Comparing groups versus individuals in decision making: A systematic review protocol

Background Biodiversity management requires effective decision making at various stages. However decision making in the real world is complex, driven by multiple factors and involves a range of stakeholders. Understanding the factors that influence decision making is crucial to addressing the conflicts that arise in conservation. Decisions can be made either by individuals or by groups. This precise context has been studied extensively for several decades by behavioural economists, social psychologists and intelligence analysts. The observations from these disciplines can offer useful insights for biodiversity conservation. A systematic review on group versus individual decision making is currently lacking. This systematic review would enable us to synthesize the key insights from these disciplines for a range of scenarios useful for conservation. Methods The review will document studies that have investigated differences between group and individual decision making. The focus will be on empirical studies; the comparators in this case are decisions made by individuals while the intervention is group decision making. Outcomes include level of bias in decision outcomes or group performance. The search terms will include various combinations of the words “group”, “individual” and “decision-making”. The searches will be conducted in major publication databases, google scholar and specialist databases. Articles will be screened at the title and abstract and full text level by two reviewers. After checking for internal validity, the articles will be synthesized into subsets of decision contexts in which decision making by groups and individuals have been compared. The review process, all extracted data, original studies identified in the systematic review process and inclusion and exclusion decisions will be freely available as Additional file 1 in the final review.NM is funded by the Fondation Weiner Anspach in Belgium. WJS is funded by Arcadia. LVD was supported under the Biodiversity and Ecosystem Service Sustainability (BESS) Programme, grant code NE/K015419/1. GES is funded by The Nature Conservancy.This is the final version of the article. It first appeared from BioMed Central via http://dx.doi.org/10.1186/s13750-016-0066-

Long Range Interaction Models and Yangian Symmetry

The generalized Sutherland-Romer models and Yan models with internal spin degrees are formulated in terms of the Polychronakos' approach and RTT relation associated to the Yang-Baxter equation in consistent way. The Yangian symmetry is shown to generate both models. We finally introduce the reflection algebra K(u) to the long range models.Comment: 13 pages, preprint of Nankai Institute of Mathematics ( Theoretical Physics Division ), published in Physical Review E of 1995. For hard copy, write to Prof. Mo-lin GE directly. Do not send emails to this accoun

Simple study designs in ecology produce inaccurate estimates of biodiversity responses

Monitoring the impacts of anthropogenic threats and interventions to mitigate these threats is key to understanding how to best conserve biodiversity. Ecologists use many different study designs to monitor such impacts. Simpler designs lacking controls (e.g. Before-After (BA) and After) or pre-impact data (e.g. Control-Impact (CI)) are considered to be less robust than more complex designs (e.g. Before-After Control-Impact (BACI) or Randomised Controlled Trials (RCTs)). However, we lack quantitative estimates of how much less accurate simpler study designs are in ecology. Understanding this could help prioritise research and weight studies by their design’s accuracy in meta-analysis and evidence assessment. 2. We compared how accurately five study designs estimated the true effect of a simulated environmental impact that caused a step-change response in a population’s density. We derived empirical estimates of several simulation parameters from 47 ecological datasets to ensure our simulations were realistic. We measured design performance by determining the percentage of simulations where: (i) the true effect fell within the 95% Confidence Intervals of effect size estimates, and (ii) each design correctly estimated the true effect’s direction and magnitude. We also considered how sample size affected their performance. 3. We demonstrated that BACI designs performed: 1.3-1.8 times better than RCTs; 2.9-4.2 times vs BA; 3.2-4.6 times vs CI; and 7.1-10.1 times vs After designs (depending on sample size), when correctly estimating true effect’s direction and magnitude to within ±30%. Although BACI designs suffered from low power at small sample sizes, they outperformed other designs for almost all performance measures. Increasing sample size improved BACI design accuracy but only increased the precision of simpler designs around biased estimates. 4. Synthesis and applications. We suggest that more investment in more robust designs is needed in ecology since inferences from simpler designs, even with large sample sizes may be misleading. Facilitating this requires longer-term funding and stronger research-practice partnerships. We also propose ‘accuracy weights’ and demonstrate how they can weight studies in three recent meta-analyses by accounting for study design and sample size. We hope these help decision-makers and meta-analysts better account for study design when assessing evidence

Spin dependent extension of Calogero-Sutherland model through anyon like representations of permutation operators

We consider a $A_{N-1}$ type of spin dependent Calogero-Sutherland model, containing an arbitrary representation of the permutation operators on the combined internal space of all particles, and find that such a model can be solved as easily as its standard $su(M)$ invariant counterpart through the diagonalisation of Dunkl operators. A class of novel representations of the permutation operator $P_{ij}$, which pick up nontrivial phase factors along with interchanging the spins of $i$-th and $j$-th particles, are subsequently constructed. These `anyon like' representations interestingly lead to different variants of spin Calogero-Sutherland model with highly nonlocal interactions. We also explicitly derive some exact eigenfunctions as well as energy eigenvalues of these models and observe that the related degeneracy factors crucially depend on the choice of a few discrete parameters which characterise such anyon like representations.Comment: 25 pages, plain LaTex file, the results of sec.4 are presented in a more explicit way, to appear in Nucl. Phys.

