Tuesday, August 03, 2021

Study: Consumption of music streaming declined significantly during COVID-19 lockdowns worldwide

CARNEGIE MELLON UNIVERSIT

The COVID-19 pandemic was expected to change how people consume media. A new study analyzed online music streaming data for top songs for two years in 60 countries, as well as COVID-19 case and lockdown statistics and daily mobility data, to determine the nature of those changes. The study found that the pandemic significantly reduced the consumption of audio music streaming in many countries.

The study, by researchers at Carnegie Mellon University (CMU), the Korea Advanced Institute of Science and Technology (KAIST), and City University of New York, appears in Marketing Science.

“Our work is the first to gauge the impact of COVID-19 on digital streaming consumption in a global context,” explains Rahul Telang, professor of information systems at CMU’s Heinz College, who coauthored the study. “It upends the popular expectation that online media platforms would benefit from the restrictions put in place during the pandemic, in part because this type of music consumption is not standalone entertainment, but complements activities that declined during lockdowns, such as commuting.”

Worldwide, the economic impacts of COVID-19 shutdowns have been substantial. But amid a market meltdown, some anticipated that demand for digital streaming services would surge since many people were forced to stay at home and work remotely, spending more time online. Moreover, as theaters and live concerts were shuttered, it was anticipated that consumers would be more likely to listen to music at home.

In this study, researchers analyzed streaming data from Spotify, one of the largest music streaming service providers, for weekly top 200 songs during 104 consecutive weeks between June 2018 and May 2020 in 60 countries. They also examined COVID-19 case data from the European Centre for Disease Prevention and Control, data on enforced social distancing measures by governments from the Oxford COVID-19 Government Response Tracker, and country-level data on changes to individuals’ time allocation during the pandemic from Google’s COVID-19 Community Mobility Reports.

To account for the growth and seasonality of streaming demand, researchers compared weekly streams with those of a comparable week the prior year for each country, comparing 52 weeks from June 1, 2018, to May 30, 2019, with 52 weeks from May 31, 2019, to May 28, 2020.

In more than two-thirds of the countries studied that enforced lockdowns, music streaming volume declined significantly after the lockdowns took effect. On average, audio music consumption decreased 12.5 percent after the World Health Organization (WHO) pandemic declaration on March 11, 2020. As a result, during the pandemic, Spotify lost 692 million euros ($838 million) of revenue in the first three quarters of 2020.

Reductions in workers’ commuting time correlated strongly with the decline in music consumption, the study found, indicating that restricted movement contributed to the shrinkage. In fact, countries with larger decreases in mobility and transit time saw more marked reductions in music streaming after the pandemic. Another factor driving consumption could be that people spent less money on music streaming during the pandemic, a time when many lost income.

The study also examined music consumption through video platforms (e.g., online video channels), using data from YouTube’s music streaming platform from July 2019 to October 2020. Consumption via video platforms, which requires more attention and is less complementary to activities like driving, rose during the study period, with unprecedented surges in volume after the WHO’s declaration. Based on counts of artists’ video views on YouTube, music demand in this medium increased more dramatically in countries with more COVID-19 cases, stricter lockdown policies, and sharper declines in individuals’ mobility.

Finally, the study examined how a temporary easing of many COVID-19 restrictions in late April and early May 2020 affected streaming volume. Results suggest a partial rebound in streaming volume in countries with a decrease in COVID-19 cases and with declines in the amount of time people spent at home. Researchers suggest that any resurgence of new cases of the virus could lead to further restrictions and more work from home, which would likely depress streaming demand once more.

“Our findings suggest that the pandemic has changed the environment of media consumption, putting streaming audio music in fiercer competition with other forms of media,” notes Jaeung Sim, a Ph.D. candidate in KAIST’s College of Business, who led the study. “As such, they provide useful insights and actions that can be put into practice during and after the COVID-19 pandemic.” Among the possible actions, the study suggests that platform providers look at new approaches to boost fans’ engagement, reconsider the timing of new album releases, and rethink promotion strategies.

