UTA helps deliver major science library to Ecuador

ARDRC secures funding to send 11,000 natural history books and journals to country’s National Biodiversity Institute, supporting research and education

University of Texas at Arlington

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Dozens of volunteers at UTA packaged and sorted the material over the course of a year before finally shipping it via ocean freight to Ecuador.

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Credit: Photo courtesy UTA

As a result of hard work and collaboration between The University of Texas at Arlington’s Amphibian and Reptile Diversity Research Center (ARDRC) and the Joseph Rex Dinardo Jr. Herpetology and Natural History Science Research Trust in Philadelphia, thousands of literature items have been donated to the National Institute of Biodiversity (INABIO) in Quito, Ecuador, to help it jump start its renovated education and research program for biodiversity.

The Joseph Rex Dinardo Jr. Trust recently donated thousands of rare books and other scientific literature related to amphibians and reptiles to the ARDRC, making it one of the largest herpetology research libraries in the world. Due to its close affiliation to the ARDRC, the Dinardo Jr. Trust requested the help of UTA research scientists to find a home for the remainder of its natural history literature that did not pertain to herpetology.

“We knew this literature could have a big impact on both education and research at the right scientific institution, considering it spanned such a breadth of biodiversity and topics,” said Greg Pandelis, collections manager and biological curator for the ARDRC. “Given our close relationship and past collaboration with INABIO, we proposed the idea that the literature be donated there.”

INABIO is rapidly becoming one of the foremost entities for biodiversity research and education in South America, expanding recently with a new building to house its public exhibits and updated research facilities, including a state-of-the-art genomics lab. INABIO researchers expressed a strong desire to acquire and house a research library as part of that expansion, which would serve both their researchers and the public. However, the logistical hurdle in transporting the literature to such a distant country was not small.

“The ARDRC was able to secure a grant from the U.S. Agency for Internal Development to fully fund the transfer of this donation to INABIO,” Pandelis said. “From there, we employed the help of dozens of volunteers at UTA to package and sort the material over the course of a year before finally shipping it via ocean freight to Ecuador. They have received the materials and are in the process of indexing the massive donation in their new facilities.”

Pandelis emphasized that facilitating this donation cements UTA’s fruitful and ongoing collaborations with INABIO and the Dinardo Jr. Trust. INABIO has agreed to name both its library and a new species of reptile or amphibian in the future in recognition of Joseph Dinardo Jr. and his lifetime commitment to herpetology.

“For the National Biodiversity Institute of Ecuador, it has been an absolute privilege to have been a beneficiary of the Dinardo Jr. Trust, thanks to the close collaboration of our colleagues at The University of Texas at Arlington,” said Mario H. Yánez-Muñoz, an associate researcher at INABIO. “Thanks to this support, INABIO received an incredible donation of 8,570 books, 2,000 journals and 500 journal articles. This collaboration has allowed us to build an impressive bibliographic collection, with a strong focus on vertebrates. This donation will undoubtedly support the information needs of specialists, students and enthusiasts in the natural sciences throughout South America.”

“Uncle Joe lovingly curated this collection over 50 years, and his dying wish was to share it with those who would most appreciate it, furthering their understanding of herpetology and natural sciences,” Dinardo Jr.’s niece Constantina Lavonne Lambrou-Marino said. “My family and I are deeply grateful to Greg Pandelis, Mario Yánez-Muñoz, and their teams for thoughtfully executing this monumental process. Nicknamed ‘Lizard Man’ in Vietnam, Uncle Joe was especially fond of South America, and we are so pleased that his legacy will live on at INABIO.”

INABIO is rapidly becoming one of the foremost entities for biodiversity research and education in South America, expanding recently with a new building to house its public exhibits and updated research facilities, including a state-of-the-art genomics lab. 

"For the National Biodiversity Institute of Ecuador, it has been an absolute privilege to have been a beneficiary of the Dinardo Jr. Trust, thanks to the close collaboration of our colleagues at The University of Texas at Arlington,” said Mario H. Yánez-Muñoz, an associate researcher at INABIO. “Thanks to this support, INABIO received an incredible donation of 8,570 books, 2,000 journals and 500 journal articles. This collaboration has allowed us to build an impressive bibliographic collection, with a strong focus on vertebrates. This donation will undoubtedly support the information needs of specialists, students and enthusiasts in the natural sciences throughout South America.”

