Synergies for Improving Oil Palm Production and Forest Conservation in Floodplain Landscapes

Lowland tropical forests are increasingly threatened with conversion to oil palm as global demand and high profit drives crop expansion throughout the world’s tropical regions. Yet, landscapes are not homogeneous and regional constraints dictate land suitability for this crop. We conducted a regional study to investigate spatial and economic components of forest conversion to oil palm within a tropical floodplain in the Lower Kinabatangan, Sabah, Malaysian Borneo. The Kinabatangan ecosystem harbours significant biodiversity with globally threatened species but has suffered forest loss and fragmentation. We mapped the oil palm and forested landscapes (using object-based-image analysis, classification and regression tree analysis and on-screen digitising of high-resolution imagery) and undertook economic modelling. Within the study region (520,269 ha), 250,617 ha is cultivated with oil palm with 77% having high Net-Present-Value (NPV) estimates ($413/ha?yr–$637/ha?yr); but 20.5% is under-producing. In fact 6.3% (15,810 ha) of oil palm is commercially redundant (with negative NPV of $-299/ha?yr-$-65/ha?yr) due to palm mortality from flood inundation. These areas would have been important riparian or flooded forest types. Moreover, 30,173 ha of unprotected forest remain and despite its value for connectivity and biodiversity 64% is allocated for future oil palm. However, we estimate that at minimum 54% of these forests are unsuitable for this crop due to inundation events. If conversion to oil palm occurs, we predict a further 16,207 ha will become commercially redundant. This means that over 32,000 ha of forest within the floodplain would have been converted for little or no financial gain yet with significant cost to the ecosystem. Our findings have globally relevant implications for similar floodplain landscapes undergoing forest transformation to agriculture such as oil palm. Understanding landscape level constraints to this crop, and transferring these into policy and practice, may provide conservation and economic opportunities within these seemingly high opportunity cost landscapes

Use of a dual reporter plasmid to demonstrate bactofection with an attenuated aroa- derivative of Pasteurella multocida b:2

A reporter plasmid pSRG has been developed which expresses red fluorescent protein (RFP) from a constitutive prokaryotic promoter within Pasteurella multocida B:2 and green fluorescent protein (GFP) from a constitutive eukaryotic promoter within mammalian cells. This construct has been used to determine the location and viability of the bacteria when moving from the extracellular environment into the intracellular compartment of mammalian cells. Invasion assays with embryonic bovine lung (EBL) cells and an attenuated AroA- derivative of Pasteurella multocida B:2 (strain JRMT12), harbouring the plasmid pSRG, showed that RFP-expressing bacteria could be detected intracellularly at 3 h post-invasion. At this stage, some EBL cells harbouring RFP-expressing bacteria were observed to express GFP simultaneously, indicating release of the plasmid into the intracellular environment. At 5 h post-invasion, more EBL cells were expressing GFP, while still harbouring RFP-expressing bacteria. Concurrently, some EBL cells were shown to express only GFP, indicating loss of viable bacteria within these cells. These experiments proved the functionality of the pSRG dual reporter system and the potential of P. multocida B:2 JRMT12 for bactofection and delivery of a DNA vaccine

Crop expansion and conservation priorities in tropical countries

Expansion of cropland in tropical countries is one of the principal causes of biodiversity loss, and threatens to undermine progress towards meeting the Aichi Biodiversity Targets. To understand this threat better, we analysed data on crop distribution and expansion in 128 tropical countries, assessed changes in area of the main crops and mapped overlaps between conservation priorities and cultivation potential. Rice was the single crop grown over the largest area, especially in tropical forest biomes. Cropland in tropical countries expanded by c. 48,000 km2 per year from 1999–2008. The countries which added the greatest area of new cropland were Nigeria, Indonesia, Ethiopia, Sudan and Brazil. Soybeans and maize are the crops which expanded most in absolute area. Other crops with large increases included rice, sorghum, oil palm, beans, sugar cane, cow peas, wheat and cassava. Areas of high cultivation potential—while bearing in mind that political and socio-economic conditions can be as influential as biophysical ones—may be vulnerable to conversion in the future. These include some priority areas for biodiversity conservation in tropical countries (e.g., Frontier Forests and High Biodiversity Wilderness Areas), which have previously been identified as having ‘low vulnerability’, in particular in central Africa and northern Australia. There are also many other smaller areas which are important for biodiversity and which have high cultivation potential (e.g., in the fringes of the Amazon basin, in the Paraguayan Chaco, and in the savanna woodlands of the Sahel and East Africa). We highlight the urgent need for more effective sustainability standards and policies addressing both production and consumption of tropical commodities, including robust land-use planning in agricultural frontiers, establishment of new protected areas or REDD+ projects in places agriculture has not yet reached, and reduction or elimination of incentives for land-demanding bioenergy feedstock