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JOURNAL

Marketing Science

ARTICLE TITLE

Virus Shook the Streaming Star: Estimating the COVID-19 Impact on Music Consumption

New report: State of the science on western wildfires, forests and climate change

Peer-Reviewed Publication

UNIVERSITY OF WASHINGTON

2021 Cedar Creek fire — IMAGE: THE CEDAR CREEK FIRE BURNS IN WASHINGTON STATE'S METHOW VALLEY IN LATE JULY 2021. LUCKY JIM BLUFF, NEAR MAZAMA, IS SEEN BEHIND. view more
CREDIT: JESSICA KELLEY

Exceptionally hot and dry weather this summer has fueled dozens of wildfires across the western U.S., spewing smoke across the country and threatening to register yet another record-breaking year. More than a century of fire exclusion has created dense forests packed with excess trees and brush that ignite and spread fires quickly under increasingly warm and dry conditions.

Scientists largely agree that reducing these fuels is needed to make our forests and surrounding communities more resilient to wildfires and climate change. But policy and action have not kept pace with the problem and suppressing fires is still the norm, even as megafires become more common and destructive.

Seeing the urgent need for change, a team of scientists from leading research universities, conservation organizations and government laboratories across the West has produced a synthesis of the scientific literature that clearly lays out the established science and strength of evidence on climate change, wildfire and forest management for seasonally dry forests. The goal is to give land managers and others across the West access to a unified resource that summarizes the best-available science so they can make decisions about how to manage their landscapes.

“Based on our extensive review of the literature and the weight of the evidence, the science of adaptive management is strong and justifies a range of time- and research-tested approaches to adapt forests to climate change and wildfires,” said co-lead author Susan Prichard, a research scientist in the University of Washington’s School of Environmental and Forest Sciences.

These approaches include some thinning of dense forests in fire-excluded areas, prescribed burning, reducing fuels on the ground, allowing some wildfires to burn in backcountry settings under favorable fuel and weather conditions, and revitalizing Indigenous fire stewardship practices. The findings were published Aug. 2 as an invited three-paper feature in the journal Ecological Applications.

The authors studied and reviewed over 1,000 published papers to synthesize more than a century of research and observations across a wide geographic range of western North American forests. The analysis didn’t include rainforests in the Pacific Northwest or other wet forests where thinning and prescribed burning wouldn’t be advised.

“The substantial changes associated with more than a century of fire exclusion jeopardize forest diversity and keystone processes as well as numerous other social and ecological values including quantity and quality of water, stability of carbon stores, air quality, and culturally important resources and food security,” said co-lead author and UW researcher Keala Hagmann.

This ambitious set of articles was inspired by the reality that under current forest and wildfire management, massive wildfires and drought are now by far the dominant change agents of western North American forests. There is an urgent need to apply ecologically and scientifically credible approaches to forest and fire management at a pace and scale that matches the scope of the problem, the authors say.

Part of the solution involves addressing ongoing confusion over how to rectify the effects of more than a century of fire exclusion as the climate continues to warm. Land managers and policymakers recognize that the number and size of severe fires are rapidly increasing with climate change, but agreement and funding to support climate and wildfire adaptation are lagging.

To that end, these papers review the strength of the science on the benefits of adapting fire-excluded forests to a rapidly warming climate. The authors address 10 common questions, including whether management is needed after a wildfire, or whether fuel treatments (thinning, prescribed burning) work under extreme fire weather. They also discuss the need to integrate western fire science with traditional ecological knowledge and Indigenous fire uses that managed western landscapes for thousands of years.

Although climate change brings with it many uncertainties, the evidence supporting intentional forest adaptation is strong and broad based. The authors clearly demonstrate that lingering uncertainties about the future should no longer paralyze actions that can be taken today to adapt forests and communities to a warming climate and more fire.

“This collection represents a blending of scientific voices across the entire disciplinary domain,” said co-lead author Paul Hessburg, a research ecologist with the U.S. Forest Service and affiliate professor at the UW. “After reviewing the evidence, it is clear that the changes to forest conditions and fire regimes across the West are significant. The opportunity ahead is to adapt forests to rapidly changing climatic and wildfire regimes using a wide range of available, time-tested management tools.”

Co-authors on this special report are from University of Arizona, University of British Columbia, University of California, Berkeley, University of California, Merced, University of Idaho, University of Montana, University of New Mexico, Northern Arizona University, Oregon State University, The Pennsylvania State University, Utah State University, U.S. Forest Service research stations (Pacific Northwest, Pacific Southwest, Rocky Mountain), U.S. Forest Service, Pacific Southwest Region, Washington State Department of Natural Resources, California Department of Forestry and Fire Protection, U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service, U.S. Geological Survey, The Nature Conservancy, R.W. Gray Consulting, Rocky Mountain Tree-Ring Research and Spatial Informatics Group.