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Photo credit UTA

About The University of Texas at Arlington (UTA)

Located in the heart of the Dallas-Fort Worth Metroplex, The University of Texas at Arlington is a comprehensive teaching, research, and public service institution dedicated to the advancement of knowledge through scholarship and creative work. With an enrollment of approximately 41,000 students, UT Arlington is the second-largest institution in the UT System. UTA’s combination of outstanding academics and innovative research contributes to its designation as a Carnegie R-1 “Very High Research Activity” institution, a significant milestone of excellence. The University is designated as a Hispanic Serving-Institution and an Asian American Native American Pacific Islander-Serving Institution by the U.S. Department of Education and has earned the Seal of Excelencia for its commitment to accelerating Latino student success. The University ranks in the top five nationally for veterans and their families (Military Times, 2024), is No. 4 in Texas for advancing social mobility (U.S. News & World Report, 2025), and is No. 6 in the United States for its undergraduate ethnic diversity (U.S. News & World Report, 2025). UT Arlington’s approximately 270,000 alumni occupy leadership positions at many of the 21 Fortune 500 companies headquartered in North Texas and contribute to the University’s $28.8 billion annual economic impact on Texas.

 

Researchers link India’s food program to better health and stronger incomes

The health and economic benefits of food transfer programs reach far beyond the caloric content of the subsidized food

University of California - Santa Barbara

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(Santa Barbara, Calif.) — Despite humanity’s scientific achievements and globalized economy, malnutrition remains a global issue. The United Nations estimated that 2.33 billion people experienced moderate or severe food insecurity in 2023.

Researchers at UC Santa Barbara, the Indian Institute of Management and the University of Calgary examined the impacts of the world’s largest food assistance program to understand its effectiveness. Their results, published in the American Economic Journal, reveal health and economic benefits that reach far beyond the caloric content of the subsidized food.

“Malnutrition in India has been this long-standing problem,” said co-author Kathy Baylis, a professor in UCSB’s Geography Department and the Environmental Markets Lab (emLab). “Stunting rates for children in India are the same as they are in some of the poorest countries in sub-Saharan Africa, even though it is a lot wealthier.” As a result, India’s Public Distribution System (PDS) is the world’s largest food transfer program, and India’s most far-reaching social safety net.

PDS operates in a similar manner to how food stamps worked in the United States in decades past: Eligible families and individuals can purchase bags of rice or wheat at heavily subsidized rates. The PDS serves 800 million people and accounted for 60% of India’s social assistance budget in 2019 through 2020, the paper explains.

Changes to India’s food assistance program

For many years PDS had been administered at a state level. But in 2013, India’s federal government established minimum standards for the program. Many states had to increase their assistance as a result, providing either larger grain portions or lower prices.

The researchers compared the effects between states already meeting the federal standards and those that had to change. They used data from the International Crops Research Institute for the Semi-Arid Tropics, which, with support from the Gates Foundation, implemented a five-year survey of families in the program covering 30 villages across eight states.

The authors tracked children’s height for age as an indicator of malnutrition. This measurement captures longer-term trends than a simple body mass index, Baylis explained. “The reason we care about stunting, this height for age, is that it’s associated with all sorts of bad long-run outcomes, including worse health outcomes and cognitive challenges, which affect education and income,” she said. It’s also a metric tracked around the globe.

A balanced diet

The researchers found that the average PDS expansion slashed stunting prevalence from 36% to 28.8%. “Frankly, we were surprised by the magnitude,” Baylis said. These effects were most pronounced in children aged zero to two years, a critical window during which a child’s development is highly sensitive to nutritional intake.

The benefits of PDS were particularly pronounced during periods of poor rainfall. These results suggest that a nutrition-sensitive safety-net like PDS supports food security, making childhood nutrition less sensitive to local climate shocks. It’s an aspect of the program they plan to investigate further in the future.

Still, the subsidized grains may supplant more nutritious foods with empty calories, critics have levied against PDS. But the survey responses revealed that those on the program actually had more diversified diets. It seemed that, rather than crowding out other foods, subsidizing dietary staples freed up money toward more nutritious foods, particularly animal proteins like meat and dairy. This alone was large enough to account for the increase in children’s heights.

Far-reaching benefits

The authors also observed a larger effect on household expenditure than could be explained by cost savings alone. They suspect that well-fed individuals could work more hours, boosting their wages. The additional security may also have enabled people to be more selective about which jobs they took. Notably, the team only saw this trend in people who were paid hourly, rather than salary. “The secondary effect on income meant that this program was more meaningful than just the value of the food itself,” Baylis said.

