It’s possible that I shall make an ass of myself. But in that case one can always get out of it with a little dialectic. I have, of course, so worded my proposition as to be right either way (K.Marx, Letter to F.Engels on the Indian Mutiny)
Thursday, March 02, 2023
New book reveals techniques of power behind LGBTQI hate crimes in Russia
Dr Alexander Kondakov’s research highlights the devastating impacts of anti-queer rhetoric
University College Dublin (UCD) Researcher Dr Alexander Kondakov launches his new book Violent Affections (2022, UCL Press) in UCD at 5pm, 2 March 2023.
Violent Affections reveals the techniques of power that have emboldened hate crimes against queer people in Russia over the last decade.
In 2013, Russia enacted the so-called “gay propaganda” law – a censorship legislation banning LGBTQI-related content from circulation and LGBTQI activists from organising public events. Through analysis of over 300 criminal cases of anti-queer violence before and after this law was introduced, the book draws attention to the devastating consequences of anti-queer rhetoric: murders, injuries, kidnappings and other violent crimes, which doubled after the law was introduced.
Author and Assistant Professor at UCD School of Sociology, Dr Kondakov says: “It is commonly assumed that a decision to commit violence is taken individually by the perpetrators. In my analysis, however, I link that decision directly to political homophobia. I suggest that in every individual decision to kill or injure a gay person, there is a share that belongs to government officials who disseminate hate.”
The book explores the social mechanisms that impact anti-queer violence as evidenced in the reviewed criminal cases, connecting this to the political violence aimed at queer lives more generally. By bringing to light stories of LGBTQI people in Russia, this important research raises awareness of the senseless violence taking place, and illustrates the dire impacts of discriminatory censorship laws.
Violent Affections is praised as 'immediately relevant in the contemporary period of misinformation campaigns and the influence of technology in the production of truth. Violent Affections demonstrates the interweaving of government, law, and society from a discursive technological standpoint founded on centuries of sociohistorical knowledge.' (Journal of Homosexuality, January 2023).
In this volume, Kondakov expands upon queer theory and affect theory to conceptualise what is referred to as neo-disciplinary power, developing an original explanation of how contemporary power relations are changing from those of late modernity as envisioned by Foucault’s Panopticon to neo-disciplinary power relations of a much more fragmented, fluid and unstructured kind – the Memeticon.
The book launch takes place on Thursday 2 March 2023 at 5pm in The Campus Bookshop, UCD, featuring a discussion with the author and comments from Jennifer Schweppe (University of Limerick), one of Ireland's leading scholars of hate crime. Launch tickets: here, hard copies of the book will be available to purchase.
The Frontiers of Knowledge Award goes to Timothy Besley, Torsten Persson and Guido Tabellini for transforming political economy into a modern, empirical, interdisciplinary science
The BBVA Foundation recognizes their fundamental contributions to studying how political institutions and processes shape economic policies and outcomes and how economic factors, in turn, shape political institutions
IMAGE: TIMOTHY J. BESLEY, WINNER OF THE BBVA FOUNDATION FRONTIERS OF KNOWLEDGE AWARD IN ECONOMICS, FINANCE AND MANAGEMENT.view more
CREDIT: BBVA FOUNDATION
The BBVA Foundation Frontiers of Knowledge Award in Economics, Finance and Management has gone in this fifteenth edition to Timothy J. Besley (London School of Economics), Torsten Persson (Institute of International Economic Studies, Stockholm University) and Guido Tabellini (Bocconi University,) for “illuminating the connections between the economic and political worlds” and “transforming the field of political economy,” in the words of the committee’s citation. The three awardees, together with the late Alberto Alesina (Harvard University), have employed both theoretical and empirical tools to examine “how political institutions and processes shape economic policies and outcomes on one hand, and how economic factors shape political institutions on the other,” contributing decisively to shape the field of modern political economy.
The work of Besley, Persson and Tabellini, the citation concludes, “has enriched economics by drawing important connections between the economy and politics,” and “has spawned a flourishing literature in several areas of the social sciences.”
An evidence-based field of study
The organization of states and their institutional structures in relation to the socioeconomic realities of their citizens has been an object of study since at least the mid-18th century, led by thinkers such as Adam Smith or David Ricardo. But these great theorists of classical economics had to make do with hypothetical cases and constructs, having no firm data to rely on, a situation that endured until the ascension of statistics in the 20th century, as John Maynard Keynes complained in his day.
