A statewide survey shows the digital divide narrowing in California, but many low-income residents remain under-connected

Reports and Proceedings

UNIVERSITY OF SOUTHERN CALIFORNIA

 

IMAGE: 

BROADBAND ADOPTION BY PRESENCE OF SCHOOL-AGE CHILDREN

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CREDIT: USC ANNENBERG SCHOOL FOR COMMUNICATION AND JOURNALISM AND THE CALIFORNIA EMERGING TECHNOLOGY FUND

Statewide broadband adoption remains high with 91% of households in California enjoying high-speed internet access at home, according to new survey results released today by USC, the California Emerging Technology Fund and the California Department of Technology.

The overall findings are consistent with the 2021 results of the biennial Statewide Digital Equity Survey, which monitors Californians’ digital access. The latest findings also reveal that the percentage of under-connected households — those with only a smartphone — was cut in half from 6% to 3%.

However, broadband adoption among families with school-age children decreased from 97% in 2021 to 93% in 2023, likely due to the expiration of school-based programs that sponsored internet connectivity during the COVID-19 pandemic.

In addition, fewer children in K-12 households have a desktop, laptop or tablet computer available at home to use for school activities that are not shared with other family members, a decline from nearly 95% in 2021 to about 72% in 2023, the researchers found.

“There was significant progress in reducing the number of under-connected households,” said Hernán Galperin, the study’s lead researcher and a professor at the USC Annenberg School for Communication and Journalism. “However, our latest data also point to the sobering reality of the challenges in reaching the most digitally disadvantaged households.”

The 2023 survey is the largest endeavor to date by USC Annenberg researchers with CETF in collaboration with the California Department of Technology to obtain a highly representative sample of Californians, said Sunne Wright McPeak, president and CEO of CETF.

“We went to great lengths developing a robust methodology to get the clearest picture of how Californians are faring in broadband adoption,” said McPeak. “We now know we still have some miles to go for Californians to achieve full adoption. The survey confirms that affordability remains the major barrier to broadband adoption and underscores the need to ensure that low-income households always will have affordable home internet service available to them.”

The researchers used a multimodal approach — an effective method for sampling hard-to-reach populations, including unconnected and under-connected households — by combining text-to-online responses with telephone interviews conducted through random digit dialing.

In addition, researchers oversampled residents in rural counties and low-income households, as well as people with disabilities.

CETF has sponsored the Statewide Digital Equity Survey since 2008. USC has been the independent research partner for conducting the CETF surveys in 2021 and 2023.

Broadband adoption in California (IMAGE)

UNIVERSITY OF SOUTHERN CALIFORNIA

 

Broadband adoption in California

CREDIT

USC Annenberg School for Communication and Journalism and California Emerging Technology Fund

More Californians come online

The results show that California has made significant progress in improving internet access among specific disadvantaged groups, such as:

• households with disabilities, up from 83% in 2021 to 91% in 2023
• adults 60 years and older, increasing from 78% in 2021 to 90% in 2023
• adults without a high-school degree, up from 64% in 2021 to 79% in 2023

The data also show that overall adoption trends among racial minority groups improved over the past decade. Among Asian Americans, broadband adoption levels have reached similar levels as those among non-Hispanic white residents. Hispanic/Latino residents still trail non-Hispanic white residents by about 10 percentage points; however, the most recent data show progress in broadband adoption after several years of declines, the researchers wrote.

“To truly eliminate the digital divide, we must confront racial and ethnic disparities by implementing targeted strategies and policies that uplift digitally disadvantaged communities,” said François Bar, co-author of the study and professor of communication and spatial sciences at USC Annenberg. “The insights gleaned from this latest survey can help shape these initiatives.”

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About the survey

The Statewide Survey on Broadband Adoption has been conducted regularly since 2008.

Methodology

The 2023 Statewide Survey on Broadband Adoption and Digital Equity is one of the largest ever conducted on broadband adoption in California. The performance standards for the survey methodology were established by the California Department of Technology in collaboration with CETF. The methodology included telephone interviews conducted through random digit dialing (RDD) and text-to-online responses, as well as an oversample of pre-paid numbers to capture low-income households. People with disabilities were contacted based on a California Department of Rehabilitation randomized client list. Overall, the sample included 3,560 households, including 1,899 in the main sample. Another 1,661 households were part of a targeted oversample comprising 1,059 rural California households, 283 low-income households, and 319 people with disabilities. The overall margin of error for the survey was +/-3%.

