LEAVE NO ONE BEHIND: Approaches to Working Effectively With American Indians/ Alaska Natives

This publication was written to assist benefits planners and advocates in working more effectively with American Indian and Alaskan Native populations. The guide provides a general orientation to these indigenous populations and highlights cultural differences. It also provides more in depth information on conducting outreach and working in tandem with sovereign nations

A monitoring system for preventive control of Desert Locust in West Africa

Agricultural pests like the Desert locust, Schistocerca gregaria (Forskål 1775), often migrate across borders and cause major losses and emergencies. In the past, such damage often led to famines and sometimes triggered trade restrictions. An international preventive strategy is currently recommended in each country on early warning and reaction capacities. As a result, the extent and frequency of invasions were considerably reduced during the last 50 years. However, countries are frequently unable to react sufficiently quickly to nip outbreaks in the bud, and late extensive emergency operations, with large use of pesticides as well as international assistance, became necessary. The Emergency Prevention System for Transboundary Animal and Plant Pests and Diseases (EMPRES, Desert Locust component) was established by FAO in order to minimize the risk of such emergencies. In Western and Northern Africa, EMPRES was implemented in 2006 to develop a more effective early survey and a better preventive management of Desert locust populations in their reproduction areas. Enhancing national capacities and building a common system for monitoring each national preventive control was considered as a priority. Such a tool was developed by French CIRAD in 2009 and is a main component of the "National Locust Risk Management Plans". This software, using a simple web interface, is built around a database. All data from 10 West African national Locust control units, about infrastructures, materials, human resources and financial means, were collected and organized in the database. The frequency of the updates is connected to the nature of information, from 3 to 12 months and performed at the country level. Real-time consultations, codifications and outputs are made easily by the internet. This system allows a real-time collection/dissemination of information and a better organization of preventive control at the regional level, key points to improve management of Desert locust risk. (Résumé d'auteur

Strategic Pest Management Booklets for Farmers in Kaffrine, Senegal

abstract: When Kaffrine, Senegal, is faced with the threat of a locust plague, farmers tend to struggle with determining what actions and when they should take place to prevent a plague from occurring. The inability of farmers to readily identify the early threats of a locust plague is a primary issue that has been affecting communities in Kaffrine for millennia. Locust plagues affect the functionality of Senegal’s ecosystems, the welfare of its social systems, and the peoples’ economic opportunities. The project focuses on the creation of 300 pest identification booklets that provide five villages in Kaffrine the proper education to prevent locust plagues from forming. I have partnered with the Global Locust Initiative (GLI) to help make these booklets come to fruition as the booklets target the lack of early detection awareness that is at the root of locust plagues. By providing the villages with these booklets, the farmers and community members, will be more educated on how to identify and act on the early threats of a plague. Additional outcomes of creating these booklets are as follows: improved well-being of the farming community, increased millet yields, and enhanced global food system sustainability. As locusts are a migratory pest, it is recommended that more stakeholders are provided the proper educational material to help them identify the early threats of a locust plague to prevent negative externalities from being imposed on the surrounding ecology, individuals, and agriculture

Locust-inspired vision system on chip architecture for collision detection in automotive applications

This paper describes a programmable digital computing architecture dedicated to process information in accordance to the organization and operating principles of the four-layer neuron structure encountered at the visual system of Locusts. This architecture takes advantage of the natural collision detection skills of locusts and is capable of processing images and ascertaining collision threats in real-time automotive scenarios. In addition to the Locust features, the architecture embeds a Topological Feature Estimator module to identify and classify objects in collision course.European Commission IST2001 - 38097Ministerio de Ciencia y Tecnología TIC2003 - 09817- C02 - 0

Desert locust populations, rainfall and climate change: insights from phenomenological models using gridded monthly data

Using autocorrelation analysis and autoregressive integrated moving average (ARIMA)modelling, we analysed a time series of the monthly number of 1° grid squares infested with desert locust Schistocerca gregaria swarms throughout the geographical range of the species from 1930–1987. Statistically significant first- and higher-order autocorrelations were found in the series. Although endogenous components captured much of the variance, adding rainfall data improved endogenous ARIMA models and resulted in more realistic forecasts. Using a square-root transformation for the locust data improved the fit. The models were only partially successful when accounting for the dramatic changes in abundance which may occur during locust upsurges and declines, in some cases successfully predicting these phenomena but underestimating their severity. Better fitting models were also produced when rainfall data were added to models of an equivalent series for desert locust hoppers (nymphs) that incorporated lagged data for locust swarms as independent variables, representing parent generations. The results are discussed in relation to predicting likely changes in desert locust dynamics with reference to potential effects of climate change

Energy localisation and frequency analysis in the locust ear

Animal ears are exquisitely adapted to capture sound energy and perform signal analysis. Studying the ear of the locust, we show how frequency signal analysis can be performed solely by using the structural features of the tympanum. Incident sound waves generate mechanical vibrational waves that travel across the tympanum. These waves shoal in a tsunami like fashion, resulting in energy localisation that focuses vibrations onto the mechanosensory neurons in a frequency dependent manner. Using finite element analysis, we demonstrate that two mechanical properties of the locust tympanum, distributed thickness and tension, are necessary and sufficient to generate frequency-dependent energy localisation. <br/

