Setback distances as a conservation tool in wildlife-human interactions : testing their efficacy for birds affected by vehicles on open-coast sandy beaches

In some wilderness areas, wildlife encounter vehicles disrupt their behaviour and habitat use. Changing driver behaviour has been proposed where bans on vehicle use are politically unpalatable, but the efficacy of vehicle setbacks and reduced speeds remains largely untested. We characterised bird-vehicle encounters in terms of driver behaviour and the disturbance caused to birds, and tested whether spatial buffers or lower speeds reduced bird escape responses on open beaches. Focal observations showed that: i) most drivers did not create sizeable buffers between their vehicles and birds; ii) bird disturbance was frequent; and iii) predictors of probability of flushing (escape) were setback distance and vehicle type (buses flushed birds at higher rates than cars). Experiments demonstrated that substantial reductions in bird escape responses required buffers to be wide (> 25 m) and vehicle speeds to be slow (< 30 km h-1). Setback distances can reduce impacts on wildlife, provided that they are carefully designed and derived from empirical evidence. No speed or distance combination we tested, however, eliminated bird responses. Thus, while buffers reduce response rates, they are likely to be much less effective than vehicle-free zones (i.e. beach closures), and rely on changes to current driver behaviou

Setback distances as a conservation tool in wildlife-human interactions : testing their efficacy for birds affected by vehicles on open-coast sandy beaches

In some wilderness areas, wildlife encounter vehicles disrupt their behaviour and habitat use. Changing driver behaviour has been proposed where bans on vehicle use are politically unpalatable, but the efficacy of vehicle setbacks and reduced speeds remains largely untested. We characterised bird-vehicle encounters in terms of driver behaviour and the disturbance caused to birds, and tested whether spatial buffers or lower speeds reduced bird escape responses on open beaches. Focal observations showed that: i) most drivers did not create sizeable buffers between their vehicles and birds; ii) bird disturbance was frequent; and iii) predictors of probability of flushing (escape) were setback distance and vehicle type (buses flushed birds at higher rates than cars). Experiments demonstrated that substantial reductions in bird escape responses required buffers to be wide (> 25 m) and vehicle speeds to be slow (< 30 km h-1). Setback distances can reduce impacts on wildlife, provided that they are carefully designed and derived from empirical evidence. No speed or distance combination we tested, however, eliminated bird responses. Thus, while buffers reduce response rates, they are likely to be much less effective than vehicle-free zones (i.e. beach closures), and rely on changes to current driver behaviou

Efficient Physical Embedding of Topologically Complex Information Processing Networks in Brains and Computer Circuits

Nervous systems are information processing networks that evolved by natural selection, whereas very large scale integrated (VLSI) computer circuits have evolved by commercially driven technology development. Here we follow historic intuition that all physical information processing systems will share key organizational properties, such as modularity, that generally confer adaptivity of function. It has long been observed that modular VLSI circuits demonstrate an isometric scaling relationship between the number of processing elements and the number of connections, known as Rent's rule, which is related to the dimensionality of the circuit's interconnect topology and its logical capacity. We show that human brain structural networks, and the nervous system of the nematode C. elegans, also obey Rent's rule, and exhibit some degree of hierarchical modularity. We further show that the estimated Rent exponent of human brain networks, derived from MRI data, can explain the allometric scaling relations between gray and white matter volumes across a wide range of mammalian species, again suggesting that these principles of nervous system design are highly conserved. For each of these fractal modular networks, the dimensionality of the interconnect topology was greater than the 2 or 3 Euclidean dimensions of the space in which it was embedded. This relatively high complexity entailed extra cost in physical wiring: although all networks were economically or cost-efficiently wired they did not strictly minimize wiring costs. Artificial and biological information processing systems both may evolve to optimize a trade-off between physical cost and topological complexity, resulting in the emergence of homologous principles of economical, fractal and modular design across many different kinds of nervous and computational networks

Utilizing the Luminex Magnetic Bead-Based Suspension Array for Rapid Multiplexed Phosphoprotein Quantification.

