Species matter when considering landscape effects on carabid distributions

Increasing the abundance and diversity of carabid beetles is a common objective of farm habitat management to deliver sustainable pest control. Carabid spatial distributions in relation to crop areas are important to the delivery of this ecosystem service. We used pitfall count data at distances from edge habitats into crop centres, from farm sites across the UK, to determine the effects of in-field and adjacent environmental features on carabid abundance and diversity. Overall carabid abundance increased towards the crop centre, whilst species richness and diversity decreased. The analyses of carabid abundance based on all the species pooled together strongly reflected the behaviour of the most abundant species. Species preferences varied by crop, soil type, and environmental features. For instance, some species were positively associated with habitats such as margins, while others responded negatively. This contrast in individual species models highlights the limitations on pooled models in elucidating responses. Studies informing farm-habitat design should consider individual species’ preferences for effective enhancement of pest control services. Diverse cropping and landscape heterogeneity at the farm scale can benefit the varied preferences of individual species, help build diverse communities and, potentially increase service resilience and stability over time

Mortality after discharge from long-term psychiatric care in Scotland, 1977 – 94: a retrospective cohort study

BACKGROUND: Recent United Kingdom strategies focus on preventable suicide deaths in former psychiatric in-patients, but natural causes of death, accidents and homicide may also be important. This study was intended to find the relative importance of natural and unnatural causes of death in people discharged from long-term psychiatric care in Scotland in 1977 –1994. METHODS: People discharged alive from psychiatric hospitals in Scotland in 1977 – 94 after a stay of one year or longer were identified using routine hospital records. Computer record linkage was used to link hospital discharges to subsequent death records. Mortality was described using a person-years analysis, and compared to the general population rates. RESULTS: 6,776 people were discharged in the time period. 1,994 people (29%) died by the end of follow-up, 732 more deaths than expected. Deaths from suicide, homicide, accident and undetermined cause were increased, but accounted for only 197 of the excess deaths. Deaths from respiratory disease were four times higher than expected, and deaths from other causes, including cardiovascular disease, were also elevated. CONCLUSION: Suicide is an important cause of preventable mortality, but natural causes account for more excess deaths. Prevention activities should not focus only on unnatural causes of death

A future for Hashima: pornography, representation and time

This article sets out to investigate the relationship between ruins, futurity, and ‘ruin porn’ - a visual mode of representation that all too often seeks to fix post-industrial ruins as mere aesthetic objects, devoid of history and/or temporality. It does so by focusing on performance, which, in this context, is understood as a processual mode of art-making that provides spectators with an experience of time. In this expanded definition of performance, as one may perhaps expect, the performativity of the object is not limited to the theatrical event alone; rather, it now inheres in sometimes uncanny durational aspects of both still and moving images. The essay proceeds in three stages. Part one provides a historical and theoretical overview of the type of performance inherent in ‘ruin porn’; part two critiques two images from Yves Marchand's and Romain Meffre's Gunkanjima (2013), a photo album that attempted to document the ruins of Hashima, an island situated 15 kilometres from Nagasaki City in the East China Sea; and part three investigates the very different aesthetic at work in Lee Hassall's film Return to Battleship Island (2013) which was made in response to AHRC- funded project, ‘The Future of Ruins: Reclaiming Abandonment and Toxicity on Hashima Island’ (2013). In this reading of Return to Battleship Island , the onus is on showing how Hassall's film, in its representation of Hashima's crumbling apartment blocks and industrial buildings, intentionally sought to contest the atemporal logic of ‘ruin porn’ by attempting to endow the viewing experience with a sense of futurity. Crucially, this does not mean that film represented the future as an object, but, on the contrary, tried to make it palpable, as something one undergoes physically in the very act of reception

Publishing a Textbook with Instructional Design in Mind: Getting Quality Matters Certification for an OER Course

Dress, Appearance, and Diversity in U.S. Society is an open textbook which was recognized for its accessibility, visual appeal, and content as part of its associated course’s Quality Matters review process. Kelly Reddy-Best, the lead author and instructor for the course, worked with staff in the Center for Excellence in Learning and Teaching and the Iowa State University Library to collaboratively develop the textbook by repurposing content that she had previously created for her course. We customized this content to align with the course’s learning objectives and to help learners connect more meaningfully to its core concepts. Learner engagement is particularly important for this course since it covers topics such as identity, social justice, and diversity in ways that might be new to some audiences.This article is published as Elder, A. K., Reddy-Best, K. L., Hassall, L., & Inefuku, H. (2023). Publishing a Textbook with Instructional Design in Mind: Getting Quality Matters Certification for an OER Course. Case Studies in Library Publishing, 1(1). Retrieved from https://cslp.pubpub.org/pub/91vu6bxr. Posted with permission. under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International license

Why does a grasshopper have fewer, larger offspring at its range limits?

Analysis of size of offspring reared through three laboratory generations from populations of the field grasshopper Chorthippus brunneus from 27 sites around the British Isles showed that offspring were larger towards the cooler-wetter conditions in the western and northern limits of the range. This variation had a significant genetic component. There was a trade-off between clutch size and offspring size between and within populations. Under favourable thermal and feeding conditions maternal fitness was optimal when individuals produced the largest clutches of the smallest eggs, but under poor conditions maternal fitness was optimal when individuals produced small clutches of very large offspring. Calculation of geometric mean fitness over time indicated that having larger offspring near to the edge of the range could be advantageous as a conservative risk-spreading strategy. As well as geographic variation in egg size, significant environment-genotype interactions in egg size in relation to temperature were observed