An experimental assessment of the efficacy of falconry to mitigate human-wildlife conflict: Egyptian Geese Alopochen aegyptiaca at golf courses

Includes bibliographical referencesHuman-wildlife conflicts are increasing globally and are believed to be one of the most prevalent and intractable issues that face conservation biologists today. One such conflict is found on golf courses, where high numbers of geese can come into conflict with residents and members. In South Africa, the indigenous Egyptian Goose Alopochen aegyptiaca population has increased dramatically over recent years and as a result they are often seen as nuisance animals whose population requires active management. Most non-lethal methods of goose control have had little success due to habituation to their presence, whilst the use of lethal methods are often deemed socially unacceptable. In this study we experimentally investigated the efficacy of falconry as a management tool to mitigate human-wildlife conflict. We hypothesised that the use of falconry would re-establish a landscape of fear, whereby habitat choice is influenced by the perceived fear of predation, resulting in the local departure of geese to a safer habitat, thereby reducing the population of geese to a tolerable level. Absolute counts of geese and analysis of vigilance levels were conducted at three golf courses in the Western Cape which included two control sites and a treatment site. The results of the experiment indicate that goose abundance declined by 73% at the treatment site after falconry was initiated, and that this was well over the losses due to direct predation. Vigilance levels increased by 7 6% during the treatment period, with no such changes observed at either control site. Additionally, vigilance was higher when filmed from a golf buggy compared to when filmed on foot, which may suggest the geese also learned to associate the golf buggy with the threat of predation, enhancing the overall efficacy of the falconry. While there is a relatively small lethal aspect to falconry, the results of this study confirm that a reduction in the population of geese can be achieved by simulating the naturally occurring non-lethal effects of predation that have been lost in some habitats, as a result of anthropogenic changes to the landscape. To our knowledge, this is the first truly experimental test of the efficacy of falconry to reduce nuisance birds and these important ecological findings have relevance for techniques that people deploy for dealing with human wildlife conflict, particularly where lethal options are unfavourable

Including mixed methods research in systematic reviews: Examples from qualitative syntheses in TB and malaria control.

BACKGROUND: Health policy makers now have access to a greater number and variety of systematic reviews to inform different stages in the policy making process, including reviews of qualitative research. The inclusion of mixed methods studies in systematic reviews is increasing, but these studies pose particular challenges to methods of review. This article examines the quality of the reporting of mixed methods and qualitative-only studies. METHODS: We used two completed systematic reviews to generate a sample of qualitative studies and mixed method studies in order to make an assessment of how the quality of reporting and rigor of qualitative-only studies compares with that of mixed-methods studies. RESULTS: Overall, the reporting of qualitative studies in our sample was consistently better when compared with the reporting of mixed methods studies. We found that mixed methods studies are less likely to provide a description of the research conduct or qualitative data analysis procedures and less likely to be judged credible or provide rich data and thick description compared with standalone qualitative studies. Our time-related analysis shows that for both types of study, papers published since 2003 are more likely to report on the study context, describe analysis procedures, and be judged credible and provide rich data. However, the reporting of other aspects of research conduct (i.e. descriptions of the research question, the sampling strategy, and data collection methods) in mixed methods studies does not appear to have improved over time. CONCLUSIONS: Mixed methods research makes an important contribution to health research in general, and could make a more substantial contribution to systematic reviews. Through our careful analysis of the quality of reporting of mixed methods and qualitative-only research, we have identified areas that deserve more attention in the conduct and reporting of mixed methods research

Dismantling the Juggernaut: Assessing the Potential of an Ecosocialist Green New Deal

