Factors Affecting Crop Insurance Purchase Decisions in Northern Illinois

When making crop insurance purchase decisions, farmers must consider multiple factors. This paper examines such factors through the use of a survey conducted in a 42 county region of Northern Illinois during 2005. Participants were asked who most influenced their crop insurance purchase decision and if the availability of a Premium Discount Plan (PDP) affected their decision. Respondents indicated that they generally made crop insurance purchase decisions independently, and that the availability of a PDP influenced about 25% of the decisions made. Questions about the importance of ten specific purchase factors were also asked in two distinct groups of five factors each. In one group of factors, price of the insurance was found to be more important than the probability of receiving a claim payment. The other group of factors revealed that government subsidization of premium and weather concerns were highly important to survey participants. Results have also been summarized according to the risk attitude of respondents. Crop insurance participation, plan and coverage level, and other demographic data were collected as well. Further analysis will be conducted to determine relationships between purchase decision factors and the characteristics of the respondents.Risk and Uncertainty,

Standardized NEON organismal data for biodiversity research

Understanding patterns and drivers of species distribution and abundance, and thus biodiversity, is a core goal of ecology. Despite advances in recent decades, research into these patterns and processes is currently limited by a lack of standardized, high-quality, empirical data that span large spatial scales and long time periods. The NEON fills this gap by providing freely available observational data that are generated during robust and consistent organismal sampling of several sentinel taxonomic groups within 81 sites distributed across the United States and will be collected for at least 30 years. The breadth and scope of these data provide a unique resource for advancing biodiversity research. To maximize the potential of this opportunity, however, it is critical that NEON data be maximally accessible and easily integrated into investigators\u27 workflows and analyses. To facilitate its use for biodiversity research and synthesis, we created a workflow to process and format NEON organismal data into the ecocomDP (ecological community data design pattern) format that were available through the ecocomDP R package; we then provided the standardized data as an R data package (neonDivData). We briefly summarize sampling designs and data wrangling decisions for the major taxonomic groups included in this effort. Our workflows are open-source so the biodiversity community may: add additional taxonomic groups; modify the workflow to produce datasets appropriate for their own analytical needs; and regularly update the data packages as more observations become available. Finally, we provide two simple examples of how the standardized data may be used for biodiversity research. By providing a standardized data package, we hope to enhance the utility of NEON organismal data in advancing biodiversity research and encourage the use of the harmonized ecocomDP data design pattern for community ecology data from other ecological observatory networks

Mitochondria-localized AMPK responds to local energetics and contributes to exercise and energetic stress-induced mitophagy

Mitochondria form a complex, interconnected reticulum that is maintained through coordination among biogenesis, dynamic fission, and fusion and mitophagy, which are initiated in response to various cues to maintain energetic homeostasis. These cellular events, which make up mitochondrial quality control, act with remarkable spatial precision, but what governs such spatial specificity is poorly understood. Herein, we demonstrate that specific isoforms of the cellular bioenergetic sensor, 5′ AMP-activated protein kinase (AMPKα1/α2/β2/γ1), are localized on the outer mitochondrial membrane, referred to as mitoAMPK, in various tissues in mice and humans. Activation of mitoAMPK varies across the reticulum in response to energetic stress, and inhibition of mitoAMPK activity attenuates exercise-induced mitophagy in skeletal muscle in vivo. Discovery of a mitochondrial pool of AMPK and its local importance for mitochondrial quality control underscores the complexity of sensing cellular energetics in vivo that has implications for targeting mitochondrial energetics for disease treatment

Harnessing the NEON data revolution to advance open environmental science with a diverse and data-capable community

It is a critical time to reflect on the National Ecological Observatory Network (NEON) science to date as well as envision what research can be done right now with NEON (and other) data and what training is needed to enable a diverse user community. NEON became fully operational in May 2019 and has pivoted from planning and construction to operation and maintenance. In this overview, the history of and foundational thinking around NEON are discussed. A framework of open science is described with a discussion of how NEON can be situated as part of a larger data constellation—across existing networks and different suites of ecological measurements and sensors. Next, a synthesis of early NEON science, based on >100 existing publications, funded proposal efforts, and emergent science at the very first NEON Science Summit (hosted by Earth Lab at the University of Colorado Boulder in October 2019) is provided. Key questions that the ecology community will address with NEON data in the next 10 yr are outlined, from understanding drivers of biodiversity across spatial and temporal scales to defining complex feedback mechanisms in human–environmental systems. Last, the essential elements needed to engage and support a diverse and inclusive NEON user community are highlighted: training resources and tools that are openly available, funding for broad community engagement initiatives, and a mechanism to share and advertise those opportunities. NEON users require both the skills to work with NEON data and the ecological or environmental science domain knowledge to understand and interpret them. This paper synthesizes early directions in the community’s use of NEON data, and opportunities for the next 10 yr of NEON operations in emergent science themes, open science best practices, education and training, and community building

Factors Affecting Crop Insurance Purchase Decisions in Northern Illinois

When making crop insurance purchase decisions, farmers must consider multiple factors. This paper examines such factors through the use of a survey conducted in a 42 county region of Northern Illinois during 2005. Participants were asked who most influenced their crop insurance purchase decision and if the availability of a Premium Discount Plan (PDP) affected their decision. Respondents indicated that they generally made crop insurance purchase decisions independently, and that the availability of a PDP influenced about 25% of the decisions made. Questions about the importance of ten specific purchase factors were also asked in two distinct groups of five factors each. In one group of factors, price of the insurance was found to be more important than the probability of receiving a claim payment. The other group of factors revealed that government subsidization of premium and weather concerns were highly important to survey participants. Results have also been summarized according to the risk attitude of respondents. Crop insurance participation, plan and coverage level, and other demographic data were collected as well. Further analysis will be conducted to determine relationships between purchase decision factors and the characteristics of the respondents