, generated images of flooding in places where flooding is not physically possible. 

The team’s method is a proof-of-concept, meant to demonstrate a case in which generative AI models can generate realistic, trustworthy content when paired with a physics-based model. In order to apply the method to other regions to depict flooding from future storms, it will need to be trained on many more satellite images to learn how flooding would look in other regions.

“The idea is: One day, we could use this before a hurricane, where it provides an additional visualization layer for the public,” says Björn Lütjens, a postdoc in MIT’s Department of Earth, Atmospheric and Planetary Sciences, who led the research while he was a doctoral student in MIT’s Department of Aeronautics and Astronautics (AeroAstro). “One of the biggest challenges is encouraging people to evacuate when they are at risk. Maybe this could be another visualization to help increase that readiness.”

To illustrate the potential of the new method, which they have dubbed the “Earth Intelligence Engine,” the team has made it available as an online resource for others to try.

The researchers report their results today in the journal IEEE Transactions on Geoscience and Remote Sensing. The study’s MIT co-authors include Brandon Leschchinskiy; Aruna Sankaranarayanan; and Dava Newman, professor of AeroAstro and director of the MIT Media Lab; along with collaborators from multiple institutions.

Generative adversarial images

The new study is an extension of the team’s efforts to apply generative AI tools to visualize future climate scenarios. 

“Providing a hyper-local perspective of climate seems to be the most effective way to communicate our scientific results,” says Newman, the study’s senior author. “People relate to their own zip code, their local environment where their family and friends live. Providing local climate simulations becomes intuitive, personal, and relatable.”

For this study, the authors use a conditional generative adversarial network, or GAN, a type of machine learning method that can generate realistic images using two competing, or “adversarial,” neural networks. The first “generator” network is trained on pairs of real data, such as satellite images before and after a hurricane. The second “discriminator” network is then trained to distinguish between the real satellite imagery and the one synthesized by the first network.

Each network automatically improves its performance based on feedback from the other network. The idea, then, is that such an adversarial push and pull should ultimately produce synthetic images that are indistinguishable from the real thing. Nevertheless, GANs can still produce “hallucinations,” or factually incorrect features in an otherwise realistic image that shouldn’t be there. 

“Hallucinations can mislead viewers,” says Lütjens, who began to wonder whether such hallucinations could be avoided, such that generative AI tools can be trusted to help inform people, particularly in risk-sensitive scenarios. “We were thinking: How can we use these generative AI models in a climate-impact setting, where having trusted data sources is so important?” 

Flood hallucinations

In their new work, the researchers considered a risk-sensitive scenario in which generative AI is tasked with creating satellite images of future flooding that could be trustworthy enough to inform decisions of how to prepare and potentially evacuate people out of harm’s way.

Typically, policymakers can get an idea of where flooding might occur based on visualizations in the form of color-coded maps. These maps are the final product of a pipeline of physical models that usually begins with a hurricane track model, which then feeds into a wind model that simulates the pattern and strength of winds over a local region. This is combined with a flood or storm surge model that forecasts how wind might push any nearby body of water onto land. A hydraulic model then maps out where flooding will occur based on the local flood infrastructure and generates a visual, color-coded map of flood elevations over a particular region. 

“The question is: Can visualizations of satellite imagery add another level to this, that is a bit more tangible and emotionally engaging than a color-coded map of reds, yellows, and blues, while still being trustworthy?” Lütjens says. 

The team first tested how generative AI alone would produce satellite images of future flooding. They trained a GAN on actual satellite images taken by satellites as they passed over Houston before and after Hurricane Harvey. When they tasked the generator to produce new flood images of the same regions, they found that the images resembled typical satellite imagery, but a closer look revealed hallucinations in some images, in the form of floods where flooding should not be possible (for instance, in locations at higher elevation). 

To reduce hallucinations and increase the trustworthiness of the AI-generated images, the team paired the GAN with a physics-based flood model that incorporates real, physical parameters and phenomena, such as an approaching hurricane’s trajectory, storm surge, and flood patterns. With this physics-reinforced method, the team generated satellite images around Houston that depict the same flood extent, pixel by pixel, as forecasted by the flood model.

