2015 Forest Resources Assessment shows positive global trends but forest loss and degradation persist in poor tropical countries

The Global Forest Resources Assessment 2015 shows that deforestation has slowed and afforestation has increased globally during 1990–2015. Planted forests have increasingly provided goods and services hitherto derived from natural forests, and mosaic forests in agricultural landscapes are increasing. Forest gain is occurring at higher latitudes and in richer countries whilst forest loss continues in poor countries in the tropics. Some middle income tropical countries are now also transitioning to forest gain. These transition countries are characterised by reforms to forest management and improvements in agricultural practices but also by significant expansions of planted forest, which account for ∼25–100% of gains. Forest-area estimates of the FRA align with satellite-derived estimates, with deviations of ⩽±7% globally and ⩽±17% for the tropics. Mosaics comprised of trees outside forests, remnant forest patches, and young regenerating forests constitute a modest proportion of the tropical forest estate and are seemingly well inventoried by the FRA. Extensive areas of forest experienced partial canopy cover reduction since 2000, particularly in the tropics where their area is ∼6.5 times that deforested since 1990. The likelihood of the eventual loss of these forests and a decline in their capacity to provide goods and services is a matter of concern. Demand for industrial wood and fuelwood increased 35% in the tropics since 1990, principally in poorer countries, and growth in demand will accelerate into the future, particularly in the Asia-Pacific region. Notwithstanding significant increases in forests within protected areas since 1990 to 517 Mha (16.3%) globally and 379 Mha (26.6%) in the tropics, increasing demands for ecological services, forest products, and climate change mitigation is likely to be met from an expanding area of planted forests more than from the declining area of natural forests, particularly in Africa. The global rate of planted-forest expansion since 1990 is close to a target rate of 2.4% per annum necessary to replace wood supplied from natural forests in the medium term, though the expansion rate has declined to 1.5% since 2005. Multiple-use forests permitting both production and conservation account for 26% of the global forest area and 17% of the tropical forest area, and have increased by 81.8 Mha or 8.5% globally since 1990, with most gains in the tropics. Sustainable forest management in low-income and tropical countries remains modest, with only 37% low-income country forests covered by forest inventories. International support has proven effective at increasing this coverage since 2010

Factors that Most Influence Success or Failure in Illicit Crop Reduction and Drug Supply Control

Several interrelated drivers of illicit crop cultivation appear remarkably consistent across virtually all illegal crop producing regions: insurgency or armed conflict, insufficient state authority and weak territorial control, a climate of instability, poverty and food insecurity, remoteness and a lack of infrastructure and development. This research paper argues that the enduring success of illicit crop reduction and drug supply control efforts in a given area depends on the extent to which these environmental factors are mitigated or eliminated. The work further proposes that properly designed, carefully coordinated, and consistently funded alternative development (AD) programs have demonstrated the greatest promise for dramatically altering the primary drivers underlying illegal drug crop cultivation. By contrast, it contends that forced crop eradication without the prior establishment of effective AD can and has often resulted in dramatic short-term reductions in drug crop yields while exacerbating the fundamental causes of illicit cultivation. The research employs two case-oriented methods of qualitative analysis. First, a within-case method of process tracing is used, followed by a method of comparative analysis between the three case studies: Thailand and Laos in Southeast Asia, and Colombia in South America

Learning from local perceptions for strategic road development in Cambodia's protected forests

Road development in tropical forest landscapes is contentious. Local preferences are often subordinated to global economic and environmental concerns. Opportunities to seek solutions based on local context are rare. We examined local perspectives on road development within Cambodia's Keo Seima Wildlife Sanctuary to explore opportunities for optimizing conservation and development outcomes. We conducted household surveys to document the perceived benefits and risks of road development. We found that in the sanctuary, road rehabilitation may accelerate transitions to intensified agriculture and diversified, off-farm incomes. All households prefer good roads and poorer households prioritize road development over other village infrastructure. Households perceive the most prominent benefit of roads to be access to hospital. Local government authorities are responsible for controlling land use and conversion within village boundaries and are therefore highly influential in determining the social and environmental outcomes of roads. Strategies to mitigate environmental risks of roads without constraining development benefits must focus on improving local capacity for decision-making and transparency. Local institutions in tropical forest landscapes must have greater control over development benefits if they are to reinvest assets to achieve conservation success

Extensive loss of translational genes in the structurally dynamic mitochondrial genome of the angiosperm Silene latifolia

