A Model for Cultivating Global Engagement Beyond Academic Tourism

The message to environmental scholars in Pope Francis’ Encyclical “Laudato Si” is clear: contributions from Science, Technology, Engineering, and Mathematics (STEM) must serve to inform both local and international conversations as well as connect learning communities in developed and developing nations. In the hope of fostering international opportunities that challenge U.S. students to link their academic degrees with social justice elements that calibrate them to the historical reality the overwhelming majority of the world experiences, we outline a teacher-scholar model that serves as a tool for the advancement of social and environmental justice issues in developing countries

La Diversidad de los Análisis de Diversidad La Diversidad de los Analisis de Diversidad [The Diversity of Diversity Analyses]

There is a lack of consistency with respect to the use of the terms like species richness, diversity and biodiversity, which extends to the analysis of diversity indices and the merit of using diversity indices in the evaluation (comparison and contrast) of biological communities. The purpose of this article is to provide working definitions for these terms and cite examples from the primary literature that demonstrate the utility of estimating richness, evaluating proportional abundance patterns, as well as comparing indices of diversity and similarity to study patterns of biological organization at different ecological scales. Additionally, we provide a manual in the appendix for downloading and using a freeware application (EstimateS) to estimate species richness and construct rarefaction curves for various diversity indices based on the patterns detected from field-data

Detection of Secondary Microplastics in an Aquatic Mesocosm by Means of Object-Based Image Analysis

When plastics are discarded, they do not biodegrade and instead break down over time into progressively smaller particles, termed secondary microplastics, which adversely impact biota and human health as well as persist in the environment for centuries. Our research objective was to evaluate the capabilities of object-based image analyses in detecting compositionally varied microplastics suspended in an aquatic mesocosm under no-slip and turbulent water conditions. We found that the presence of polypropylene, polyethylene terephthalate, and low-density polyethylene microplastic pollution in both single-type and mixed-type suspensions was not detectable by either average red (R), average blue (B), average green (G), or average RBG pixel intensities, but was significantly detectable by means of total RBG pixel intensity from digital imagery of the surface-water. Our findings suggest that object-based image analyses of surface waters to quantify pixel information is better suited for monitoring the presence and absence of suspended microplastics, rather than for the stepwise determination of microplastic concentrations. We propose the development of a smartphone application to facilitate citizen-science monitoring of microplastic contamination as well as comment on future applications utilizing drone imagery to boost cloud-based mapping spatiotemporal plumes