John Marshall Photography

For more information, contact Prichard at sprich@uw.edu, Hagmann at hokulea@uw.edu and Hessburg at paul.hessburg@usda.gov. (Note: Prichard is unavailable for interviews the week of Aug. 2)

Download images: https://drive.google.com/drive/folders/1Z9mepOBBWQSFwaRZky5rM9piDAytW7yy?usp=sharing (If link doesn’t work, copy and paste into a browser)

JOURNAL

Ecological Applications

DOI

10.1002/eap.2432

METHOD OF RESEARCH

Literature review

SUBJECT OF RESEARCH

Not applicable

ARTICLE TITLE

Special feature: Climate change and western wildfires (3 related papers)

ARTICLE PUBLICATION DATE

2-Aug-2021

Researchers use AI to unlock the secrets of ancient texts

Peer-Reviewed Publication

UNIVERSITY OF NOTRE DAME

The Abbey Library of St. Gall in Switzerland is home to approximately 160,000 volumes of literary and historical manuscripts dating back to the eighth century — all of which are written by hand, on parchment, in languages rarely spoken in modern times.

To preserve these historical accounts of humanity, such texts, numbering in the millions, have been kept safely stored away in libraries and monasteries all over the world. A significant portion of these collections are available to the general public through digital imagery, but experts say there is an extraordinary amount of material that has never been read — a treasure trove of insight into the world’s history hidden within.

Now, researchers at University of Notre Dame are developing an artificial neural network to read complex ancient handwriting based on human perception to improve capabilities of deep learning transcription.

“We’re dealing with historical documents written in styles that have long fallen out of fashion, going back many centuries, and in languages like Latin, which are rarely ever used anymore,” said Walter Scheirer, the Dennis O. Doughty Collegiate Associate Professor in the Department of Computer Science and Engineering at Notre Dame. “You can get beautiful photos of these materials, but what we’ve set out to do is automate transcription in a way that mimics the perception of the page through the eyes of the expert reader and provides a quick, searchable reading of the text.”

In research published in the Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers journal Transactions on Pattern Analysis and Machine Intelligence, Scheirer outlines how his team combined traditional methods of machine learning with visual psychophysics — a method of measuring the connections between physical stimuli and mental phenomena, such as the amount of time it takes for an expert reader to recognize a specific character, gauge the quality of the handwriting or identify the use of certain abbreviations.

Scheirer’s team studied digitized Latin manuscripts that were written by scribes in the Cloister of St. Gall in the ninth century. Readers entered their manual transcriptions into a specially designed software interface. The team then measured reaction times during transcription for an understanding of which words, characters and passages were easy or difficult. Scheirer explained that including that kind of data created a network more consistent with human behavior, reduced errors and provided a more accurate, more realistic reading of the text.

“It’s a strategy not typically used in machine learning,” Scheirer said. “We’re labeling the data through these psychophysical measurements, which comes directly from psychological studies of perception — by taking behavioral measurements. We then inform the network of common difficulties in the perception of these characters and can make corrections based on those measurements.”

Using deep learning to transcribe ancient texts is something of great interest to scholars in the humanities.

“There’s a difference between just taking the photos and reading them, and having a program to provide a searchable reading,” said Hildegund Müller, associate professor in the Department of Classics at Notre Dame. “If you consider the texts used in this study — ninth-century manuscripts — that’s an early stage of the Middle Ages. It’s a long time before the printing press. That’s a time when an enormous amount of manuscripts was produced. There is all sorts of information hidden in these manuscripts — unidentified texts that nobody has seen before.”

Scheirer said challenges remain. His team is working on improving accuracy of transcriptions, especially in the case of damaged or incomplete documents, as well as how to account for illustrations or other aspects of a page that could be confusing to the network.

However, the team was able to adjust the program to transcribe Ethiopian texts, adapting it to a language with a completely different set of characters — a first step toward developing a program with the capability to transcribe and translate information for users.

“In the literary field, it could be really helpful. Every good literary work is surrounded by a vast amount of historical documents, but where it’s really going to be useful is in historical archival research,” said Müller. “There is a great need to advance the digital humanities. When you talk about the Middle Ages and early modern times, if you want to understand the details and consequences of historical events, you have to look through the written material, and these texts are the only thing we have. The problem may be even greater outside the Western world. Think of languages that are disappearing in cultures that are under threat. We must first of all preserve these works, make them accessible and, at some point, incorporate translations to make them a part of cultural processes that are still underway — and we are racing against time.”