“We show a tangible way to combine machine learning with physics for a use case that’s risk-sensitive, which requires us to analyze the complexity of Earth’s systems and project future actions and possible scenarios to keep people out of harm’s way,” Newman says. “We can’t wait to get our generative AI tools into the hands of decision-makers at the local community level, which could make a significant difference and perhaps save lives.” 

The research was supported, in part, by the MIT Portugal Program, the DAF-MIT Artificial Intelligence Accelerator, NASA, and Google Cloud.

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Written by Jennifer Chu, MIT News

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Journal

IEEE Transactions on Geoscience and Remote Sensing

DOI

10.1109/TGRS.2024.3493763 

Article Title

“Generating Physically-Consistent Satellite Imagery for Climate Visualizations”

New model combines data to improve typhoon forecasting

Institute of Atmospheric Physics, Chinese Academy of Sciences

 

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HAIYAN-I, about to take off for an observation mission

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Credit: Liu Zhenyu

Over the past few decades, because of the frequent number of typhoons making landfall in South China, the Guangzhou Institute of Tropical and Marine Meteorology has developed a model, called CMA-TRAMS, to provide operational forecasting products for typhoons.

Years of research carried out by scientists has led to the point where we know that assimilating unmanned aerial vehicle (UAV) and atmospheric sounding data can enhance the typhoon forecasting capabilities of numerical models. However, in practical operations, the scarcity of such data over ocean regions restricts further improvement in operational typhoon forecasting.

Based on these considerations, China’s National Meteorological Observation Centre has promoted a new generation of operational sounding systems called “Beidou”. Compared to traditional sounding balloons, the Beidou system provides more segments of high-level observation data. Combined with the data from the new-generation HAIYAN-I UAV, the data sources over the ocean during landfalling typhoons have been greatly enriched.

On this basis, the CMA-TRAMS team conducted an assimilation forecast experiment with observations that targeted Typhoon Haikui, which occurred in 2023. The results showed that, with the new assimilated data, the forecast landing point of Haiku was significantly closer to reality, which is published in Atmospheric and Oceanic Science Letters recently.

"This experiment marks the first attempt to assimilate both Beidou sounding data and UAV data into an operational forecast system for South China, and the results suggest it represents a good start," says Dr. Sheng Hu, one of the corresponding authors of the study.

The other corresponding author, Dr Xuefen Zhang, adds "Promoting the integration of new observation data into operational forecasting models is crucial. We hope to continue conducting such operational assimilation experiments to ultimately serve frontline operational forecasts."

In the future, the CMA-TRAMS team plan to conduct further targeted observations of typhoons in the South China Sea and increase the application of observational data in the assimilation process. Ultimately, they hope to provide higher-quality typhoon forecasts for the South China region.

 

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Journal

Atmospheric and Oceanic Science Letters

DOI

10.1016/j.aosl.2024.100555 

 

To design better water filters, MIT engineers look to manta rays

New research shows the filter-feeders strike a natural balance between permeability and selectivity that could inform design of water treatment systems

Massachusetts Institute of Technology

 

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Engineers fabricated a simple water filter modeled after the mobula ray’s plankton-filtering features. Pictured are pieces of the filter.  

 

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Credit: Jennifer Chu

Filter feeders are everywhere in the animal world, from tiny crustaceans and certain types of coral and krill, to various molluscs, barnacles, and even massive basking sharks and baleen whales. Now, MIT engineers have found that one filter feeder has evolved to sift food in ways that could improve the design of industrial water filters.

In a paper appearing this week in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, the team characterizes the filter-feeding mechanism of the mobula ray — a family of aquatic rays that includes two manta species and seven devil rays. Mobula rays feed by swimming open-mouthed through plankton-rich regions of the ocean and filtering plankton particles into their gullet as water streams into their mouths and out through their gills. 

