Modeling risk of landslide initiation and runout in the Colorado Front Range under current and future climates

2021 Fall.Includes bibliographical references.Precipitation-induced landslides pose risks to humans through property damage, disruption of infrastructure, injury, and loss of life. Due to the spatial and temporal heterogeneity of soil moisture and landscape characteristics that impact slope stability and potential impacts of climate change on landslide location, quantifying landslide risk to humans is difficult as uncertainties are not represented in available datasets. Recent developments have improved our ability to probabilistically model landslide initiation, thus allowing for the incorporation of spatial and temporal uncertainty in the prediction of the onset of hillslope failures. The ability to incorporate uncertainty in landslide models is particularly valuable for considering how climate change, which could impact vegetation cover and associated root cohesion, might alter the vulnerability of people and infrastructure to landslides. The aim of this analysis is to probabilistically forecast landslide susceptibility under climate change by incorporating changes in the type and distribution of vegetation while accounting for uncertainties in key properties. Using Landlab, a Python-based toolkit for landscape modeling, we perform Monte Carlo simulations with an infinite slope stability model to make spatially explicit calculations of the probability of landslide initiation. The soil moisture input to the landslide model is from the Equilibrium Moisture from Topography, Vegetation, and Soil (EMT+VS) model, which downscales coarse-resolution soil moisture by incorporating the dependence of soil moisture on topographic, vegetative, and soil characteristics. We evaluate model sensitivity and identify that vegetation, which impacts cohesion and soil depth, has a large impact on the model. We evaluate model performance by simulating landslide susceptibility over a 1333 km2 area of the Colorado Front Range as there is a large inventory of more than 1300 landslides from an extreme precipitation event in 2013. One anticipated effect of climate change in the Colorado Front Range is a reduction in the survivability of trees, which we incorporate through applying reductions to vegetative cohesion and vegetation cover. For the 2013 event, the model predicts 79.6% of the mapped landslides and 5.8% of the rest of the study area as being unstable. A deterministic model using mean values from the probability model and assuming FS ≤ 1 is unstable captures only 42% of observed landslides, supporting the use of the probabilistic model. The probabilities are low (P(F) 0.8) values, with the latter having higher slopes and lower vegetation. 66% of nodes with P(F) > 0 occur on south facing slopes where trees are less abundant. After incorporating climate change, we see an increase in the areas susceptible to landslides and a shift to more instability on north-facing slopes. Our study suggests that vegetation changes due to climate change could result in major shifts in the people and infrastructure susceptible to landslides in the Colorado Front Range. In conjunction with landslide initiation, determining landslide runout is important to fully analyze landslide risk. Landslide runout modeling for large areas is difficult due to limited information and the complexity of landslides. The difficulties of physically modeling landslides on large spatial scales have led to the development of empirical methods based on topographic attributes. While empirical models are limited in that they require calibration in new areas and thus can only be applied to areas with landslide inventories, they provide a way to model landslide runout at large spatial scales and identify areas for further, potentially more physically-based, analyses. We investigate whether topographic controls can be used to predict landslide termination. We develop a landslide runout model and apply it to a 10-m elevation grid. Our model routes landslides downslope with d8 flow direction method and uses a critical slope, defined as a minimum slope a landslide must encounter to end, and slope persistence, defined as the distance the landslide must travel under the critical slope, to represent landslide stopping locations. We apply our model to see if it can replicate landslide runout in the Colorado Front Range due to a large landslide inventory from a 2013 precipitation event that induced approximately 1300 mapped landslides. The calibrated model has a critical slope of 3° and a slope persistence of 20 m and predicts landslide distance in both the calibration and evaluation areas with a Nash-Sutcliffe (NS) value of 0.69 and 0.58, respectively. We compare our calibrated model to an angle of reach approach, an approach that has been applied previously for landslide runout mapping which determines the slope between the start and end of a landslide, and determine that the best NS value of 0.14 occurs at an angel of 20°. Our results show that within our study area, topographic controls provide plausible initial estimates of runout endpoints and an improvement over similarly simplistic methods such as the angle of reach. The potential of using critical slope combined with slope persistence to capture topographic controls to predict runout endpoints is a promising opportunity for landslide hazard mapping at large spatial extents

Is greater decisionmaking power of women associated with reduced gender discrimination in South Asia?

