Movement, habitat selection, and survival of female wood ducks (Aix sponsa) and ducklings at Long Point, Ontario.

Nest box programs provide additional nesting opportunities for wood ducks throughout their breeding range. The purpose of my research was to understand habitat use and survival of wood ducks produced from nest boxes during the brood-rearing period. I used radio-telemetry to monitor female wood ducks and ducklings to 30 days post-hatch. Females showed the greatest selection for swamp, scrub-shrub, and emergent marsh habitats, and used emergent marsh most. Female survival was high (0.90, 95% CI = 0.81 – 1.0). Conversely, brood survival (0.47, 95% CI = 0.33 - 0.69) and duckling survival (0.18, 95% CI = 0.14 – 0.22) were low, but similar to estimates from other studies. Brood survival decreased with hatch date, but increased with precipitation. Duckling survival was greater with younger and heavier females, and decreased with increased brood size. Management should focus on conservation and provision of swamp and scrub-shrub habitats, and increasing duckling survival to benefit recruitment

Trump holds more positive views toward Vladimir Putin than both his predecessor and his own foreign policy team

Content analysis of public statements by Stephen Benedict Dyson and Matthew J. Parent shows that President Trump has described a more positive approach to Russia than that of President Obama, and President Putin has responded in kind. Data shows that foreign policy officials of the Trump administration hold significantly more hostile views toward Russia than the president, providing further insight into the nature of the Putin-Trump relationship

Internet of Things for beyond-the-laboratory prosthetics research

Research on upper-limb prostheses is typically laboratory-based. Evidence indicates that research has not yet led to prostheses that meet user needs. Inefficient communication loops between users, clinicians and manufacturers limit the amount of quantitative and qualitative data that researchers can use in refining their innovations. This paper offers a first demonstration of an alternative paradigm by which remote, beyond-the-laboratory prosthesis research according to user needs is feasible. Specifically, the proposed Internet of Things setting allows remote data collection, real-time visualization and prosthesis reprogramming through Wi-Fi and a commercial cloud portal. Via a dashboard, the user can adjust the configuration of the device and append contextual information to the prosthetic data. We evaluated this demonstrator in real-time experiments with three able-bodied participants. Results promise the potential of contextual data collection and system update through the internet, which may provide real-life data for algorithm training and reduce the complexity of send-home trials. This article is part of the theme issue ‘Advanced neurotechnologies: translating innovation for health and well-being’

Arduino-based myoelectric control: Towards longitudinal study of prosthesis use

Understanding how upper-limb prostheses are used in daily life helps to improve the design and robustness of prosthesis control algorithms and prosthetic components. However, only a very small fraction of published research includes prosthesis use in community settings. The cost, limited battery life, and poor generalisation may be the main reasons limiting the implementation of home-based applications. In this work, we introduce the design of a cost-effective Arduino-based myoelectric control system with wearable electromyogram (EMG) sensors. The design considerations focused on home studies, so the robustness, user-friendly control adjustments, and user supports were the main concerns. Three control algorithms, namely, direct control, abstract control, and linear discriminant analysis (LDA) classification, were implemented in the system. In this paper, we will share our design principles and report the robustness of the system in continuous operation in the laboratory. In addition, we will show a first real-time implementation of the abstract decoder for prosthesis control with an able-bodied participant