Spatial uncertainty and structuration effects on preventive management of locust plagues: a multi-agent perspective

The spatial structure of locust outbreaks is a major item of planning and success of locust preventive management strategies. Indeed, preventive management relies on where and when survey teams have to be sent to explore and report the biotope situation and the potential locust population development in order to react in time to any upsurge. The spatial concentration of areas favourable to outbreak has been documented in many species. Other spatial limits are the areas where the preventive management fails to collect information, either because of insecurity or remoteness. We explored these spatial specificities with the help of ALMMAS, a spatially explicit multi-agent system representing a typical preventive management system with 4 levels of agents: locusts moving randomly and causing intermittently outbreaks spatially localized, field teams conducting surveys and controlling locusts, a management centre hiring and funding the field teams, and a budget holder funding the management centre depending on its own perception of the risk. We simulated 1) some areas where field teams have a low access (only through a corridor), 2) some areas where field teams have no access at all and 3) some areas where the probability to observe initial outbreaks is concentrated in hotspots. We explored the effects of number and size of these areas on the proportion of plague times through series of 100-year simulations. We observed that a strong effort of the budget holder to keep its funding through time might be annihilated with only 5% of a spatial territory with a restricted access. Logically, we obtained also that the largest the areas without access are, the worse the proportion of plague years is. But interestingly, if these inaccessible areas are divided in several small spots, the plagues are more numerous than with only one equivalent inaccessible area. This is explainable through a border-effect, i.e. more kilometres of frontiers to control when there are several inaccessible areas instead of one. The concentration of outbreaks in hotspots also increased the probability to observe plagues. Here too, the spatial distribution of only one hotspot was easier to control for the field teams than of several hotspots of identical size. But particularly, an interesting finding was that with only one hotspot, the period of cyclic behaviour of the budget holder between awareness and the reduction of funding was longer than with several smaller hotspots. These results highlight the need to consider the spatial specificity and accessibility of each locust species when planning the sustainability of anti-locust management systems. The cyclic outbreaks of some locust species, despite the significant budgets in order to establish a preventive management system, may be related to these spatial specificities. Further studies should also focus on the effects of concentrating the attention of surveys in outbreak hotspots

Quantitative genetics of the Desert Locust's larval growth: Rate and life-history strategy : PS3M358 Ecology

Schistocerca gregaria, the desert locust, which is distributed from north-west Africa to south-east Asia, is one of the most known and studied locust species. In order to prevent local human populations from the threat of pullulations, we need to know more about population dynamics of the desert locust, especially for the solitarious populations which are less studied than gregarious ones. Predicting the evolution of population dynamics needs a good knowledge of life-history traits that influence population demography. Growth is one of these traits, since it is directly linked to the onset of sexual maturity, then reproduction. Moreover, in order to investigate the potential of selection on individual growth, one needs to evaluate its heritability by disentangling genetic and additive variation in traits phenotype from non-genetic variance due to other (environmental) factors. Here we present a work done on a first generation lab population of S. gregaria sampled in the field. We recorded individual larval growth of 15 full-sib families, based on body weight and morphology in controlled conditions. We describe larval growth by analyzing growth rate as well as several key variables involved in life-history strategy (body weight and size at emergence, growth rate until adult emergence, maximum body weight, age at adult emergence, larval strategy). Thanks to the known relatedness structure of our sample, we also calculate the heritability of those traits and make predictions about the ability of S. gregaria populations to respond to selection on larval growth

Reactive direction control for a mobile robot: A locust-like control of escape direction emerges when a bilateral pair of model locust visual neurons are integrated

Locusts possess a bilateral pair of uniquely identifiable visual neurons that respond vigorously to the image of an approaching object. These neurons are called the lobula giant movement detectors (LGMDs). The locust LGMDs have been extensively studied and this has lead to the development of an LGMD model for use as an artificial collision detector in robotic applications. To date, robots have been equipped with only a single, central artificial LGMD sensor, and this triggers a non-directional stop or rotation when a potentially colliding object is detected. Clearly, for a robot to behave autonomously, it must react differently to stimuli approaching from different directions. In this study, we implement a bilateral pair of LGMD models in Khepera robots equipped with normal and panoramic cameras. We integrate the responses of these LGMD models using methodologies inspired by research on escape direction control in cockroaches. Using ‘randomised winner-take-all’ or ‘steering wheel’ algorithms for LGMD model integration, the khepera robots could escape an approaching threat in real time and with a similar distribution of escape directions as real locusts. We also found that by optimising these algorithms, we could use them to integrate the left and right DCMD responses of real jumping locusts offline and reproduce the actual escape directions that the locusts took in a particular trial. Our results significantly advance the development of an artificial collision detection and evasion system based on the locust LGMD by allowing it reactive control over robot behaviour. The success of this approach may also indicate some important areas to be pursued in future biological research