This is not 30% of species. It’s not just song birds, or bald eagles, or other charismatic species. It’s a third of the total birds in the sky, gone. This is an ecological collapse in motion – we are losing birds, insects, amphibians, you name it.
Category Archives: Peer Reviewed Article Review
bacteria, viruses, and fungi, oh my!
In the category of new diseases to worry about, and just in case you have not yet perused the latest issue of the Journal of Fungi, Candida auris is a really dangerous yeast fungus making the rounds in hospitals.
On the Origins of a Species: What Might Explain the Rise of Candida auris?
Candida auris is an emerging multidrug-resistant yeast first described in 2009 that has since caused healthcare-associated outbreaks of severe human infections around the world. In some hospitals, it has become a leading cause of invasive candidiasis. C. auris is markedly different from most other pathogenic Candida species in its genetics, antifungal resistance, and ability to spread between patients. The reasons why this fungus began spreading widely in the last decade remain a mystery. We examine available data on C. auris and related species, including genomic epidemiology, phenotypic characteristics, and sites of detection, to put forth hypotheses on its possible origins. C. auris has not been detected in the natural environment; related species have been detected in in plants, insects, and aquatic environments, as well as from human body sites. It can tolerate hypersaline environments and higher temperatures than most Candida species. We explore hypotheses about the pre-emergence niche of C. auris, whether in the environmental or human microbiome, and speculate on factors that might have led to its spread, including the possible roles of healthcare, antifungal use, and environmental changes, including human activities that might have expanded its presence in the environment or caused increased human contact.
beware the powerful house cat lobby
House cats have hired a major lobbying firm to promote their interests, as the song bird special interest attacks continue to escalate.
Okay, that’s my onion-like joke headline. But apparently, there is a vicious academic debate about just how much of a risk domestic cats pose to biodiversity when they are allowed to range outdoors. There is also a values conflict between people who feel very strongly about the welfare of individual animals, both wild and domestic, and people who feel very strongly about ecosystem functions and services. And obviously, there are lots of people who have strong feelings about all these things, and may have some internal conflicts to resolve.
There was one turn of phrase in this article I particularly liked: describing cats as “sentient, sapient, and social individuals”. I looked up sapient in the Websters 1913 dictionary:
Sapient
Sa”pi*ent
(?), a.
[L. sapiens, -entis, p. pr. of sapere to taste, to have sense, to know. See Sage
, a.
] Wise; sage; discerning; — often in irony or contempt.
Where the sapient king
Held dalliance with his fair Egyptian spouse.
Milton.
Syn. — Sage; sagacious; knowing; wise; discerning.
the emerging science of aquatic system connectivity
JAWRA has a nice literature review on this topic, particularly the science of how wetlands function hydrologically based on their placement in the watershed. I can see a lot of useful applications in both urban and rural hydrology. In my experience, and particularly on the urban end, there is very little hard science built into our legal and policy frameworks on this topic, for example in municipal drainage codes and stormwater management requirements.
species persistence and ecosystem fragmentation
Here’s a new paper on relationships between biodiversity and ecosystem fragmentation/connectivity. If I could go back to school and just study whatever I wanted for fun and without economic constraints, maybe this would be it. My basic question would be how much you can really expect to optimize patches and corridors within urban and suburban areas, agricultural areas, and protected natural lands to preserve as much ecosystem function as possible while still supporting a human population.
Species persistence in spatially regular networks
Over the past decades, numerous studies have provided new insights into the importance of spatial network structure for metapopulation persistence. However, systematic work on how variation in patch degree (i.e., the number of neighbors of a patch) in spatial networks modifies metapopulation dynamics is still lacking. Using both pair approximation (PA) and cellular automaton (CA) models, we investigate how different patch network structures affect species persistence while considering both local and global dispersal. Generally, the PA model displays similar metapopulation patterns compared to the CA simulations. Using both models, we find that an increase of relative extinction rate decreases global patch occupancy (GPO) and thereby increases the extinction risk for local dispersers, while increasing patch degree promotes species persistence through increasing dispersal pathways. Interestingly, patch degree does not affect local species clumping in spatially regular patch networks. Relative to local dispersers, species with global dispersal can maintain the highest GPO, and their metapopulation dynamics are not influenced by spatial network structure, as they can establish in any patch randomly without dispersal limitation. Concerning species conservation, we theoretically demonstrate that increasing patch connectivity (e.g., constructing ecological corridors) in spatial patch networks would be an effective strategy for the survival of species with distance-limited dispersal.