The study of protein phosphorylation is critical for the advancement of our understanding of cellular responses to external and internal stimuli. Phosphorylation, the addition of phosphate groups, most often occurs on serine, threonine, or tyrosine residues due to the action of protein kinases. This structural change causes the protein to become activated (or deactivated) and enables it in turn to initiate the phosphorylation of other proteins in a cascade, eventually causing cell-wide changes such as apoptosis, cell differentiation, and growth (among others). Cellular phosphoprotein pathway dysregulation by mutation or chromosomal instability can often give the cell a selective advantage and lead to cancer. Obviously the understanding of these systems is of huge importance to the field of oncology.This chapter aims to provide a "how to" manual for one such technology, the 96-well plate-based xMAP® platform from Luminex. The system utilizes antibody-bound free-floating magnetic spheres which can easily be removed from suspension via magnetization. There are 100 unique bead sets (moving up to 500 bead sets for the most recent system) identified by the ratio of two dyes coating the microsphere. Each bead set is conjugated to a specific antibody which allows targeted protein extraction from low-concentration lysate solution. Biotinylated secondary antibodies/streptavidin-R-phycoerythrin (SAPE) complexes provide the quantification mechanism for the phosphoprotein of interest

International Consensus Statement on Rhinology and Allergy: Rhinosinusitis

Background: The 5 years since the publication of the first International Consensus Statement on Allergy and Rhinology: Rhinosinusitis (ICAR‐RS) has witnessed foundational progress in our understanding and treatment of rhinologic disease. These advances are reflected within the more than 40 new topics covered within the ICAR‐RS‐2021 as well as updates to the original 140 topics. This executive summary consolidates the evidence‐based findings of the document. Methods: ICAR‐RS presents over 180 topics in the forms of evidence‐based reviews with recommendations (EBRRs), evidence‐based reviews, and literature reviews. The highest grade structured recommendations of the EBRR sections are summarized in this executive summary. Results: ICAR‐RS‐2021 covers 22 topics regarding the medical management of RS, which are grade A/B and are presented in the executive summary. Additionally, 4 topics regarding the surgical management of RS are grade A/B and are presented in the executive summary. Finally, a comprehensive evidence‐based management algorithm is provided. Conclusion: This ICAR‐RS‐2021 executive summary provides a compilation of the evidence‐based recommendations for medical and surgical treatment of the most common forms of RS

State and bias estimation for soil moisture profiles by an ensemble Kalman filter: Effect of assimilation depth and frequency

[1] An ensemble Kalman filter for state estimation and a bias estimation algorithm were applied to estimate individual soil moisture profiles in a small corn field with the CLM2.0 model through the assimilation of measurements from capacitance probes. Both without and with inclusion of bias correction, the effect of the assimilation frequency, the assimilation depth, and the number of observations assimilated per profile were studied. Assimilation of complete profiles had the highest impact on deeper soil layers, and the optimal assimilation frequency was about 1-2 weeks, if bias correction was applied. The optimal assimilation depth depended on the calibration results. Assimilation in the surface layer had typically less impact than assimilation in other layers. Through bias correction the soil moisture estimate greatly improved. In general, the correct propagation of the innovations for both the bias-blind state and bias filtering from any layer to other layers was insufficient. The approximate estimation of the a priori (bias) error covariance and the choice of a zero-initialized persistent bias model made it impossible to estimate the bias in layers for which no observations were available. Copyright 2007 by the American Geophysical Union.status: publishe

Adaptive Soil Moisture Profile Filtering for Horizontal Information Propagation in the Independent Column-Based CLM2.0

Data assimilation aims to provide an optimal estimate of the overall system state, not only for an observed state variable or location. However, large-scale land surface models are typically column-based and purely random ensemble perturbation of states will lead to block-diagonal a priori (or background) error covariance. This facilitates the filtering calculations but compromises the potential of data assimilation to influence (unobserved) vertical and horizontal neighboring state variables. Here, a combination of an ensemble Kalman filter and an adaptive covariance correction method is explored to optimize the variances and retrieve the off-block-diagonal correlations in the a priori error covariance matrix. In a first time period, all available soil moisture profile observations in a small agricultural field are assimilated into the Community Land Model, version 2.0 (CLM2.0) to find the adaptive second-order a priori error information. After that period, only observations from single individual soil profiles are assimilated with inclusion of this adaptive information. It is shown that assimilation of a single profile can partially rectify the incorrectly simulated soil moisture spatial mean and variability. The largest reduction in the root-mean-square error in the soil moisture field varies between 7% and 22%, depending on the soil depth, when assimilating a single complete profile every two days during three months with a single time-invariant covariance correction. © 2009 American Meteorological Society.status: publishe