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Tag: Environmental Science

  • Yellow evolution: Unique genes led to new species of monkeyflower

    Yellow evolution: Unique genes led to new species of monkeyflower

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    Newswise — Monkeyflowers glow in a rich assortment of colors, from yellow to pink to deep red-orange. But about 5 million years ago, some of them lost their yellow. In the Feb. 10 issue of Science, UConn botanists explain what happened genetically to jettison the yellow pigment, and the implications for the evolution of species.

    Monkeyflowers are famous for growing in harsh, mineral-rich soils where other plants can’t. They are also famously diverse in shape and color. And monkeyflowers provide a textbook example of how a single-gene change can make a new species. In this case, a monkeyflower species lost the yellow pigments in the petals but gained pink about 5 million years ago, attracting bees for pollination. Later, a descendent species accumulated mutations in a gene called YUP that recovered the yellow pigments and led to production of red flowers. The species stopped attracting bees. Instead, hummingbirds pollinated it, isolating the red flowers genetically and creating a new species.

    UConn botanist Yaowu Yuan and postdoctoral researcher Mei Liang (currently a professor at South China Agricultural University), with collaborators from four other institutes, have now shown exactly which gene it is that changed to prevent monkeyflowers from making yellow. Their research, published this week in Science, adds weight to a theory that new genes create phenotypic diversity and even new species.

    The YUP gene in question is found at a locus, or region, of the monkeyflower genome that has three new genes. These new genes are not found in species outside of this group. They are duplicates of other genes from other parts of the monkeyflower genome. In particular, YUP is a partial duplicate of a pre-existing gene that has nothing to do with color.

    Standard genetics thought is that partial duplicate genes regulate the genes they are derived from; it was very unlikely that these genes would affect an unrelated gene. Liang decided to investigate what these genes were doing anyway, against the advice of Yuan, who thought it was a waste of time.  But Liang’s persistence paid off: she discovered that the YUP gene was actually targeting the plants’ master regulator of carotenoids, the pigments that make monkeyflowers and other plants yellow. YUP produced many small RNAs that suppressed the carotenoid gene. There are very few examples of genes that produce small RNAs affecting traits important to the creation of a new species.

    “This experience really taught me how important it is not to constrain oneself with ‘conventional wisdom’,” Yuan says. Not only does YUP regulate a gene it is entirely unrelated to it; the other two genes at this same locus also affect monkeyflower color, Yuan says.

    The uniqueness of these three genes, only found in a few closely related monkeyflowers, is an important clue as to how new species evolve.

    “Almost every single species has unique genes,” called ‘taxon specific’ because they are only found in a small group of species. “For the most part, we have no idea what these genes do,” says Yuan. This research shows that these taxon specific genes can be the keys to the new species. Previously, many geneticists and evolutionary biologists thought that it was changes in the expression of common genes shared by many different species that differentiated them, and that the small number of idiosyncratic genes were unlikely to be important.

    “We think we understand evolution well enough to make predictions. But now we are realizing we really don’t. Evolution is just so unpredictable,” Yuan says.

    His lab is now looking at how the monkeyflower genome controls the production of pigment spatially. For example, some monkeyflowers have upper petals that are entirely white, but lower petals with color. Yuan and his colleagues want to know how the plants suppress pigment only in certain parts of the flower.

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    University of Connecticut

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  • Powerful earthquake hits Turkey and Syria – media experts available for comment

    Powerful earthquake hits Turkey and Syria – media experts available for comment

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    Newswise — Dr Carmen Solana, course leader for MSc Crisis and Disaster Management at the University of Portsmouth:
    https://www.port.ac.uk/about-us/structure-and-governance/our-people/our-staff/carmen-solana

    Available for Zoom/Skype/WhatsApp interviews

    “Earthquakes cannot be accurately forecast, so prevention of the consequences depends on the country’s preparedness, such as earthquake resistant infrastructure, and efficient response.

    “The resistant infrastructure unfortunately is patchy in South Turkey and especially in Syria, so saving lives now mostly relies on a quick response. The next 24 hours are crucial to find survivors, after 48 hours the number of survivors decreases enormously.”

    Dr Catherine Mottram, Senior Lecturer in Structural Geology and Tectonics at the University of Portsmouth:
    https://www.port.ac.uk/about-us/structure-and-governance/our-people/our-staff/catherine-mottram

    Available for Zoom/Skype/WhatsApp interviews

    “Earthquakes occur when locked portions of faults suddenly ‘break’, resulting in rocks moving rapidly during catastrophic failure events. Aftershocks are usually lower magnitude earthquakes that happen as the crust settles and recovers in the new position. 

