Getting Beyond Visual Impact: Designing Renewable Energy as a Positive Landscape Addition

The critical necessity of scaling up renewable energy to meet the challenge of climate change implicates vast swaths of American landscape. Renewable energy infrastructure has long concerned itself with minimizing its visual impact, in order to decrease opposition from local landowners and users of the landscape. As energy facilities proliferate across the landscape, their visual impact can be expected to grow as well—both in terms of the scale of installations, as well as the amount of territory affected. On public lands, renewable energy infrastructure has had to compete with alternate public uses of the land, including scenic and recreational values. Managers of public landscapes have developed specific procedures for describing the visual impact to landscapes stemming from energy development, and specific methodologies to evaluate whether a particular project should proceed. In most contemporary energy planning processes that include landscape design professionals, these designers’ scope is limited to comparing the visual impact of discrete energy installations: the spacing, height, and alignment of wind turbines or solar panels, for example. We argue for a more inclusive approach to incorporating spatial design considerations, earlier in the planning process, as a way of incorporating public aspirations and opinions about the energy landscape, expanding the field of potential planning outcomes, and identifying synergies for co-locating multiple positive elements. How can energy infrastructure actively participate in the shaping of a positive landscape experience, and not just try to minimize its impact on the landscape? This paper will present several examples of infrastructure-driven landscape transformations that actively incorporated public input and visual assessment considerations, at the municipal and regional scales, in order to develop energy planning frameworks with high social acceptance. One case study looks at the spatial planning around wind turbine installations in the Wieringermeer polder in the Netherlands, which used design to develop a consistent image for wind installations, and create a recognizable new layer in the cultural landscape that reflects the qualities, scale, and character of the underlying landscape (H+N+S Landschapsarchitecten, 2014). One other European example demonstrates the impact of an iterative design process in producing the successful Middelgrunden wind farm in Copenhagen, Denmark. We analyze the potential of these kinds of planning processes on American renewable energy infrastructure planning. We note examples of energy planning that are successfully minimizing conflict between social and ecological stakeholders, focusing on California programs such as the Desert Renewable Energy Conservation Plan (DRECP), but that would benefit from incorporating design methodologies more extensively to manage visual landscape impact

Viral population estimation using pyrosequencing

The diversity of virus populations within single infected hosts presents a major difficulty for the natural immune response as well as for vaccine design and antiviral drug therapy. Recently developed pyrophosphate based sequencing technologies (pyrosequencing) can be used for quantifying this diversity by ultra-deep sequencing of virus samples. We present computational methods for the analysis of such sequence data and apply these techniques to pyrosequencing data obtained from HIV populations within patients harboring drug resistant virus strains. Our main result is the estimation of the population structure of the sample from the pyrosequencing reads. This inference is based on a statistical approach to error correction, followed by a combinatorial algorithm for constructing a minimal set of haplotypes that explain the data. Using this set of explaining haplotypes, we apply a statistical model to infer the frequencies of the haplotypes in the population via an EM algorithm. We demonstrate that pyrosequencing reads allow for effective population reconstruction by extensive simulations and by comparison to 165 sequences obtained directly from clonal sequencing of four independent, diverse HIV populations. Thus, pyrosequencing can be used for cost-effective estimation of the structure of virus populations, promising new insights into viral evolutionary dynamics and disease control strategies.Comment: 23 pages, 13 figure

Lineage-Specific Biology Revealed by a Finished Genome Assembly of the Mouse

A finished clone-based assembly of the mouse genome reveals extensive recent sequence duplication during recent evolution and rodent-specific expansion of certain gene families. Newly assembled duplications contain protein-coding genes that are mostly involved in reproductive function

American Gut: an Open Platform for Citizen Science Microbiome Research

McDonald D, Hyde E, Debelius JW, et al. American Gut: an Open Platform for Citizen Science Microbiome Research. mSystems. 2018;3(3):e00031-18

Erratum: Corrigendum: Sequence and comparative analysis of the chicken genome provide unique perspectives on vertebrate evolution

International Chicken Genome Sequencing Consortium. The Original Article was published on 09 December 2004. Nature432, 695–716 (2004). In Table 5 of this Article, the last four values listed in the ‘Copy number’ column were incorrect. These should be: LTR elements, 30,000; DNA transposons, 20,000; simple repeats, 140,000; and satellites, 4,000. These errors do not affect any of the conclusions in our paper. Additional information. The online version of the original article can be found at 10.1038/nature0315

Climate Futures 2 | Design Politics, Design Natures, Aesthetics and the Green New Deal, Session 4: Liberatory Aesthetics for a Just Transition?

