139 research outputs found
Crop Pests and Predators Exhibit Inconsistent Responses to Surrounding Landscape Composition
The idea that noncrop habitat enhances pest control and represents a winâwin 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 winâwin would benefit from increased understanding of how landscape effects are modulated by local farm management and the biology of pests and their enemies
The Confidence Database
Understanding how people rate their confidence is critical for the characterization of a wide range of perceptual, memory, motor and cognitive processes. To enable the continued exploration of these processes, we created a large database of confidence studies spanning a broad set of paradigms, participant populations and fields of study. The data from each study are structured in a common, easy-to-use format that can be easily imported and analysed using multiple software packages. Each dataset is accompanied by an explanation regarding the nature of the collected data. At the time of publication, the Confidence Database (which is available at https://osf.io/s46pr/) contained 145 datasets with data from more than 8,700 participants and almost 4âmillion trials. The database will remain open for new submissions indefinitely and is expected to continue to grow. Here we show the usefulness of this large collection of datasets in four different analyses that provide precise estimations of several foundational confidence-related effects
Crop pests and predators exhibit inconsistent responses to surrounding landscape composition
The idea that noncrop habitat enhances pest control and represents a winâwin 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 winâwin would benefit from increased understanding of how landscape effects are modulated by local farm management and the biology of pests and their enemies
The Science Performance of JWST as Characterized in Commissioning
This paper characterizes the actual science performance of the James Webb
Space Telescope (JWST), as determined from the six month commissioning period.
We summarize the performance of the spacecraft, telescope, science instruments,
and ground system, with an emphasis on differences from pre-launch
expectations. Commissioning has made clear that JWST is fully capable of
achieving the discoveries for which it was built. Moreover, almost across the
board, the science performance of JWST is better than expected; in most cases,
JWST will go deeper faster than expected. The telescope and instrument suite
have demonstrated the sensitivity, stability, image quality, and spectral range
that are necessary to transform our understanding of the cosmos through
observations spanning from near-earth asteroids to the most distant galaxies.Comment: 5th version as accepted to PASP; 31 pages, 18 figures;
https://iopscience.iop.org/article/10.1088/1538-3873/acb29
The James Webb Space Telescope Mission
Twenty-six years ago a small committee report, building on earlier studies,
expounded a compelling and poetic vision for the future of astronomy, calling
for an infrared-optimized space telescope with an aperture of at least .
With the support of their governments in the US, Europe, and Canada, 20,000
people realized that vision as the James Webb Space Telescope. A
generation of astronomers will celebrate their accomplishments for the life of
the mission, potentially as long as 20 years, and beyond. This report and the
scientific discoveries that follow are extended thank-you notes to the 20,000
team members. The telescope is working perfectly, with much better image
quality than expected. In this and accompanying papers, we give a brief
history, describe the observatory, outline its objectives and current observing
program, and discuss the inventions and people who made it possible. We cite
detailed reports on the design and the measured performance on orbit.Comment: Accepted by PASP for the special issue on The James Webb Space
Telescope Overview, 29 pages, 4 figure
Differential attentional responding in caesarean versus vaginally delivered infants
Abstract Little is known about the role that the birth experience plays in brain and cognitive development. Recent research has suggested that birth experience influences the development of the somatosensory cortex, an area involved in spatial attention to sensory information. In this study, we explored whether differences in spatial attention would occur in infants who had different birth experiences, as occurs for caesarean versus vaginal delivery. Three-month-old infants performed either a spatial cueing task or a visual expectation task. We showed that caesarean-delivered infants' stimulus-driven, reflexive attention was slowed relative to vaginally delivered infants', whereas their cognitively driven, voluntary attention was unaffected. Thus, types of birth experience influence at least one form of infants' attention, and possibly any cognitive process that relies on spatial attention. This study also suggests that birth experience influences the initial state of brain functioning and, consequently, should be considered in our understanding of brain development
Sensitivity to major versus minor musical modes is bimodally distributed in young infants
The difference between major and minor scales plays a central role in Western music. However, recent research using random tone sequences ("tone-scrambles") has revealed a dramatically bimodal distribution in sensitivity to this difference: 30% of listeners are near perfect in classifying major versus minor tone-scrambles; the other 70% perform near chance. Here, whether or not infants show this same pattern is investigated. The anticipatory eye-movements of thirty 6-month-old infants were monitored during trials in which the infants heard a tone-scramble whose quality (major versus minor) signalled the location (right versus left) where a subsequent visual stimulus (the target) would appear. For 33% of infants, these anticipatory eye-movements predicted target location with near perfect accuracy; for the other 67%, the anticipatory eye-movements were unrelated to the target location. In conclusion, six-month-old infants show the same distribution as adults in sensitivity to the difference between major versus minor tone-scrambles
- âŠ