Environment and Rural Affairs Monitoring & Modelling Programme ERAMMP - Report-32: National Forest in Wales - Evidence Review

This review was commissioned by Welsh Government (WG) from the Environment and Rural Affairs Monitoring and Modelling Programme (ERAMMP) to provide key evidence of potential benefits and disbenefits of woodland creation, woodland expansion and managing undermanaged woodland, to provide an evidence base to inform the development of a National Forest for Wales. During the commissioning process, WG emphasised that the evidence provided must reflect the collective views of the community by reviewing the literature in an objective way highlighting where evidence is contradictory or weak. Within the time available, evidence of causality of impacts, the likely timescales and magnitude of these impacts should be also be presented, for both positive and negative impacts of woodland expansion and management of undermanaged woodlands. This Evidence Pack should also build on the evidence put forward in the ERAMMP Sustainable Farm Scheme (SFS) (https://erammp.wales/en/resources) which included a range of assessments of the value of intervention measures which promoted trees within a landscape setting for a range of environmental, economic and social outcomes. The required rapid production of the review in four months meant an expert approach of key evidence was expected rather than a systematic review. Key topics to cover were selected, in partnership with WG, focussing on issues that could fundamentally change decision-making going forward. The final agreed list was arranged under a series of high-level subject headings, and the individual reviews published as ERAMMP Reports 33 to 38 and include; Biodiversity; Managing Undermanaged Woodland; Future-proofing our Woodland; Climate Change Mitigation; Ecosystem Services, and Economics and Natural Capital Accounting. An Integrated Assessment was also commissioned to provide a synthesis of cross-cutting themes and dependencies between topics. These ERAMMP reports are all provided as Annexes to this report

Reproducibility in the absence of selective reporting : An illustration from large-scale brain asymmetry research

Altres ajuts: Max Planck Society (Germany).The problem of poor reproducibility of scientific findings has received much attention over recent years, in a variety of fields including psychology and neuroscience. The problem has been partly attributed to publication bias and unwanted practices such as p-hacking. Low statistical power in individual studies is also understood to be an important factor. In a recent multisite collaborative study, we mapped brain anatomical left-right asymmetries for regional measures of surface area and cortical thickness, in 99 MRI datasets from around the world, for a total of over 17,000 participants. In the present study, we revisited these hemispheric effects from the perspective of reproducibility. Within each dataset, we considered that an effect had been reproduced when it matched the meta-analytic effect from the 98 other datasets, in terms of effect direction and significance threshold. In this sense, the results within each dataset were viewed as coming from separate studies in an "ideal publishing environment," that is, free from selective reporting and p hacking. We found an average reproducibility rate of 63.2% (SD = 22.9%, min = 22.2%, max = 97.0%). As expected, reproducibility was higher for larger effects and in larger datasets. Reproducibility was not obviously related to the age of participants, scanner field strength, FreeSurfer software version, cortical regional measurement reliability, or regional size. These findings constitute an empirical illustration of reproducibility in the absence of publication bias or p hacking, when assessing realistic biological effects in heterogeneous neuroscience data, and given typically-used sample sizes

Mouse Chromosome 11

Peer Reviewedhttp://deepblue.lib.umich.edu/bitstream/2027.42/46996/1/335_2004_Article_BF00648429.pd

Subcortical volumes across the lifespan: data from 18,605 healthy individuals aged 3-90 years

Age has a major effect on brain volume. However, the normative studies available are constrained by small sample sizes, restricted age coverage and significant methodological variability. These limitations introduce inconsistencies and may obscure or distort the lifespan trajectories of brain morphometry. In response, we capitalized on the resources of the Enhancing Neuroimaging Genetics through Meta-Analysis (ENIGMA) Consortium to examine age-related trajectories inferred from cross-sectional measures of the ventricles, the basal ganglia (caudate, putamen, pallidum, and nucleus accumbens), the thalamus, hippocampus and amygdala using magnetic resonance imaging data obtained from 18,605 individuals aged 3-90 years. All subcortical structure volumes were at their maximum value early in life. The volume of the basal ganglia showed a monotonic negative association with age thereafter; there was no significant association between age and the volumes of the thalamus, amygdala and the hippocampus (with some degree of decline in thalamus) until the sixth decade of life after which they also showed a steep negative association with age. The lateral ventricles showed continuous enlargement throughout the lifespan. Age was positively associated with inter-individual variability in the hippocampus and amygdala and the lateral ventricles. These results were robust to potential confounders and could be used to examine the functional significance of deviations from typical age-related morphometric patterns.Education and Child Studie

State of the world’s plants and fungi 2020

Kew’s State of the World’s Plants and Fungi project provides assessments of our current knowledge of the diversity of plants and fungi on Earth, the global threats that they face, and the policies to safeguard them. Produced in conjunction with an international scientific symposium, Kew’s State of the World’s Plants and Fungi sets an important international standard from which we can annually track trends in the global status of plant and fungal diversity