In recent decades, with information more readily available, the new political economy pioneered by the awardees has brought with it two main innovations: the primacy of empirical inquiry and the use of the tools and techniques of modern economic science. Their research, which has been widely cited by social scientists of every branch, country and school of thought, forms the core of a whole new field of study — Modern Political Economy — that exhibits all the clarity of robust theory applied to solid, evidence-driven analysis. Proof of its success is a statistic quoted by Francesco Trebbi, Professor of Business and Public Policy at the University of California, Berkeley and one of the nominators of the new laureates, to the effect that “around one tenth of top journal publications in economics every year (according to the NBER Political Economy program meeting in April 2019)” build squarely on their approach.
For Mónica Martínez Bravo, a professor in the Centre for Monetary and Financial Studies (CEMFI), the awardees’ work stands out in this thriving field “for leading and lighting the way for other researchers to follow, proposing and developing new aspects and approaches to unravel the linkages between politics and economics. Beyond simply seeking to understand the sociopolitical context for public policymaking, they model the behavior of agents – citizens, institutions and organizations – and make it the centerpiece of the theoretical framework. And then they develop empirical tests to find whether these theories are supported by the facts.”
There is a broadening consensus around both the importance of institutional quality for economic development, and the potentially damaging effects of inequality on economic growth. In the last 15 years these ideas have found their way into the reports of multilateral organizations like the World Bank. Ideas drawn from the increasingly influential field of modern political economy, and elaborated by the awardees in a series of publications outstanding in their scope, quality and impact.
The first wave of the new political economy
In the mid-1970s, Torsten Persson (Stockholm, 1954) was dividing his time between higher education and his military training. He initially had his sights set on studying medicine, but changed tack in light of the experience of talking to his fellow soldiers and a visit to late Francoist Spain: “I thought I needed to widen my views on the world around me, to try and understand society, and that led me to economics and political science.”
Around the same time, in Italy, Guido Tabellini was becoming convinced that “big mistakes” were being made in economic policy: “We had a very high inflation rate, were accumulating large government debt and going through a financial crisis. Not because the economy was weak, but because policymakers were enacting very bad policies. And so, for many of us, trying to understand why those bad policies were chosen over more efficient alternatives was something that sparked our curiosity.” Among the many was his friend Alberto Alesina, another of the figures behind the birth of the new political economy who sadly died in 2020.
Tabellini and Persson would discover their shared motivations when their respective academic careers took them to the University of California, Los Angeles (UCLA) in 1989-1990. Both believed traditional analysis had been hamstrung because it looked in one direction only; at the way that policymaking acted on the real economy. What was needed, they felt, was to dig deeper and ask how economic policies were actually arrived at, how they were chosen and how they reflected the institutional environment in which they were formed: “In what would become the first wave of the political economy revolution,” Professor Persson relates, “the punchline, if you like, was that it was political and economic forces together that determined which policies got enacted in a given country.”
The result of their exchanges was the 1990 book Macroeconomic Policy, Credibility and Politics, which Persson views as the cornerstone of modern political economy, followed by talks at congresses and in lecture halls where they continued to work up their ideas. In the year 2000 they published Political Economics. Explaining Economic Policy, now a standard in its field. In both these works the authors combine insights from the macroeconomic literature on the time-consistency of policy with the theories of public choice and rational choice, as well as game theory, to explore how politics interacts with the economy in the shaping of economic policies.
In their later book, The Economic Effects of Constitutions, published in 2005, they used long time series for a number of countries to study the linkages between constitutional structures — whether a country has a presidential or parliamentary system or if the electoral rules are majoritarian, proportional or representative — and economic policymaking in areas like taxation, income redistribution programs or the provision of public goods. What they pursued in their research was a deep understanding of the institutional environment in each study state, “and all this information was there in the data,” Persson explains.
From theory to empirical evidence
At these early stages the field advanced in parallel with economics as a whole: from theory to empirical inquiry. “Many assumptions of the rational expectations theory are not applicable in real circumstances,” Tabellini points out. “So in political economics, a lot of attention is now going to how beliefs and opinions are formed. And to do that we need to exploit insights from psychology and sociology, to understand how our value systems largely influence behaviors like, for instance, the way we vote.”
Observation and empirical analysis would thus take center stage, backed by interaction with other disciplines. Political science, for instance, had elucidated how the party system in a given state tends to favor single-party or coalition governments. Persson and Tabellini expanded on this insight to show that these same trends could determine such key economic variables as levels of public spending or public debt, since a country with frequent coalition governments will lean towards greater government spending. “Political scientists had not got that far,” Tabellini remarks, “while, on the economics side, little thought had gone to how policy decisions reflect the incentives of the policymakers.”
In an extensive body of research they have found that “a clear separation of the executive and legislative powers subject to proper checks and balances is a way to prevent the abuse of power and to guarantee the smooth functioning of a democratic system,” in the words of the citation, or argued that a country’s economic growth policies can be structurally undermined by inequalities in wealth and income distribution.