This study shows that food transfers seem to provide many benefits, an important insight as economists and policymakers discuss different strategies, such as direct cash transfers. “Other papers have found that if you give people cash the prices of food go up in those areas,” Baylis explained, “particularly the prices of more nutrient-dense foods, because there’s more demand.” But providing subsidized food can actually drive down food prices.

And a food program seems to keep participants focused on food. “People are keeping those savings within the food category in their budget,” she said.

To the authors, it’s now clear that the benefits of PDS extend well beyond just calories. “Social safety nets can have these big knock-on effects in terms of things like income, health and human capital,” Baylis said. “Even if the safety net itself isn’t huge, they can be really beneficial more broadly than we might have expected.”

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Journal

American Economic Journal Applied Economics

Article Title

American Economic Journal

CAPITALI$M IS CRIMINAL

Powerful legal and financial services enable kleptocracy, research shows

University of Exeter

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Powerful legal and financial service industries are enabling kleptocracy and corrupt elites to operate with relative impunity, a new study shows.

The research details how “enablers” from these industries exploit deregulation and the under-enforcement of the law to game the system. They can offshore their clients' wealth, and enhance their reputations and influence via philanthropy, political donations, and the use of the UK's punitive libel regime.

Most of this “enabling” is likely to be non-criminal, given the very few convictions despite the widely acknowledged extent of kleptocracy. These services —or professional indulgences— also include the explaining of kleptocratic sources of wealth and concealing of ownership.

Indulging kleptocracy: British Service Providers, Postcommunist Elites, and the Enabling of Corruption, by John Heathershaw, Tena Prelec, and Tom Mayne, outlines how kleptocracy is creating moral and economic problems. It impoverishes the global south and undermines institutions in the global north, eroding faith in democracy by empowering corrupt elite business-political networks in global politics.

Professor Heathershaw said: “Kleptocracy requires help – enabling - from legal and financial professionals. This can be licit and illicit, willingly complicit, negligence or deliberate corruption. It is important to shed light on dangerous patterns of corruption, break the system of indulgences and stymie the globalization of kleptocracy.”

The book outlines the important relationship between illicit (all that which is criminal, unethical, and noncompliant) and the licit (all that which is lawful, ethical, and compliant according to professional standards) because those in services “cross the frontier” at the wishes of their clients. It is at this boundary of il/ licit that the bulk of work is done. The book explains the impact of the emergence of these blurred boundaries and network ties.

Professor Heathershaw said: “The UK has become an entrepôt for the corrupt and a market for short-term capital.”

The book contains nine case studies of corruption and kleptocracy, and each of these contains a variety of professional service providers. It outlines the historical and contemporary political context of the UK’s kleptocracy problem in which demand for its enabling services has emerged.

The researchers have previously published a database which contains 99 cases of property purchases worth more than £2 billion and made over the period from 1998 to 2020 on behalf of the elites of Russian and Eurasian states. All have completed residential real estate transactions in the UK, many using complex offshore structures to conceal either uncertain beneficial ownership or dubious sources of wealth.

The book shows there are three mechanisms of transnational kleptocracy—incumbency, alliance, and
enabling. While incumbency and alliance both matter for certain indulgences such as explaining away suspicious wealth and avoiding the threat of individual sanctions, these are less powerful than the enabler effect.

 

Carbon capture from constructed wetlands declines as they age

Study shows climate benefits, especially in early years

29 years of carbon sequestration in two constructed riverine wetlands

Ohio State University

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COLUMBUS, Ohio – Constructed wetlands do a good job in their early years of capturing carbon in the environment that contributes to climate change – but that ability does diminish with time as the wetlands mature, a new study suggests.

Researchers examined soil core samples taken from two constructed freshwater wetlands and compared them to data from previous studies of the same wetlands over 29 years to determine how well human-made wetlands sequester — or capture and store — carbon as they age. 

Findings showed both wetlands captured similar amounts of carbon over the decades, but neither has shown a net gain or loss since year 15.

But their value in sequestering carbon is remarkable, the researchers said.

“Wetlands are generally thought of as the kidneys of our world because they can clean water naturally and sequester carbon well,” said Jay Martin, a distinguished professor in food, agricultural and biological engineering at The Ohio State University and a co-author of the study. “As we try to combat climate change, they also provide habitat for many species that are important to us.”

The researchers analyzed data from the Schiermeier Olentangy River Wetland Research Park (ORWRP), a site ideal for long-term study due to the overwhelming amount of environmental data it generated over the past three decades.

Previous studies of the park revealed that its soil has shown an increase in carbon levels. But by using detailed measurements taken in the wetland’s 29th year post-construction, Martin’s team found that wetlands’ ability to sequester carbon diminishes as they mature. 

