Hunting in times of change: Uncovering indigenous strategies in the Colombian amazon using a role-playing game

Despite growing industrialization, the shift to a cash economy and natural resource overexploitation, indigenous people of the Amazon region hunt and trade wildlife in order to meet their livelihood requirements. Individual strategies, shaped by the hunters' values and expectations, are changing in response to the region's economic development, but they still face the contrasting challenges of poverty and overhunting. For conservation initiatives to be implemented effectively, it is crucial to take into account people's strategies with their underlying drivers and their adaptive capabilities within a transforming socio-economic environment. To uncover hunting strategies in the Colombian Amazon and their evolution under the current transition, we co-designed a role-playing game together with the local stakeholders. The game revolves around the tension between ecological sustainability and food security—hunters' current main concern. It simulates the mosaic of activities that indigenous people perform in the wet and dry season, while also allowing for specific hunting strategies. Socio-economic conditions change while the game unfolds, opening up to emerging alternative potential scenarios suggested by the stakeholders themselves. Do hunters give up hunting when given the opportunity of an alternative income and protein source? Do institutional changes affect their livelihoods? We played the game between October and December 2016 with 39 players—all of them hunters—from 9 different communities within the Ticoya reserve. Our results show that providing alternatives would decrease overall hunting effort, but impacts are not spatially homogenous. Legalizing trade could lead to overhunting except when market rules and competition come into place. When it comes to coupled human-nature systems, the best way forward to produce socially just and resilient conservation strategies might be to trigger an adaptive process of experiential learning and scenario exploration. The use of games as “boundary objects” can guide stakeholders through the process, eliciting the plurality of their strategies, their drivers and how outside change affects them

Reconciling taxonomy and phylogenetic inference: formalism and algorithms for describing discord and inferring taxonomic roots

Although taxonomy is often used informally to evaluate the results of phylogenetic inference and find the root of phylogenetic trees, algorithmic methods to do so are lacking. In this paper we formalize these procedures and develop algorithms to solve the relevant problems. In particular, we introduce a new algorithm that solves a "subcoloring" problem for expressing the difference between the taxonomy and phylogeny at a given rank. This algorithm improves upon the current best algorithm in terms of asymptotic complexity for the parameter regime of interest; we also describe a branch-and-bound algorithm that saves orders of magnitude in computation on real data sets. We also develop a formalism and an algorithm for rooting phylogenetic trees according to a taxonomy. All of these algorithms are implemented in freely-available software.Comment: Version submitted to Algorithms for Molecular Biology. A number of fixes from previous versio

New experimental limit on Pauli Exclusion Principle violation by electrons (the VIP experiment)

The Pauli Exclusion Principle is one of the basic principles of modern physics and is at the very basis of our understanding of matter: thus it is fundamental importance to test the limits of its validity. Here we present the VIP (Violation of the Pauli Exclusion Principle) experiment, where we search for anomalous X-rays emitted by copper atoms in a conductor: any detection of these anomalous X-rays would mark a Pauli-forbidden transition. ] VIP is currently taking data at the Gran Sasso underground laboratories, and its scientific goal is to improve by at least four orders of magnitude the previous limit on the probability of Pauli violating transitions, bringing it into the 10**-29 - 10**-30 region. First experimental results, together with future plans, are presented.Comment: To appear in proceedings of the XLVI International Winter Meeting on Nuclear Physics, Bormio, Italy, January 20-26, 200

Testing the Pauli Exclusion Principle for Electrons

One of the fundamental rules of nature and a pillar in the foundation of quantum theory and thus of modern physics is represented by the Pauli Exclusion Principle. We know that this principle is extremely well fulfilled due to many observations. Numerous experiments were performed to search for tiny violation of this rule in various systems. The experiment VIP at the Gran Sasso underground laboratory is searching for possible small violations of the Pauli Exclusion Principle for electrons leading to forbidden X-ray transitions in copper atoms. VIP is aiming at a test of the Pauli Exclusion Principle for electrons with high accuracy, down to the level of 10$^{-29}$ - 10$^{-30}$, thus improving the previous limit by 3-4 orders of magnitude. The experimental method, results obtained so far and new developments within VIP2 (follow-up experiment at Gran Sasso, in preparation) to further increase the precision by 2 orders of magnitude will be presented.Comment: Proceedings DISCRETE 2012-Third Symposium on Prospects in the Physics of Discrete Symmetries, Lisbon, December 3-7, 201

