Road exposure and the detectability of birds in field surveys

Road ecology, the study of the impacts of roads and their traffic on wildlife, including birds, is a rapidly growing field, with research showing effects on local avian population densities up to several kilometres from a road. However, in most studies, the effects of roads on the detectability of birds by surveyors are not accounted for. This could be a significant source of error in estimates of the impacts of roads on birds and could also affect other studies of bird populations. Using road density, traffic volume and bird count data from across Great Britain, we assess the relationships between roads and detectability of a range of bird species. Of 51 species analysed, the detectability of 36 was significantly associated with road exposure, in most cases inversely. Across the range of road exposure recorded for each species, the mean positive change in detectability was 52% and the mean negative change was 36%, with the strongest negative associations found in smaller-bodied species and those for which aural cues are more important in detection. These associations between road exposure and detectability could be caused by a reduction in surveyors’ abilities to hear birds or by changes in birds’ behaviour, making them harder or easier to detect. We suggest that future studies of the impacts of roads on populations of birds or other taxa, and other studies using survey data from road-exposed areas, should account for the potential impacts of roads on detectability.The BBS is jointly funded by the BTO, JNCC and RSPB. Stuart Newson is supported by the BTO’s Young Scientists’ Programme. Sophia C. Cooke is funded by the Natural Environment Research Council

Large slow-roll corrections to the bispectrum of noncanonical inflation

Nongaussian statistics are a powerful discriminant between inflationary models, particularly those with noncanonical kinetic terms. Focusing on theories where the Lagrangian is an arbitrary Lorentz-invariant function of a scalar field and its first derivatives, we review and extend the calculation of the observable three-point function. We compute the "next-order" slow-roll corrections to the bispectrum in closed form, and obtain quantitative estimates of their magnitude in DBI and power-law k-inflation. In the DBI case our results enable us to estimate corrections from the shape of the potential and the warp factor: these can be of order several tens of percent. We track the possible sources of large logarithms which can spoil ordinary perturbation theory, and use them to obtain a general formula for the scale dependence of the bispectrum. Our result satisfies the next-order version of Maldacena's consistency condition and an equivalent consistency condition for the scale dependence. We identify a new bispectrum shape available at next-order, which is similar to a shape encountered in Galileon models. If fNL is sufficiently large this shape may be independently detectable.Comment: v1: 37 pages, plus tables, figures and appendices. v2: supersedes version published in JCAP; some clarifications and more detailed comparison with earlier literature. All results unchanged. v3:improvements to some plots; text unchange

Virtual Reflexes

Virtual Reality is used successfully to treat people for regular phobias. A new challenge is to develop Virtual Reality Exposure Training for social skills. Virtual actors in such systems have to show appropriate social behavior including emotions, gaze, and keeping distance. The behavior must be realistic and real-time. Current approaches consist of four steps: 1) trainee social signal detection, 2) cognitive-affective interpretation, 3) determination of the appropriate bodily responses, and 4) actuation. The "cognitive" detour of such approaches does not match the directness of human bodily reflexes and causes unrealistic responses and delay. Instead, we propose virtual reflexes as concurrent sensory-motor processes to control virtual actors. Here we present a virtual reflexes architecture, explain how emotion and cognitive modulation are embedded, detail its workings, and give an example description of an aggression training application

Rapid post-fire re-assembly of species-rich bryophyte communities in Afroalpine heathlands

Questions In some fire-prone ecosystems, bryophytes play a crucial role by providing the surface fuel that controls the fire return interval. Afroalpine heathlands are such an ecosystem, yet almost nothing is known about the bryophytes in this system. We do not know the level of species richness, or if there is a successive accumulation of species over time, or if some species are adapted to specific phases along the successional gradient, for example early-successional species sensitive to competition. Location Afroalpine heathlands in Ethiopia. Methods We made an inventory of all bryophytes in 48 plots of 5 m × 5 m, distributed along a chronosequence from 1 to 25 years post fire. The heathlands are located between 3500 m and 3800 m a.s.l. and are managed by traditional pasture burning with fire intervals of 8–20 years. Results We found in total 111 taxa of bryophytes. Post-fire mortality was almost 100%. The youngest plots had only a few cosmopolitan species often found after fire. Initially, species richness increased monotonically while starting to level off around 15 years after fire, when many plots had around 30 species and a high cover of Breutelia diffracta, which is a key ground-living species, important as surface fuel. Most species were found with sporophytes, a pattern even stronger for the most frequent species. Conclusions Interestingly, bryophyte diversity is already remarkably high by only 15 years after total eradication. The relatively slow accumulation of species in the first years after fire suggests that dispersal in space, and not time, is the major mechanism by which sites regain their diversity (i.e. spore banks play a smaller role than colonization of wind-borne spores). This indicates that the high species richness is built up through colonization from surrounding heathlands, and perhaps also from higher-altitude alpine grasslands and lower-altitude forests, and that the bryophyte diversity in this system is maintained by the traditional fire and grazing management

Interinstrument comparison of remote-sensing devices and a new method for calculating on-road nitrogen oxides emissions and validation of vehicle-specific power