Modifying the Yamaguchi Four-Component Decomposition Scattering Powers Using a Stochastic Distance

Model-based decompositions have gained considerable attention after the initial work of Freeman and Durden. This decomposition which assumes the target to be reflection symmetric was later relaxed in the Yamaguchi et al. decomposition with the addition of the helix parameter. Since then many decomposition have been proposed where either the scattering model was modified to fit the data or the coherency matrix representing the second order statistics of the full polarimetric data is rotated to fit the scattering model. In this paper we propose to modify the Yamaguchi four-component decomposition (Y4O) scattering powers using the concept of statistical information theory for matrices. In order to achieve this modification we propose a method to estimate the polarization orientation angle (OA) from full-polarimetric SAR images using the Hellinger distance. In this method, the OA is estimated by maximizing the Hellinger distance between the un-rotated and the rotated $T_{33}$ and the $T_{22}$ components of the coherency matrix $\mathbf{[T]}$. Then, the powers of the Yamaguchi four-component model-based decomposition (Y4O) are modified using the maximum relative stochastic distance between the $T_{33}$ and the $T_{22}$ components of the coherency matrix at the estimated OA. The results show that the overall double-bounce powers over rotated urban areas have significantly improved with the reduction of volume powers. The percentage of pixels with negative powers have also decreased from the Y4O decomposition. The proposed method is both qualitatively and quantitatively compared with the results obtained from the Y4O and the Y4R decompositions for a Radarsat-2 C-band San-Francisco dataset and an UAVSAR L-band Hayward dataset.Comment: Accepted for publication in IEEE J-STARS (IEEE Journal of Selected Topics in Applied Earth Observations and Remote Sensing

Automorphic forms and rational homology 3–spheres

We investigate a question of Cooper adjacent to the Virtual Haken Conjecture. Assuming certain conjectures in number theory, we show that there exist hyperbolic rational homology 3–spheres with arbitrarily large injectivity radius. These examples come from a tower of abelian covers of an explicit arithmetic 3–manifold. The conjectures we must assume are the Generalized Riemann Hypothesis and a mild strengthening of results of Taylor et al on part of the Langlands Program for GL2 of an imaginary quadratic field. The proof of this theorem involves ruling out the existence of an irreducible two dimensional Galois representation rho of Gal(Qbar/Qsqrt-2) satisfying certain prescribed ramification conditions. In contrast to similar questions of this form, rho is allowed to have arbitrary ramification at some prime pi of Z[sqrt -2]. In the next paper in this volume, Boston and Ellenberg apply pro–p techniques to our examples and show that our result is true unconditionally. Here, we give additional examples where their techniques apply, including some non-arithmetic examples. Finally, we investigate the congruence covers of twist-knot orbifolds. Our experimental evidence suggests that these topologically similar orbifolds have rather different behavior depending on whether or not they are arithmetic. In particular, the congruence covers of the non-arithmetic orbifolds have a paucity of homology

Image processing for smarter browsing of ocean color data products: investigating algal blooms

Remote sensing technology continues to play a significant role in the understanding of our environment and the investigation of the Earth. Ocean color is the water hue due to the presence of tiny plants containing the pigment chlorophyll, sediments, and colored dissolved organic material and so can provide valuable information on coastal ecosystems. We propose to make the browsing of Ocean Color data more efficient for users by using image processing techniques to extract useful information which can be accessible through browser searching. Image processing is applied to chlorophyll and sea surface temperature images. The automatic image processing of the visual level 1 and level 2 data allow us to investigate the occurrence of algal blooms. Images with colors in a certain range (red, orange etc.) are used to address possible algal blooms and allow us to examine the seasonal variation of algal blooms in Europe (around Ireland and in the Baltic Sea). Yearly seasonal variation of algal blooms in Europe based on image processing for smarting browsing of Ocean Color are presented