 

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METHOD OF RESEARCH

Survey

SUBJECT OF RESEARCH

People

 

BSC predicts that global-mean temperature could reach the 1.5ºC warming level threshold in 2024

Annual global mean surface temperatures in 2024 will likely exceed the 1.5ºC threshold for the first time, according to the prediction carried out by the Climate Variability and Change group at the Barcelona Supercomputing Center

Reports and Proceedings

BARCELONA SUPERCOMPUTING CENTER

 

IMAGE: 

BSC RESEARCHERS MARKUS DONAT, ÉTIENNE TOURIGNY, VLADIMIR LAPIN AND ROBERTO BILBAO.

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CREDIT: BSC-CNS

2023 has just been confirmed as the hottest year on record, with global average temperatures exceeding pre-industrial conditions by 1.48°C, as stated by the Copernicus Programme of the European Union. Climate scientists from the Barcelona Supercomputing Center-Centro Nacional de Computación (BSC-CNS), based on the BSC decadal forecast system, were capable of predicting a year ago that 2023 had a high probability of being the warmest year on record.

After the record-smashing conditions in 2023, the imminent question is how the year 2024 and the following years will turn out. The recently released decadal forecast reveals that annual global mean surface temperatures in 2024 will probably further exceed those from 2023, and temperatures will continue to increase in the following years as greenhouse gas emissions continue.

The 2024-2033 prediction

Climate scientists of the Climate Variability and Change (CVC) group at the Earth Sciences Department of BSC have recently conducted a decadal forecast for the next ten years, i.e., the 2024-2033 period. The BSC decadal forecast system predicts that the annual global-mean surface temperature for 2024 will be between 1.43-1.69ºC warmer than for pre-industrial levels (defined as the average from 1850 to 1900), with a central estimate of 1.54ºC.

This means that temperatures in 2024 will likely be warmer than in 2023, and there is a high chance (74% probability) that annual global mean temperature will exceed the 1.5ºC threshold for the first time. The warming is primarily due to the continued emissions of greenhouse gases to the atmosphere due to human activities, particularly burning fossil fuels. The El Niño conditions developing in the Pacific Ocean, which are expected to peak in winter 2023/2024, also contribute to the exceptionally warm global mean temperature conditions.

BSC researcher Roberto Bilbao, the main responsible for performing the BSC decadal forecast, stated: “Our decadal forecast system allows us to predict both the year-to-year variations and longer-term warming trends by considering the influences of greenhouse gas and aerosol emissions and inherent natural variability of the climate system.”

In the next 10 years, surface temperatures are expected to continue increasing in response to continued greenhouse gas emissions. The BSC forecast system predicts that the average of the next two five-year period (2024-2028 and 2029-2033) global mean temperatures could reach between 1.49-1.79ºC and 1.67-1.94ºC above pre-industrial levels, respectively.

While annual mean temperature exceeding the 1.5 ºC threshold in 2024 does not necessarily breach the Paris Agreement, which refers to the average of 20 years, it indicates that the world is rapidly approaching this threshold. Combining the past 10 years of observations and the 10-year BSC forecasts, the mean of this 20-year period (2014-2033) is 1.41±0.05ºC. This indicates that we are on the brink of breaching the Paris Agreement in the coming years.

“Despite the possible year-to-year variations, where individual years can be slightly warmer or cooler than previous years, the global climate is still on a concerning warming trajectory, which is bringing us very close to breaching the goals that global leaders agreed upon in Paris in 2015,” explained ICREA Professor and co-leader of the CVC group Markus Donat.

Figure 1. Evolution of global mean surface air temperatures in observations and the latest forecasts by the decadal prediction system of the BSC.

CREDIT

BSC-CNS

The BSC decadal forecast system

Predicting the variations in climate for the near future is considered one of the most challenging problems the climate forecasting community faces. Until recently, seasonal forecasts (predictions for the next few months) and climate projections (information for long periods over the next 100 years) were the only sources of future climate information available to interested users.

However, newly developed decadal climate prediction systems can foresee variations from a year to a decade. Within this timescale, the evolution of the Earth system is impacted by both natural variability and external forcings (such as rising greenhouse gas concentrations in the atmosphere that cause global warming). Decadal predictions aim to fill the gap between seasonal predictions and climate projections, offering the potential to inform current adaptation and, thus, increase resilience.

The BSC is one of the four “Global Producing Center of Near-Term Climate Prediction” endorsed by the World Meteorological Organization (WMO) that produces yearly operational decadal climate predictions. The CVC group develops the BSC decadal forecast system, which predicts changes in average climate conditions (such as temperature or precipitation, among many other variables) and the frequency and intensity of extreme climate events (such as heatwaves, floods and droughts) over the next decade.

