The Outcome of Northern Fur Seal Harvesting: The Results of Calibration of Mathematical Models Based on Observation Data (the Example of Tyulenii Island Population)

Tendencies in the dynamics of harvested northern fur seal (Callorhinus ursinus) population on the Tyulenii Island have been analyzed in detail. The results show that retardation of reproduction (decrease in the numbers of pups) and decline in the survival of young females (up to 3 years of age) by the late 1980s resulted in a reduction of the total number of females and a significant increase in the proportion of older females. This tendency changed during the later observation period (after 1988–1989) due to increase in the survival of young females: the female population has gradually recovered, with the proportion of young females increasing at the expense of old females (aged over 10 years). The age composition of males has also changed: the proportion of young animals has decreased, while that of large mature males (bulls) has increased. Moreover, the number of bulls continues to increase and has already exceeded the level that formerly provided for the well-being of the population. This, a paradoxical situation has arisen: the numbers of females and bulls are increasing, whereas pup production remains at a low level.

     

Microtargeting for conservation

Widespread human action and behavior change is needed to achieve many conservation goals. Doing so at the requisite scale and pace will require the efficient delivery of outreach campaigns. Conservation gains will be greatest when efforts are directed toward places of high conservation value (or need) and tailored to critical actors. Recent strategic conservation planning has relied primarily on spatial assessments of biophysical attributes, largely ignoring the human dimensions. Elsewhere, marketers, political campaigns, and others use microtargeting—predictive analytics of big data—to identify people most likely to respond positively to particular messages or interventions. Conservationists have not yet widely capitalized on these techniques. To investigate the effectiveness of microtargeting to improve conservation, we developed a propensity model to predict restoration behavior among 203,645 private landowners in a 5,200,000 ha study area in the Chesapeake Bay Watershed (U.S.A.). To isolate the additional value microtargeting may offer beyond geospatial prioritization, we analyzed a new high-resolution land-cover data set and cadastral data to identify private owners of riparian areas needing restoration. Subsequently, we developed and evaluated a restoration propensity model based on a database of landowners who had conducted restoration in the past and those who had not (n = 4978). Model validation in a parallel database (n = 4989) showed owners with the highest scorers for propensity to conduct restoration (i.e., top decile) were over twice as likely as average landowners to have conducted restoration (135%). These results demonstrate that microtargeting techniques can dramatically increase the efficiency and efficacy of conservation programs, above and beyond the advances offered by biophysical prioritizations alone, as well as facilitate more robust research of many social–ecological systems.     

Bibliometric analysis of simulated driving research from 1997 to 2016

Objective: The objective of this study was to explore the evolution footprints of simulated driving research in the past 20 years through rigorous and systematic bibliometric analysis, to provide insights regarding when and where the research was performed and by whom and how the mainstream content evolved over the years.

Methods: The analysis began with data retrieval in Web of Science with defined search terms related to simulated driving. BibExcel and CiteSpace were employed to conduct the performance analysis and co-citation network analysis; that is, probe of the performance of institutes, journals, authors, and research hotspots.

Results: A total of 3,766 documents were filtered out and presented an exponential growth from 1997 to 2016. The United States contributed the most publications as well as international collaborations followed by Germany and China. In addition, several universities in The Netherlands and the United States dominated the list of contributing institutes. The leading journals were in transportation and ergonomics. The leading researchers were also recognized among the 8,721 contributing authors, such as J. D. Lee, D. L. Fisher, J. H. Kim, and K. A. Brookhuis. Finally, the co-citation analysis illuminated the evolution of simulated driving research that covered the following topics roughly in chronological order: task-induced stress, drivers with neurological disorders, alertness and sleepiness while driving, trust toward driving assistance systems, driver distraction, the effect of drug use, the validity of simulators, and automated driving.

Conclusions: This article employed bibliometric tools to probe the contributing countries, institutes, journals, authors, and mainstream hotspots of simulated driving research in the past 20 years. A systematic bibliometric analysis of this field will help researchers realize the panorama of global simulated driving and establish future research directions.     

