Communicating Environmental Risks: Local Newspaper Coverage of Shellfish Bacterial Contamination in Maine

Coastal resources play a vital role in Maine’s cultural and economic wellbeing, contributing an estimated 168 billion dollars to the Maine economy. There are numerous risks to the sustainability of Maine’s shellfishing industry and working waterfront, including pathogenic bacterial pollution. In this study, we ask a broad fundamental question central to science and environmental journalism: how do newspapers cover localized environmental risks and what are the implications of those approaches? Utilizing the northeastern US state of Maine’s shellfishing industry as an exemplar environmental issue, this study examines how Maine’s two most read newspapers, the Bangor Daily News and the Portland Press Herald, report on bacterial contamination and shellfish. This study examines the themes that are present in the newspaper articles published about shellfish between 2003 and 2014 and analyses the types of sources journalists used within their coverage of these issues. Overall, we identified seven key themes: economic concerns, environmental impacts, political and regulatory issues, issues of public health and safety, reference to cultural values, technical and infrastructural issues, and aesthetic concerns. The most commonly cited individuals in the articles were government officials and scientists. The least cited groups were clammers and shellfishermen, general citizens, advocacy groups, and worm diggers. Implications for local coverage of environmental risks in Maine, science communication, and sustainability science are discussed

Communicating Environmental Risks: Local Newspaper Coverage of Shellfish Bacterial Contamination in Maine

Coastal resources play a vital role in Maine’s cultural and economic wellbeing, contributing an estimated 168 billion dollars to the Maine economy. There are numerous risks to the sustainability of Maine’s shellfishing industry and working waterfront, including pathogenic bacterial pollution. In this study, we ask a broad fundamental question central to science and environmental journalism: how do newspapers cover localized environmental risks and what are the implications of those approaches? Utilizing the northeastern US state of Maine’s shellfishing industry as an exemplar environmental issue, this study examines how Maine’s two most read newspapers, the Bangor Daily News and the Portland Press Herald, report on bacterial contamination and shellfish. This study examines the themes that are present in the newspaper articles published about shellfish between 2003 and 2014 and analyses the types of sources journalists used within their coverage of these issues. Overall, we identified seven key themes: economic concerns, environmental impacts, political and regulatory issues, issues of public health and safety, reference to cultural values, technical and infrastructural issues, and aesthetic concerns. The most commonly cited individuals in the articles were government officials and scientists. The least cited groups were clammers and shellfishermen, general citizens, advocacy groups, and worm diggers. Implications for local coverage of environmental risks in Maine, science communication, and sustainability science are discussed

Where Brain, Body and World Collide

The production cross section of electrons from semileptonic decays of beauty hadrons was measured at mid-rapidity (|y| < 0.8) in the transverse momentum range 1 < pt < 8 Gev/c with the ALICE experiment at the CERN LHC in pp collisions at a center of mass energy sqrt{s} = 7 TeV using an integrated luminosity of 2.2 nb^{-1}. Electrons from beauty hadron decays were selected based on the displacement of the decay vertex from the collision vertex. A perturbative QCD calculation agrees with the measurement within uncertainties. The data were extrapolated to the full phase space to determine the total cross section for the production of beauty quark-antiquark pairs

