Just Fake It! Public Understanding of Ecological Restoration

When you travel by train from Amsterdam to Lelystad, you do not expect to see many herds of wild animals in an open landscape. What you do see, however, are herds of Heck cattle and Konik horses, and huge herds of red deer! This is possible in the nature reserve of the Oostvaardersplassen. Some people even compare it to areas in Africa like the Serengeti (Vera 2009). The development of this area marked the beginning of an interesting switch in Dutch nature conservation policy from a defensive approach to the development of a new nature, more proactive approach. For more than one hundred years, people had tried to preserve the traditional agrarian cultural landscape, which had to be protected against industrialization, recreation and the expansion of cities. This resulted in the development of a preservationist movement, which tried to save nature by buying land. In the 1960s, in line with scientific progress in ecology, ecological engineers started to restore areas and ‘bring nature back’. Two major Dutch players were responsible for this switch: the National Forest Service and the Society of Nature Conservancy. The Oostvaardersplassen lakes area and the river delta area of the Millingerwaard are the first Dutch areas where large herbivores have been introduced into nature reserves. Around 1980, ecological engineers, notably in the USA, argued that the destruction of nature in a certain area, for example if the use of the area had been changed to industrial, could be repaired by the ecological restoration of nature

Genome-wide association study of pediatric obsessive-compulsive traits: shared genetic risk between traits and disorder

Using a novel trait-based measure, we examined genetic variants associated with obsessive-compulsive (OC) traits and tested whether OC traits and obsessive-compulsive disorder (OCD) shared genetic risk. We conducted a genome-wide association analysis (GWAS) of OC traits using the Toronto Obsessive-Compulsive Scale (TOCS) in 5018 unrelated Caucasian children and adolescents from the community (Spit for Science sample). We tested the hypothesis that genetic variants associated with OC traits from the community would be associated with clinical OCD using a meta-analysis of all currently available OCD cases. Shared genetic risk was examined between OC traits and OCD in the respective samples using polygenic risk score and genetic correlation analyses. A locus tagged by rs7856850 in an intron of PTPRD (protein tyrosine phosphatase δ) was significantly associated with OC traits at the genome-wide significance level (p = 2.48 × 10−8). rs7856850 was also associated with OCD in a meta-analysis of OCD case/control genome-wide datasets (p = 0.0069). The direction of effect was the same as in the community sample. Polygenic risk scores from OC traits were significantly associated with OCD in case/control datasets and vice versa (p’s < 0.01). OC traits were highly, but not significantly, genetically correlated with OCD (rg = 0.71, p = 0.062). We report the first validated genome-wide significant variant for OC traits in PTPRD, downstream of the most significant locus in a previous OCD GWAS. OC traits measured in the community sample shared genetic risk with OCD case/control status. Our results demonstrate the feasibility and power of using trait-based approaches in community samples for genetic discovery