Evaluation of photolysis and hydrolysis of pyraclostrobin in aqueous solutions and its degradation products in paddy water

This study evaluated the hydrolysis and photolysis kinetics of pyraclostrobin in an aqueous solution using ultra-high-performance liquid chromatography–photodiode array detection and identified the resulting metabolites of pyraclostrobin by hydrolysis and photolysis in paddy water using high-resolution mass spectrometry coupled with liquid chromatography. The effect of solution pH, metal ions and surfactants on the hydrolysis of pyraclostrobin was explored. The hydrolysis half-lives of pyraclostrobin were 23.1–115.5?days and were stable in buffer solution at pH 5.0. The degradation rate of pyraclostrobin in an aqueous solution under sunlight was slower than that under UV photolysis reaction. The half-lives of pyraclostrobin in a buffer solution at pH 5.0, 7.0, 9.0 and in paddy water were less than 12?h under the two light irradiation types. The metabolites of the two processes were identified and compared to further understand the mechanisms underlying hydrolysis and photolysis of pyraclostrobin in natural water. The extracted ions obtained from paddy water were automatically annotated by Compound Discoverer software with manual confirmation of their fragments. Two metabolites were detected and identified in the pyraclostrobin hydrolysis, whereas three metabolites were detected and identified in the photolysis in paddy water.     

Determination of the residue dynamics and dietary risk of thiamethoxam and its metabolite clothianidin in citrus and soil by LC-MS/MS

A modified quick, easy, cheap, effective, rugged and safe (QuEChERS) method was developed for the determination of thiamethoxam and its metabolite clothianidin in citrus (including the whole citrus, peel and pulp) and soil samples by liquid chromatography-tandem mass spectrometry. The sample was extracted with acetonitrile and purified with octadecylsilane. The detection limits of both compounds were 0.0001–0.0002?mg kg^–1, while the limit of quantification of thiamethoxam was 0.002?mg kg^–1 and the limit of quantitation of metabolites was 0.001?mg kg^–1. The recovery was 70.37%–109.76%, with inter-day relative standard deviations (RSD) (n?=?15) values ≤9.46% for the two compounds in the four matrices. The degradation curve of thiamethoxam in whole citrus and soil was plotted using the first-order kinetic model. The half-life of the whole citrus was 1.9–6.2?days, and the half-life of the soil was 3.9–4.2?days. The terminal residue of thiamethoxam (the sum of thiamethoxam and clothianidin, expressed as thiamethoxam) was found to be concentrated on the peel. The final residual amount of thiamethoxam in the edible portion (pulp) was less than 0.061?mg kg^–1. The risk quotient values were all below 1, indicating that thiamethoxam as a citrus insecticide does not pose a health risk to humans at the recommended dosage.     

Framing of Geoengineering Affects Support for Climate Change Mitigation

The growing recognition that climate change mitigation alone will be inadequate has led scientists and policymakers to discuss climate geoengineering. An experiment with a US sample found, contrary to previous research, that reading about geoengineering did not reduce conservatives’ skepticism about the existence of anthropogenic climate change. Moreover, depending on how it is framed, geoengineering can reduce support for mitigation among both conservatives and non-conservatives. When geoengineering is framed as a major solution, people worry less about climate change, leading to reduced mitigation support. When framed as disastrous, people perceived geoengineering as riskier, also leading to a decrease in mitigation support. A more moderate framing of geoengineering as a partial solution is less susceptible to moral hazard effects. Overall, results suggest that geoengineering will not lessen political polarization over anthropogenic climate change, and could undercut support for mitigation efforts. Instead, framing geoengineering as a small piece to solving a big puzzle seems to be the best strategy to weaken this potential moral hazard.     

Parxit,the United States,and the world

<正>1.Introduction And now we have Parxit.On 1 June 2017,President Trump issued the highly unpopular announcement that the United States will withdraw from the 2015 Paris Agreement on Climate Change.In this brief piece,I will try to explain the reasons for this nearly unprecedented act of foreign policy folly(Ronald Reagan did pull out of the Law of the Sea     

Research priorities for managing the impacts and dependencies of business upon food,energy, water and the environment

Delivering access to sufficient food, energy and water resources to ensure human wellbeing is a major concern for governments worldwide. However, it is crucial to account for the ‘nexus’ of interactions between these natural resources and the consequent implications for human wellbeing. The private sector has a critical role in driving positive change towards more sustainable nexus management and could reap considerable benefits from collaboration with researchers to devise solutions to some of the foremost sustainability challenges of today. Yet opportunities are missed because the private sector is rarely involved in the formulation of deliverable research priorities. We convened senior research scientists and influential business leaders to collaboratively identify the top forty questions that, if answered, would best help companies understand and manage their food-energy-water-environment nexus dependencies and impacts. Codification of the top order nexus themes highlighted research priorities around development of pragmatic yet credible tools that allow businesses to incorporate nexus interactions into their decision-making; demonstration of the business case for more sustainable nexus management; identification of the most effective levers for behaviour change; and understanding incentives or circumstances that allow individuals and businesses to take a leadership stance. Greater investment in the complex but productive relations between the private sector and research community will create deeper and more meaningful collaboration and cooperation.