CSES Module 3 Full Release

The module was administered as a post-election interview. The resulting data are provided along with voting, demographic, district and macro variables in a single dataset. CSES Variable List The list of variables is being provided on the CSES Website to help in understanding what content is available from CSES, and to compare the content available in each module. Themes: MICRO-LEVEL DATA: Identification and study administration variables: weighting factors; election type; date of election 1st and 2nd round; study timing (post election study, pre-election and post-election study, between rounds of majoritarian election); mode of interview; gender of interviewer; date questionnaire administered; primary electoral district of respondent; number of days the interview was conducted after the election Demography: age; gender; education; marital status; union membership; union membership of others in household; business association membership, farmers´ association membership; professional association membership; current employment status; main occupation; socio economic status; employment type - public or private; industrial sector; current employment status, occupation, socio economic status, employment type - public or private, and industrial sector of spouse; household income; number of persons in household; number of children in household under the age of 18; attendance at religious services; religiosity; religious denomination; language usually spoken at home; race; ethnicity; region of residence; rural or urban residence Survey variables: most important issues of election; candidates competencies to deal with most important issues; difference who is in power and who people vote for; evaluation of governments performance; party and leader that represent respondent´s view best; sympathy scale for selected parties and political leaders; assessment of parties and political leaders on a left-right-scale; self-assessment on a left-right-scale; differences of choice options; campaign involvement; satisfaction with democracy; party identification; intensity of party identification; respondent cast a ballot at the current and the previous election; vote choice (presidential, lower house and upper house elections) at the current and the previous election; respondent cast candidate preference vote at the current and the previous election; political information items DISTRICT-LEVEL DATA: number of seats contested in electoral district; number of candidates; number of party lists; percent vote of different parties; official voter turnout in electoral district MACRO-LEVEL DATA: election outcomes by parties in current (lower house/upper house) legislative election; percent of seats in lower house received by parties in current lower house/upper house election; percent of seats in upper house received by parties in current lower house/upper house election; percent of votes received by presidential candidate of parties in current elections; electoral turnout; party of the president and the prime minister before and after the election; number of portfolios held by each party in cabinet, prior to and after the most recent election; size of the cabinet after the most recent election; number of parties participating in election; ideological families of parties; left-right position of parties assigned by experts and alternative dimensions; most salient factors in the election; fairness of the election; formal complaints against national level results; election irregularities reported; scheduled and held date of election; irregularities of election date; extent of election violence and post election violence; geographic concentration of violence; post-election protest; electoral alliances permitted during the election campaign; existing electoral alliances; requirements for joint party lists; possibility of apparentement and types of apparentement agreements; multi-party endorsements on ballot; votes cast; voting procedure; voting rounds; party lists close, open, or flexible; transferable votes; cumulated votes if more than one can be cast; compulsory voting; party threshold; unit for the threshold; freedom house rating; democracy-autocracy polity IV rating; age of the current regime; regime: type of executive; number of months since last lower house and last presidential election; electoral formula for presidential elections; electoral formula in all electoral tiers (majoritarian, proportional or mixed); for lower and upper houses was coded: number of electoral segments; linked electoral segments; dependent formulae in mixed systems; subtypes of mixed electoral systems; district magnitude (number of members elected from each district); number of secondary and tertiary electoral districts; fused vote; size of the lower house; GDP growth (annual percent); GDP per capita; inflation, GDP Deflator (annual percent); Human development index; total population; total unemployment; constitutional federal structure; number of legislative chambers; electoral results data available; effective number of electoral and parliamentary partie

Data from: Crop pests and predators exhibit inconsistent responses to surrounding landscape composition

AbstractThe idea that noncrop habitat enhances pest control and represents a win–win opportunity to conserve biodiversity and bolster yields has emerged as an agroecological paradigm. However, while noncrop habitat in landscapes surrounding farms sometimes benefits pest predators, natural enemy responses remain heterogeneous across studies and effects on pests are inconclusive. The observed heterogeneity in species responses to noncrop habitat may be biological in origin or could result from variation in how habitat and biocontrol are measured. Here, we use a pest-control database encompassing 132 studies and 6,759 sites worldwide to model natural enemy and pest abundances, predation rates, and crop damage as a function of landscape composition. Our results showed that although landscape composition explained significant variation within studies, pest and enemy abundances, predation rates, crop damage, and yields each exhibited different responses across studies, sometimes increasing and sometimes decreasing in landscapes with more noncrop habitat but overall showing no consistent trend. Thus, models that used landscape-composition variables to predict pest-control dynamics demonstrated little potential to explain variation across studies, though prediction did improve when comparing studies with similar crop and landscape features. Overall, our work shows that surrounding noncrop habitat does not consistently improve pest management, meaning habitat conservation may bolster production in some systems and depress yields in others. Future efforts to develop tools that inform farmers when habitat conservation truly represents a win–win would benefit from increased understanding of how landscape effects are modulated by local farm management and the biology of pests and their enemies

CSES Module 1-3 Harmonized Trend File

Für weitere Informationen zur Variablenliste siehe die Dokumentation (Codebook) des CSES Module 1-3 Harmonized Trend File. Informationen zum Inhalt können den Studiennummern ZA5179 CSES Module 1 Full Release, ZA5180 CSES Module 2 Full Release, und ZA5181 CSES Module 3 Full Release entnommen werden