"Recent research has shown that improving women's decisionmaking power relative to men's within households leads to improvements in a variety of well-being outcomes for children. In South Asia, where the influence of women's power is particularly strong, these outcomes include children's nutritional status and the quality of feeding and health care practices. Focusing on nutritional status, this paper presents the results of a study investigating whether increases in women's power have a stronger positive influence on the nutritional status of their daughters than their sons. If so, then increasing women's power not only improves the well-being of children as a group, but also serves as a force to reduce long-standing discrimination that undermines female capabilities in many important areas of life as well as human and economic development in general. To investigate this issue, the study draws on Demographic and Health Survey data collected during the 1990s in four countries: Bangladesh, India, Nepal, and Pakistan. The main empirical technique employed is multivariate regression analysis with statistical tests for significant differences in effects for girl and boy children. A total of 30,334 women and 33,316 children under three years old are included in the analysis. The study concludes that, for the South Asia region as a whole, an increase in women's decisionmaking power relative to men's, if substantial, would be an effective force for reducing discrimination against girl children. However, this finding is not applicable in all countries and for all areas and age groups of children. Indeed the study finds evidence that in some areas, for instance the northern and western states of India as a group, increasing women's power would lead to a worsening of gender discrimination against girls. This is likely the result of deeply embedded son preference associated with highly patriarchal social systems. The lesson for policymakers and development practitioners is that while increasing women's power is likely to improve the well-being of children, in some geographical areas it will not necessarily diminish discrimination against girls, which violates human rights and undermines the region's economic development and the health of its population. In these areas, to overcome son preference, economic returns to girls will have to be increased and efforts to change customs regarding marriage and inheritance associated with patriarchal kinship systems, which favor males, will have to be made." Authors' AbstractGender discrimination ,Women Social conditions ,Children Nutrition ,Economic development ,

Common trends and common cycles in Canada: who knew so much has been going on?

It is generally accepted that convergence is well established for regional Canadian per capita outputs. The authors present evidence that long-run movements are driven by two stochastic common trends in this time series. This evidence casts doubt on the convergence hypothesis for Canada. Another prevalent belief is that Canada forms an optimal currency area (OCA). The authors uncover three serially correlated common cycles whose asymmetries suggest Canada is not an OCA. Their common trend-common cycle decomposition of regional outputs also reveals that trend shocks dominate fluctuations in Ontario, Quebec, and the Maritimes in the short run and long run but not in British Columbia and the Prairie region. Thus, regional Canadian economic fluctuations are driven by a rich, diverse, and economically important set of propagation and growth mechanisms.

Book Discussion

A book discussion of The Color Purple by Alice Walker. Faculty panelists include Rashidah Muhammad, professor of English and secondary education; Elizabeth Johnson, assistant professor of history; Elizabeth Todd-Breland, assistant professor of social science; and Byron Waller, associate professor of counseling

Exploring a Transcriptional Regulatory Region in Mycobacteriophage JacoRen57

Mycobacteriophages are infectious particles that infect mycobacteria, and little is known about cis-regulatory elements that control their gene expression. In phage genomes, cis-regulatory elements commonly precede a series of genes that are expressed as an operon. JacoRen57 is a cluster AB mycobacteriophage that possesses forward and reverse genes with non-coding gaps interspersed throughout its genome. We assayed one of the gap regions of JacoRen57 (40644-40974 bps) for regulatory activity in the downstream direction when present in its host, Mycobacterium smegmatis, by cloning the region into pLO86, a vector containing the mCherry reporter gene. The putative regulatory region induced the expression of mCherry in vivo, indicating the presence of a promoter in this region of the JacoRen57 genome. Utilizing 5’ deletions analysis, we identified promoter and repressor elements within this regulatory region. We are conducting further experiments to understand the characteristics of the repressor region and which sigma factor/s binds to this promoter

Exploring a Putative Promoter Region in Mycobacteriophage JacoRen57

Phages are abundant particles that infect bacteria. For the SEA-PHAGES program, students discover phages and annotate their genomes. Throughout the annotation process, genes are identified based on bioinformatics evidence; however, little is known about mycobacteriophage promoters as they are not annotated. Promoters are necessary for gene expression, and in mycobacteriophages, a promoter typically precedes a series of genes that are expressed as a single transcript from which multiple proteins are translated. JacoRen57 is a singleton mycobacteriophage with a siphoviridae morphotype that possesses forward and reverse genes with gaps located at the transitions from forward to reverse genes. We hypothesized that these gaps contain promoters. We used BPROM and PePPER, prokaryotic promoter predictor software, which yielded matches to promoter consensus sequences in one of the gap regions. We cloned the putative promoter region into pLO86, a vector containing the mCherry reporter gene, to determine if the cloned region functions as a promoter by inducing mCherryexpression in Mycobacterium smegmatis. The putative promoter region did not function as a promoter in vivo under standard M. smegmatisgrowth conditions