The pillars of prosperity
In parallel, Timothy Besley had embarked on his own line of research at Princeton University, informed in part by Persson and Tabellini’s work as the LSE professor recalls: “In my early work I studied the impact of having term limits on politicians. In some countries, politicians have to retire, so U.S. presidents, for instance, can only serve two terms and then they have to leave. So [with Anne Case] we looked at the impact of term limits on incentives, and found that when a politician is subject to a term limit, they’re clearly not going to be thinking beyond the end of their time in office.” One consequence of this attitude was that public spending and debt rose at a higher rate.
That same year, in 1995, Besley was invited to a conference Torsten Persson was organizing in Italy in a bid to bring together researchers with an interest in this young and burgeoning field. Shortly after, the three awardees formed an interdisciplinary research group that would meet two or three times a year, and professors Besley and Persson began work on their co-publications.
Among the most far-reaching was their book Pillars of Prosperity (2011) examining he determinants and consequences of what they called “state capacity.” The three pillars referred to are, in Besley’s words: “firstly, the power to raise taxes; secondly, the ability to make and enforce laws; and, thirdly, the state’s capacity to spend wisely on things that make their citizens’ lives better, be it health systems, education systems or infrastructure.”
These three pillars, his research finds, are closely interrelated: “If you’re going to make your citizens’ lives better by providing healthcare, for instance, you need to build collective capacity. And that links to the power to raise taxes, because citizens are only willing to be taxed if the revenues are used wisely, to create, say, improvements in their lives.” Not only interrelated, then, but mutually reinforcing. “It’s not God-given that you can tax the population,” Professor Persson adds. “You need to build institutions in order to have a well-working tax system. You can’t just decide to do it. It requires purposeful action and looking for investments on behalf of the state. So we wanted to study under what circumstances a state would have appropriate motives to invest in its development.”
Besley’s subsequent research, building on the three pillars of prosperity theory, helps explain why some countries have failed to deliver development and remain fragile at best. He talks in this respect about three types of state: those whose state capacity is strong, with the pillars of prosperity in place, which are generally referred to as successful or common interest states; a second group whose regimes are perpetuated through the use of force and repression. They may display some of the defining characteristics of the pillars of prosperity, but can only sustain them by means of powerful armies, police forces subservient to their interests, changes in political mechanisms as their needs dictate, and censorship and control of the media. The term used for them is special interest states. And finally, we have the weak states, those that have failed even to establish long-run systems. Rulers come and go and they have not built state capacities to any meaningful extent.
In its citation, the committee also singles out Timothy Besley’s work on the role played by property rights and other institutions, like labor market regulation or political accountability, in the economic outcomes of developing countries. “It’s a central feature of modern political economy,” he explains. “Capitalist market systems need a way of establishing and maintaining property rights. If you have property rights, you can create incentives to invest that translate into economic growth. And so, you have economic benefits from a state that is able to build legal capacity.” Plus, as Tabellini says of tax systems, if the state sees it as good and necessary to establish or uphold property rights, it needs to have a firm grasp of the kind of politics that support them. “It’s not enough to say they’re a good idea. You have to understand how to actually bring them about and ensure their enforcement.”
Nominators
Timothy Besley, Torsten Persson and Guido Tabellini were nominated for the award by Robin Burgess and Maitreesh Ghatak, economics professors at the London School of Economics (United Kingdom); Hannes Mueller, a tenured researcher at the Institute for Economic Analysis, CSIC (Spain); and Francesco Trebbi, a professor in the Haas School of Business at the University of California, Berkeley (United States).
Laureate bio notes
Timothy Besley (Kesteven, United Kingdom, 1960) earned his PhD in Economics from the University of Oxford (1987). After teaching at Princeton University (United States) from 1989 to 1995, he joined the London School of Economics and Political Science, where he is now School Professor of Economics and Political Science and W. Arthur Lewis Professor of Development Economics. Besley is one of nine members of the UK’s National Infrastructure Commission, and has served as an external member of the Bank of England’s Monetary Policy Committee. A former president of the International Economic Association, the European Economic Association, the Econometric Society and the Royal Econometric Society, he has also been co-editor of American Economic Review and is currently on the editorial board of Economica,
Torsten Persson, winner of the BBVA Foundation Frontiers of Knowledge Award in Economics, Finance and Management.
Torsten Persson (Stockholm, Sweden, 1954) received his PhD in Economics from Stockholm University (1982), where he is currently Swedish Research Council Distinguished Professor at the Institute of International Economic Studies. He is also a Centennial Professor at the London School of Economics (UK) and Director of the Institutions, Organizations and Growth program of global research network CIFAR. He has held visiting positions at Harvard, Princeton and Berkeley universities, among others, and is a former president of both the Econometric Society and the European Economic Association. As well as chairing the Scientific Advisory Board to the Swedish Treasury, Persson has served as associate editor of the European Economic Review and the Journal of Economic Growth, and as an elected trustee of the Nobel Foundation.