High sensitivity tests of the Pauli Exclusion Principle with VIP2

The Pauli Exclusion Principle is one of the most fundamental rules of nature and represents a pillar of modern physics. According to many observations the Pauli Exclusion Principle must be extremely well fulfilled. Nevertheless, numerous experimental investigations were performed to search for a small violation of this principle. The VIP experiment at the Gran Sasso underground laboratory searched for Pauli-forbidden X-ray transitions in copper atoms using the Ramberg-Snow method and obtained the best limit so far. The follow-up experiment VIP2 is designed to reach even higher sensitivity. It aims to improve the limit by VIP by orders of magnitude. The experimental method, comparison of different PEP tests based on different assumptions and the developments for VIP2 are presented.Comment: 6 pages, 3 figures, Proceedings DISCRETE2014 Conferenc

New experimental limit on Pauli Exclusion Principle violation by electrons (the VIP experiment)

The Pauli exclusion principle (PEP) represents one of the basic principles of modern physics and, even if there are no compelling reasons to doubt its validity, it still spurs a lively debate, because an intuitive, elementary explanation is still missing, and because of its unique stand among the basic symmetries of physics. A new limit on the probability that PEP is violated by electrons was estabilished by the VIP (VIolation of the Pauli exclusion principle) Collaboration, using the method of searching for PEP forbidden atomic transitions in copper. The preliminary value, {1/2}\beta^{2} \textless 4.5\times 10^{-28}, represents an improvement of about two orders of magnitude of the previous limit. The goal of VIP is to push this limit at the level of $10^{-30}$.Comment: submitted to Journal of Physics: Conference Series, by the Institute of Physic

Application of photon detectors in the VIP2 experiment to test the Pauli Exclusion Principle

The Pauli Exclusion Principle (PEP) was introduced by the austrian physicist Wolfgang Pauli in 1925. Since then, several experiments have checked its validity. From 2006 until 2010, the VIP (VIolation of the Pauli Principle) experiment took data at the LNGS underground laboratory to test the PEP. This experiment looked for electronic 2p to 1s transitions in copper, where 2 electrons are in the 1s state before the transition happens. These transitions violate the PEP. The lack of detection of X-ray photons coming from these transitions resulted in a preliminary upper limit for the violation of the PEP of $4.7 \times 10^{-29}$. Currently, the successor experiment VIP2 is under preparation. The main improvements are, on one side, the use of Silicon Drift Detectors (SDDs) as X-ray photon detectors. On the other side an active shielding is implemented, which consists of plastic scintillator bars read by Silicon Photomultipliers (SiPMs). The employment of these detectors will improve the upper limit for the violation of the PEP by around 2 orders of magnitude

VIP 2: Experimental tests of the Pauli Exclusion Principle for electrons

The Pauli Exclusion Principle (PEP) was famously discovered in 1925 by the austrian physicist Wolfgang Pauli. Since then, it underwent several experimental tests. Starting in 2006, the VIP (Violation of the Pauli Principle) experiment looked for 2p to 1s X-ray transitions in copper, where 2 electrons are present in the 1s state before the transition happens. These transitions violate the PEP, and the lack of detection of the corresponding X-ray photons lead to a preliminary upper limit for the violation of the PEP of 4.7 * 10^(-29). The follow-up experiment VIP 2 is currently in the testing phase and will be transported to its final destination, the underground laboratory of Gran Sasso in Italy, in autumn 2015. Several improvements compared to its predecessor like the use of new X-ray detectors and active shielding from background gives rise to a goal for the improvement of the upper limit of the probability for the violation of the Pauli Exclusion Principle of 2 orders of magnitude