The floor of the mobula ray’s mouth is lined on either side with parallel, comb-like structures, called plates, that siphon water into the ray’s gills. The MIT team has shown that the dimensions of these plates may allow for incoming plankton to bounce all the way across the plates and further into the ray’s cavity, rather than out through the gills. What’s more, the ray’s gills absorb oxygen from the outflowing water, helping the ray to simultaneously breathe while feeding. 

“We show that the mobula ray has evolved the geometry of these plates to be the perfect size to balance feeding and breathing,” says study author Anette “Peko” Hosoi, the Pappalardo Professor of Mechanical Engineering at MIT. 

The engineers fabricated a simple water filter modeled after the mobula ray’s plankton-filtering features. They studied how water flowed through the filter when it was fitted with 3D-printed plate-like structures. The team took the results of these experiments and drew up a blueprint, which they say designers can use to optimize industrial cross-flow filters, which are broadly similar in configuration to that of the mobula ray. 

“We want to expand the design space of traditional cross-flow filtration with new knowledge from the manta ray,” says lead author and MIT postdoc Xinyu Mao PhD ’24. “People can choose a parameter regime of the mobula ray so they could potentially improve overall filter performance.”

Hosoi and Mao co-authored the new study with Irmgard Bischofberger, associate professor of mechanical engineering at MIT. 

A better trade-off

The new study grew out of the group’s focus on filtration during the height of the Covid pandemic, when the researchers were designing face masks to filter out the virus. Since then, Mao has shifted focus to study filtration in animals and how certain filter-feeding mechanisms might improve filters used in industry, such as in water treatment plants. 

Mao observed that any industrial filter must strike a balance between permeability (how easily fluid can flow through a filter), and selectivity (how successful a filter is at keeping out particles of a target size). For instance, a membrane that is studded with large holes might be highly permeable, meaning a lot of water can be pumped through using very little energy. However, the membrane’s large holes would let many particles through, making it very low in selectivity. Likewise, a membrane with much smaller pores would be more selective yet also require more energy to pump the water through the smaller openings. 

“We asked ourselves, how do we do better with this tradeoff between permeability and selectivity?” Hosoi says. 

As Mao looked into filter-feeding animals, he found that the mobula ray has struck an ideal balance between permeability and selectivity: The ray is highly permeable, in that it can let water into its mouth and out through its gills quickly enough to capture oxygen to breathe. At the same time, it is highly selective, filtering and feeding on plankton rather than letting the particles stream out through the gills. 

The researchers realized that the ray’s filtering features are broadly similar to that of industrial cross-flow filters. These filters are designed such that fluid flows across a permeable membrane that lets through most of the fluid, while any polluting particles continue flowing across the membrane and eventually out into a reservoir of waste. 

The team wondered whether the mobula ray might inspire design improvements to industrial cross-flow filters. For that, they took a deeper dive into the dynamics of mobula ray filtration.

A vortex key

As part of their new study, the team fabricated a simple filter inspired by the mobula ray. The filter’s design is what engineers refer to as a “leaky channel” — effectively, a pipe with holes along its sides. In this case, the team’s “channel” consists of two flat, transparent acrylic plates that are glued together at the edges, with a slight opening between the plates through which fluid can be pumped. At one end of the channel, the researchers inserted 3D-printed structures resembling the grooved plates that run along the floor of the mobula ray’s mouth. 

The team then pumped water through the channel at various rates, along with colored dye to visualize the flow. They took images across the channel and observed an interesting transition: At slow pumping rates, the flow was “very peaceful,” and fluid easily slipped through the grooves in the printed plates and out into a reservoir. When the researchers increased the pumping rate, the faster-flowing fluid did not slip through, but appeared to swirl at the mouth of each groove, creating a vortex, similar to a small knot of hair between the tips of a comb’s teeth.

“This vortex is not blocking water, but it is blocking particles,” Hosoi explains. “Whereas in a slower flow, particles go through the filter with the water, at higher flow rates, particles try to get through the filter but are blocked by this vortex and are shot down the channel instead. The vortex is helpful because it prevents particles from flowing out.”

