Quantitative analysis of behaviour phase difference in locusts with the examination of spatial distribution patterns

The use of cameras to analyze locust activity, attraction / repulsion is an innovation that is increasingly used in behavioral studies. It allows to simultaneously collect information without interacting with the locusts and to observe more discrete behaviors which are not visually noticeable. Although the technique is complementary to the one focused on the analysis of the individual response to a group of stimuli, it offers an improvement in the observation methods of groups of individuals through the application of spatial statistics. In our present study, we did laboratory analysis of locust spatial distribution patterns in a circular arena for characterizing phase status. With spatial statistics, we examined the temporal variations of nearest neighbor distances as a criterion of attraction / repulsion between individuals raised either in isolation or in groups in order to induce phase behavior. Also, the successive changes of position of the individuals because of their activity in the circular arena were interpreted as criterion of differentiation between solitarious and gregarious locust phases. Tests were carried out, first with the sequences of photographs taken at regular intervals on 3rd instar hoppers of Desert Locust, Schistocerca gregaria, and secondly with the help of video tracking on 3rd instar hoppers of the Migratory Locust, Locusta migratoria. Making inferences on the underlying process that generates the temporal variations of the positions of the hoppers in the arena, we found that there was a larger nearest neighbor distance between isolated-rearedhoppers (indicating repulsion) in contrast to crowd-rearedhoppers, which showed an attraction with their conspecifics. From the analysis of walked distances in both tests, we found a greater activity of crowd-rearedhoppers compared to isolated-rearedhoppers. This method of quantitative analysis of locust phase differences appears to be more effective in saving time and providing more insight into as yet unclear aspects of behavioral phase studies

Machine Translation for Nko: Tools, Corpora and Baseline Results

Currently, there is no usable machine translation system for Nko, a language spoken by tens of millions of people across multiple West African countries, which holds significant cultural and educational value. To address this issue, we present a set of tools, resources, and baseline results aimed towards the development of usable machine translation systems for Nko and other languages that do not currently have sufficiently large parallel text corpora available. (1) Fria$\parallel$el: A novel collaborative parallel text curation software that incorporates quality control through copyedit-based workflows. (2) Expansion of the FLoRes-200 and NLLB-Seed corpora with 2,009 and 6,193 high-quality Nko translations in parallel with 204 and 40 other languages. (3) nicolingua-0005: A collection of trilingual and bilingual corpora with 130,850 parallel segments and monolingual corpora containing over 3 million Nko words. (4) Baseline bilingual and multilingual neural machine translation results with the best model scoring 30.83 English-Nko chrF++ on FLoRes-devtest

SMOS based high resolution soil moisture estimates for Desert locust preventive management

This paper presents the first attempt to include soil moisture information from remote sensing in the tools available to desert locust managers. The soil moisture requirements were first assessed with the users. The main objectives of this paper are: i) to describe and validate the algorithms used to produce a soil moisture dataset at 1 km resolution relevant to desert locust management based on DisPATCh methodology applied to SMOS and ii) the development of an innovative approach to derive high-resolution (100 m) soil moisture products from Sentinel-1 in synergy with SMOS data. For the purpose of soil moisture validation, 4 soil moisture stations where installed in desert areas (one in each user country). The soil moisture 1 km product was thoroughly validated and its accuracy is amongst the best available soil moisture products. Current comparison with in-situ soil moisture stations shows good values of correlation (R>0.7R>0.7) and low RMSE (below 0.04 m3 m−3). The low number of acquisitions on wet dates has limited the development of the soil moisture 100 m product over the Users Areas. The Soil Moisture product at 1 km will be integrated into the national and global Desert Locust early warning systems in national locust centres and at DLIS-FAO, respectively