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JOURNAL

IEEE Transactions on Pattern Analysis and Machine Intelligence

Researchers envision better health interventions for men who have sex with men

Peer-Reviewed Publication

VIRGINIA COMMONWEALTH UNIVERSITY

While much of the health research around men who have sex with men (MSM) involves HIV, these communities are at increased risk for other health problems including certain types of cancer, substance use and mental health issues. A new scoping review by VCU School of Medicine and Massey Cancer Center researchers finds that a specific type of data collection methodology called ecological momentary assessment (EMA), alongside of or as an intervention itself, could be particularly effective in supporting these populations.

EMA is a research method that repeatedly samples subjects in their natural environment to better understand their experiences over a period of time. It has the potential to create a rich dataset allowing researchers and clinicians to identify behavioral trends and contributing factors. This contrasts with other types of health behavior research that rely on retrospective feedback given directly to researchers or clinicians at a single point in time. EMAs minimize recall bias and can improve engagement among participants.

A scoping review provides an overview of available research evidence relative to a specific subject matter.

The authors first identified an initial set of 129 studies in their preliminary search, of which 15 met their eligibility criteria for the scoping review. The eligible studies included a total of 952 participants, with the smallest sample size being 12 and the largest being 120. They found that EMA methodology is both feasible and acceptable at high rates among MSM, especially when examining psychological and behavioral outcomes such as negative or positive affect, risky sexual behavior and substance use.

“Ecological momentary assessment is a relatively novel approach to health behavior research, so I wanted to see what had been done, what were the best practices and what gaps existed in the research in order to inform future studies as well as behavioral and therapeutic interventions for MSM and other populations,” says Viktor Clark, M.S., lead author on the study and doctoral student in the Department of Health Behavior and Policy at VCU School of Medicine. “We found strong support for EMAs, but we also found many of the study designs to be lacking best practices and a tendency for the research to focus on stigmatized behaviors such as substance abuse and unprotected sex.”

Clark conceived of the scoping review while taking a research methodology class led by Sunny Jung Kim, Ph.D., assistant professor in the Department of Health Behavior and Policy at VCU School of Medicine and Harrison Scholar and member of the Cancer Prevention and Control research program at VCU Massey Cancer Center. Kim’s class covered experience-sampling methods, including EMAs, and Clark felt they could be uniquely applied to benefit MSM, a collection of populations they had previously studied.

“EMAs have traditionally used methods such as written diaries and phone calls to sample participants over a period of time. 85 percent of Americans now own a smart phone, so there is great potential for EMAs to evolve with advances in technology,” says Kim. “Short, micro surveys delivered through text messages or apps have the ability to collect extensive longitudinal data over time to better understand patterns and changes in behavior. They even have the potential to help health care professionals predict and intervene to prevent negative health outcomes in a variety of populations.”

The review evaluated the different studies based on the Center for Disease Control’s compendium of evidence-based interventions and best practices for HIV prevention. Most studies did not meet the full criteria for best standards defined by the CDC’s recommendations. Kim and Clark stress the importance of developing evidence-based best practices for designing future EMAs, especially when delivered via smartphone or computer as there are unique challenges and opportunities associated with these platforms.

“I hope to continue this line of research into my Ph.D. dissertation. I have submitted a grant application to fund a study to test a conceptual model for interactions between health care providers and gender-and sexual-minority patients to identify points where EMA methodology could add further depth to findings,” says Clark. “The goal is to make the patient-provider relationship better with communication and technology in order to improve things like medicine adherence and overall health outcomes.”

Kim has also submitted a grant application to fund an EMA-based intervention study for cancer survivors. She plans to conduct research to identify factors, barriers and themes related to pain management and quality of life, and then use that information to design and deliver a technology-based intervention that distills scientific evidence into easy-to-understand messages that help support patient care.

Both authors stress the importance of an open science framework in which methods and results can be widely shared. Their article is publicly available on the Journal of Medical Internet Research’s website.