Nesting Ecology of Ducks in the Boreal Forest

The western boreal forest (WBF) is an important breeding area for North American ducks, second only to the prairie pothole region (PPR). The WBF is experiencing intensive industrial development, causing habitat loss and fragmentation. Land use change can have profound effects on predator-prey interactions and influence population dynamics. In most avian species, nest success is critical to population persistence. Therefore, species are under intense selective pressure to choose a safe nest site. Currently, we have limited knowledge of duck nesting ecology in the WBF, including the influence of changing land use practices on how ducks select nest sites, how those decisions influence nest survival, what predators eat duck nests, and how land use change effects predator communities. To answer these questions, we conducted extensive field research, which involved searching for and monitoring nests of ground nesting boreal ducks, using camera traps to identify predators at real and artificial nests, and using camera traps to monitor predator occupancy across our study area. We located 167 duck nests of 8 different species between 2016 and 2018 by nest searching across a gradient of industrial development. We investigated nest-site selection of ground nesting ducks in the WBF of Alberta at multiple levels and spatial scales using logistic regression-based resource selection functions. We also investigated how land use, landcover, and nest attributes (e.g., nest age, nest initiation date) influenced the daily survival rate of nests using the logistic exposure model. Finally, we evaluated land use and landcover characteristics that predicted predator occupancy using multiscale occupancy models from camera trap data across our study area to understand how predator communities are affected by industrial development. Our results provide the first descriptive studies of the nesting ecology of boreal ducks from Canada. We identified that ducks selected greater overhead cover and proportion of grass at nest sites, relative to paired-random locations. We also identified that nest-site selection strategies at the microhabitat level were different across nesting guilds and species in relation to vegetation structure and composition, which may facilitate coexistence. At a macrohabitat level, we identified strong selection for marsh habitat, with avoidance of pipelines and seismic lines. We also demonstrated how considering multiple spatial scales while investigating habitat selection is critical by illustrating scale dependent responses to different resources. We then spatially predicted our best model and its error to identify important nesting habitat for boreal ducks, which can be used to help prioritize habitat conservation in the region. Nest survival was relatively low across species (0.212 [85% CI: 0.152 - 0.282]) and increased with nest age and varied annually. At the microhabitat scale, nest survival increased with greater graminoid, forb, and shrub cover at the nest. At the macrohabitat scale, nest survival decreased with greater proportion of fen habitat, and increased with greater lengths of pipelines and roads in proximity to the nest. We did not find evidence that oil and gas development negatively affected duck nest survival. We identified 8 different species that predated boreal duck nests including American black bear, weasel spp., American marten, Canada lynx, coyote, red squirrel, common raven, and red-tailed hawk. Next, we found that predator species were more likely to use habitats associated with industrial development as opposed to prey species that avoided industrial development. Specifically, coyotes, black bears, and gray wolves had a higher probability of being detected in association with industrial development suggesting they might be more active or abundant in these areas. Considering this evidence with our nesting ecology data, we suggest that ducks appear to be resilient to current levels of development through avoiding predators during nest-site selection. However, continued development combined with climate change has the potential to continue to alter these relationships. This dissertation represents a first step towards understanding the nesting ecology of ducks in the boreal forest. We provide multiple lines of evidence from our study to help improve our understanding of the effect of industrial development on ducks. The human demand for natural resources is likely to continue to increase the industrial footprint in the boreal forest, a region once considered pristine. To successfully conserve wildlife in this region, continued research is required to deepen our understanding of how the industrial footprint influences habitat selection and space use of predators and prey. The evidence provided herein can be used to revise and adapt our current hypotheses and assumptions to direct further research questions to produce strong inference about ducks and development in the boreal forest

Online Extraction and Single Trial Analysis of Regions Contributing to Erroneous Feedback Detection

International audienceUnderstanding how the brain processes errors is an essential and active field of neuroscience. Real time extraction and analysis of error signals provide an innovative method of assessing how individuals perceive ongoing interactions without recourse to overt behaviour. This area of research is critical in modern Brain–Computer Interface (BCI) design, but may also open fruitful perspectives in cognitive neuroscience research. In this context, we sought to determine whether we can extract discriminatory error-related activity in the source space, online, and on a trial by trial basis from electroencephalography data recorded during motor imagery. Using a data driven approach, based on interpretable inverse solution algorithms, we assessed the extent to which automatically extracted error-related activity was physiologically and functionally interpretable according to performance monitoring literature. The applicability of inverse solution based methods for automatically extracting error signals, in the presence of noise generated by motor imagery, was validated by simulation. Representative regions of interest, outlining the primary generators contributing to classification, were found to correspond closely to networks involved in error detection and performance monitoring. We observed discriminative activity in non-frontal areas, demonstrating that areas outside of the medial frontal cortex can contribute to the classification of error feedback activity