<p>Abstract</p> <p>Background</p> <p>Mitochondrial gene loss and functional transfer to the nucleus is an ongoing process in many lineages of plants, resulting in substantial variation across species in mitochondrial gene content. The Caryophyllaceae represents one lineage that has experienced a particularly high rate of mitochondrial gene loss relative to other angiosperms.</p> <p>Results</p> <p>In this study, we report the first complete mitochondrial genome sequence from a member of this family, <it>Silene latifolia</it>. The genome can be mapped as a 253,413 bp circle, but its structure is complicated by a large repeated region that is present in 6 copies. Active recombination among these copies produces a suite of alternative genome configurations that appear to be at or near "recombinational equilibrium". The genome contains the fewest genes of any angiosperm mitochondrial genome sequenced to date, with intact copies of only 25 of the 41 protein genes inferred to be present in the common ancestor of angiosperms. As observed more broadly in angiosperms, ribosomal proteins have been especially prone to gene loss in the <it>S. latifolia </it>lineage. The genome has also experienced a major reduction in tRNA gene content, including loss of functional tRNAs of both native and chloroplast origin. Even assuming expanded wobble-pairing rules, the mitochondrial genome can support translation of only 17 of the 61 sense codons, which code for only 9 of the 20 amino acids. In addition, genes encoding 18S and, especially, 5S rRNA exhibit exceptional sequence divergence relative to other plants. Divergence in one region of 18S rRNA appears to be the result of a gene conversion event, in which recombination with a homologous gene of chloroplast origin led to the complete replacement of a helix in this ribosomal RNA.</p> <p>Conclusions</p> <p>These findings suggest a markedly expanded role for nuclear gene products in the translation of mitochondrial genes in <it>S. latifolia </it>and raise the possibility of altered selective constraints operating on the mitochondrial translational apparatus in this lineage.</p

COSMOS: Towards an integrated and scalable service for analysing social media on demand

The growing number of people using social media to publish their opinions, share expertise, make social connections and promote their ideas to an international audience is creating data on an epic scale. This enables social scientists to conduct research into ethnography, discourse analysis and analysis of social interactions, providing insight into today's society, which is largely augmented by social computing. The tools available for such analysis are often proprietary and expensive, and often non-interoperable, meaning the rapid marshalling of large data-sets through a range of analyses is arduous and difficult to scale. The collaborative online social media observatory (COSMOS), an integrated social media analysis tool is presented, developed for open access within academia. COSMOS is underpinned by a scalable Hadoop infrastructure and can support the rapid analysis of large data-sets and the orchestration of workflows between tools with limited human effort. We describe an architecture and scalability results for the computational analysis of social media data, and comment on the storage, search and retrieval issues associated with massive social media data-sets. We also provide an insight into the impact of such an integrated on-demand service in the social science academic community

Who tweets? Deriving the demographic characteristics of age, occupation and social class from Twitter user meta-data

This paper specifies, designs and critically evaluates two tools for the automated identification of demographic data (age, occupation and social class) from the profile descriptions of Twitter users in the United Kingdom (UK). Meta-data data routinely collected through the Collaborative Social Media Observatory (COSMOS: http://www.cosmosproject.net/) relating to UK Twitter users is matched with the occupational lookup tables between job and social class provided by the Office for National Statistics (ONS) using SOC2010. Using expert human validation, the validity and reliability of the automated matching process is critically assessed and a prospective class distribution of UK Twitter users is offered with 2011 Census baseline comparisons. The pattern matching rules for identifying age are explained and enacted following a discussion on how to minimise false positives. The age distribution of Twitter users, as identified using the tool, is presented alongside the age distribution of the UK population from the 2011 Census. The automated occupation detection tool reliably identifies certain occupational groups, such as professionals, for which job titles cannot be confused with hobbies or are used in common parlance within alternative contexts. An alternative explanation on the prevalence of hobbies is that the creative sector is overrepresented on Twitter compared to 2011 Census data. The age detection tool illustrates the youthfulness of Twitter users compared to the general UK population as of the 2011 Census according to proportions, but projections demonstrate that there is still potentially a large number of older platform users. It is possible to detect “signatures” of both occupation and age from Twitter meta-data with varying degrees of accuracy (particularly dependent on occupational groups) but further confirmatory work is needed

Multiscale, multimodal analysis of tumor heterogeneity in IDH1 mutant vs wild-type diffuse gliomas.