    “There is the potential that the 7.5 magnitude shock was related to a second period of movement along a different depth or along strike location on the fault, or on a different fault strand. Geophysicists will be able to reconstruct exactly where movement occurred along the fault by reconstructing data collected by seismometers in the region, so more information should come out in the coming days and weeks about exactly what happened.

    “The earthquake likely occurred on either the East Anatolian Fault or Dead Sea Transform, both of these are strike-slip faults, so a very similar geological setting to the San Andreas Fault in North America. The East Anatolian Fault is also a plate boundary between the broadly northward moving Arabian plate and the westward moving Anatolian plate. The Anatolian plate is very seismically active and is bordered by two strike-slip faults, the North and East Anatolian faults. There is also volcanic activity and other modern geological hazards associated with the boundaries.”

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    University of Portsmouth

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  • Study reveals salps play outsize role in damping global warming

    Study reveals salps play outsize role in damping global warming

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    Newswise — Humans continue to amplify global warming by emitting billions of tons of carbon dioxide into the atmosphere each year. A new study reveals that a distant human relative plays an outsize role in damping the impacts of this greenhouse gas by pumping large amounts of carbon from the ocean surface to the deep sea, where it contributes nothing to current warming.

    The study, led by Dr. Deborah Steinberg of William & Mary’s Virginia Institute of Marine Science, appeared in the latest issue of Global Biogeochemical Cycles. It reports on research conducted as part of EXPORTS, a 4-year, multi-institutional field program funded by NASA. Co-authors hail from marine institutes in Maine, Bermuda, California, Newfoundland, British Columbia, and Alaska.

    The goal of EXPORTS, for EXport Processes in the Ocean from RemoTe Sensing, is to combine shipboard and satellite observations to more accurately quantify the global impact of the “biological pump.” This is a suite of biological processes that transport carbon and other organic matter from sunlit surface waters to the deep sea, effectively removing carbon dioxide from the surface ocean and atmosphere. Tiny drifting animals called zooplankton play a key role in the pump by eating phytoplankton, which incorporate carbon from carbon dioxide into their tissues during photosynthesis, then exporting that carbon to depth.

    During a month-long EXPORTS expedition to the northeast Pacific Ocean in 2018, Steinberg and colleagues chanced upon a large bloom of a poorly studied player in the biological pump: a species of gelatinous zooplankton named Salpa aspera. Like other salps, these “jelly barrels” begin life with a notochord—the structure that develops into the spinal cord in humans and other vertebrates—and as adults drift through the world’s oceans like tiny transparent whales, filtering microscopic plants afloat in the water. 

    Three features keyed the team’s interest in salps, and S. aspera in particular. One is that these organisms can reproduce asexually, rapidly cloning into immense blooms under the right conditions. Second is that S. aspera is bigger and filters more water than most other zooplankton, thus producing larger, heavier fecal pellets. Third is that it migrates up and down through the water each day, rising to feed on phytoplankton during the cover of night and jetting to the perpetual darkness of the deep sea during sunlit hours to avoid its own predators, which include sea turtles, marine birds, and fishes.

    Together, these features had led researchers to suspect that salps might play an important role in the biological pump, as large blooms of these relatively bulky zooplankton could effectively transport carbon to depth through their heavy, fast-sinking fecal pellets; vertical migrations that give those pellets a head start on their journey to depth; and the sinking of countless salp carcasses during a bloom (individual salps live only a few weeks).

    But the proof is in the pudding, and the ephemeral life cycle and uneven distribution of salps has long challenged efforts to study their role in carbon export and deep-sea food webs. “Salps follow a ‘bloom or bust’ life cycle,” says Steinberg, “with populations that are inherently patchy in space and time. That makes it hard to observe or model their contribution to the export of carbon to the deep sea.”

    During the 2018 EXPORTS expedition to the Pacific, Steinberg and colleagues were able to overcome these challenges by deploying a wide range of ocean-observation tools, from traditional plankton nets and sediment traps to underwater video recorders and sonar-based computer models. Moreover, by using two research vessels—the 277-ft Roger Revelleand the 238-ft Sally Ride—the scientists were able to observe conditions not only inside the salp bloom but in surrounding waters, providing a broader geographic context for their study.

    The results of the team’s unprecedented field campaign were clear. “High salp abundances, combined with unique features of their ecology and physiology, lead to an outsized role in the biological pump,” says Steinberg. 