Guido Tabellini, winner of the BBVA Foundation Frontiers of Knowledge Award in Economics, Finance and Management.
Guido Tabellini (Turin, Italy, 1956) completed a PhD in Economics at the University of California, Los Angeles (UCLA) in 1984. Between the years 1985 and 1994, his teaching and research career took him to Stanford University, UCLA, and, on his return to Italy, the universities of Cagliari and Brescia. In 1994 he moved to Bocconi University, initially as Director (to 2002) and later President (2002-2008) of the Innocenzo Gasparini Institute for Economic Research. A former rector of the university (2008-2012), he is now Professor of Economics and holder of the Intesa Sanpaolo Chair in Political Economics at Bocconi, as well as serving as its Vice President and President of its Institute of European Policymaking. Tabellini is the current past president of the Econometric Society, as well as a former president of the European Economic Association.
Economics, Finance and Management committee and evaluation support panel
The committee in this category was chaired by Eric S. Maskin, Adams University Professor at Harvard University (United States) and Nobel Laureate in Economics, with Manuel Arellano, Professor of Economics in the Center for Monetary and Financial Studies (CEMFI) of Banco de España acting as secretary. Remaining members were SirRichard Blundell, David Ricardo Professor of Political Economy at University College London (United Kingdom), Antonio Ciccone, Professor of Economics at the University of Mannheim (Germany); Pinelopi Koujianou Goldberg, Elihu Professor of Economics and Global Affairs at Yale University (United States); Andreu Mas-Colell, Professor Emeritus of Economics at Pompeu Fabra University and the Barcelona School of Economics (Spain); Lucrezia Reichlin, Professor of Economics at the London Business School (United Kingdom); and Fabrizio Zilibotti, Tuntex Professor of International and Development Economics at Yale University (United States).
The evaluation support panel charged with nominee pre-assessment was coordinated by Hugo Rodríguez Mendizabal, Tenured Scientist at the Institute for Economic Analysis (IAE, CSIC) and formed by: Adelheid Holl, Tenured Scientist at the Institute of Public Goods and Policies (IPP-CCHS, CSIC); Samir Mili Chargui, Tenured Scientist at the Institute of Economics, Geography and Demography (IEGD-CCHS, CSIC); and Xavier Ramos Morilla, Professor of Applied Economics at the Universidad Autónoma de Barcelona (UAB).
About the BBVA Foundation Frontiers of Knowledge Awards
The BBVA Foundation centers its activity on the promotion of world-class scientific research and cultural creation, and the recognition of talent.
The BBVA Foundation Frontiers of Knowledge Awards, funded with 400,000 euros in each of their eight categories, recognize and reward contributions of singular impact in physics and chemistry, mathematics, biology and biomedicine, technology, environmental sciences (climate change, ecology and conservation biology), economics, social sciences, the humanities and music, privileging those that significantly enlarge the stock of knowledge in a discipline, open up new fields, or build bridges between disciplinary areas. The goal of the awards, established in 2008, is to celebrate and promote the value of knowledge as a public good without frontiers, the best instrument to take on the great global challenges of our time and expand the worldviews of individuals for the benefit of all humanity. Their eight categories address the knowledge map of the 21st century.
The BBVA Foundation has been aided in the evaluation of nominees for the Frontiers Award in Economics, Finance and Management by the Spanish National Research Council (CSIC), the country’s premier public research organization. CSIC has a preferential role in the appointment of members to the evaluation support panels made up of leading experts in the corresponding knowledge area, who are charged with undertaking an initial assessment of the candidates proposed by numerous institutions across the world, and drawing up a reasoned shortlist for the consideration of the award committees. CSIC is also responsible for designating each committee’s chair and participates in the selection of remaining members, thus helping to ensure objectivity in the recognition of scientific excellence.
IMAGE: TO FILL THE TWO CHAIRHOLDERS POSITIONS, ÉTS MONTREAL IS SEEKING RESEARCHERS WHO ARE EXPERTS IN THE FIELD OF BUILDINGS AND INFRASTRUCTURE AND WHOSE WORK FOCUSES ON RESILIENCE CAPACITY AND ADAPTABILITY TO CLIMATE CHANGE.view more
CREDIT: ETS
To fill the two Chairholders positions, ÉTS is seeking researchers who are experts in the field of buildings and infrastructure and whose work focuses on resilience capacity and adaptability to climate change.
Canada Research Chair (Tier 1)
This Research Chair will receive CAN$ 200,000 in funding per year over a period of seven years, and is open to researchers whose achievements have had a significant impact on their field of expertise.