Poor availability of context-specific evidence hampers decision-making in conservation

Evidence-based conservation relies on reliable and relevant evidence. Practitioners often prefer locally relevant studies whose results are more likely to be transferable to the context of planned conservation interventions. To quantify the availability of relevant evidence for amphibian and bird conservation we reviewed Conservation Evidence, a database of quantitative tests of conservation interventions. Studies were geographically clustered, and few locally conducted studies were found in Western sub-Saharan Africa, Russia, South East Asia, and Eastern South America. Globally there were extremely low densities of studies per intervention - fewer than one study within 2000 km of a given location. The availability of relevant evidence was extremely low when we restricted studies to those studying biomes or taxonomic orders containing high percentages of threatened species, compared to the most frequently studied biomes and taxonomic orders. Further constraining the evidence by study design showed that only 17–20% of amphibian and bird studies used reliable designs. Our results highlight the paucity of evidence on the effectiveness of conservation interventions, and the disparity in evidence for local contexts that are frequently studied and those where conservation needs are greatest. Addressing the serious global shortfall in context-specific evidence requires a step change in the frequency of testing conservation interventions, greater use of reliable study designs and standardized metrics, and methodological advances to analyze patchy evidence bases

Integrable boundary impurities in the t-J model with different gradings

We investigate the generalized supersymmetric $t-J$ model with boundary impurities in different gradings. All three different gradings: fermion, fermion, boson (FFB), boson, fermion, fermion (BFF) and fermion, boson, fermion (FBF), are studied for the generalized supersymmetric $t-J$ model. Boundary K-matrix operators are found for the different gradings. By using the graded algebraic Bethe ansatz method, we obtain the eigenvalues and the corresponding Bethe ansatz equations for the transfer matrix.Comment: Latex file, 20 page

Elementary Excitations and Dynamical Correlation Functions of the Calogero-Sutherland Model with Internal Symmetry

We consider the physical properties of elementary excitations of the Calogero-Sutherland (CS) model with SU(K) internal symmetry. From the results on the thermodynamics of this model, we obtain the charge, spin, and statistics of elementary excitations. Combining this knowledge and the known results on the dynamics in the spinless CS model, we propose the expression for the dynamical correlation functions of the SU(K) CS model. In the asymptotic region, we confirm the consistency of our results with predictions from conformal field theory.Comment: 22 pages, REVTe

Understanding Urban Demand for Wild Meat in Vietnam: Implications for Conservation Actions

Vietnam is a significant consumer of wildlife, particularly wild meat, in urban restaurant settings. To meet this demand, poaching of wildlife is widespread, threatening regional and international biodiversity. Previous interventions to tackle illegal and potentially unsustainable consumption of wild meat in Vietnam have generally focused on limiting supply. While critical, they have been impeded by a lack of resources, the presence of increasingly organised criminal networks and corruption. Attention is, therefore, turning to the consumer, but a paucity of research investigating consumer demand for wild meat will impede the creation of effective consumer-centred interventions. Here we used a mixed-methods research approach comprising a hypothetical choice modelling survey and qualitative interviews to explore the drivers of wild meat consumption and consumer preferences among residents of Ho Chi Minh City, Vietnam. Our findings indicate that demand for wild meat is heterogeneous and highly context specific. Wild-sourced, rare, and expensive wild meat-types are eaten by those situated towards the top of the societal hierarchy to convey wealth and status and are commonly consumed in lucrative business contexts. Cheaper, legal and farmed substitutes for wild-sourced meats are also consumed, but typically in more casual consumption or social drinking settings. We explore the implications of our results for current conservation interventions in Vietnam that attempt to tackle illegal and potentially unsustainable trade in and consumption of wild meat and detail how our research informs future consumer-centric conservation actions

Stochastic association of neighboring replicons creates replication factories in budding yeast

Peer reviewedPublisher PD

Building a tool to overcome barriers in research-implementation spaces: The conservation evidence database

Conservation practitioners, policy-makers and researchers work within shared spaces with many shared goals. Improving the flow of information between conservation researchers, practitioners and policy-makers could lead to dramatic gains in the effectiveness of conservation practice. However, several barriers can hinder this transfer including lack of time, inaccessibility of evidence, the real or perceived irrelevance of scientific research to practical questions, and the politically motivated spread of disinformation. Conservation Evidence works to overcome these barriers by providing a freely-available database of summarized scientific evidence for the effects of conservation interventions on biodiversity. The methods used to build this database – a combination of discipline-wide literature searching and subject-wide evidence synthesis – have been developed over the last 15 years to address the challenges of synthesizing large volumes of evidence of varying quality and measured outcomes. Here, we describe the methods to enhance understanding of the database and how it should be used. We discuss how the database can help to expand multi-directional information transfers between research, practice and policy, which should improve the implementation of evidence-based conservation and, ultimately, achieve better outcomes for biodiversity