Annotated Bibliography on Research Related to Arts for Children & Youth

Provides a bibliography of reports demonstrating the positive effects of arts education on children and youth. Includes hyperlinks and abstracts

Integrating tropical research into biology education is urgently needed

Understanding tropical biology is important for solving complex problems such as climate change, biodiversity loss, and zoonotic pandemics, but biology curricula view research mostly via a temperatezone lens. Integrating tropical research into biology education is urgently needed to tackle these issues. The tropics are engines of Earth systems that regulate global cycles of carbon and water, and are thus critical for management of greenhouse gases. Compared with higher-latitude areas, tropical regions contain a greater diversity of biomes, organisms, and complexity of biological interactions. The tropics house the majority of the world’s human population and provide important global commodities from species that originated there: coffee, chocolate, palm oil, and species that yield the cancer drugs vincristine and vinblastine. Tropical regions, especially biodiversity hotspots, harbor zoonoses, thereby having an important role in emerging infectious diseases amidst the complex interactions of global environmental change and wildlife migration [1]. These well-known roles are oversimplified, but serve to highlight the global biological importance of tropical systems. Despite the importance of tropical regions, biology curricula worldwide generally lack coverage of tropical research. Given logistical, economic, or other barriers, it is difficult for undergraduate biology instructors to provide their students with field-based experience in tropical biology research in a diverse range of settings, an issue exacerbated by the Coronavirus Disease 2019 (COVID-19) pandemic. Even in the tropics, field-based experience may be limited to home regions. When tropical biology is introduced in curricula, it is often through a temperate- zone lens that does not do justice to the distinct ecosystems, sociopolitical histories, and conservation issues that exist across tropical countries and regions [2]. The tropics are often caricatured as distant locations known for their remarkable biodiversity, complicated species interactions, and unchecked deforestation. This presentation, often originating from a colonial and culturally biased perspective, may fail to highlight the role of tropical ecosystems in global environmental and social challenges that accompany rising temperatures, worldwide biodiversity loss, zoonotic pandemics, and the environmental costs of ensuring food, water, and other ecosystem services for humans [3]

Averting biodiversity collapse in tropical forest protected areas

The rapid disruption of tropical forests probably imperils global biodiversity more than any other contemporary phenomenon¹⁻³. With deforestation advancing quickly, protected areas are increasingly becoming final refuges for threatened species and natural ecosystem processes. However, many protected areas in the tropics are themselves vulnerable to human encroachment and other environmental stresses⁴⁻⁹. As pressures mount, it is vital to know whether existing reserves can sustain their biodiversity. A critical constraint in addressing this question has been that data describing a broad array of biodiversity groups have been unavailable for a sufficiently large and representative sample of reserves. Here we present a uniquely comprehensive data set on changes over the past 20 to 30 years in 31 functional groups of species and 21 potential drivers of environmental change, for 60 protected areas stratified across the world’s major tropical regions. Our analysis reveals great variation in reserve ‘health’: about half of all reserves have been effective or performed passably, but the rest are experiencing an erosion of biodiversity that is often alarmingly widespread taxonomically and functionally. Habitat disruption, hunting and forest-product exploitation were the strongest predictors of declining reserve health. Crucially, environmental changes immediately outside reserves seemed nearly as important as those inside in determining their ecological fate, with changes inside reserves strongly mirroring those occurring around them. These findings suggest that tropical protected areas are often intimately linked ecologically to their surrounding habitats, and that a failure to stem broad-scale loss and degradation of such habitats could sharply increase the likelihood of serious biodiversity declines.Keywords: Ecology, Environmental scienc

Integrating tropical research into biology education is urgently needed

Understanding tropical biology is important for solving complex problems such as climate change, biodiversity loss, and zoonotic pandemics, but biology curricula view research mostly via a temperate-zone lens. Integrating tropical research into biology education is urgently needed to tackle these issues.This article is published as Russell AE, Aide TM, Braker E, Bruna EM, Ganong CN, Hardin RD, et al. (2022) Integrating tropical research into biology education is urgently needed. PLoS Biol 20(6): e3001674. https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pbio.3001674. Posted with permission. This is an open access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License, which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original author and source are credited

Integrating tropical research into biology education is urgently needed.

Understanding tropical biology is important for solving complex problems such as climate change, biodiversity loss, and zoonotic pandemics, but biology curricula view research mostly via a temperate-zone lens. Integrating tropical research into biology education is urgently needed to tackle these issues

Unsettling Standards: the biological age controversy

One key debate within the sociology of aging and the life course over the past decade has been focused on understanding the extent to which there has been a shift from a reliance on chronological age to segment the life course and ascertain age-specific norms, values, and expectations toward a destandardized life course in advanced economies. In this, little attention has been devoted to the infrastructural processes that would support such a transition: the technologies, standards, and conventions that would, in practice, equip a personalized, individualized management of the life course. This article focuses on one of such standards, “biological age” (BA), and the 40-year controversy around the method and purpose of its measurement. Drawing on published research and archival and interview data collected in Europe and North America, the article suggests that the persistent uncertainty surrounding BA measurements is structured by differing interlocking relationships between normative ideals of the life course and methodological approaches to knowledge making to understand and manage the relationship among aging, health, and illness. Understanding this controversy and the configuration of normative and epistemic conventions that underpin its dynamic provides a unique lens on the complex interweaving relationship between expertise, scientific and technological standards, and social, normatively embedded age identities in contemporary societies