Assessment of Use,Reuse, and End‐of‐Life Disposal and X‐Ray Fluorescence Analysis Screening of Waste Mobile Phones in Nigeria

Insights into consumer behavior, hazards of inappropriate disposal, and opportunities to reclaim valuable resources     

Energy Communication: Theory and Praxis Towards a Sustainable Energy Future

This essay comments and expands upon an emerging area of research, energy communication, that shares with environmental communication the fraught commitment to simultaneously study communication as an ordinary yet potentially transformative practice, and a strategic endeavour to catalyse change. We begin by defining and situating energy communication within ongoing work on the discursive dimensions of energy extraction, production, distribution, and consumption. We then offer three generative directions for future research related to energy transitions as communicative processes: analysing campaigns’ strategic efforts, critically theorizing energy’s transnational power dynamics, and theorizing the energy democracy movement.     

A guide to using the internet to monitor and quantify the wildlife trade

The unrivaled growth in e-commerce of animals and plants presents an unprecedented opportunity to monitor wildlife trade to inform conservation, biosecurity, and law enforcement. Using the internet to quantify the scale of the wildlife trade (volume and frequency) is a relatively recent and rapidly developing approach that lacks an accessible framework for locating relevant websites and collecting data. We produced an accessible guide for internet-based wildlife trade surveillance. We detailed a repeatable method involving a systematic internet search, with search engines, to locate relevant websites and content. For data collection, we highlight web-scraping technology as an efficient way to collect data in an automated fashion at regularly timed intervals. Our guide is applicable to the multitude of trade-based contexts because researchers can tailor search keywords for specific taxa or derived products and locations of interest. We provide information for working with the diversity of websites used in wildlife trade. For example, to locate relevant content on social media (e.g., posts or groups), each social media platform should be examined individually via the site's internal search engine. A key advantage of using the internet to study wildlife trade is the relative ease of access to an increasing amount of trade-related data. However, not all wildlife trade occurs online and it may occur on unobservable sections of the internet.     

An Integrated WebGIS Framework for Volunteered Geographic Information and Social Media in Soil and Water Conservation

Volunteered geographic information and social networking in a WebGIS has the potential to increase public participation in soil and water conservation, promote environmental awareness and change, and provide timely data that may be otherwise unavailable to policymakers in soil and water conservation management. The objectives of this study were: (1) to develop a framework for combining current technologies, computing advances, data sources, and social media; and (2) develop and test an online web mapping interface. The mapping interface integrates Microsoft Silverlight, Bing Maps, ArcGIS Server, Google Picasa Web Albums Data API, RSS, Google Analytics, and Facebook to create a rich user experience. The website allows the public to upload photos and attributes of their own subdivisions or sites they have identified and explore other submissions. The website was made available to the public in early February 2011 at and evaluated for its potential long-term success in a pilot study.     

Naming,Mourning, and the Work of Earthly Coexistence

Setting out from Jacques Derrida’s assertion that every act of naming is “a foreshadowing of mourning” ([2008. The animal that therefore I am. (M.-L. Mallet, Ed., D. Wills, Trans.). New York, NY: Fordham University Press], p. 20), this paper argues that the work of earthly coexistence is underwritten by the intertwined practices of naming and mourning. The paper demonstrates that names provide access to and shape our perceptions of earthly entities; that the act of naming prepares us for the work of mourning; that the proper names given to endlings provide poignant points of access to species on the edge of extinction; that species names disclose species as such and, thus, enable us to grieve not just particular living organisms but entire ways of life; and that the name given to the current geological epoch, the “anthropocene,” simultaneously reflects and engenders a mode of awareness which enables us to relinquish those ways of being human that no longer seem sustainable and carry forth those that promise to enrich earthly coexistence.     

Politics of Edibility: Reconceptualizing Ecological Relationality

Taking the Infinity Burial Project (IBP) as its inspiration, this essay theorizes a politics of edibility by way of decomposing the discursive boundaries erected between human bodies and environments. In particular, this essay reads the IBP as a deconstruction of another dualism—eater/eaten—that permeates and informs cultural practices from birth to burial. Mobilizing a rhetoric of carnality, the IBP decomposes the human body's relation to its environments, merging its statuses as eater and eaten. At the same time, this rhetoric of carnality also emphasizes the irreducibly productive nature of consumption as an articulatory practice in its own right. As this essay argues, a politics of edibility not only recognizes the superficiality of the body/environment and eater/eaten dichotomies but it also respects the relations generated in the wake of their deconstruction.     