The service combines observational data and climate models, a mathematical representation of the Earth’s climate typically covering the atmosphere, ocean, sea ice and land, to provide the best estimate of the climate system at a specific time. In addition, the BSC also conducts research to enhance decadal predictions and exchange knowledge with interested users since predicting the variations in climate for the upcoming 1-10 years offers multiple opportunities for adaptation to a changing climate in the near future and is crucial to support the development of a more resilient society.

 

Parents more likely to attempt suicide in first years after child’s cancer diagnosis

However, parents are not more likely to die by suicide, finds study of parents in Denmark and Sweden

Peer-Reviewed Publication

PLOS

Parents who have a child with cancer are more likely to attempt suicide during the first years after diagnosis, according to a new study conducted by Qianwei Liu of Southern Medical University, China, and colleagues, published January 16th in the open access journal PLOS Medicine.

Receiving a cancer diagnosis for a child is an incredibly stressful and distressing experience for parents. These parents, especially mothers, face an increased risk of psychiatric disorders, but little is known about the risk of suicide. In the new study, researchers looked at the number of suicide attempts in more than 100,000 parents who had a child diagnosed with cancer in Denmark (1978-2016) or Sweden (1973-2014). For comparison, they looked at rates of suicide attempts in siblings of the parents of children with cancer, and in more than 1 million parents whose children did not have cancer.

The team saw an increased risk of a suicide attempt during the first years after a child’s cancer diagnosis, especially when the child was diagnosed under the age of 18 or had an aggressive or fatal form of cancer. However, there was no increased risk of parental suicide attempt later on, and no higher risk of death by suicide any time after the cancer diagnosis.

The new findings suggest that medical professionals should be more vigilant for possible suicide attempts among parents of children with cancer, especially during the first few years after diagnosis. The researchers propose that future studies should investigate whether these findings can be generalized to other countries with different healthcare systems, cultures, and cancer rates, as compared to Denmark and Sweden.

Liu adds, “Parents of children with cancer experienced an increased risk of suicide attempt during first few years after a child’s cancer diagnosis, but had no altered risk of death by suicide at any time.”

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In your coverage, please use this URL to provide access to the freely available paper in PLOS Medicine: http://journals.plos.org/plosmedicine/article?id=10.1371/journal.pmed.1004322

Citation: Liu Q, László KD, Wei D, Yang F, Fall K, Valdimarsdóttir U, et al. (2024) Suicide attempt and death by suicide among parents of young individuals with cancer: A population-based study in Denmark and Sweden. PLoS Med 21(1): e1004322. https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pmed.1004322

Author Countries: Sweden, United States, Denmark

Funding: This study was supported by the Swedish Cancer Society (grant number: 20 0846 PjF to FF), Karolinska Institutet (Senior Researcher Award and Strategic Research Area in Epidemiology to FF), the China Scholarship Council (grant number: 201700260291 to QL; grant number: 201700260276 to DW), the Novo Nordisk Foundation (grant number: NNF18OC0052029 to JL), the Independent Research Fund Denmark (grant numbers: DFF-6110-00019B, DFF-9039-00010B, and 1030-00012B to JL), the Nordic Cancer Union (grant number: R275-A15770 and R278-A15877 to JL), the Karen Elise Jensens Fond (2016 to JL), and the Swedish Research Council for Health, Working Life and Welfare (grant numbers: 2017-00531 to FF and 2015-00837 to KDL). The funders had no role in study design, data collection and analysis, decision to publish, or preparation of the manuscript.

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JOURNAL

PLoS Medicine

DOI

10.1371/journal.pmed.1004322 

METHOD OF RESEARCH

Observational study

SUBJECT OF RESEARCH

People

COI STATEMENT

Competing interests: The authors have declared no conflicts of interest.

 

E-cigarettes help pregnant smokers quit without risks to pregnancy

Peer-Reviewed Publication

QUEEN MARY UNIVERSITY OF LONDON

A new analysis of trial data on pregnant smokers, led by researchers at Queen Mary University of London, finds that the regular use of nicotine replacement products during pregnancy is not associated with adverse pregnancy events or poor pregnancy outcomes.  

The PREP 2 study used data collected from over 1100 pregnant smokers attending 23 hospitals in England and 1 stop-smoking service in Scotland to compare pregnancy outcomes in women who did or did not use nicotine in the form of e-cigarettes (EC) or nicotine patches regularly during their pregnancy. Researchers took measurements of salivary cotinine levels at baseline and towards the end of pregnancy, and gathered information about each participant’s use of cigarettes or types of NRT, respiratory symptoms, and the birth weight and other data of their babies at birth. 