Candidates who wish to submit an application must be capable of proposing an original, innovative research program related to the adaptability of infrastructure and buildings to climate change and the reduction of their environmental footprints, along with their integration into a circular economy model.
In addition to the above-mentioned funding, which is intended to support the research work, an application for a $250,000 grant can be submitted to a major Canadian funding program to acquire equipment.
Deadline for submitting applications: April 30, 2023, at Midnight (Québec time).
The incumbent Chairholder of this Research Chair will benefit from CAN$ 100,000 in funding per year over a period of five years, and an additional yearly allowance of CAN$ 20,000 for the same period if the individual is a first-time Chairholder. The total amount of CAN$ 120,000 will contribute to the full funding of the Chairholder’s research work.
In addition to the above-mentioned funding, an application for a $140,000 grant can be submitted to a major Canadian funding program to acquire equipment.
Deadline for submitting applications: April 30, 2023, at Midnight (Québec time).
École de technologie supérieure is one of ten constituents of the Université du Québec network. It trains engineers and researchers who are recognized for their practical and innovative approach, the development of new technologies and their skill at transferring their knowledge to companies. Almost one-quarter of all engineers in Québec graduated from ÉTS, which boasts 11,000 students, including 2,650 at the graduate and post-graduate level. ÉTS specializes in applied training and research in engineering, and maintains a unique partnership with the business sector and with industry. For more information, please visit etsmtl.ca.
Putting a price tag on the amenity value of private forests
When it comes to venturing into and enjoying nature, forests are the people’s top choice – at least in Denmark. This is also reflected in the sales prices of properties with private forest. But beyond earnings potential, this first study of its kind, conducted by the University of Copenhagen, puts a price tag on the so-called amenity value of Danish private forests.
Forests have a nearly therapeutic effect on humans. Perhaps that is why eight out of ten of Danes have wandered in the woods over the last year and trends like forest bathing are gaining in popularity. Most people have probably experienced relaxing their shoulders, deepening their breathing, and found peace while being immersed in the deep, quiet tranquility of a forest.
While there is nothing novel about venturing into the woods to find peace of mind, the value of forests for Danes is fully intact. Studies by the Danish Outdoor Council and UCPH’s Department of Geosciences and Natural Resource Management, among others, have shown that Danes prefer forest outings over trips to the beach or wandering open fields and meadows.
Forest owners are quite aware of this as well. A new study by researchers at the University of Copenhagen’s Department of Food and Resource Economics investigated the amenity value of private forest ownership. It turns out that there are good reasons to buy (or plant) private forest for anyone interested in increasing the quality of their and their family’s life – or increase their property value, as the amenity value is clearly reflected in the sales prices of rural properties.
"We see a fairly significant difference in the price of rural homes with and without forested areas larger than half a hectare. In fact, we see an increased value of DKK 25,000-75,000 per hectare of private forest, less the income opportunities from the forest," says Marie Lautrup of the Department of Food and Resource Economics, the study’s lead author.
Using large data sets, Lautrup and her colleagues were able to exclude other rural home factors that might otherwise explain their increased value, thereby excluding the forest's potential as a source of income from forestry, hunting leases, etc., from the equation.
"In this way, we isolated this intangible amenity value of private forests and put a price tag on it," says the researcher.
She hopes that the findings can be used by public authorities and lawmakers to target government support and incentives to establish and conserve private forest.
The bigger the forest, the greater its amenity value
Most forests in Denmark are owned by private landholders. Proprietorship is divided into many small forest owners and a few people who own a lot. According to Marie Lautrup, forest owners have a great influence on the landscape that Danes live and go about in. As such, it was interesting for her to investigate the values private forest owners attribute to their forests.
"Fortunately, we can see that private forest owners are like most people when it comes to forests. In particular, they love deciduous forests and their tall and thereby older trees. So, they have an incentive to manage their forest with the same interests in mind, and thus with the same values as the rest of society. So far so good," says Marie Lautrup.
But why do they have forest – is it just to make money? The researchers sought answers to this question as well. The conclusion was that forest holds great value for private owners, beyond its capital value.
"In fact, the figures in our study demonstrate that regardless of whether it is a small or a slightly larger forest, the sale price is characterized by a value attributed to it by the owner's pure joy of the forest, i.e., its perceived amenity value. We haven’t accounted for all forest sizes in the study, but based on the data we have, it seems that any increase in value follows forest size. The more, the better," says Marie Lautrup.
Can help increase Danish forest area
The researchers hope that politicians and public authorities will be able to use the study to target legislation on deductions and subsidies related to forest management and afforestation efforts.
