Canopy recruitment dynamics in naturally regenerated longleaf pine (pinus palustris) woodlands

The ecological and cultural values of the longleaf pine (Pinus palustris) ecosystem, in combination with an approximately 97 percent loss in historic range, has led to increasing interest in ecosystem restoration and management in recent decades. While research has elucidated much about regeneration dynamics, there is a paucity of information regarding the recruitment period between the grass stage and canopy status. The overall goal of this project was to determine the factors influencing canopy recruitment rates and patterns in naturally regenerated longleaf pine woodlands. This research utilized two distinct datasets collected at the Joseph W. Jones Ecological Research Center, a naturally regenerated second-growth landscape in southwest Georgia. First, we utilized data from long-term monitoring plots of tagged natural regeneration to model survival probability. Second, we conducted stem analysis on midstory and overstory trees in order to retrospectively examine rates and patterns of height growth during canopy recruitment. We found that 10-year regeneration mortality was concentrated within the smallest size classes and that survival was strongly driven by individual size (both root collar diameter and height) and relative height within dense regeneration clusters. Individual growth of midstory trees was strongly driven by overstory abundance but minimally related to soil moisture class. In comparing the growth rates of midstory and overstory trees on the same site, we found that midstory trees in open environments displayed comparable or better growth rates than overstory trees. In dense stands, however, midstory trees were generally from the same age cohort as overstory trees and likely stagnated in height and diameter growth after falling behind peers during canopy recruitment. Suppression and release patterns were common in the growth histories of midstory trees within dense stands but less so for overstory trees or midstory trees within open stands. Our results indicate that rapid initial growth and dominant crown position within even-aged cohorts is important for eventual canopy recruitment. Survival probability is low for individuals in lower crown positions, although a given individual may persist in the midstory for decades with minimal height or diameter growth. These individuals may then respond to release and resume growth. To facilitate recruitment of young individuals into the midstory, some level of overstory reduction is necessary in dense stands

Financial incentives for low-carbon transition: from citizens to professional investors

Decarbonisation of the global economy requires an energy transition of exceptional scope, depth and speed, and a doubling of the current level of investment in low-carbon technologies. However, the risk perception of individual market participants—a key determinant of the pace at which these technologies will be deployed—is an under-addressed theme in the academic literature. In this thesis the risk-return preferences and investment attributes that are attractive to different types of investors are investigated, with a view to informing the design of financial incentives introduced by Governments. In Chapter 2 the literature assessing the impact of technology-specific financial incentives on the levels of investment in low carbon technologies from local citizen investors is evaluated. It is concluded that feed in tariffs, grants and tax incentives can be successful in mobilising greater levels of investment from non-traditional investors, but that soft loans are less effective as a stand-alone instrument. In the following chapter, a novel analytical approach is introduced to explore the use of financial incentives in key jurisdictions to overcome barriers to investment from local citizen actors. The importance of instrument design over instrument choice emerged from this analysis. The requirement for incentives at feasibility and development stages of renewable projects also emerged as a distinguishing feature of projects with citizen involvement, reflecting the high risk-aversion of these actors, as well as their inability to manage risk across a portfolio of projects. At later project stages, market-independent supports (feed in tariffs, grants and tax incentives) were found to have been effectively deployed, however, more market-based instruments (feed in premiums and quota schemes) were also found to be effective if tailored to the specific needs of citizen investors. In Chapter 4 the risk-return preferences of a representative sample of citizen investors in Ireland—a market with no citizen investment tradition—were explored using a choice experiment. A high level of interest in investing in wind, solar, biomass and waste-to-energy projects was uncovered, however, a majority of citizens were found to be highly risk-averse, and investment amounts were low compared to equity required for larger projects. These findings suggest that greater levels of investment capital could be mobilized from citizen investors using specifically tailored incentives. However, these actors can only make a limited overall contribution, and promoting greater levels of investment from professional investors is crucial if climate objectives are to be met. In Chapter 5, semi-structured interviews and an on-line survey were therefore used to compare attitudes to stranding risk for investors in power generation assets with investors in financial assets. Asset stranding risk was found to be a more prominent issue for the former cohort, suggesting that as you move along the investment chain—away from physical assets and towards financial assets—far less is known about climate risk, and it becomes increasingly challenging for investors to manage it. Managing the risks face by different investor cohorts emerges as an important means of mobilising greater levels of investment and reducing the cost of capital for low-carbon technologies, which in turn has the potential to increase the speed of energy transition. Understanding the risk-return preferences of different cohorts of investors, however, remains both understudied and underappreciated in the climate policy and climate finance literature. The findings from this study both address this literature gap and uncover several themes meriting further analysis and investigation