The study found that e-cigarettes were more commonly used in the group studied than nicotine patches (47% compared with 21%), and also confirmed previous unexpected findings that EC use may reduce respiratory infections in vapers, possibly because the main ingredients of EC, aerosol, propylene glycol, and glycerine, have antibacterial effects.  

Women who smoked and also used one of the nicotine replacement products during their pregnancy had babies with the same birth weights as women who only smoked, while babies born to women who did not smoke during pregnancy did not differ in birth weight, whether the women did or did not use nicotine products. Regular use of nicotine products was not associated with any adverse effects in mothers or their babies. 

Lead researcher, Professor Peter Hajek from the Wolfson Institute of Population Health, Queen Mary University of London, said: "The trial contributes answers to two important questions, one practical and one concerning our understanding of risks of smoking. E-cigarettes helped pregnant smokers quit without posing any detectable risks to pregnancy compared with stopping smoking without further nicotine use. Using nicotine containing aids to stop smoking in pregnancy thus appears safe. The harms to pregnancy from smoking, in late pregnancy at least, seem to be due to other chemicals in tobacco smoke rather than nicotine." 

Prof Tim Coleman from the University of Nottingham’s Smoking in Pregnancy Research Group, which led trial recruitment said: “Smoking in pregnancy is a massive public health problem and nicotine containing aids can help pregnant women to stop smoking, but some clinicians are reticent about providing NRT or e-cigarettes in pregnancy.  This study provides further, reassuring evidence that tobacco smoke chemicals rather than nicotine are responsible for smoking-related harms, so  using nicotine containing aids to quit is vastly preferable to continuing to smoke when pregnant.” 

Professor Linda Bauld, Bruce and John Usher Chair in Public Health at the University of Edinburgh and a study co-investigator said: “Clinicians, pregnant women and their families have questions about the safety of using nicotine replacement therapy (NRT) or e-cigarettes during pregnancy.  Women who continue to smoke during pregnancy often find it difficult to stop but products like NRT or e-cigarettes can help them to do so. These results suggest that NRT or vaping can be used as part of a quit attempt without adverse effects. Our findings should be reassuring, and provide further important evidence to guide decision-making on smoking cessation during pregnancy.” 

The study, conducted by researchers at Queen Mary University of London, University of New South Wales (Australia), University of Nottingham, St George’s University of London, University of Stirling, University of Edinburgh, and King’s College London, and St George’s University Hospitals NHS Foundation Trust, analysed data collected in the Pregnancy Trial of E-cigarettes and Patches (PREP) randomised controlled trial, funded by the National Institute for Health and Care Research (NIHR). 

 

ENDS 

 

NOTES TO EDITORS 

Contact: Honey Lucas 

Faculty Communications Officer – Medicine and Dentistry 

Queen Mary University of London Email: h.lucas@qmul.ac.uk or contact press@qmul.ac.uk  

 

The published paper: 

“Safety of e-cigarettes and nicotine patches as stop-smoking aids in pregnancy: Secondary analysis of the Pregnancy Trial of E-cigarettes and Patches (PREP) randomised controlled trial”. 

Journal: Addiction 

Publication date and embargo: Embargoed until 8AM (UK TIME) WEDNESDAY 17 JANUARY 2024 

DOI: 10.1111/add.16422 

Available after publication at: https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1111/add.16422  

 

Authors: 

Francesca Pesola, PhD (1), Katie Myers Smith, PhD (1), Anna Phillips-Waller, BSc (1) , Dunja Przulj, PhD (1), Christopher Griffiths, D.Phil (1), Robert Walton MD (2), Hayden McRobbie PhD (3), Tim Coleman MD (4), Sarah Lewis, PhD (4), Rachel Whitemore, BA (4), Miranda Clark BSc (4), Michael Ussher, PhD (5), Lesley Sinclair MSc (6), Emily Seager PhD (1), Sue Cooper, PhD (4), Linda Bauld, PhD (6), Felix Naughton, PhD (7), Peter Sasieni, PhD (8), Isaac Manyonda PhD (9), Peter Hajek, PhD (1). 

1) Wolfson Institute of Population Health, Queen Mary University of London. 

2) Blizard Institute, Queen Mary University of London. 

3) National Drug and Alcohol Research Centre, University of New South Wales, Sydney, Australia. 

4) Centre for Academic Primary Care, University of Nottingham. 