For example, the results can be used to accelerate ordinary people's efforts to increase Denmark's forest area, because establishing small forests is a good investment.
"In Denmark, we have a political goal of reaching 20-25% forested area by the end of the 21st century. The remaining 5-10% can be obtained by encouraging private landowners to plant forests, among other things. Traditionally, it has been difficult to put the public subsidy pool to use," explains Marie Lautrup and continues:
"Those who receive forest subsidies tend to be the large forest owners. So, if you want to boost private forest development, you may need to get hold of the slightly smaller owners. Here, the study clearly shows that it creates value, both in terms of quality of life, but also financially, to become a small forest owner," she says.
Planting forests of a certain size in Denmark may also make them fall under the Danish Forest Act. The 1805 law prohibits forests from being cleared and came into being at a time when Denmark lacked wood to build warships, among other things.
According to Marie Lautrup, increasing the forested area of Denmark has several advantages. On the one hand, it will increase forest access for Danes, as private forests are open to all during daytime, so long as paths are used, except for in very small forests.
At the same time, it could play a role in Denmark's efforts to reduce atmospheric CO2, as trees are natural CO2 capturers.
Facts: What is amenity value?
Amenity value is something that cannot be immediately sold in a market, for example timber and hunting leases.
It can be understood as qualities in a place or environment that make it attractive to use, e.g. in connection with the importance of scenic surroundings for a home's sales value
Facts: Danes prefer forests
Forests have clearly occupied first place as a destination for outdoors life over the past 30 years, despite many other new types of leisure and experiences.
Studies conducted by the Danish Outdoor Council have also shown that forest trips and picnics are Danes' favorite experience in nature, ahead of, for example, visits to the beach and meadows. 78% of Danes visited forests over the past six months
According to a previous study by the Department of Geosciences and Natural Resource Management, approximatively 70 million visits are made by Danes to the forest annually – an average of 30-40 times per person.
About the study
The study is based on property registers, map data and accounting data, and shows correspondence – or correlation – between privately-owned forest and sales prices of rural properties, which reveal a measurable amenity value of private forest.
The researchers have analysed an increased amenity value per additional hectare of forest of DKK 25,000-75,000. And higher still for the smallest rural homes.
By statistically comparing similar rural homes, the researchers were able to identify the impact of a wide range of characteristics on rural home sales prices, including forested areas of at least half a hectare.
(Both data availability and the official definition of forest have placed constraints on the study — there must be more than half an acre of trees of a certain height before it counts in the statistics.)
In this way, the researchers concluded that forest has a significant positive impact on the sales price and been able to estimate the average value of an extra hectare of forest.
They have deducted all income (e.g., timber production and hunting leases) to be left with a concrete value of the joy of forest ownership – or amenity value.
What are humans? What are animals? And what makes humans unique? The comparative psychologist Fumihiro Kano has set himself a life goal to answer those questions. On 28 February 2023 it was announced that the scientist from the Cluster of Excellence “Centre for the Advanced Study of Collective Behaviour” (CASCB) at the University of Konstanz will receive the Manfred Fuchs Prize from the Heidelberg Academy of Sciences and Humanities of the State Baden-Württemberg for his interdisciplinary work in animal behaviour research.
Fumihiro Kano wears a motion capture suit, eye tracking glasses, and holds a table tennis racket with markers in his hand. “I am interested in what animals see, feel, and think, and ultimately how humans, as one of the primate species, are unique in perception, cognition, and social behaviour,” he says and then starts to play table tennis in his lab. Fumihiro Kano has been a group leader at the CASCB since 2021. He started his career at Kyoto University and was enrolled at the Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology and at the University of Oxford before coming to Konstanz. He describes himself not a passionate table tennis player, but the Japanese researcher thinks that everyone is able to play the sport. That is the reason he chose table tennis for an experiment.
How groups interact
Together with his Postdoctoral Researcher Prasetia Putra, Kano conducts a study where they want to unravel the underlying mechanism of human coordination in sports using behavioural and physiological modalities. “Sometimes groups coordinate nicely, sometimes they fail, but what is the secret behind it?” asks Kano. “So far, the individuals’ anticipation ability, movement coordination, and physiological difference is unknown,” he says.
Therefore, this study aims to fill those gaps by measuring an individual’s gaze direction, body movements, and heartbeat. Participants play table tennis in teams of two while wearing a motion capture suit as Kano does. Even the table tennis ball is marked. A motion caption camera system tracks the movements.
The focus is on micro behaviour
Overall, Fumihiro Kano concentrates on micro behaviour to map human and animal behaviour. His research species include birds, primates, and human adults. They target various collective behaviour, including team cooperation, vigilance, and collective foraging. “Basically, I just bring non-inversive cutting edge technologies to the field,” he says.