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About VCU Massey Cancer Center
VCU Massey Cancer Center is working toward a future without cancer – one discovery, one successful therapy and one life saved at a time. Among the top 4 percent of cancer centers in the country to be designated by the National Cancer Institute to lead and shape America’s cancer research efforts, Massey is dedicated to saving and improving lives by discovering, developing, delivering and teaching effective means to prevent, detect and treat cancer and to making those advancements equally available to all. Massey is leading the nation in establishing a 21st-Century model of equity for cancer research and care, in which the community is informing and partnering with Massey on its research to best address the cancer burden and disparities of those the cancer center serves. Massey conducts cancer research spanning basic, translational, clinical and population sciences; offers state-of-the-art cancer therapies and clinical trials, including a network that brings trials to communities statewide; provides oncology education, teaching and training; and promotes cancer prevention. At Massey, subspecialized oncology experts collaborate in multidisciplinary teams to provide award-winning, comprehensive cancer care at multiple sites throughout Virginia. Visit Massey online at masseycancercenter.org or call 877-4-MASSEY for more information.

JOURNAL

Journal of Medical Internet Research

DOI

10.2196/27751

METHOD OF RESEARCH

Systematic review

SUBJECT OF RESEARCH

Not applicable

ARTICLE TITLE

Ecological Momentary Assessment and mHealth Interventions Among Men Who Have Sex With Men: Scoping Review

Social and spatial networks influence HIV and hepatitis transmission in people who inject drugs

Understanding social and spatial networks in the transmission of HIV and hepatitis C among people who inject drugs could identify hubs for more efficient and timely intervention

Peer-Reviewed Publication

ELIFE

The risk of HIV or hepatitis C in people who inject drugs is influenced as much by their social interactions and the venues where they inject as other risk factors, according to a study published today in eLife.

The findings could help direct public health efforts to locations where HIV and hepatitis is most frequently transmitted, allowing more efficient use of harm reduction services and more quickly interrupting disease transmission.

India has one of the highest burdens of HIV and hepatitis C resulting from injection drug use. Efforts to stop the spread of these diseases are hindered by a suboptimal understanding of the role social networks can play in the spread of infectious diseases, especially in a population which includes many people who are without homes and hard to reach.

Social interactions can be used to interrupt disease transmission and can be useful for combating epidemics among populations that are linked by a common behaviour – in this case, injecting drugs – according to the authors. However, developing network-based interventions in this population is challenging because the network structure is often unknown or poorly understood, particularly indirect networks (as in ‘friend-of-a-friend’ connections).

To address this, the authors set out to understand the structure of the social connections (injection partners) and spatial connections (places where people inject) of those who inject drugs in New Delhi, India. They started by recruiting an initial group of 10 people who inject drugs, who then provided the names of injecting partners. They were asked to recruit these contacts into the study. These recruits were, in turn, asked to do the same. The study was set up so that none of the contacts were duplicated, but if a person was referred by more than one contact, they were then interconnected to each of the named contacts. The result was a network of direct and indirect connections between 2,512 people who injected drugs, mostly men and aged 26 years on average, covering a total of 181 venues across a 20km radius.

The team then offered testing for HIV and hepatitis C to the participants, with appropriate referrals to care when applicable, and asked them to complete surveys to provide additional information on factors such as education level, homelessness, injection frequency, type of drug injected, sexual activity and syringe-sharing.

At the start of the study, 37% were HIV-positive and 65% had antibodies to hepatitis C, with 80% of these people having an active infection. Most were unaware they had hepatitis C. Of those living with HIV, 65% were directly connected with one other HIV-positive person. Of those with an active hepatitis C infection, 74% were directly connected with at least one other person who had an active infection.

The strongest determinant of testing positive for HIV or hepatitis C was injecting at the most popular injection venue – this increased the odds of infection by 50%. Even if an individual did not personally inject at that site, their odds of infection increased if one of their injection partners did. For each person separating a given individual with the most popular location, the likelihood of having HIV or hepatitis C reduced by 14%. Similarly, for each person separating a given individual from a person testing positive for HIV or hepatitis C, the likelihood of having HIV and hepatitis C decreased by 13%.

The findings show that HIV and hepatitis C infection is not only associated with individual risk factors such as age, education or injection frequency, but also direct and indirect social and spatial network connections – even after accounting for individual-level characteristics. The study has led to a better understanding of the network structure of people who inject drugs in New Delhi and highlighted the role of indirect connections and space on disease burden. The authors say it also urges a rethink of ‘networks’ to incorporate indirect network connections and spaces when thinking about interventions to interrupt disease transmission.