Financial incentives to promote citizen investment in low-carbon and resource-efficient assets

If the ambitious objectives of the international community, as set out in the Paris Agreement of December 2015, are to be met, rapid decarbonisation is required over the coming decades, particularly in developed countries. Many industrialised countries are incentivising the uptake of low-carbon and resource efficient technologies such as waste-to-energy, wind, solar photovoltaic (PV), and biomass heating systems, which alone have the potential to make a very substantial contribution to global decarbonisation by 2050 (IEA, 2015). It is notable that these technologies are particularly attractive to local citizen investors who are acting individually, as a member of a community group or as party to a project by a professional developer (Enzensberger et al., 2003). This is because of their maturity, modularity, high reliability, the simplicity of the energy generation process and availability of technical service providers (Yildiz, 2014). These technologies, however, face a number of barriers when it comes to widespread deployment; this means that their full potential cannot not realised. According to the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), policy must address these barriers to enable the full theoretical potential for mitigation to be realised. As illustrated in Figure 1.1, these barriers are not just technical and economic, but also relate to socio-economic, regulatory and institutional factors (IPCC-WGIII, 2001, p. 752). The focus of this report is on addressing two of the key barriers identified in the IPCC typology: financial barriers (and the consequent investment shortfall in low-carbon technologies (LCTs) (section 1.2)), and lack of social support among citizens for low-carbon transition (section 1.3). These barriers are discussed in turn, focusing on the potential for citizen investment to address them

Beyond Western, educated, industrial, rich, and democratic (WEIRD) psychology: measuring and mapping scales of cultural and psychological distance

In this article, we present a tool and a method for measuring the psychological and cultural distance between societies and creating a distance scale with any population as the point of comparison. Because psychological data are dominated by samples drawn from Western, educated, industrialized, rich, and democratic (WEIRD) nations, and overwhelmingly, the United States, we focused on distance from the United States. We also present distance from China, the country with the largest population and second largest economy, which is a common cultural comparison. We applied the fixation index (FST), a meaningful statistic in evolutionary theory, to the World Values Survey of cultural beliefs and behaviors. As the extreme WEIRDness of the literature begins to dissolve, our tool will become more useful for designing, planning, and justifying a wide range of comparative psychological projects. Our code and accompanying online application allow for comparisons between any two countries. Analyses of regional diversity reveal the relative homogeneity of the United States. Cultural distance predicts various psychological outcomes

A damage model based on failure threshold weakening

A variety of studies have modeled the physics of material deformation and damage as examples of generalized phase transitions, involving either critical phenomena or spinodal nucleation. Here we study a model for frictional sliding with long range interactions and recurrent damage that is parameterized by a process of damage and partial healing during sliding. We introduce a failure threshold weakening parameter into the cellular-automaton slider-block model which allows blocks to fail at a reduced failure threshold for all subsequent failures during an event. We show that a critical point is reached beyond which the probability of a system-wide event scales with this weakening parameter. We provide a mapping to the percolation transition, and show that the values of the scaling exponents approach the values for mean-field percolation (spinodal nucleation) as lattice size $L$ is increased for fixed $R$. We also examine the effect of the weakening parameter on the frequency-magnitude scaling relationship and the ergodic behavior of the model

Human Bacterial Artificial Chromosome (BAC) Transgenesis Fully Rescues Noradrenergic Function in Dopamine β-Hydroxylase Knockout Mice