In another experiment, he focuses on group performances in pigeons, “a very social bird species,” as he says. While pigeons forage, they want to eat as much as possible. Nevertheless, they need to be attentive collectively, to be aware when a predator attacks them. “In our experiment, my PhD student Mathilde Delacoux and I created a situation where the pigeons see warning cue and we tried to find out the group performance during the pretended attack.”
Thanks to modern tracking technology, the research group knows precisely where each individual is looking at and if the individual has the head up or down while the pretended predator calls. The researchers conduct the experiment in the Imaging Barn, a collaborative project between the CASCB and the Max Planck Institute of Animal Behavior. It is a core facility for studying the dynamics of highly naturalistic interactions. Both experiments are still running, so they themselves are still curious about the results.
“In a highly creative way, Fumihiro Kano uses and extends state-of-the-art informatics methods as tracking and modelling to study cognition and behaviour of humans and different animal species, from birds to monkeys, from individuals to groups of humans and animals,” Oliver Deussen, speaker of the CASCB mentions.
Key facts
Fumihiro Kano will be awarded the Manfred Fuchs Prize of the Heidelberg Academy of Sciences and Humanities for his interdisciplinary work in animal behaviour research.
Fumihiro Kano is interested in what animals see, feel, and think, and ultimately how humans, as one of the primate species, are unique in perception, cognition, and social behaviour.
Caption: Table tennis experiment with Fumihiro Kano. For tracking his movements, he wears a motion-capture suit, eye-tracking glasses and holds a table tennis bat with marker dots in his hand.
Copyright: Elisabeth Böker, CASCB, University of Konstanz
U.S. birds’ Eastern, Western behavior patterns are polar opposites
Study analyzes avian cross-country biodiversity changes over a year
COLUMBUS, Ohio – There is much more to avian biodiversity in the United States than the number of different species living in a given region or community, but the diversity of birds’ ecosystem contributions – assessed through measures of their diet, body structure and foraging methods – are much tougher to study.
And with hundreds of species migrating south for the winter and north for summer breeding, birds’ ecosystem function patterns change over space and time – creating a serious analytical challenge.
But two scientists from The Ohio State University have established what could be considered a baseline map of annual avian functional and species diversity patterns in the U.S., logging 11,000 code-running hours at the Ohio Supercomputer Center to produce their findings.
And what they found was a stunner: Functional diversity patterns in the West, where species and functional richness are both highest during the breeding season, are the polar opposite of what is seen in the East, where functional diversity is lowest when species richness is high. That pattern in the East is particularly puzzling because it means the overall diversity of birds’ ecosystem contributions are highest when a huge number of migratory species are gone.
“This tells us that, probably, migratory birds in the East versus the West have very different functional contributions to assemblages,” said lead author Marta Jarzyna, assistant professor of evolution, ecology and organismal biology at Ohio State.
“It suggests that resident birds in the East have a wider array of functional characteristics than migratory birds, and in the West, it’s the opposite: Migratory birds contribute more to functional richness than resident birds.”
The researchers used 2019 data from the Cornell Lab of Ornithology’s eBird Status and Trends, which provided seasonal abundance estimates for over 800 species. Beyond quantifying species richness, Jarzyna and Stagge also incorporated four characteristics to derive estimates of functional diversity: birds’ body mass, diet (ranging from bugs and rodents to nectar and seeds), foraging niche (in or near water or the ground, or in spaces among or above trees) and activity time, at night or during the day.
The collaboration with Stagge was key to incorporating the passage of time, Jarzyna said: As a hydrologist studying climate data, he was proficient in research techniques used to analyze seasonal variations.
Scientists have known for some time that knowledge of the functional richness birds bring to their communities tells us much more about biodiversity than a simple count of resident and migrating species, Jarzyna said.
“Different species obviously have different characteristics and different traits, and contribute in different ways to the community composition and ecosystem functioning,” she said.
“You can have 10 species in a community that just eat seeds, or 10 species in a community, five of which eat seeds and five of which eat insects. The community with more diverse attributes will have more functional diversity, even though in terms of species richness they might be exactly the same.”
To date, efforts to describe avian functional diversity have tended to focus only on one breeding season at a time – a summer in the Northern Hemisphere. This study is the first to take species and their traits’ differences into consideration as their abundances change across the country over all 12 months of a year.
By determining that functional diversity patterns in the East and West differ so dramatically, the researchers now have a much better handle on what is going on across the seasons – but lots of questions remain about why.
“Why is it in the East that in the winter, when we are seeing so many species leaving those regions, we see an increase in functional richness? It didn’t make a lot of sense that you would gain this other dimension of diversity while losing something else,” Jarzyna said. “It’s not the case in the West, where we are seeing both the highest species richness and highest functional richness in the summer.”