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This study was supported by the National Institute on Drug Abuse, part of the National Institutes of Health, under award numbers R01DA041736, DP2DA040244, R01DA041034, K24DA035684.

Media contact

Emily Packer, Media Relations Manager

eLife

e.packer@elifesciences.org

+44 (0)1223 855373

About eLife

eLife is a non-profit organisation created by funders and led by researchers. Our mission is to accelerate discovery by operating a platform for research communication that encourages and recognises the most responsible behaviours. We aim to publish work of the highest standards and importance in all areas of biology and medicine, including Epidemiology and Global Health, and Medicine, while exploring creative new ways to improve how research is assessed and published. eLife receives financial support and strategic guidance from the Howard Hughes Medical Institute, the Knut and Alice Wallenberg Foundation, the Max Planck Society and Wellcome. Learn more at https://elifesciences.org/about.

To read the latest Epidemiology and Global Health research published in eLife, visit https://elifesciences.org/subjects/epidemiology-global-health.

And for the latest in Medicine, see https://elifesciences.org/subjects/medicine.

DOI

10.7554/eLife.69174

ARTICLE TITLE

Role of direct and indirect social and spatial ties in the diffusion of HIV and HCV among people who inject drugs: A cross-sectional community-based network analysis in New Delhi, India

ARTICLE PUBLICATION DATE

2-Aug-2021

'Virtual nature' experiences reduce stress in prisons

Peer-Reviewed Publication

UNIVERSITY OF UTAH

Nature imagery in prison — IMAGE: A PROJECTOR SHOWS NATURE IMAGERY ON THE WALL OF A PRISON. view more
CREDIT: BENJ DRUMMOND

Before you read any more, find a picture of a natural setting or play a sound of a natural habitat. Here’s a YouTube video with both, if you need it. A few minutes should be enough.

You’ve just had a “virtual nature experience.” How do you feel? If you felt less stress, you’re not alone. The experience might even feel like it transports you to a different place.

For people who are in jails or prisons, experiencing nature virtually is usually their only option. A new study from University of Utah researchers finds that exposure to nature imagery or nature sounds decreased physiological signs of stress in the incarcerated, and spurred their interest in learning more about the habitats they experienced. The researchers also found that, in general, people didn’t strongly prefer visual to auditory nature experiences.

The findings from the study, published in Ecopsychology, could be put to use to benefit the physical and mental health of the incarcerated, says Nalini Nadkarni of the School of Biological Sciences.

“Findings from this study provide also help us understand how providing nature or nature imagery might be beneficial for other nature-deprived populations,” she says.

Virtual nature

For nearly 20 years, Nadkarni has been bringing science and nature into prisons, to people who have little to no contact with what she and her colleagues call the “the non-built green and blue parts of our world.” In multiple facilities at multiple levels of the correctional system, she’s found people that are curious and eager to learn all they can about the natural world.

One of her efforts, at the Snake River Correctional Facility, is called the “Blue Room,” a room in a maximum security facility where people in solitary confinement are able to watch videos showing natural environments. Previous work showed that the people who watched the videos reported more positive moods and committed fewer violent infractions. The Blue Room was even named one of 2014’s top 25 innovations by Time magazine.

For the new study, Nadkarni and her colleagues including Sara Yeo, associate professor in the College of Humanities and James Ruff, associate instructor in the School of Biological Sciences, met with 71 men in medium or minimum security blocks in the Salt Lake County Jail. After a survey about their opinions on science and nature, the participants viewed and listened to three-minute segments of video and audio of four different nature habitats: forests, mountains, oceans and streams. The researchers call these sessions “virtual nature experiences.”

The researchers monitored the participants’ stress level throughout with two measures: salivary cortisol, which responds to changes in stress within minutes, and galvanic skin response, which measures unconscious changes in skin electrical properties related to emotional states.

The participants reported feeling less stressed after the virtual nature experiences, and the physiological measurements backed that up. Nature exposure measurably decreased their stress.

Audio/visual

The researchers had expected that the sights of nature would produce a stronger stress-reducing effect than the sounds, but found that that wasn’t always the case. “We learned that both visual and auditory stimuli evoked positive responses,” Nadkarni says, “but that these responses were mixed – some of the respondents articulated a stronger preference and exhibited stronger physiological responses to auditory versus visual responses.”