5) Division of Population Health Sciences and Education, St. George’s, University of London and Institute of Social Marketing and Health, University of Stirling. 

6) Usher Institute and SPECTRUM Consortium, University of Edinburgh. 

7) School of Health Sciences, University of East Anglia. 

8) The Cancer Research UK and King’s College London Cancer Prevention Trials Unit, King’s College London, UK. Please note, Peter Sasieni is now Professor of Cancer Epidemiology, Centre Co-Lead for the Centre for Cancer Screening, Prevention and Early Diagnosis, in the Wolfson Institute of Population Health at Queen Mary University of London. 

9) St George’s University Hospitals NHS Foundation Trust. 

 

Funding information: 

The study was funded by the National Institute for Health and Care Research (NIHR), ref: 15/57/85. 

 

About Queen Mary www.qmul.ac.uk 

At Queen Mary University of London, we believe that a diversity of ideas helps us achieve the previously unthinkable. 

Throughout our history, we’ve fostered social justice and improved lives through academic excellence. And we continue to live and breathe this spirit today, not because it’s simply ‘the right thing to do’ but for what it helps us achieve and the intellectual brilliance it delivers. 

Our reformer heritage informs our conviction that great ideas can and should come from anywhere. It’s an approach that has brought results across the globe, from the communities of east London to the favelas of Rio de Janeiro. 

We continue to embrace diversity of thought and opinion in everything we do, in the belief that when views collide, disciplines interact, and perspectives intersect, truly original thought takes form. 

 

About the National Institute for Health and Care Research (NIHR) 

The mission of the National Institute for Health and Care Research (NIHR) is to improve the health and wealth of the nation through research. We do this by: 

• Funding high quality, timely research that benefits the NHS, public health and social care; 

• Investing in world-class expertise, facilities and a skilled delivery workforce to translate discoveries into improved treatments and services; 

• Partnering with patients, service users, carers and communities, improving the relevance, quality and impact of our research; 

• Attracting, training and supporting the best researchers to tackle complex health and social care challenges; 

• Collaborating with other public funders, charities and industry to help shape a cohesive and globally competitive research system; 

• Funding applied global health research and training to meet the needs of the poorest people in low and middle income countries. 

NIHR is funded by the Department of Health and Social Care. Its work in low and middle income countries is principally funded through UK Aid from the UK government. 

 

 

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JOURNAL

Addiction

DOI

10.1111/add.16422 

METHOD OF RESEARCH

Data/statistical analysis

SUBJECT OF RESEARCH

People

ARTICLE TITLE

Safety of e-cigarettes and nicotine patches as stop-smoking aids in pregnancy: Secondary analysis of the Pregnancy Trial of E-cigarettes and Patches (PREP) randomized controlled trial

ARTICLE PUBLICATION DATE

17-Jan-2024

 

Amnesia caused by head injury reversed in early mouse study

Peer-Reviewed Publication

GEORGETOWN UNIVERSITY MEDICAL CENTER

WASHINGTON - A mouse study designed to shed light on memory loss in people who experience repeated head impacts, such as athletes, suggests the condition could potentially be reversed. The research in mice finds that amnesia and poor memory following head injury is due to inadequate reactivation of neurons involved in forming memories.

The study, conducted by researchers at Georgetown University Medical Center in collaboration with Trinity College Dublin, Ireland, is reported January 16, 2024, in the Journal of Neuroscience.

Importantly for diagnostic and treatment purposes, the researchers found that the memory loss attributed to head injury was not a permanent pathological event driven by a neurodegenerative disease.  Indeed, the researchers could reverse the amnesia to allow the mice to recall the lost memory, potentially allowing cognitive impairment caused by head impact to be clinically reversed.

The Georgetown investigators had previously found that the brain adapts to repeated head impacts by changing the way the synapses in the brain operate. This can cause trouble in forming new memories and remembering existing memories. In their new study, investigators were able to trigger mice to remember memories that had been forgotten due to head impacts.

“Our research gives us hope that we can design treatments to return the head-impact brain to its normal condition and recover cognitive function in humans that have poor memory caused by repeated head impacts,” says the study’s senior investigator, Mark Burns, PhD, a professor and Vice-Chair in Georgetown’s Department of Neuroscience and director of the Laboratory for Brain Injury and Dementia.

In the new study, the scientists gave two groups of mice a new memory by training them in a test they had never seen before. One group was exposed to a high frequency of mild head impacts for one week (similar to contact sport exposure in people) and one group were controls that didn’t receive the impacts. The impacted mice were unable to recall the new memory a week later.