The Green New Deal proposes a holistic solution to an immense problem, arguing that the radical transformation of capitalism is the only option if humanity is to save itself from ecocide. The logical underpinnings of GND proposals are varied: Keynesian economists, environmental justice groups, Indigenous activists, and ecosocialists have contributed to its development and debate. The platform promises to impact many immediate appearances of climate-changing capitalism, from income distributions to fossil emissions. I ask whether it sufficiently addresses the underlying economic and political form-determinations that necessitate capitalist extraction, exploitation, and expansion, constituting limits to what can be achieved under this social metabolic order. The first research contribution is theoretical. ‘Ecological state-derivation’ combines ecological Marxism with a vein of state theory rooted in Marx’s third volume of Capital. It explains the capitalist state as a necessary mediation of capital’s economic and environmental contradictions. The resulting political forms are socially restrictive, yet contradictory and vulnerable to change. This enables a second, policy-oriented research contribution: a ‘form-analysis’ of the GND. I analyse three proposals according to their own terms and in the terms of ecological state-derivation. The result is an immanent understanding of the policy platforms and a deep interrogation of their adequacy. My ‘positive criticism’ finds the GND framework’s most radical variants to align with the insights of ecological state-derivation. A ‘radical’ or ‘ecosocialist’ GND installs an intersectional ‘working-class general interest’ into the very constitution of the state, intensifying the labour-capital contradiction in politics and the economy by way of ‘democratised decommodification,’ and as appropriate, decolonised forms of self-determination

COVID has changed students’ needs and expectations. How do universities respond?

Flexibility is often understood as student preferences for modes of learning. Some students see benefits in fully online learning and may decide to continue in that mode. The majority, though, have expressed a strong desire to return to campus. But they want to retain the flexibility of online learning. This conversation piece explores how universities move forward with teaching post-pandemic

Semi-Automated Library Preparation for High-Throughput DNA Sequencing Platforms

Next-generation sequencing platforms are powerful technologies, providing gigabases of genetic information in a single run. An important prerequisite for high-throughput DNA sequencing is the development of robust and cost-effective preprocessing protocols for DNA sample library construction. Here we report the development of a semi-automated sample preparation protocol to produce adaptor-ligated fragment libraries. Using a liquid-handling robot in conjunction with Carboxy Terminated Magnetic Beads, we labeled each library sample using a unique 6 bp DNA barcode, which allowed multiplex sample processing and sequencing of 32 libraries in a single run using Applied Biosystems' SOLiD sequencer. We applied our semi-automated pipeline to targeted medical resequencing of nuclear candidate genes in individuals affected by mitochondrial disorders. This novel method is capable of preparing as much as 32 DNA libraries in 2.01 days (8-hour workday) for emulsion PCR/high throughput DNA sequencing, increasing sample preparation production by 8-fold

Research Articles in Simplified HTML: a Web-first format for HTML-based scholarly articles

Purpose. This paper introduces the Research Articles in Simplified HTML (or RASH), which is a Web-first format for writing HTML-based scholarly papers; it is accompanied by the RASH Framework, a set of tools for interacting with RASH-based articles. The paper also presents an evaluation that involved authors and reviewers of RASH articles submitted to the SAVE-SD 2015 and SAVE-SD 2016 workshops. Design. RASH has been developed aiming to: be easy to learn and use; share scholarly documents (and embedded semantic annotations) through the Web; support its adoption within the existing publishing workflow. Findings. The evaluation study confirmed that RASH is ready to be adopted in workshops, conferences, and journals and can be quickly learnt by researchers who are familiar with HTML. Research Limitations. The evaluation study also highlighted some issues in the adoption of RASH, and in general of HTML formats, especially by less technically savvy users. Moreover, additional tools are needed, e.g., for enabling additional conversions from/to existing formats such as OpenXML. Practical Implications. RASH (and its Framework) is another step towards enabling the definition of formal representations of the meaning of the content of an article, facilitating its automatic discovery, enabling its linking to semantically related articles, providing access to data within the article in actionable form, and allowing integration of data between papers. Social Implications. RASH addresses the intrinsic needs related to the various users of a scholarly article: researchers (focussing on its content), readers (experiencing new ways for browsing it), citizen scientists (reusing available data formally defined within it through semantic annotations), publishers (using the advantages of new technologies as envisioned by the Semantic Publishing movement). Value. RASH helps authors to focus on the organisation of their texts, supports them in the task of semantically enriching the content of articles, and leaves all the issues about validation, visualisation, conversion, and semantic data extraction to the various tools developed within its Framework