The team surmised that vortices are the key to mobula rays’ filter-feeding ability. The ray is able to swim at just the right speed that water, streaming into its mouth, can form vortices between the grooved plates. These vortices effectively block any plankton particles — even those that are smaller than the space between plates. The particles then bounce across the plates and head further into the ray’s cavity, while the rest of the water can still flow between the plates and out through the gills. 

The researchers used the results of their experiments, along with dimensions of the filtering features of mobula rays, to develop a blueprint for cross-flow filtration. 

“We have provided practical guidance on how to actually filter as the mobula ray does,” Mao offers.

“You want to design a filter such that you’re in the regime where you generate vortices,” Hosoi says. “Our guidelines tell you: If you want your plant to pump at a certain rate, then your filter has to have a particular pore diameter and spacing to generate vortices that will filter out particles of this size. The mobula ray is giving us a really nice rule of thumb for rational design.” 

This work was supported, in part, by the U.S. National Institutes of Health, and the Harvey P. Greenspan Fellowship Fund. 

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Written by Jennifer Chu, MIT News

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Journal

Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences

DOI

10.1073/pnas.2410018121 

Article Title

Permeability-selectivity trade-off for a universal leaky channel inspired by mobula filters”

Article Publication Date

25-Nov-2024

Infrastructure, enforcement key to ridding food waste from landfills

Of 9 states with food-waste laws, only Massachusetts has figured out the formula

University of Texas at Austin

AUSTIN, Texas — The U.S. wastes a third of its food supply, according to the U.S. Department of Agriculture. Worldwide, food waste contributes 8% of human greenhouse gas emissions. The problem is so severe that the USDA and the Environmental Protection Agency pledged nearly 10 years ago to cut food waste in half by 2030.

Because 60% of commercial food waste ends up in landfills — from sources such as grocery stores and restaurants — it seems like an easy fix to ban that dumping. Since 2014, nine states have passed laws pressing businesses to compost food waste instead of trashing it.

But new research from Texas McCombs finds most of those state laws have been ineffective in reducing food waste disposal. The sole exception is Massachusetts, which achieved a 7.3% decrease over time.

“We were surprised to find that in every other state, the data suggests the laws did basically nothing,” says Ioannis Stamatopoulos, associate professor of information, risk, and operations management. “But in Massachusetts, the law had precisely the expected effects.”

With McCombs doctoral candidate Fiori Anglou and Robert Sanders of the University of California San Diego, Stamatopoulos set out to assess how well the bans were working. Says Anglou, “We all thought these laws were an interesting policy tool that aims to mitigate the effects of climate change.”

If they worked, the researchers expected, their effects would show up in reduced amounts of landfill waste and methane emissions.

But tracking down those numbers proved to be a “Herculean task,” Stamatopoulos says, because the EPA does not compile food-waste figures by state.

To fill the data void, Anglou compiled data on landfilled and incinerated waste from 36 states by contacting individual state agencies and filing public records requests. The data let the researchers estimate what would have happened to the states with bans if the bans had not passed.

“Fiori succeeded where the EPA failed,” Stamatopoulos says.

Four of the first five states to pass laws — California, Connecticut, Rhode Island, and Vermont — did not significantly reduce waste going to landfills, compared with expected volumes without the laws.

Massachusetts, by contrast, cut waste streams while also reducing methane emissions per ton of waste, by 26%. What was it doing differently? The researchers found several reasons why, in Stamatopoulos’ words, the state “seemed to get everything right.”

• Making it affordable. The state had a 51% higher density of composting facilities per 1,000 square miles than the next-densest state with a food-waste ban, Vermont. By having enough composting infrastructure statewide, it lowered costs. Groceries and restaurants didn’t have to pay private businesses more to ship their waste too far.
• Making it easy. Massachusetts kept its ban simple. There were no exceptions, and generation thresholds did not change frequently, so producers were clear whether they fell under the law.
• Enforcing the law. Massachusetts aggressively enforced its food-waste ban. It increased the monetary cost of noncompliance, issued notices to violators, and conducted 216% more inspections per year than the next-highest state: again, Vermont.