    To put things in perspective, the observed salp bloom covered more than 4,000 square miles (~11,000 km2), about the size of Connecticut. With onboard experiments showing salps capable of exporting a daily average of 9 milligrams of carbon through each square meter at 100 meters below the bloom, the amount of carbon exported to the deep sea was about 100 metric tons per day. For comparison, a typical passenger car emits 4.6 metric tons per year. Comparing these values shows the carbon removed from the climate system each day of the bloom is equal to taking 7,500 cars off the road. Adjusting these values using the team’s highest measured rate of salp-mediated export (34 mg of C per day) increases the carbon offset to more than 28,000 vehicles.

    Moving forward, the team calls for increased recognition of the key role that salps play in global carbon export. “Blooms like the one we observed often go undetected,” says Steinberg, “and their contributions to the biological pump are rarely quantified, even in some of the best-studied regions of the world’s oceans.” Incorporation of salp dynamics into a recent carbon-cycle model illustrates the potential of salp-mediated export. In this global model, salps and other tunicates exported 700 million metric tons of carbon to the deep sea each year, equal to emissions from more than 150 million cars. 

    “Greater use of new technologies, such as adding video imaging systems to autonomous floats, would help detect these salp blooms,” says Steinberg. “Our study serves as a ‘call to arms’ to better detect and quantify these processes, using technology and sampling schemes that enable their inclusion in measurements and models of the biological carbon pump.”

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    Virginia Institute of Marine Science

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  • Decades-old crustaceans coaxed from lake mud give up genetic secrets revealing evolution in action

    Decades-old crustaceans coaxed from lake mud give up genetic secrets revealing evolution in action

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    Newswise — Human actions are changing the environment at an unprecedented rate. Plant and animal populations must try to keep up with these human-accelerated changes, often by trying to rapidly evolve tolerance to changing conditions.

    University of Oklahoma researchers Lawrence Weider, professor of biology, and Matthew Wersebe, a biology doctoral candidate, demonstrated rapid evolution in action by sequencing the genomes of a population of Daphnia pulicaria, an aquatic crustacean, from a polluted lake.  

    The research, which was conducted as part of Wersebe’s doctoral dissertation, was recently published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.  Wersebe and Weider revived decades-old Daphnia resting eggs from lake sediments, a method known as resurrection ecology, which has been refined in Weider’s lab over the past several decades. They then sequenced the entire genomes of 54 different Daphnia individuals from different points-in-time, allowing them to study the genetics and evolution of the population.

    The Daphnia were collected from Tanners Lake, located in Oakdale, Minnesota. Tanners Lake has suffered significant salt pollution, stemming from the widespread use of road deicing salts in its watershed.  

    Daphnia, also known as water fleas, play critical roles in environmental monitoring. For example, they have served as important test organisms in laboratories around the world for over a century because of their sensitivity to many environmental stressors such as chemicals. In nature, Daphnia act as a keystone species in freshwater food webs globally, where they feed on algae to help keep lake and reservoir water clean and serve as a food item for recreational and commercially important fish species.

    Wersebe’s and Weider’s results indicate that rapid adaptation to salt pollution may allow lake Daphnia to persist in the face of anthropogenic salinization, maintaining the food webs and ecosystem services that Daphnia support. However, the ability of these populations to adapt will depend on the speed at which these changes are occurring and the underlying genetic makeup of the impacted populations. 

    Over the past several years, many researchers have published results defining the scope and scale of lake salinization and recent research has highlighted the ecological impacts. However, to date, the evolutionary implications are not well known. Through their study, Wersebe and Weider reported signatures of natural selection throughout the genome near genes related to osmoregulation and ion regulation, key processes for dealing with high salt. Characterizing clones for salinity tolerance revealed evidence that genetic changes may underlie rapid evolution.  

    “Work like this is the first step in designing future studies incorporating recent technological advances, such as CRISPR gene editing, allowing the creation of comprehensive genotype-to-phenotype maps and predicting the role that genetic variation plays in creating diverse forms and functions,” Wersebe said. “In fact, we found a promising gene that appears not to work properly in the older Daphnia, but a functional copy of the gene is increasing in frequency – true evolution in action.”

    Future research using these advanced technologies for cutting and pasting the non-functional gene into Daphnia would be one way to better probe the effects that mutations have on complex phenotypic traits like salinity tolerance.  

    The work was funded by the OU Department of Biology Adams Summer Scholarship, Robberson OU Graduate College Grant, Hill Fund for Research in Biology, OU Graduate Student Senate Research Grant, American Museum of Natural History Theodore Roosevelt Grant and the National Science Foundation Biogeography of Behavior student seed grant awarded to Wersebe in support of graduate research. The study was facilitated by material and technical assistance from the University of Oklahoma Biological Station in Kingston, Oklahoma, and the St. Croix Watershed Research Station in Marine-on-St. Croix, Minnesota.  