Building survivable futures on a warming planet is not simply going to involve policy for a Green New Deal. Just transitions to post-carbon just futures are inevitably going to raise very significant aesthetic, political and cultural issues about the worlds that we are leaving behind and the world that we need to design and make. The Green New Deal or the just transition more broadly has developed little in the way of a new aesthetic or cultural politics. Its primary co-ordinates have been to look back to the political and public aesthetics that emerged around the first New Deal of the 1930s or turn to the aesthetic that emerged out of predominantly white US environmentalisms of the 1970s. Do we need to find other ways to “stay with the trouble” to paraphrase Donna Haraway as we try and construct survivable futures? What might a joyful, aesthetics of a just transition look like that can come to terms with the loss of certain kinds of nature-cultures, modes of valuing and modes of making and be open to the challenge of designing new cosmopolitan nature-cultures, new ways of valuing and new modes of future making? Can we envisage an aesthetic and cultural politics that reclaims low carbon pleasures present in everyday life? Does a progressive cultural politics for a just transition require a broader decentering of Eurocentric or US centric environmental aesthetics and a more sustained engagement with the insights of decolonial, Latinx, post humanist, cosmopolitical and other currents? In this panel we ponder the kinds of liberatory aesthetics and cultural politics that could underpin the just transition and offer solidarity and hope across borders and boundaries. Sponsored by the Division of Experimental and Foundation Studies, Rhode Island School of Desig

Climate Futures 1 | Climate Futures, Design and the Just Transition, Session 2: Design, Creative Labor and the Just Transition

The just transition implies that we decarbonize our energy systems but also embark on a much broader redesign of our socio-material relations and landscapes. What role can design play in thinking about just transitions? What might the designed landscapes of just transitions look like? Who should be the designers of the just transition? To what extent might a just transition involve a revaluing of the creative labor and design intelligences of many different kinds of people beyond the world of professional designers

Denser and greener cities: Green interventions to achieve both urban density and nature

Abstract Green spaces in urban areas—like remnant habitat, parks, constructed wetlands, and street trees—supply multiple benefits. Many studies show green spaces in and near urban areas play important roles harbouring biodiversity and promoting human well‐being. On the other hand, evidence suggests that greater human population density enables compact, low‐carbon cities that spare habitat conversion at the fringes of expanding urban areas, while also allowing more walkable and livable cities. How then can urban areas have abundant green spaces as well as density? In this paper, we review the empirical evidence for the relationships between urban density, nature, and sustainability. We also present a quantitative analysis of data on urban tree canopy cover and open space for United States large urbanized areas, as well as an analysis of non‐US Functional Urban Areas in OECD countries. We found that there is a negative correlation between population density and these green spaces. For Functional Urban Areas in the OECD, a 10% increase in density is associated with a 2.9% decline in tree cover. We argue that there are competing trade‐offs between the benefits of density for sustainability and the benefits of nature for human well‐being. Planners must decide an appropriate density by choosing where to be on this trade‐off curve, taking into account city‐specific urban planning goals and context. However, while the negative correlation between population density and tree cover is modest at the level of US urbanized areas (R2 = 0.22), it is weak at the US Census block level (R2 = 0.05), showing that there are significant brightspots, neighbourhoods that manage to have more tree canopy than would be expected based upon their level of density. We then describe techniques for how urban planners and designers can create more brightspots, identifying a typology of urban forms and listing green interventions appropriate for each form. We also analyse policies that enable these green interventions illustrating them with the case studies of Curitiba and Singapore. We conclude that while there are tensions between density and urban green spaces, an urban world that is both green and dense is possible, if society chooses to take advantage of the available green interventions and create it. Read the free Plain Language Summary for this article on the Journal blog