“Most research in this area has been in human brains with chronic traumatic encephalopathy (CTE), which is a degenerative brain disease found in people with a history of repetitive head impact,” said Burns. “By contrast, our goal was to understand how the brain changes in response to the low-level head impacts that many young football players regularly experience.”

Researchers have found that, on average, college football players receive 21 head impacts per week with defensive ends receiving 41 head impacts per week. The number of head impacts to mice in this study were designed to mimic a week of exposure for a college football player, and each single head impact by itself was extraordinarily mild.

Using genetically modified mice allowed the researchers to see the neurons involved in learning new memories, and they found that these memory neurons (the "memory engram") were equally present in both the control mice and the experimental mice.

To understand the physiology underlying these memory changes, the study’s first author, Daniel P. Chapman, Ph.D., said, “We are good at associating memories with places, and that's because being in a place, or seeing a photo of a place, causes a reactivation of our memory engrams. This is why we examined the engram neurons to look for the specific signature of an activated neuron. When the mice see the room where they first learned the memory, the control mice are able to activate their memory engram, but the head impact mice were not. This is what was causing the amnesia.”

The researchers were able to reverse the amnesia to allow the mice to remember the lost memory using lasers to activate the engram cells. “We used an invasive technique to reverse memory loss in our mice, and unfortunately this is not translatable to humans,” Burns adds. “We are currently studying a number of non-invasive techniques to try to communicate to the brain that it is no longer in danger, and to open a window of plasticity that can reset the brain to its former state.”

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In addition to Burns and Chapman the authors include Stefano Vicini at Georgetown University and Sarah D. Power and Tomás J. Ryan at Trinity College Dublin, Ireland.

This work was supported by the Mouse Behavior Core in the Georgetown University Neuroscience Department and by the National Institutes of Health (NIH) / National Institute of Neurological Disorders and Stroke (NINDS) grants R01NS107370 & R01NS121316. NINDS also supported F30 NS122281 and the Neural Injury and Plasticity Training Grant housed in the Center for Neural Injury and Recovery at Georgetown University (T32NS041218). Seed funding is from the CTE Research Fund at Georgetown.

The authors report having no personal financial interests related to the study.

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JOURNAL

JNeurosci

METHOD OF RESEARCH

Experimental study

SUBJECT OF RESEARCH

Animals

ARTICLE TITLE

Amnesia after repeated head impact is caused by impaired synaptic plasticity in the memory engram

ARTICLE PUBLICATION DATE

16-Jan-2024

 

Canadian Science Publishing goes live on OA switchboard

Business Announcement

CANADIAN SCIENCE PUBLISHING

As part of our open science strategy, Canadian Science Publishing (CSP) is pleased to announce our new partnership with OA Switchboard, a mission-driven, community led initiative designed to simplify the sharing of information between stakeholders about open access publications throughout the whole publication journey.

“We’re thrilled to partner with the OA Switchboard to improve the visibility of the work we publish,” says Elaine Stott, Chief Executive Officer of CSP. “This initiative enables institutions, consortia and funders to report open access information from all participating publishers within a singular data format.”

As of January 1, 2024, all open access manuscripts published in CSP journals, trigger an automatic P1 message (a set of metadata related to a specific article publication) upon version of record publication to the affiliated librarian or research funder confirming the published article’s details. These will be sent to libraries, consortia, and funders active within the OA Switchboard program.

As an independent intermediary, OA Switchboard aims to connect parties and systems, streamlining and simplifying the exchange of OA related publication-level information.

The OA Switchboard:

• offers standardised and authoritative publication metadata for internal and external reporting and purchasing decisions
• enables libraries to monitor deal compliance across many publishers and confirm author and article compliance
• delivers structured version of record metadata format (JSON and Excel)
• feeds data automatically into existing funder, institution and library systems for further integration, processing and analysis
• adopts the ESAC and Jisc standard reporting recommendations

“OA Switchboard shapes collaborative infrastructure to make the ecosystem work better for everyone. It is a mission-driven practical solution, that thrives on collaboration. The more stakeholders connect, the better the service for everyone. We are delighted to have Canadian Science Publishing, with their OA ambitions, participate in the initiative,” says Yvonne Campfens, Executive Director of Stichting OA Switchboard.

For more information on how you can join the OA Switchboard, contact Yvonne Campfens, Executive Director. You can also learn more about OA Switchboard in this three-minute video.

About Canadian Science Publishing

Canadian Science Publishing (CSP) is an independent, not-for-profit leader in mobilizing science, making sure it is easy to discover, use, and share. Featuring content from a global community of researchers, CSP is Canada’s largest publisher of peer-reviewed science journals. 