Dopamine β-hydroxylase (DBH) converts dopamine (DA) to norepinephrine (NE) in noradrenergic/adrenergic cells. DBH deficiency prevents NE production and causes sympathetic failure, hypotension and ptosis in humans and mice; DBH knockout (Dbh -/-) mice reveal other NE deficiency phenotypes including embryonic lethality, delayed growth, and behavioral defects. Furthermore, a single nucleotide polymorphism (SNP) in the human DBH gene promoter (-970C\u3eT; rs1611115) is associated with variation in serum DBH activity and with several neurological- and neuropsychiatric-related disorders, although its impact on DBH expression is controversial. Phenotypes associated with DBH deficiency are typically treated with L-3,4-dihydroxyphenylserine (DOPS), which can be converted to NE by aromatic acid decarboxylase (AADC) in the absence of DBH. In this study, we generated transgenic mice carrying a human bacterial artificial chromosome (BAC) encompassing the DBH coding locus as well as ~45 kb of upstream and ~107 kb of downstream sequence to address two issues. First, we characterized the neuroanatomical, neurochemical, physiological, and behavioral transgenic rescue of DBH deficiency by crossing the BAC onto a Dbh -/- background. Second, we compared human DBH mRNA abundance between transgenic lines carrying either a C or a T at position -970. The BAC transgene drove human DBH mRNA expression in a pattern indistinguishable from the endogenous gene, restored normal catecholamine levels to the peripheral organs and brain of Dbh -/- mice, and fully rescued embryonic lethality, delayed growth, ptosis, reduced exploratory activity, and seizure susceptibility. In some cases, transgenic rescue was superior to DOPS. However, allelic variation at the rs1611115 SNP had no impact on mRNA levels in any tissue. These results indicate that the human BAC contains all of the genetic information required for tissue-specific, functional expression of DBH and can rescue all measured Dbh deficiency phenotypes, but did not reveal an impact of the rs11115 variant on DBH expression in mice

Initial Teacher Education for Inclusion Phase 1 and 2 Report: NCSE Research Report No. 26