Although most food-waste laws have had disappointing results, Stamatopoulos says he hopes the research will bolster faith that they can succeed if they are backed up with infrastructure and enforcement. 

“Hopefully, the next time a state wants extra funding for these laws, they can point to the work and show that investing in the infrastructure will pay off, as it did in Massachusetts,” he says. “We need to push in this direction if we want to make these laws effective and combat climate change.”

“Of the First Five States With Food Waste Bans, Massachusetts Alone Has Reduced Landfill Waste” is published in Science.

Watch a video interview with the researchers from The University of Texas McCombs School of Business.

 

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Journal

Science

DOI

10.1126/science.adn4216 

Article Title

Of the first five US states with food waste bans, Massachusetts alone has reduced landfill waste

 

Fossil amphibians found in burrows where they waited for the next rainy season

Salamander-like creatures were given a Shoshone name by Indigenous students in Wyoming: Ninumbeehan dookoodukah

Peer-Reviewed Publication

Field Museum

 

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An illustration from the paper, depicting Ninumbeehan digging a burrow in a riverbed for the dry season and then re-emerging when the monsoon returned.

Higher res tif file available on request at press@fieldmuseum.org.

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Credit: Copyright: Gabriel N. Ugueto.

Two hundred and thirty million years ago, in what’s now Wyoming, the seasons were dramatic. Torrential rain would pelt the region for months on end, and when the mega-monsoon ended, the region became extremely dry. This weather would have been challenging for amphibians that need to keep their skin moist, but one group of salamander-like creatures found a solution, as evidenced by their bizarre fossils. In a new study in the journal Proceedings of the Royal Society B, researchers described a new species of fossil amphibian, preserved in torpedo-shaped burrows where they waited out the dry season.

“Based on how the rocks in the area formed and what they're made of, we can tell that Wyoming experienced some of the most drastic seasonal effects of the mega-monsoon that affected the whole supercontinent of Pangea,” says Cal So, the study’s lead author and an incoming postdoctoral scientist at the Field Museum in Chicago. “So how did these animals stay moist and prevent themselves from drying out during the hot and dry season that lasted several months? This is the cool thing. We find these fossils inside these cylindrical structures up to 12 inches long, which we’ve interpreted as burrows.”

So, who recently obtained their PhD from George Washington University, first encountered the strange fossil burrows when they were an undergraduate at the University of Wisconsin, working with Research Scientist David Lovelace of the University of Wisconsin Geology Museum.

In 2014, Lovelace was searching for fossils in Wyoming, in an area stewarded by the Bureau of Land Management in a rock layer he would eventually call the Serendipity Beds. “One of my passions is ichnology-- the hidden biodiversity that can be shown through tracks of animals or traces of other living organisms,” says Lovelace. He spotted a small cylindrical structure, and several larger ones that looked “like a Pringle can,” made of rock. Lovelace recognized the structures as in-filled burrows made by an animal long ago, but a small one stood out. “It was tiny, it was so cute,” he says. He collected several of the cylinders for his research.

Back in the lab, Lovelace took a hammer to one of the preserved burrows to see if there were any fossils inside, and he found a tiny, toothy skull. “I saw sharp, pointy teeth, and my first thought was that it was a baby crocodile,” Lovelace says. “But when we put it all together and prepared it, we realized it was some sort of amphibian.”

Lovelace reached out to Jason Pardo, a postdoctoral researcher at the Field Museum who specializes in fossil amphibians, who created high-resolution CT scans of another of the fossil burrows and revealed a tiny skeleton inside. “At this point, we were like, ‘Oh my god, we have something really cool,’” says Lovelace. “I went back to put together the geological story of the site, and then we were just finding these burrows everywhere. We couldn’t not find them, the site was ridiculously loaded.”

On one of his return trips, he dispatched So, who was then an undergraduate, to collect more of the burrows. Ultimately, the team gathered around 80 fossil burrows, most of which contained skulls and bones of the ancient amphibians. These bones contained clues to the animals’ lifestyles. No complete skeletons have been found, but based on the partial remains, they were probably about a foot long. They had tiny, underdeveloped arms, but the researchers think they had another way to dig their burrows.