The researchers also noted that videos produced a more variable response overall than audio, meaning that different video habitats produced different stress-relieving responses, whereas responses to different audio habitats were largely constant. When asked to rate the different segments, the participants rated highest the videos of streams and lakes, videos of ocean and beaches and sounds of streams, followed by videos of mountains.

Eager to learn

At the end of the experiment, the researchers asked participants how interested they might be in taking a biology or ecology course to learn more about the habitats they’d seen and heard. Overall, they were more interested in learning about nature after the experience. Yeo, who studies science communication, says this result is encouraging, as people who are incarcerated not only have limited access to nature but may have had limited exposure to science before their incarceration.

“And so it’s really hopeful to think that one can see these changes even among groups that are not necessarily selecting science, or that we maybe don’t think of as having an affinity for science,” she says. “It’s still important for us to try to share experiences with science, even in places where we normally wouldn’t.”

Ruff adds that helping people in prisons reduce their stress may help them later successfully re-enter society.

“Decreasing their stress while incarcerated,” he says, “through low cost-methods like exposure to nature imagery, could allow them to better focus on their educational, mental health and job training needs leading to better outcomes. What this study does is begin to fine-tune what aspects of nature imagery optimally reduces stress.”

Nadkarni hopes the results can be applied to people in other institutional or nature-deprived environments, such as residential treatment center, senior assisted living centers, or even windowless cubicles for office workers.

“Our work leads to future studies of the effects of virtual nature in such habitats,” she says.

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Find the full study here.

Other co-authors on this study included Tierney M. Thys of the California Academy of Sciences, Allison Anholt of the University of Newfoundland, and Jeff Treviño of California State University, Monterey Bay.

The Prison Education Project

This isn’t the only effort by the U to improve the lives of incarcerated people in Utah. The U’s Prison Education Project works to advance educational equity in prisons. Inspired by a 2016 Honors College course and directed by Educational Leadership and Policy associate professor Erin Castro, the project launched at Draper prison in 2017. Project researchers participated in a recent study to survey the educational opportunities available in prisons and examined the barriers to accessing higher education while in prison, including facility rules against online classes and completing paperwork for financial aid. The project is working to develop a comprehensive state-wide strategy to prison higher education that will expand access and pathways to completion. Learn more about the Prison Education Project here.

JOURNAL

Ecopsychology

DOI

10.1089/eco.2020.0043

METHOD OF RESEARCH

Experimental study

SUBJECT OF RESEARCH

People

ARTICLE TITLE

Providing Virtual Nature Experiences to Incarcerated Men Reduces Stress and Increases Interest in the Environment

ARTICLE PUBLICATION DATE

9-Jun-2021

MRIs on crop roots open new doors for agriculture

Scientists examine plant roots to make improvements, enhance water-use efficiency

Grant and Award Announcement

TEXAS A&M AGRILIFE COMMUNICATIONS

A team of scientists led by Texas A&M AgriLife is taking a page from the medical imaging world and using MRI to examine crop roots in a quest to develop crops with stronger and deeper root systems.

Nithya Rajan, Ph.D., stands with the low-field MRI rhizotron in the greenhouse at Texas A&M University. (Texas A&M AgriLife photo by Laura McKenzie)

The team from Texas A&M AgriLife Research, Harvard Medical School, ABQMR Inc. and Soil Health Institute developed a novel MRI-based root phenotyping system to nondestructively acquire high-resolution images of plant roots growing in soil and established the Texas A&M Roots Lab to further develop this technology as a new tool for assessing crop root traits.

The “Field-Deployable Magnetic Resonance Imaging Rhizotron for Modeling and Enhancing Root Growth and Biogeochemical Function” is a part of the Rhizosphere Observations Optimizing Terrestrial Sequestration, ROOTS, program funded through U.S. Department of Energy’s Advanced Research Projects Agency-Energy program.

Nithya Rajan, Ph.D., AgriLife Research crop physiologist/agroecologist in the College of Agriculture and Life Sciences Department of Soil and Crop Sciences, Bryan-College Station, is leading this multidisciplinary project team.

“We are applying this technology to see if we can sense roots growing in agricultural soils and characterize them,” she said. “To date, imaging roots in soil has been challenging because the soil is complex, with solids, moisture and roots. We just want to image the roots.”