Newly identified climatically and environmentally significant high-latitude dust sources

Dust particles from high latitudes have a potentially large local, regional, and global significance to climate and the environment as short-lived climate forcers, air pollutants, and nutrient sources. Identifying the locations of local dust sources and their emission, transport, and deposition processes is important for understanding the multiple impacts of high-latitude dust (HLD) on the Earth's systems. Here, we identify, describe, and quantify the source intensity (SI) values, which show the potential of soil surfaces for dust emission scaled to values 0 to 1 concerning globally best productive sources, using the Global Sand and Dust Storms Source Base Map (G-SDS-SBM). This includes 64 HLD sources in our collection for the northern (Alaska, Canada, Denmark, Greenland, Iceland, Svalbard, Sweden, and Russia) and southern (Antarctica and Patagonia) high latitudes. Activity from most of these HLD sources shows seasonal character. It is estimated that high-latitude land areas with higher (SI ≥0.5), very high (SI ≥0.7), and the highest potential (SI ≥0.9) for dust emission cover >1 670 000 km2, >560 000 km2, and >240 000 km2, respectively. In the Arctic HLD region (≥60∘ N), land area with SI ≥0.5 is 5.5 % (1 035 059 km2), area with SI ≥0.7 is 2.3 % (440 804 km2), and area with SI ≥0.9 is 1.1 % (208 701 km2). Minimum SI values in the northern HLD region are about 3 orders of magnitude smaller, indicating that the dust sources of this region greatly depend on weather conditions. Our spatial dust source distribution analysis modeling results showed evidence supporting a northern HLD belt, defined as the area north of 50∘ N, with a “transitional HLD-source area” extending at latitudes 50–58∘ N in Eurasia and 50–55∘ N in Canada and a “cold HLD-source area” including areas north of 60∘ N in Eurasia and north of 58∘ N in Canada, with currently “no dust source” area between the HLD and low-latitude dust (LLD) dust belt, except for British Columbia. Using the global atmospheric transport model SILAM, we estimated that 1.0 % of the global dust emission originated from the high-latitude regions. About 57 % of the dust deposition in snow- and ice-covered Arctic regions was from HLD sources. In the southern HLD region, soil surface conditions are favorable for dust emission during the whole year. Climate change can cause a decrease in the duration of snow cover, retreat of glaciers, and an increase in drought, heatwave intensity, and frequency, leading to the increasing frequency of topsoil conditions favorable for dust emission, which increases the probability of dust storms. Our study provides a step forward to improve the representation of HLD in models and to monitor, quantify, and assess the environmental and climate significance of HLD

Phosphonic Acid-Functionalized Diblock Copolymer Nano-Objects via Polymerization-Induced Self-Assembly: Synthesis, Characterization, and Occlusion into Calcite Crystals

Dialkylphosphonate-functionalized and phosphonic acid-functionalized macromolecular chain transfer agents (macro-CTAs) were utilized for the reversible addition–fragmentation chain transfer (RAFT) dispersion polymerization of benzyl methacrylate (BzMA) at 20% w/w solids in methanol at 64 °C. Spherical, worm-like and vesicular nano-objects could all be generated through systematic variation of the mean degree of polymerization of the core-forming PBzMA block when using relatively short macro-CTAs. Construction of detailed phase diagrams is essential for the reproducible targeting of pure copolymer morphologies, where these were characterized using transmission electron microscopy (TEM) and dynamic light scattering (DLS). For nano-objects prepared using the phosphonic acid-based macro-CTA, transfer from methanol dispersion to water leads to the development of anionic surface charge as a result of ionization of the stabilizer chains, but this does not adversely affect the copolymer morphology. Given the well-known strong affinity of phosphonic acid for calcium ions, selected nano-objects were evaluated for their in-situ occlusion within growing CaCO3 crystals. Scanning electron microscopy (SEM) studies provide convincing evidence for the occlusion of both worm-like and vesicular phosphonic acid-based nano-objects and hence the production of a series of interesting new organic-inorganic nanocomposites