The study was recently published in the journal Ecological Engineering. 

Under current conditions, the wetlands have become a stable ecological force, and this equilibrium isn’t expected to change anytime soon. 

“When you first construct a wetland, the initial plant growth is often what causes carbon to be sequestered so quickly,” said Daniel Ruane, a former master’s student in ecological engineering and the lead author of the study. “But it just isn’t possible to have infinite growth.” 

Although there are limits to how much atmospheric carbon artificial wetlands can effectively store, since their carbon sequestration and storage rates are still far greater than other ecosystems, they still represent a potential solution to counter climate change, said Ruane. 

As a result, future research into the health of the ORWRP is likely to analyze the various plant communities that grow within the area as well as investigate methane emission levels to determine how long the land can function as a carbon sink. 

“The benefits that wetlands provide are increasingly positive,” said Martin. “Our findings emphasize that these ecosystems should be looked at in a better light now than ever before.”

Due to an increase in urban and agricultural land use, more than 50% of Earth’s natural wetlands have disappeared over the last few centuries. This decline has impacted ecosystem services all around the U.S., but most notably in the Midwest, said Martin. 

In Ohio, for example, projected wetland loss is closer to 90%, jeopardizing many essential processes that humans rely on, like water quality improvement and flood mitigation. 

This provides even more reason why policymakers should be trying to build and maintain wetland ecosystems, Ruane said. 

“If we started to create and restore more wetlands now, that could solve a lot of our problems down the road,” he said. 

Co-authors of the study include Michael Brooker and William Mitsch of Ohio State, Blanca Bernal of Greencollar US Inc., Chris Anderson of Auburn University, and Robert Nairn of the University of Oklahoma.

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Contact: Jay Martin, Martin.1130@osu.edu

Written by: Tatyana Woodall, Woodall.52@osu.edu

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Journal

Ecological Engineering

DOI

10.1016/j.ecoleng.2024.107435 

Article Title

29 years of carbon sequestration in two constructed riverine wetlands

 

Life cycles of some insects adapt well to a changing climate. Others, not so much.

Grasshoppers that overwinter as juveniles have a head start on those that emerge in the spring.

University of California - Berkeley

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A grasshopper, Melanoplus boulderensis, typical of the Colorado Rocky Mountains.

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Credit: Thomas Naef, 2022

As insect populations decrease worldwide in what some have called an "insect apocalypse," biologists are desperate to determine how the six-legged creatures are responding to a warming world and to predict the long-term winners and losers.

A new study of Colorado grasshoppers shows that, while the answers are complicated, biologists have much of the knowledge they need to make these predictions and prepare for the consequences.

The findings, published Jan. 30 in the journal PLOS Biology, come thanks to the serendipitous discovery of 13,000 grasshoppers all collected from the same Colorado mountain site between 1958 and 1960 by a biologist at the University of Colorado Boulder (CU Boulder). After that scientist's untimely death in 1973, the collection was rescued by his son and donated to the CU Museum, where it languished until 2005, when César Nufio, then a postdoctoral fellow, rediscovered it. Nufio set about curating the collection and initiated a resurvey of the same sites to collect more grasshoppers.

The newly collected insects allowed Nufio and his colleagues — Caroline Williams of the University of California, Berkeley, Lauren Buckley of the University of Washington in Seattle and postdoctoral fellow Monica Sheffer, who has an appointment at both institutions — to assess the impact of climate change over the past 65 years on the sizes of six species of grasshopper. Because insects are cold-blooded and don't generate their own heat, their body temperatures and rates of development and growth are more sensitive to warming in the environment.

Despite much speculation that animals will decrease in size to lessen heat stress as the climate warms, the biologists found that some of the grasshopper species actually got larger over the decades, taking advantage of an earlier spring to fatten up on greenery. This worked only for species that overwinter as juveniles — a stage called nymphal diapause — and thus can get a head start on chowing down in the spring. Species that hatch in the spring from eggs laid in the fall — the egg diapausers — did not have this advantage and became smaller over the years, likely as a result of vegetation drying up earlier.

"This research emphasizes that there will certainly be species that are winners and losers, but subgroups within those species populations, depending on their ecological or environmental context, will have different responses," Sheffer said.

The authors of the new study predicted much of this based on the life cycles of the grasshoppers and the environmental conditions at the site.

"We sat down and looked at all that was known about the system, such as elevational gradients and how that should modify responses and how different grasshoppers might respond, with all the wealth of information we knew about their natural history. And while not all our predictions were supported, many of them actually were," said Williams, the John L. and Margaret B. Gompertz Chair in Integrative Biology at UC Berkeley.

