Strategies for determining soil-loss tolerance

Excessive soil losses due to erosion or lateral displacement by machinery impair productivity. Some soil loss is tolerable, but not so much that plant productivity diminishes. Thus productivity is the dominant concern in determining soil-loss tolerance. The effects of soil loss on productivity, however, are difficult to determine. Therefore, two alternatives are discussed for determining the limits of soil loss, or soil-loss tolerance. These alternatives are the maintenance of soil organic matter and, for shallow and moderately deep soils, the maintenance of soil depth. They are not new strategies, but our rapidly increasing knowledge of the dynamics of soil organic matter and the rates of soil formation from bedrock or consolidated sediments warrants the reconsideration of these alternatives. Reductions in either soil organic matter or the depth of shallow or moderately deep soils will lead to declining productivity. Soil organic matter, considered to be a surrogate for productivity, is much easier to monitor than is productivity. Also, there are many computer models for predicting the effects of management on soil organic matter. Recently compiled data on rates of soil formation suggest that soil losses of 1 t/a (2.24 Mg/ha yr) are greater than the rate of replenishment by the weathering of lithic or paralithic material in all but very wet climates.     

The fine structure of the osphradial leaflets in Conus flavidus

The osphradium in the genus Conus is a prominent bi-lamellate structure lying in the mantle roof near to the base of the siphon. Fine structural examination shows that the component cells are organised into a peripheral and a central region. The peripheral region consists of pigmented epidermal cells forming prominent ridges between which are grooves, at the sides of which lie the sensory cells, protected in clefts. The central region is clearly differentiated from the peripheral by a prominent basement membrane. This region contains smooth muscle, paired nerve trunks and a discrete area of cells containing numerous, dense, cored vesicles.     

Extinction risk of the endemic vascular flora of Kauai,Hawaii, based on IUCN assessments

The International Union for Conservation of Nature's Red List of Threatened Species (IUCN Red List) is the world's most comprehensive information source on the global conservation status of species. Governmental agencies and conservation organizations increasingly rely on IUCN Red List assessments to develop conservation policies and priorities. Funding agencies use the assessments as evaluation criteria, and researchers use meta-analysis of red-list data to address fundamental and applied conservation science questions. However, the circa 143,000 IUCN assessments represent a fraction of the world's biodiversity and are biased in regional and organismal coverage. These biases may affect conservation priorities, funding, and uses of these data to understand global patterns. Isolated oceanic islands are characterized by high endemicity, but the unique biodiversity of many islands is experiencing high extinction rates. The archipelago of Hawaii has one of the highest levels of endemism of any floristic region; 90% of its 1367 native vascular plant taxa are classified as endemic. We used the IUCN's assessment of the complete single-island endemic (SIE) vascular plant flora of Kauai, Hawaii, to assess the proportion and drivers of decline of threatened plants in an oceanic island setting. We compared the IUCN assessments with federal, state, and other local assessments of Kauai species or taxa of conservation concern. Finally, we conducted a preliminary assessment for all 1044 native vascular plants of Hawaii based on IUCN criterion B by estimating area of occupancy, extent of occurrence, and number of locations to determine whether the pattern found for the SIE vascular flora of Kauai is comparable to the native vascular flora of the Hawaiian Islands. We compared our results with patterns observed for assessments of other floras. According to IUCN, 256 SIE vascular plant taxa are threatened with extinction and 5% are already extinct. This is the highest extinction risk reported for any flora to date. The preliminary assessment of the native vascular flora of Hawaii showed that 72% (753 taxa) is threatened. The flora of Hawaii may be one of the world's most threatened; thus, increased and novel conservation measures in the state and on other remote oceanic islands are urgently needed.     

First Jurassic Choristodera from Asia

Although choristoderes have a good Lower Cretaceous record in Asia, they have never previously been recorded from Jurassic deposits. Here we describe fragmentary vertebral material referable to Choristodera indet. from the Middle Jurassic Balabansai Svita of the Fergana Valley, Kyrgyzstan. This provides a significant range extension for the group in Asia and shows that choristoderes already had a Pan-Laurasian distribution in the Jurassic.     

A robust approach for iterative contaminant source location and release history recovery

Contamination source identification is a crucial step in environmental remediation. The exact contaminant source locations and release histories are often unknown due to lack of records and therefore must be identified through inversion. Coupled source location and release history identification is a complex nonlinear optimization problem. Existing strategies for contaminant source identification have important practical limitations. In many studies, analytical solutions for point sources are used; the problem is often formulated and solved via nonlinear optimization; and model uncertainty is seldom considered. In practice, model uncertainty can be significant because of the uncertainty in model structure and parameters, and the error in numerical solutions. An inaccurate model can lead to erroneous inversion of contaminant sources. In this work, a constrained robust least squares (CRLS) estimator is combined with a branch-and-bound global optimization solver for iteratively identifying source release histories and source locations. CRLS is used for source release history recovery and the global optimization solver is used for location search. CRLS is a robust estimator that was developed to incorporate directly a modeler's prior knowledge of model uncertainty and measurement error. The robustness of CRLS is essential for systems that are ill-conditioned. Because of this decoupling, the total solution time can be reduced significantly. Our numerical experiments show that the combination of CRLS with the global optimization solver achieved better performance than the combination of a non-robust estimator, i.e., the nonnegative least squares (NNLS) method, with the same solver.     

Intentionally building relationships between participatory online groups and formal organisations for effective emergency response

Advances in information and communication technologies enable the public to contribute to emergency response. For instance, reporting systems set up during recent disasters allowed affected people to submit testimonies about conditions on the ground. In addition, the public has analysed data and helped to mobilise and deliver relief resources. To plan intentionally for an integrative emergency response system in the networked age, this research explores two subject areas: (i) the organisational and technical determinants of relationships forged between formal organisations and participatory online groups established by the public; and (ii) the consequences of the outcomes generated by these relationships. Four in‐depth case studies were selected for the analysis, which revealed that resource dependence, shared understanding, and the use of certain types of information technology influence the formation of such relationships. Furthermore, healthy collaborative relationships increase the chances of desirable results, including inter‐organisational alignment and minimal long‐term harm owing to a disaster.     

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.