Glioma is recognized to be a highly heterogeneous CNS malignancy, whose diverse cellular composition and cellular interactions have not been well characterized. To gain new clinical- and biological-insights into the genetically-bifurcated IDH1 mutant (mt) vs wildtype (wt) forms of glioma, we integrated data from protein, genomic and MR imaging from 20 treatment-naïve glioma cases and 16 recurrent GBM cases. Multiplexed immunofluorescence (MxIF) was used to generate single cell data for 43 protein markers representing all cancer hallmarks, Genomic sequencing (exome and RNA (normal and tumor) and magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) quantitative features (protocols were T1-post, FLAIR and ADC) from whole tumor, peritumoral edema and enhancing core vs equivalent normal region were also collected from patients. Based on MxIF analysis, 85,767 cells (glioma cases) and 56,304 cells (GBM cases) were used to generate cell-level data for 24 biomarkers. K-means clustering was used to generate 7 distinct groups of cells with divergent biomarker profiles and deconvolution was used to assign RNA data into three classes. Spatial and molecular heterogeneity metrics were generated for the cell data. All features were compared between IDH mt and IDHwt patients and were finally combined to provide a holistic/integrated comparison. Protein expression by hallmark was generally lower in the IDHmt vs wt patients. Molecular and spatial heterogeneity scores for angiogenesis and cell invasion also differed between IDHmt and wt gliomas irrespective of prior treatment and tumor grade; these differences also persisted in the MR imaging features of peritumoral edema and contrast enhancement volumes. A coherent picture of enhanced angiogenesis in IDHwt tumors was derived from multiple platforms (genomic, proteomic and imaging) and scales from individual proteins to cell clusters and heterogeneity, as well as bulk tumor RNA and imaging features. Longer overall survival for IDH1mt glioma patients may reflect mutation-driven alterations in cellular, molecular, and spatial heterogeneity which manifest in discernable radiological manifestations

Social media analysis, Twitter and the London Olympics (a research note)

During the course of this paper we examine publically available social media data that relates to the London 2012 Olympic Games that has been harvested and analysed using the Cardiff Online Social Media ObServatory (COSMOS). Social media has matured sufficiently in terms of user uptake and incorporation into traditional media platforms and outlets that the recent London Olympics has been described as the first social media games. For example, the BBC used the Twitter stream to incorporate and mobilise audience participation into its Olympic coverage. With this in mind, this paper will explore the analysis of social media data in relation to sporting events and social media use. In doing so we identify the ways in which COSMOS can be used to identify hashtag popularity over a specific time period to identify real world events, in this case ‘Super Saturday’. The paper reports on indicative evidence that links real-world sporting events to spikes in real time populations’ reaction through self-reported social media updates. In turn, the paper provides an analysis of frequency and sentiment of tweets containing the most popular UK hashtag connected to the London 2012 Olympics over a specified time period. This has consequences for conceptualising the relationship between social actors, events and social media and methodological strategies for understanding the dynamic (locomotive) reactions of populations

A pilot study of nintedanib in molecularly selected patients with advanced non-small cell lung cancer

BACKGROUND: Nintedanib is a small molecule tyrosine kinase inhibitor (TKI) targeting vascular endothelial growth factor receptor (VEGFR), platelet-derived growth factor receptor (PDGFR), and fibroblast growth factor receptor (FGFR). The purpose of the study was to evaluate the response rate for patients with advanced non-small cell lung cancer (NSCLC) with mutations in METHODS: Patients with advanced NSCLC previously treated with platinum-doublet chemotherapy with the above mutations were enrolled. Exclusion criteria included necrotic tumors with invasion of blood vessels, history of recent thromboembolic events, increased risk of bleeding or thrombosis, myocardial infarction, and weight loss \u3e10% within past 6 months. Nintedanib was administered at a dose of 200 mg orally twice daily until disease progression or unacceptable toxicity. The primary endpoint was objective response rate (ORR) by Response Evaluation Criteria in Solid Tumors (RECIST) 1.1. Secondary endpoints included progression-free survival (PFS) and correlating outcomes with specific mutations. This study was registered with ClinicalTrials.gov, number NCT02299141. RESULTS: Between 2015 and 2019, 20 patients were enrolled with a median age was 66 years, 15 (75%) were females, 15 (75%) had adenocarcinoma, and 17 patients had a CONCLUSIONS: In this pilot study in heavily pretreated and molecularly selected patients with metastatic NSCLC, nintedanib showed modest activity