Trapping phosphorus in runoff with a phosphorus removal structure

Reduction of phosphorus (P) inputs to surface waters may decrease eutrophication. Some researchers have proposed filtering dissolved P in runoff with P-sorptive byproducts in structures placed in hydrologically active areas with high soil P concentrations. The objectives of this study were to construct and monitor a P removal structure in a suburban watershed and test the ability of empirically developed flow-through equations to predict structure performance. Steel slag was used as the P sorption material in the P removal structure. Water samples were collected before and after the structure using automatic samples and analyzed for total dissolved P. During the first 5 mo of structure operation, 25% of all dissolved P was removed from rainfall and irrigation events. Phosphorus was removed more efficiently during low flow rate irrigation events with a high retention time than during high flow rate rainfall events with a low retention time. The six largest flow events occurred during storm flow and accounted for 75% of the P entering the structure and 54% of the P removed by the structure. Flow-through equations developed for predicting structure performance produced reasonable estimates of structure "lifetime" (16.8 mo). However, the equations overpredicted cumulative P removal. This was likely due to differences in pH, total Ca and Fe, and alkalinity between the slag used in the structure and the slag used for model development. This suggests the need for an overall model that can predict structure performance based on individual material properties.     

A risk assessment study of water quality,biota, and legacy sediment prior to small dam removal in a tributary to the Delaware River

The proposed removal of three run-of-river dams (all ≤5-m height) in eastern Pennsylvania along lower Bushkill Creek, a tributary of the Delaware River, has provided a valuable opportunity for multidisciplinary research involving the collection of more than 5 years of pre-removal monitoring data, analysis of heavy metals in legacy sediment cores, and associated toxicity assays to determine the singular and interactive effects of lead, copper, and cadmium on survival and behavior of a common macroinvertebrate found in Bushkill Creek. Monitoring data were collected from sites approximately 35 m upstream and downstream of dams and reference sites located approximately 5 km upstream of all dams. Results indicate that oxygen levels, macroinvertebrate diversity, and proportion of sensitive taxa were significantly lower upstream and downstream of dams in comparison with upstream reference reaches. The strong correlation between water quality and macroinvertebrates in this system implies that removal of the lower three dams would lead to improvements in water quality, biotic integrity, and resilience in lower Bushkill Creek. Sediment analyses and toxicity assays suggest that dam removal and sediment mobilization may route contaminated sediments downstream at concentrations that may harm more sensitive biota. However, macroinvertebrate mortality and behavior were not significantly different from clean water controls for the large majority of toxicity assays. All together, these results suggest that dams 1–3 are good candidates for successful stream restoration but that the removals would best be planned in a way that mitigates potential impacts of contaminated legacy sediment.     

A multispecies test of source–sink indicators to prioritize habitat for declining populations

For species at risk of decline or extinction in source–sink systems, sources are an obvious target for habitat protection actions. However, the way in which source habitats are identified and prioritized can reduce the effectiveness of conservation actions. Although sources and sinks are conceptually defined using both demographic and movement criteria, simplifications are often required in systems with limited data. To assess the conservation outcomes of alternative source metrics and resulting prioritizations, we simulated population dynamics and extinction risk for 3 endangered species. Using empirically based habitat population models, we linked habitat maps with measured site‐ or habitat‐specific demographic conditions, movement abilities, and behaviors. We calculated source–sink metrics over a range of periods of data collection and prioritized consistently high‐output sources for conservation. We then tested whether prioritized patches identified the habitats that most affected persistence by removing them and measuring the population response. Conservation decisions based on different source–sink metrics and durations of data collection affected species persistence. Shorter time series obscured the ability of metrics to identify influential habitats, particularly in temporally variable and slowly declining populations. Data‐rich source–sink metrics that included both demography and movement information did not always identify the habitats with the greatest influence on extinction risk. In some declining populations, patch abundance better predicted influential habitats for short‐term regional persistence. Because source–sink metrics (i.e., births minus deaths; births and immigrations minus deaths and emigration) describe net population conditions and cancel out gross population counts, they may not adequately identify influential habitats in declining populations. For many nonequilibrium populations, new metrics that maintain the counts of individual births, deaths, and movement may provide additional insight into habitats that most influence persistence.