Emissions of nitrogen oxides (NOx) by vehicles in real driving environments are only partially understood. This has been brought to the attention of the world with recent revelations of the cheating of the type of approval tests exposed in the dieselgate scandal. Remote-sensing devices offer investigators an opportunity to directly measure in situ real driving emissions of tens of thousands of vehicles. Remote-sensing NO₂ measurements are not as widely available as would be desirable. The aim of this study is to improve the ability of investigators to estimate the NO₂ emissions and to improve the confidence of the total NOx results calculated from standard remote-sensing device (RSD) measurements. The accuracy of the RSD speed and acceleration module was also validated using state-of-the-art onboard global positioning system (GPS) tracking. Two RSDs used in roadside vehicle emissions surveys were tested side by side under off-carriageway conditions away from transient pollution sources to ascertain the consistency of their measurements. The speed correlation was consistent across the range of measurements at 95% confidence and the acceleration correlation was consistent at 95% confidence intervals for all but the most extreme acceleration cases. VSP was consistent at 95% confidence across all measurements except for those at VSP ≥ 15 kW t−¹, which show a small underestimate. The controlled distribution gas nitric oxide measurements follow a normal distribution with 2σ equal to 18.9% of the mean, compared to 15% observed during factory calibration indicative of additional error introduced into the system. Systematic errors of +84 ppm were observed but within the tolerance of the control gas. Interinstrument correlation was performed, with the relationship between the FEAT and the RSD4600 being linear with a gradient of 0.93 and an R² of 0.85, indicating good correlation. A new method to calculate NOx emissions using fractional NO₂ combined with NO measurements made by the RSD4600 was constructed, validated, and shown to be more accurate than previous methods. Implications: Synchronized remote-sensing measurements of NO were taken using two different remote-sensing devices in an off-road study. It was found that the measurements taken by both instruments were well correlated. Fractional NO₂ measurements from a prior study, measurable on only one device, were used to create new NOₓ emission factors for the device that could not be measured by the second device. These estimates were validated against direct measurement of total NOₓ emission factors and shown to be an improvement on previous methodologies. Validation of vehicle-specific power was performed with good correlation observed

Combining two national‐scale datasets to map soil properties, the case of available magnesium in England and Wales

Given the costs of soil survey it is necessary to make the best use of available datasets, but data that differ with respect to some aspect of the sampling or analytical protocol cannot be combined simply. In this paper we consider a case where two datasets were available on the concentration of plant‐available magnesium in the topsoil. The datasets were the Representative Soil Sampling Scheme (RSSS) and the National Soil Inventory (NSI) of England and Wales. The variable was measured over the same depth interval and with the same laboratory method, but the sample supports were different and so the datasets differ in their variance. We used a multivariate geostatistical model, the linear model of coregionalization (LMCR), to model the joint spatial distribution of the two datasets. The model allowed us to elucidate the effects of the sample support on the two datasets, and to show that there was a strong correlation between the underlying variables. The LMCR allowed us to make spatial predictions of the variable on the RSSS support by cokriging the RSSS data with the NSI data. We used cross‐validation to test the validity of the LMCR and showed how incorporating the NSI data restricted the range of prediction error variances relative to univariate ordinary kriging predictions from the RSSS data alone. The standardized squared prediction errors were computed and the coverage of prediction intervals (i.e. the proportion of sites at which the prediction interval included the observed value of the variable). Both these statistics suggested that the prediction error variances were consistent for the cokriging predictions but not for the ordinary kriging predictions from the simple combination of the RSSS and NSI data, which might be proposed on the basis of their very similar mean values. The LMCR is therefore proposed as a general tool for the combined analysis of different datasets on soil properties

Factor structure and psychometric properties of the Body Appreciation Scale-2 among adolescents and young adults in Danish, Portuguese, and Swedish

In recent years, the study of body image shifted from focusing on the negative aspects to a more extensive view of body image. The present study seeks to validate a measure of positive body image, the Body Appreciation Scale-2 (BAS-2; Tylka & Wood-Barcalow, 2015a) in Denmark, Portugal, and Sweden. Participants (N = 1012) were adolescents and young adults aged from 12 to 19. Confirmatory factor analyses confirmed the one-dimensional factor structure of the scale. Multi-group confirmatory factor analyses indicated that the scale was invariant across sex and country. Further results showed that BAS-2 was positively correlated with self-esteem, psychological well-being, and intuitive eating. It was negatively correlated with BMI among boys and girls in Portugal but not in Denmark and Sweden. Additionally, boys had higher body appreciation than girls. Results indicated that the BAS-2 has good psychometric properties in the three languages

Contribution d’une catégorisation des RPS à la prédiction du stress et du burnout (ou du mal-être au travail) des soignants

Health-care professionals are strongly affected by distress at work. Our goal is to study the usefulness of a psychosocial risk measure, compared to a measure of psychosocial and organizational work constraints, on the prediction of distress among a population of caregivers. This measure is based on the categorization of psychosocial risk factors issued from the College of experts chaired by Gollac. Seven hundred and fifty-seven health-care professionals filled out a questionnaire composed of measures of psychosocial risks, psychosocial and organizational work constraints specific to caregivers, as well as stress and burnout. Results indicate that the measure of psychosocial risk better predicted the levels of stress and burnout than the measure of psychosocial and organizational work constraints