About OA Switchboard

The OA Switchboard is a mission-driven, community led initiative designed to simplify the sharing of information between stakeholders about open access publications throughout the whole publication journey. It provides a standardised messaging protocol and shared infrastructure that is designed to operate and integrate with all stakeholder systems. It is built by and for the people who use it, and is leveraged with existing PID’s.

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METHOD OF RESEARCH

News article

 

A new, rigorous assessment of OpenET accuracy for supporting satellite-based water management

A new study offers a comprehensive multi-model, large-scale accuracy assessment of an operational satellite-based data system to compute evapotranspiration

Peer-Reviewed Publication

DESERT RESEARCH INSTITUTE

 

IMAGE: 

AN IMAGE SHOWING THE OPENET DATA EXPLORER RASTER VIEW OF EVAPOTRANSPIRATION.

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CREDIT: DRI/OPENET

Sustainable water management is an increasing concern in arid regions around the world, and scientists and regulators are turning to remote sensing tools like OpenET to help track and manage water resources. OpenET uses publicly available data produced by NASA and USGS Landsat and other satellite systems to calculate evapotranspiration (ET), or the amount of water lost to the atmosphere through soil evaporation and plant transpiration, at the level of individual fields. This tool has the potential to revolutionize water management, allowing for field-scale operational monitoring of water use, and a new study provides a thorough analysis of the accuracy of OpenET data for various crops and natural land cover types.

In the study, published Jan. 15 in Nature Water, DRI scientists led a large team of researchers in a comparison of OpenET data to evapotranspiration data produced by 152 ground-based micrometeorological stations known as eddy covariance flux towers. The researchers found that OpenET data has high accuracy for assessing evapotranspiration in agricultural settings, particularly for annual crops like wheat, corn, soy, and rice. OpenET results for these crops were particularly reliable in arid regions like California and the Southwest, supporting the use of this tool to address an ongoing regional water sustainability crisis.

“One of the biggest questions for users of OpenET data is how accurate it is, given the magnitude and implications of the use of the data for water resource management,” said John Volk, Ph.D., lead author of the study and assistant research scientist and software engineer at DRI. “A lot of groups want to know what the expected rates of error are in agricultural lands, so that’s the major question that we wanted to address for this paper.”

The eddy covariance stations consist of instruments and techniques for calculating the flux of trace gases, like water vapor, coming off the land surface. They offer one of the best methods for quantifying evapotranspiration on the ground, Volk says, which provided the researchers the opportunity to compare the ground-based observations with those provided by satellites. Each station’s data was compared to the OpenET model ensemble, which combines six different Landsat-based models to produce an average, as well as data from each individual model. Then, the stations were grouped by land cover type and climate zone to assess how the accuracy of OpenET data changes across these variables.

“I was impressed by the level of performance of the OpenET system,” Volk said. “It’s kind of surprising how well the models did, and how well they agreed with one another in agricultural sites—particularly in the peak growing season when water demands are the highest.”

For annual crops, OpenET data for monthly, growing season, and annual evapotranspiration had an average error rate of approximately 10-20%, which is within the targeted range set by OpenET partners such as farmers and water management agencies. For annual crops growing in Mediterranean climates, monthly error rates were consistently below 10% during peak growing season, emphasizing the usefulness of this data. Accuracy for orchards was more variable (17%), which could be related to the way that shadows impact satellite data for taller vegetation, the authors say.

OpenET data can also be used for monitoring evapotranspiration in natural ecosystems and error rates for most natural land cover types was less than 1 mm per day at monthly to annual timesteps. However, ET rates are generally lower for these ecosystems, resulting in relative error rates that are higher in these environments than in croplands, and range from 35% for forests to 50% for shrublands. While the relative errors are higher for natural ecosystems, the ET data are still useful as indicators of drought impacts, vegetation water stress and water availability.

“Evapotranspiration is one of the hardest hydrologic fluxes to measure, and to think we are quantifying this flux from space with comparable or better accuracy to ground-based weather stations and meter data for agricultural lands is really remarkable,” said study co-author Justin Huntington, Ph.D., research professor at DRI. “The combined use of the Landsat-satellite archive with new Google Earth Engine cloud computing resources has been key, as has our collaboration across different research groups and use of multiple models to better understand model strengths and weaknesses and identify areas for improvement.”

Future research will focus on natural ecosystems and how OpenET models compare under different agricultural demand management and conservation actions, such as those being explored in the Colorado River Basin.