bike lanes need to be protected
I’ve always felt that drivers are more reckless on streets with bike lanes. A new study confirms this. So bike lanes need to be separated and protected to be safe. This is especially acute where I live in Philadelphia, where we have faded, poorly marked bike lanes and vehicles constantly blocking the bike lanes causing bikers to merge in and out of sometimes fast moving, often angry traffic including trucks. Still, if I have to get hit by a car on a relatively slow residential street, I think I would rather be side-swiped rather than run over from behind. Riding with the flow of traffic scares me because if an inattentive driver hits you from behind while you are making a legal stop at a stop light or stop sign, you could very well die, whereas if you are sideswiped, you have a reasonable change to crash land on the curb or run into a parked car, pedestrian, or something else to absorb some energy and slow you down hopefully without killing you. None of these things should ever happen of course, it is just cowardly and ignorant politicians and bureaucrats who are putting their citizens and children at risk when solutions are available.
rain measurement using cameras
This article is about estimating rainfall using ordinary surveillance camera footage and computer algorithms to process the videos. Measuring rainfall with physical rain gauges is subject to a lot of error, and so far the only real way to reduce the uncertainty is to add more gauges, which of course costs money. Radar can be used to improve our knowledge of what is going on in the spaces between rain gauges, but ultimately the radar-based estimates still end up being calibrated to the gauges. New methods to improve accuracy for a given gauge coverage, and/or reduce cost and gauge coverage while maintaining accuracy, would be welcome.
“Opportunistic sensing” represents an appealing idea for collecting unconventional data with broad spatial coverage and high resolution, but few studies have explored its feasibility in hydrology. This study develops a novel approach to measuring rainfall intensity in real‐world conditions based on videos acquired by ordinary surveillance cameras. The proposed approach employs a convex optimization algorithm to effectively decompose a rainy image into two layers: a pure rain‐streak layer and a rain‐free background layer, where the rain streaks represent the motion blur of falling raindrops. Then, it estimates the instantaneous rainfall intensity via geometrical optics and photographic analyses. We investigated the effectiveness and robustness of our approach through synthetic numerical experiments and field tests. The major findings are as follows. First, the decomposition‐based identification algorithm can effectively recognize rain streaks from complex backgrounds with many disturbances. Compared to existing algorithms that consider only the temporal changes in grayscale between frames, the new algorithm successfully prevents false identifications by considering the intrinsic visual properties of rain streaks. Second, the proposed approach demonstrates satisfactory estimation accuracy and is robust across a wide range of rainfall intensities. The proposed approach has a mean absolute percentage error of 21.8%, which is significantly lower than those of existing approaches reported in the literature even though our approach was applied to a more complicated scene acquired using a lower‐quality device. Overall, the proposed low‐cost, high‐accuracy approach to vision‐based rain gauging significantly enhances the possibility of using existing surveillance camera networks to perform opportunistic hydrology sensing.
Cuba “sonic attacks” may have been caused by crickets
Well, the evidence is not conclusive. Medical experts have examined people suffering symptoms after spending time at the U.S. embassy in Cuba, and at least some have concluded that they suffered some kind of injury. But this article somewhat conclusively argues that a recording released by embassy personnel to the press is actually crickets.