"Understanding what species are likely to be winners and losers with climate change has been really challenging so far," Buckley said. "Hopefully this work starts to demonstrate some principles by which we can improve predictions and figure out how to appropriately respond to ecosystem changes stemming from climate change."

Rescued grasshoppers

The 65-year-old grasshopper collection was assembled by entomologist Gordon Alexander of CU Boulder over three summers. He not only collected and mounted the specimens from plots in the Rocky Mountains near Boulder but also documented the timing of six different life stages of the grasshoppers. His death in a plane crash in 1973 left the specimens, pinned in neat rows in 250 wooden boxes, in limbo until Nufio came across them in 2005 and recognized their value if they could be compared to grasshoppers today.

Museum collections have become invaluable for long-term studies of the effects of climate change, as exemplified by a survey of mammals, birds, reptiles and amphibians conducted between 1904 and 1940 by Joseph Grinnell of UC Berkeley's Museum of Vertebrate Zoology. Recent resurveys of the same areas 100 years later that Grinnell visited helped biologists document the effects of climate change on California wildlife.

Nufio and many others eventually collected about 17,000 new grasshopper specimens from the same or similar sites around Boulder. While the new paper is the first to report the grasshopper size changes between 1960 and 2015, the authors leveraged previous studies in the lab and from experimental plots to understand why they found the patterns they did.

The insects were from a large group of non-descript grasshoppers in the Acrididae family that are so-called short-horned grasshoppers. Most were generalized grazers, though some specialized in grasses. Two species (Eritettix simplex and Xanthippus corallipes) were nymphal diapausers, achieving adulthood as early as May; two (Aeropedellus clavatus and Melanoplus boulderensis) were early season egg diapausers, maturing in mid-June; and two (Camnula pellucida and Melanoplus sanguinipes) were late season egg diapausers, maturing in late July.

The researchers found that the nymphal diapausers increased in size at lower elevations, around 6,000 feet, while the early and late emergers from overwintering eggs decreased in size over the decades at these elevations.

"For those that come out in late August, when it's very crispy and dry and we get very hot temperatures, we saw the most negative impacts of climate change," Williams said.

One thing that surprised the researchers, however, was that none of the species increased in size at higher elevations, up to about 13,000 feet, despite the fact that summer warming due to climate change is greater at higher elevations. This may be because, at higher elevations, snow inhibits early season greening up, reducing the food supply. The results confirm what the team found when it caged grasshoppers at various elevations to see how they adapted to elevational changes in heat and dryness.

"The data are consistent with grasshoppers either being able to take advantage of warming by getting bigger and coming out earlier, or for grasshoppers to experience stress and get smaller," Buckley said.

Other experiments performed by Buckley on butterflies show some of the same trends.

"We find a pretty similar message with butterflies, which is hopeful to me, in that if we can consider some basic biological principles, we really increase our ability to predict climate change responses," she said.

The team is continuing its collaboration to understand the metabolic, biochemical and genetic changes that underlie the size changes.

"Using those museum collections allowed us to go back in time to compare exactly the same sites — there hadn't been any changes in the land use over this 60-year period of warming — using exactly the same methodology," Williams said. "Having those unique historical specimens enabled us to look at the changes through time."

Other co-authors of the study are Julia Smith of the University of Washington; Simran Bawa of UC Berkeley; and Ebony Taylor, Michael Troutman and Sean Schoville of the University of Wisconsin, Madison. The work was supported by the National Science Foundation (DEB-1951356, DEB-1951588, DEB-1951364).

Collecting grasshoppers in the late 1950s  

Members of the original team surveying for grasshoppers below the Flatirons outside Boulder, Colorado, between 1958 and 1960. The initial grasshopper survey was led by Gordon Alexander of CU Boulder.

Credit

Donald Van Horn

Collecting grasshoppers in 2007 

CU Boulder undergraduate Maria E. Cruz Lopez using a sweep net to collect insects in a meadow on Chautauqua Mesa outside Boulder, Colorado, in 2007.

Credit

César Nufio

A portion of the 13,000 grasshoppers collected by the late Gordon Alexander of CU Boulder. The 65-year-old grasshoppers were compared with contemporary insects to assess the effect of climate change on their size and range.

Credit

César Nufio

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Journal

PLOS Biology

DOI

10.1371/journal.pbio.3002805 

Subject of Research

Animals

Article Title

Insect size responses to climate change vary across elevations according to seasonal timing

Article Publication Date

30-Jan-2025