The study notes that although all OpenET models have room for improvement, the results show the remarkable progress achieved in developing fully automated remote sensing techniques for mapping evapotranspiration at large spatial scales and at the resolution of individual fields based on petabytes of Landsat satellite data and new cloud computing resources.

“Farmers and water managers increasingly need accurate, field-level data on water use,” said Maurice Hall, OpenET director and senior advisor, Climate Resilient Water Systems, Environmental Defense Fund. “This study helps confirm the vital role OpenET plays in providing a more granular, dynamic picture of water use that can meaningfully inform real-time water decision-making. We look forward to continuing to refine and expand the implementation of OpenET to ensure farmers, ranchers, and communities can thrive in a world of highly stressed and variable water supplies.”

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More information: The full study, Assessing the accuracy of OpenET satellite-based evapotranspiration data to support water resource and land management applications, is available from Nature Water: 10.1038/s44221-023-00181-7. For more information on OpenET visit https://openetdata.org/. OpenET users and scientists can find the most updated accuracy information at https://openetdata.org/accuracy/.

 

Additional Quotes: “It’s truly rewarding to see decades of careful research and hard work by this science community come together, and this study sets a new benchmark for satellite mapping of field-scale evapotranspiration with Landsat,” says Forrest Melton, senior research scientist with NASA Ames Research Center. “By documenting the accuracy of the OpenET data, I anticipate that this study will further accelerate the already rapid uptake and use of these data to help solve pressing water management challenges and open up new applications and areas of future study.”

 

Study authors include: John M. Volk and Justin L. Huntington (DRI),  Forrest S. Melton (NASA Ames, CSU Monterey Bay), Richard Allen, (U. of Idaho), Martha Anderson (USDA Agricultural Research Service), Joshua B. Fisher (UCLA), Ayse Kilic (University of Nebraska-Lincoln), Anderson Ruhoff (Universidade Federal do Rio Grande do Sul), Gabriel B. Senay (U.S. Geological Survey Earth Resources Observation and Science Center), Blake Minor (DRI), Charles Morton (DRI), Thomas Ott (DRI), Lee Johnson (NASA Ames, CSU Monterey Bay), Bruno Comini de Andrade (Universidade Federal do Rio Grande do Sul), Will Carrara (NASA Ames, CSU Monterey Bay), Conor Doherty (NASA Ames), Christian Dunkerly (DRI), MacKenzie Friedrichs (KBR, Inc), Alberto Guzman (NASA Ames, CSU Monterey Bay), Christopher Hain (NASA Marshall Space Flight Center), Gregory Halverson (NASA Jet Propulsion Lab), Yanghui Kang (UC Berkeley) , Kyle Knipper (USDA Agricultural Research Service), Leonardo Laipelt (Universidade Federal do Rio Grande do Sul), Samuel Ortega-Salazar (University of Nebraska-Lincoln), Christopher Pearson (DRI), Gabriel E.L. Parrish (Innovate!, Inc.), A.J. Purdy (NASA Ames, CSU Monterey Bay), Peter ReVelle (University of Nebraska-Lincoln), Tianxin Wang (UC Berkeley), Yun Yang (Mississippi State University)

 

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About OpenET

OpenET is a public-private collaboration with input from more than 100 farmers, water managers, and other stakeholders, and led by OpenET, Inc., Desert Research Institute, NASA, Environmental Defense Fund, and the U.S. Geological Survey. Additional partners include Google, U.S. Department of Agriculture, California State University Monterey Bay, Mississippi State University, HabitatSeven, University of Idaho, University of Maryland, University of Nebraska-Lincoln, UCLA, and Universidade Federal do Rio Grande do Sul in Brazil.

 

About DRI

The Desert Research Institute (DRI) is a recognized world leader in basic and applied environmental research. Committed to scientific excellence and integrity, DRI faculty, students who work alongside them, and staff have developed scientific knowledge and innovative technologies in research projects around the globe. Since 1959, DRI’s research has advanced scientific knowledge on topics ranging from humans’ impact on the environment to the environment’s impact on humans. DRI’s impactful science and inspiring solutions support Nevada’s diverse economy, provide science-based educational opportunities, and inform policymakers, business leaders, and community members. With campuses in Las Vegas and Reno, DRI serves as the non-profit research arm of the Nevada System of Higher Education. For more information, please visit www.dri.edu.

 

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JOURNAL

Nature Water

DOI

10.1038/s44221-023-00181-7 

ARTICLE TITLE

Assessing the accuracy of OpenET satellite-based evapotranspiration data to support water resource and land management applications

ARTICLE PUBLICATION DATE

15-Jan-2024