Though one could surmise that topography or climate have something to do with these differences, Jarzyna said there is no way to know for sure without further study.
“We still don’t even know about individual species’ contributions to functional diversity and whether there is, indeed, a difference between migratory and resident birds,” she said.
Having a better understanding of how functional diversity among birds – and other species – changes over space and, the researchers noted, time, in particular, is needed to inform forecasting, conservation and management of biodiversity.
“I would argue that we can’t conserve anything if we don’t understand where it is and what it is,” Jarzyna said. “It’s the first step to telling us, ‘this is what we’ve got, and this is how it’s changing.’ What we are going to do about it is the next step.”
Bald eagles are often touted as a massive conservation success story due to their rebound from near extinction in the 1960s.
But now a highly infectious virus may put that hard-fought comeback in jeopardy.
Published in Nature’s Scientific Reports, new research from the University of Georgia showed highly pathogenic avian influenza, also known as H5N1, is killing off unprecedented numbers of mating pairs of bald eagles.
“Even just one year of losses of productivity like we’ve documented regionally is very concerning and could have effects for decades to come if representative of broader regions,” said Nicole Nemeth, lead author of the study and an associate professor in the College of Veterinary Medicine. “There were nights where I couldn’t sleep based on what we were hearing and seeing. We have already lost unprecedented numbers of wild birds due to this virus in the U.S. and it appears here to stay.”
Less than half of Georgia bald eagle nests fledged one chick in 2022
The researchers found that just under half of bald eagle nests along coastal Georgia successfully fledged at least one eaglet in 2022. That’s 30% below average for the region.
The study also showed the success rate for nests was halved in one Florida county, dropping to 41% from an average of 86.5%. Another Florida county experienced a less dramatic but still concerning decrease from an average of approximately 78% to 66.7%.
“We had reports from people who faithfully monitor eagle nests year after year with these heartbreaking stories of an adult eagle found dead below their nest. Within a few days, often its mate and the chicks were also found dead below the nest. It is clear the virus is causing nest failures,” said Nemeth, who is part of the UGA-based Southeastern Cooperative Wildlife Disease Study (SCWDS).
The collaboration is the first diagnostic and research service established specifically to investigate wildlife diseases.
Number of infected wild birds likely an undercount
The three dead eagles were found in Chatham, Glynn and Liberty counties in March.
At the time, the U.S. Department of Agriculture (USDA) had confirmed around 660 cases of the H5N1 virus in wild birds, only 11 of which were from Georgia.
That number has since skyrocketed to more than 6,200 reported cases across the country, according to the USDA’s Animal and Plant Health Inspection Service.
Those cases include a variety of vultures and other raptors, waterfowl like geese and ducks, as well as other aquatic birds like pelicans and herons, and even some songbirds, though they are less common victims of the virus. (Tens of millions of commercially farmed poultry have died or been culled due to risk of infection.)
“I think the number of wild bird cases is drastically underreported,” Nemeth said. “People will submit one snow goose, for example, and it will test positive for the virus. And then they’ll tell you, ‘Well, there are thousands of geese dying at the same site.’ But it only goes down as one infected bird.”
H5N1 doesn’t pose massive threat to humans but may to other species
The birds at biggest risk of infection are those that live in coastal or other aquatic areas inland or prey on other birds that do.
The virus can persist in water for over a year, given the proper conditions. While not a risk to people, birds can pick up the virus from spending time in the water and carry it to new locations through migration.
Raptors like eagles and vultures then catch the virus when they consume the infected birds.
“Worst case scenario, we get into a scary place with some of these bird species,” Nemeth said. “We could see a lot more decline in the numbers of eagles, raptors, waterfowl and other birds than what we’ve already seen. It could be devastating.”
Bears, red foxes and coyotes among animals infected with virus
Avian influenza has hopped species as well.
H5N1 has infected wild mammals such as red foxes, coyotes, racoons, seals, opossums and even some bears in North America. However, very few people have been infected with the virus in the U.S. and have recovered with minimal symptoms, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.
“A virus that can spread and be maintained as this virus can, it’s everywhere now,” Nemeth said. “We can’t contain the virus, and we can’t vaccinate wild birds. But we can document the losses and try to help conserve affected species and populations the best we can.”
The study was co-authored by the University of Georgia’s Mark Ruder, Rebecca Poulson and David Stallknecht. Additional co-authors include Robert Sargent of the Georgia Department of Natural Resources, Shawnlei Breeding of Audubon’s EagleWatch, Meaghan Evans, Jared Zimmerman, Rebecca Hardman, Mark Cunningham of Florida Fish and Wildlife Conservation Commission and Samantha Gibbs of U.S. Fish & Wildlife.