We need to develop crop root systems that store more carbon in soil. In addition, deeper root systems can take up more water from soil profiles, increasing crop drought resilience.
John Mullet, Ph.D., biochemist and Perry L. Adkisson Chair in Agricultural Biology in the Department of Biochemistry and Biophysics

From concept to applications, in sorghum and beyond

The project was initially funded for three years with a $4.6 million grant. The second phase of funding was approved this year at $4.4 million.

Will Wheeler, post-doctoral researcher with Texas A&M AgriLife Research, is lowering sorghum plants into the MRI rhizotron for root imaging. Steve Altobelli from ABQMR is on the right. (Texas A&M AgriLife photo by Nithya Rajan)

“In the first phase, we developed the proof of concept and initial prototypes, and in the second phase we developed a low-field MRI rhizotron for high throughput imaging and applications in a wide variety of crops in addition to energy sorghum,” Rajan said.

Also on the team with AgriLife Research are Bill Rooney, Ph.D., sorghum breeder and Borlaug-Monsanto Chair for Plant Breeding and International Crop Improvement in the Department of Soil and Crop Sciences, and John Mullet, Ph.D., biochemist and Perry L. Adkisson Chair in Agricultural Biology in the Department of Biochemistry and Biophysics.

Rooney and Mullet are using the MRI system to advance bioenergy sorghum genetics. Brock Weers, Ph.D., and Will Wheeler, Ph.D., are support scientists working with the AgriLife Research team.

“We need to develop crop root systems that store more carbon in soil,” Mullet said. “In addition, deeper root systems can take up more water from soil profiles, increasing crop drought resilience.”

From a crop improvement perspective, Rooney added, this technology is essential to effectively screen crop germplasm for specific genotypes with enhanced root systems.

Getting to the root of the matter, without disturbing the soil

A 3D Image of the sorghum root system generated using the low-field MRI rhizotron. (Photo provided by ABQMR Inc.)

Using MRI allows researchers to gather root images without damaging plants, unlike traditional methods such as trenching, soil coring and root excavation, Rajan said.

The AgriLife Research team is working with ABQMR Inc., a group of MRI scientists in Albuquerque, New Mexico, who are involved in designing and building the system.

“With low magnetic fields, MRI can be used to image roots in natural soils,” said Hilary Fabich, Ph.D., president of ABQMR. “The low magnetic fields also mean there is less of a safety risk working with the sensor in an agricultural setting.”

Using “machine learning” to see through the noise

Matt Rosen, Ph.D., is the co-principal investigator of the project. He is director of the Low-field MRI and Hyperpolarized Media Laboratory and co-director of the Center for Machine Learning at the Martinos Center for Biomedical Imaging at Harvard. Rosen and his team bring their experience with both low-field MRI physics and state-of-the-art artificial intelligence techniques to the project.

MRI 3D seGmentation and Analysis for Root Description — MIDGARD — software rendering of MRI sorghum root image. (Image provided by Bragi Sveinsson)

The Rosen lab pioneered the use of deep learning for processing MRI data. Neha Koonjoo, Ph.D., a postdoctoral fellow in the Rosen lab, has been leveraging the AUTOMAP — Automated TransfOrm by Manifold Approximation — deep learning-based image reconstruction approach to reduce the influence of environmental noise in root MRI images. Her approach was described in a recent research article.

Bragi Sveinsson, Ph.D., a postdoctoral fellow working with Rosen, developed the first prototype of a software named “MIDGARD” — MRI 3D seGmentation and Analysis for Root Description — for extracting quantitative root trait information from MRI images of roots.

The team plans to release MIDGARD as an open-source software after further testing.

“Using MIDGARD, we can extract quantitative root trait information, and this data will be used for selection of ideal plant characteristics,” Rosen said. “In the future, MIDGARD will also have the ability to three-dimensionally image soil water content, a key property that drives root growth and exploration.”

Technology to market

Technology-to-market activities of this project are led by Cristine Morgan, Ph.D., chief scientific officer of Soil Health Institute, Research Triangle Park, North Carolina, and principal investigator of the first phase of the project when she was at Texas A&M. To foster collaborations with industry partners, the Soil Health Institute established the company Intact Data Services.

“I am excited to translate this technology for phenotyping at scale, as well as the ability to use MRI to 3D-image soil water intact,” Morgan said.

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Media Inquiries to Laura Muntean, laura.muntean@ag.tamu.edu, 6012481891

Written by Kay Ledbetter, 806-547-0002, skledbetter@ag.tamu.edu