Executive Summary Background to the project The context for this project is a growing international consensus on the importance of policy initiatives to both raise the quality of teaching (OECD, 2005) and to better prepare teachers to respond to increasing diversity in communities and classrooms (EADSNE, 2011). The DES and the Teaching Council of Ireland developed policies requiring higher education institutions providing Initial Teacher Education (ITE) to undergo a re-accreditation process from 2012. This involved both an extension and a reconceptualization of programmes, with mandatory additional content related to inclusive education and differentiation, together with the opportunity for a wider range of school placement experiences. All concurrent (undergraduate) programmes of initial teacher education must be of four years' duration and all consecutive (postgraduate) programmes of initial teacher education must be of two years' duration. The latter were re-accredited at Masters Level 9 on the National Framework of Qualifications. Following this major reform, the National Council for Special Education (NCSE) in Ireland commissioned a study of ‘Initial Teacher Education for Inclusion’ in 2015. NCSE’s research aim was: ‘to establish what the components of inclusive/special education are within Initial Teacher Education (ITE) programmes in Ireland and to explore if the recent changes prepare newly qualified teachers to be inclusive using the indicators set out in the EASNIE’s Profile of Inclusive Teachers’. The European Agency for Special Needs and Inclusive Education (EASNIE) conducted a four-year project on Teacher Education for Inclusion, involving representatives of twenty five countries. A key output was a proposed ‘Profile of Inclusive Teachers’ (EADSNE, 2012), which outlines a range of attitudes, knowledge and skills in relation to four core values and eight areas of competence, to be addressed in initial teacher education to prepare all new teachers to become more inclusive. The NCSE proposed the EASNIE Profile of Inclusive Teachers as the baseline definition of inclusive teaching for the project and it is used by the research team as the framework and starting point for analysis. The ‘Initial Teacher Education for Inclusion’ project (ITE4I), runs from 2015-2018. The research team is led by Manchester Metropolitan University in partnership with University College Cork and University College London, Institute of Education. We understand this project may be one of the first system-wide, longitudinal studies of initial teacher education for inclusive teaching in Europe. This report relates to the first year of the project in 2015/16, which analysed the content of ITE programmes and studied the experiences of the first cohort of student teachers to graduate from the extended and reconceptualised programmes, in their final year of study. This comprised two phases of data collection: in Phase 1 we analysed programme documents and surveyed teacher educators; in Phase 2 we surveyed student teachers and interviewed a sample of student teachers and teacher educators. At the same time, a literature review was developed setting out definitional debates on inclusive education and outlining the scope of the international literature on inclusive teaching. Research design The Research Questions formulated by National Council for Special Education (NCSE) were as follows: 1. What are the components of inclusive/special education within Initial Teacher Education (ITE) programmes in Ireland for primary and post-primary teachers? 2. Do the recent changes to ITE prepare newly qualified teachers to be inclusive as identified by European Agency for Special Needs and Inclusive Education (EASNIE) Profile of Inclusive Teachers? 3. What is the intended impact of the changes in ITE on outcomes for students with special educational needs (SEN) and do student/newly qualified teachers perceive their learning during initial teacher education makes an impact on outcomes for students with SEN? 4. What gaps are there in how current ITE programmes prepare student teachers to be inclusive as per the EASNIE Profile of Inclusive Teachers and what aspects need to be strengthened to better prepare student teachers to be inclusive? 5. What lessons can be identified from this research for initial teacher education in Ireland and subsequent phases in the continuum of teacher education? The Project Phases were planned around data collection over the three years of the project: Phase 1 (Sept. – Jan. 2016): Analysing ITE Programme Content Data collection in Phase 1 included documentary analysis and a survey of teacher educators. Documentation relating to some 30 programmes (out of 59 nationally) from 13 ITE providers (out of 19 in total) was obtained with the support of the Teaching Council. These were primarily standard proforma submitted for re-accreditation, with module outlines appended in some cases; in addition, reviews of these submissions published by the Teaching Council were analysed, together with the criteria used for re-accreditation. The documentary analysis started from a typology derived from the EASNIE Profile of Inclusive Teachers, to examine how and where inclusive teaching is represented within ITE programme documents. A survey of teacher educators was conducted at the same time, to collect initial data on the range of views expressed by teacher educators in relation to issues of inclusive teaching in ITE programmes. The survey was constructed to reflect areas of competence within the EASNIE Profile of Inclusive Teachers, and to collect free-text comments. Following piloting, 21 respondents (programme leaders, module leaders, heads of departments) provided complete or near-complete responses giving information relating to 27 programmes from 13 institutions (some survey responses related to more than one programme). Phase 2 (Feb. – Aug. 2016): Understanding the ITE Student Experience Data collection in Phase 2 included a survey of student teachers, together with interviews with student teachers and with teacher educators at five case study sites. The five ITE providers were selected to represent a range of primary, post-primary, consecutive and concurrent programmes; and to provide a geographical spread of institutions. The survey of student teachers elicited data about their experiences of initial teacher education and their understandings of inclusive teaching. The questionnaire captured demographic information, key areas of experience prior to and during the respondents’ ITE programme, and a series of statements mapped to an analysis of the attitude, knowledge and skills components of the EASNIE profile. A total of 430 valid responses were received, representing a sample of approximately 13% of the national cohort of student teachers. The interviews with student teachers aimed to elicit their views about their course and how their studies related to their school placement experiences; their understandings of inclusive teaching; their approaches to inclusive teaching in practice; and their reflections on their own professional development in relation to inclusive teaching and how their courses might be developed. A total of 47 students were interviewed in person or by Skype, with 32 recruited at the five case study sites and a further 15 recruited by survey responses from other institutions. The interviews with teacher educators sought their views on issues of inclusive teaching and ITE in Ireland, and on the impact of the extension and reconceptualization of ITE programmes; their responses to emergent themes and issues arising from the survey of teacher educators and the documentary analysis; and their reflections on aspects of the EASNIE Profile of Inclusive Teachers. A total of 11 staff interviews were conducted across the five case study sites, typically including the Head of School or a Programme Leader and a lecturer in inclusive or special education

A Cultural Species and its Cognitive Phenotypes: Implications for Philosophy

After introducing the new field of cultural evolution, we review a growing body of empirical evidence suggesting that culture shapes what people attend to, perceive and remember as well as how they think, feel and reason. Focusing on perception, spatial navigation, mentalizing, thinking styles, reasoning (epistemic norms) and language, we discuss not only important variation in these domains, but emphasize that most researchers (including philosophers) and research participants are psychologically peculiar within a global and historical context. This rising tide of evidence recommends caution in relying on one’s intuitions or even in generalizing from reliable psychological findings to the species, Homo sapiens. Our evolutionary approach suggests that humans have evolved a suite of reliably developing cognitive abilities that adapt our minds, information-processing abilities and emotions ontogenetically to the diverse culturally-constructed worlds we confront

Author Correction: A consensus-based transparency checklist.

An amendment to this paper has been published and can be accessed via a link at the top of the paper