“Their skulls have kind of a scoop shape, so we think they used the head to scoop their way underground at the bottom of a riverbed and go through a period of having a lower metabolic rate so that they could survive the dry season. That’s similar to what some modern-day salamanders and fish do,” says So. Essentially, the ancient, aquatic amphibians spent the rainy part of the year swimming in rivers, but when those rivers dried up, they dug head-first into the muddy riverbed. They spent the dry season underground, in a state somewhat similar to hibernation, until the monsoon returned a few months later and the rainwater replenished the rivers. The fossils found by So and Lovelace just happened to be unlucky in that the rivers’ paths changed from year to year. The spots where these animals buried themselves were no longer kept moist, so the animals never emerged and instead died in their burrows.

The ancient amphibians lived in what’s now the ancestral lands of the Eastern Shoshone people, with whom the researchers have an ongoing collaborative relationship. “Our interest is in education, so we met with the Tribal Historic Preservation Officer for the Eastern Shoshone, and he connected us with the schools,” says Lovelace. “It was a great multi-generational collaboration. We invited seventh-grade students from Fort Washakie School, their teachers, and elders into the field with us. The elders told us about their understanding of the rock and their history on the land, and the students got to find burrows and bones.” 

The middle school students are learning the Shoshone language, and they worked with Elders to create a name for the fossil amphibian in Shoshone: Ninumbeehan dookoodukah. In their paper, the researchers explained, “Ninumbee is the name for the mountain-dwelling Little People who hold an important place in Shoshone culture (among others), -han is the possessive affix indicating an affiliation with the Ninumbee, dookoo means ‘flesh’ and dukah means ‘eater.’ Altogether, Ninumbeehan dookoodukah means ‘Little People’s flesh eater,’ honoring the Little People and referencing the sharp teeth of the fossil. Our intent is to pay tribute to the Eastern Shoshone people, their language and the land to which they belong.”

“The collaboration between our school district (Fremont County School District # 21) and Dr. Lovelace and his team illustrates reciprocity in action and the long-term, transformational impacts that can occur through authentic relationship building between researchers and communities,” says Amanda LeClair-Diaz, Office of Indian Education Coordinator and a co-author of the paper. “This process of scientists, community members, educators, middle school students, and Eastern Shoshone elders coming together to learn about these fossils and choosing a Shoshone name for the fossil, Ninumbeehan dookoodukah, solidifies the intergenerational connection we as Shoshone people have to our homeland and the beings that exist within this environment.”

Ninumbeehan offers scientists a tantalizing clue about what life was like in Wyoming 230 million years ago. “Small amphibians are really rare in the Triassic, and we don't know why that is,” says Pardo. “We find some big ones, but these small ones are really quite challenging to find.”

The newly described amphibians also could shed some light on how modern amphibians might fare in the extreme weather conditions brought on by the climate crisis. “Modern amphibian diversity is under substantial threat, and climate change is a huge part of that,” says Pardo. “But the way that Ninumbeehan could slow down its metabolism to wait out the dry weather indicates that some lineages of modern amphibians that have similar seasonal behavior might allow for greater survivorship than some of the models suggest. It’s a little glimmer of hope.”

Fossil skull of the newly described amphibian. 

Credit

Photo by David Lovelace

  

Cal So and Adam Fitch using a rock saw to excavate fossil burrows.

Credit

Photo by Hannah Miller

DOI

10.1098/rspb.2024.1041 

Article Title

Fossil amphibian offers insights into the interplay between monsoons and amphibian evolution in palaeoequatorial Late Triassic systems

 

“Biodiversity is not a luxury”: study explores the connection between wealth and ecosystem health

North Carolina State University

A new study suggests that a more complex understanding of how wealth and biodiversity are linked may help communities with little wealth achieve the levels of diversity typically associated with more affluent areas.

Researchers have long understood that areas with more wealth tend to have higher biodiversity, a phenomenon known as the “luxury effect.” However, the mechanisms by which wealth translates into biodiversity have been relatively underexplored, said Madhusudan Katti, associate professor of forestry and environmental resources at NC State. Katti, senior author of a paper on the study, said that framing biodiversity as a luxury undercuts the agency that people have in creating it.