Beginning in late 2016, diplomats posted to the United States embassy in Cuba began to experience unexplained health problems including ear pain, tinnitus, vertigo, and cognitive difficulties which reportedly began after they heard strange noises in their homes or hotel rooms. In response, the U.S. government dramatically reduced the number of diplomats posted at the U.S. embassy in Havana. U.S. officials initially believed a sonic attack might be responsible for their ailments. The sound linked to these attacks, which has been described as a high-pitched beam of sound, was recorded by U.S. personnel in Cuba and released by the Associated Press (AP). Because these recordings are the only available non-medical evidence of the sonic attacks, much attention has focused on identifying health problems and the origin of the acoustic signal. As shown here, the calling song of the Indies short-tailed cricket (Anurogryllus celerinictus) matches, in nuanced detail, the AP recording in duration, pulse repetition rate, power spectrum, pulse rate stability, and oscillations per pulse. The AP recording also exhibits frequency decay in individual pulses, a distinct acoustic signature of cricket sound production. While the temporal pulse structure in the recording is unlike any natural insect source, when the cricket call is played on a loudspeaker and recorded indoors, the interaction of reflected sound pulses yields a sound virtually indistinguishable from the AP sample. This provides strong evidence that an echoing cricket call, rather than a sonic attack or other technological device, is responsible for the sound in the released recording. Although the causes of the health problems reported by embassy personnel are beyond the scope of this paper, our findings highlight the need for more rigorous research into the source of these ailments, including the potential psychogenic effects, as well as possible physiological explanations unrelated to sonic attacks.
emergy
There are still people working on emergy (embodied energy) as an accounting and system simulation system. This group is in Brazil.
Contribution of the Paraconsistent Tri-Annotated Logic to emergy accounting and decision making
The process of decision-making is a complex task that can become more challenging if the information provided by indicators is contradictory. Emergy accounting is an environmental accounting methodology that has been used to guide environmental decision making. In this paper we propose a comprehensive tool to support decision-making in emergy accounting. Paraconsistent Logic is a non-classic logic, which can aid in decision-making when the investigator is confronted with contradictory results. Paraconsistent Tri-Annotated Logic (PL3v) is proposed as a decision tool to compare different systems and allow selection of those alternatives with the best performance from the standpoint of sustainability defined in emergy terms. The rationale behind our selection of a set of emergy indicators to assess sustainability included such factors as increased efficiency, setting a priority for local resource use and minimization of the use of non-renewable resources. Two actual examples from the literature that resulted in contradictory evidence of system sustainability were compared within the framework of PL3v. Emergy indicators that correspond to positive evidence of sustainability (i.e., those that show increased efficiency and greater local resource use) were assigned as two favorable logic measures of sustainability. The PL3v analysis is completed with the identification of evidence that is unfavorable to sustainability, which is given by a third indicator negatively correlated with sustainability (i.e., non-renewable resource use). Operationally, the methodology proposed the normalization of the indicator values between [0,1] to fit to the PL3v annotation framework. Comparison of the systems examined is presented through the Paraconsistent Logic approach with the aid of a graphical representation and the calculation of the degree of certainty related to the truthfulness of the sustainability proposition.
Bridging the Gap Between National and Ecosystem Accounting
This study estimated the value of a forest in Spain at more than five times what is estimated using standard national accounting methods (GDP, I assume). If this is the case, it suggests to me that the idea of just tweaking GDP to include ecosystem services isn’t going to work. The article is open access.
National accounting either ignores or fails to give due values to the ecosystem services, products, incomes and environmental assetsof a country. To overcome these shortcomings, we apply spatially-explicit extended accounts that incorporate a novel environmental income indicator, which we test in the forests of Andalusia (Spain). Extended accounts incorporate nine farmer activities (timber, cork, firewood, nuts, livestock grazing, conservation forestry, hunting, residential services and private amenity) and seven government activities (fire services, free access recreation, free access mushroom, carbon, landscape conservation, threatened biodiversity and water yield). To make sure the valuation remains consistent with standard accounts, we simulate exchange values for non-market final forest product consumption in order to measure individual ecosystem services and environmental income indicators. Manufactured capital and environmental assets are also integrated. When comparing extended to standard accounts, our results are 3.6 times higher for gross value added. These differences are explained primarily by the omission in the standard accounts of carbon activities and undervaluation of private amenity, free access recreation, landscape and threatened biodiversity ecosystem services. Extended accounts measure a value of Andalusian forest ecosystem services 5.4 times higher than that measured using the valuation criteria of standard accounts.