“Biodiversity is not a luxury, it is something we can work to nurture in cities,” Katti said. “It is not just a passive byproduct of wealth. Rather than just rely on the correlation of wealth and biodiversity, we wanted to understand the many ways that biodiversity intersects with different social pressures and systems.”

To do this, researchers began with the land itself. By first analyzing the common characteristics of biodiverse areas, they were able to work backward to uncover the processes that promoted biodiversity and the social structures which would allow those processes to occur. Katti referred to this as the social-ecological framework, which examines how nature is shaped by human actions in a social context.

“Socially, you have actors who make decisions about land use and management,” Katti said. “Someone decides how land will be used, whether it’s a city deciding where a park is going to go or zoning for industry. Then you also have individuals in their backyards deciding what they want to do with it, whether they want to a lawn, a pollinator friendly garden or something else.”

Those decisions are part of what the study calls the POSE framework. Rather than rely on descriptors like “luxury,” the framework instead describes four social factors that determine how an individual, community group, or institution can influence biodiversity: power, objectives, social/ecological context and effort (POSE). Each piece of the framework represents a point of influence that communities can leverage to build biodiversity, and which may explain the luxury effect. A person with more wealth who owns a home, for instance, would have more power over the landscape on their property than someone living in an apartment complex. By using the POSE framework, communities with less wealth can find ways to leverage the resources they do have, such as focusing on increasing effort through collective organizing.

Katti hopes that the POSE framework will help inspire people to work toward healthier landscapes in their communities.

“We want people to understand that they can influence the landscape around them even without a lot of money,” Katti said. “This is what community groups have been doing for a long time: they organize to overcome the handicap of wealth through effort. Our paper is a call to action. Biodiversity is achievable, and people have the power to create it together.”

The paper, “Biodiversity is not a luxury: Unpacking wealth and power to accommodate the complexity of urban biodiversity,” is published open access in the journal Ecosystems. First author of the paper is Renata Poulton Kamakura of Duke University. The paper was co-authored by Jin Bai and Vallari Sheel, Ph.D. students at NC State.

The work was done with support from the National Science Foundation under grant 2139754, and from the U.S. Geological Survey Southeast Climate Adaptation Science Center.

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Note to editors: The study abstract follows.

Authors: Renata Poulton Kamakura, Duke University; Jin Bai, Vallari Sheel and Madhusudan Katti, North Carolina State University

Published: Nov. 17, 2024

DOI: 10.1002/ecs2.70049

Abstract: A positive correlation between wealth and biodiversity within cities is a commonly documented phenomenon in urban ecology that has come to be labeled as the “luxury effect.” We contend that both this language and this framing restrict our understanding of how sociopolitical power dynamics influence biodiversity within and across cities. We describe how the term “luxury” is not appropriately applied to describe patterns of biodiversity and how the pattern depends on the form(s) of biodiversity investigated. While we recognize examples where there is a positive relationship between socioeconomic status and biodiversity, we describe numerous examples where either opposite patterns or no clear relationship between wealth and biodiversity is found. We propose an alternate framework, the POSE framework, that examines the Power, Objectives, mediating Socio-ecological context, and Effort of specific actors and how those may influence biodiversity. The mediating socio-ecological context includes everything from biophysical limitations to historical context and the actions of other actors. Further, it is important to understand how and to what degree we expect the actor’s actions to influence biodiversity in order to design studies that are able to detect these shifts in biodiversity. We contend that complicating our analysis to focus more on power generally, rather than socioeconomic status specifically, as well as the specific objectives of actors of interest within their socio-ecological context offers a more flexible approach that can be applied in a wider range of socio-ecological contexts and allows for more directed policy interventions.

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Journal

Ecosystems

DOI

10.1002/ecs2.70049 

Subject of Research

People

Article Title

“Biodiversity is not a luxury: Unpacking wealth and power to accommodate the complexity of urban biodiversity"