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    University of Oklahoma

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  • Tying past mass extinctions with low atmospheric CO2 is false

    Tying past mass extinctions with low atmospheric CO2 is false

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    Newswise — Attempts to discredit human-caused climate change by touting graphs of prehistoric atmospheric carbon dioxide and temperature changes are not something new. Peter Clack, an out-spoken climate change skeptic has once again tried to make a point that current atmospheric carbon dioxide levels are comparatively low compared to past eras. In this recent tweet, shared by thousands, Clack includes a graph from the work of Chris Scotese, an American geologist and paleogeographer, which shows that current levels of atmospheric carbon dioxide are relatively low compared to past events and that the only other time CO2 levels were this low was during the early Permian geological era, which spans 47 million years from the end of the Carboniferous Period 298.9 million years ago, to the beginning of the Triassic Period 251.9 million years ago. Clack mentions the “greatest extinction event in world history,” also known as the Permian Extinction as if this happened despite the low atmospheric CO2 recorded. However, most geological scientists contend that the Permian extinction occurred over the course of 15 million years during the latter part of the Permian Period (299 million to 252 million years ago).* Does this at all negate human-caused climate change that is happening in our own era? Of course not. In fact, this observation only backs the belief that a rise in global temperatures (and a sharp rise in CO2) impacts the living species on the planet. The main difference is that today’s fast rise in global temperatures can be prevented by the de-escalation of greenhouse gas emissions.

    The Permian extinction was characterized by the elimination of about 90 percent of the species on Earth. Although the exact cause of the mass extinction event has been debated in the past, a recent study from 2018 showed that the Permian mass extinction in the oceans was most likely caused by global warming that left animals unable to breathe. In fact, there was a steep rise of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere during the late Permian era, as the Scotese graph shows. Scientists believe that this was caused by considerable volcanic activity in present-day Siberia (tied to the dismantling of the supercontinent of Pangaea). This event points to rising CO2 and temperatures drastically affecting the biosphere.

    Chris Cramer, chief research officer at Underwriters Laboratories explains…

    The first and second graphs in this Tweet show that the first claim (600 million year minimum) and second claim (lowest global temperatures) are demonstrably false.

    Any relationship between the Permian extinction event and a local minimum in CO2 (relative to prior higher levels) simply shows how catastrophic it can be to living organisms when there is a significant change in CO2 levels, and associated temperatures, just as is happening right now with human activity driving CO2 above 400 ppm for the first time in millennia.

    Andrew Dessler, director of Texas Center for Climate Studies and professor of atmospheric sciences at Texas A&M also chimes in…

    So what’s wrong with this claim?  It suggests that low CO2 is the cause of the extinction.  I am not an expert on this, but I think the extinction has actually been linked to extensive volcanism that was occurring at about that same time.  In addition, 250 years ago the Earth had 280 ppm of CO2 in the atmosphere and the biosphere was doing just fine.  In fact, during the ice age (20,000 years ago), atmospheric CO2 was 180 ppm and the biosphere did OK.

    *https://www.britannica.com/science/Permian-extinction/Alteration-of-the-carbon-cycle

    Note to Journalists/Editors: The expert quotes are free to use in your relevant articles on this topic. Please attribute them to their proper sources.

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    Newswise

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  • Ancestral variation guides future environmental adaptations

    Ancestral variation guides future environmental adaptations

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    Newswise — The speed of environmental change is very challenging for wild organisms. When exposed to a new environment individual plants and animals can potentially adjust their biology to better cope with new pressures they are exposed to – this is known as phenotypic plasticity.

    Plasticity is likely to be important in the early stages of colonising new places or when exposed to toxic substances in the environment. New research published in Nature Ecology & Evolution, shows that early plasticity can influence the ability to subsequently evolve genetic adaptations to conquer new habitats.

    Sea campion, a coastal wildflower from the UK and Ireland has adapted to toxic, zinc rich industrial-era mining waste which kills most other plant species. The zinc-tolerant plants have evolved from zinc-sensitive, coastal populations separately in different places, several times.

    To understand the role of plasticity in rapid adaptation, a team of researchers lead by Bangor University conducted experiments on sea campion.

    As zinc-tolerance has evolved several times, this gave the researchers the opportunity to investigate whether ancestral plasticity made it more likely that the same genes would be used by different populations that were exposed to the same environment.

    By exposing the tolerant and sensitive plants to both benign and zinc contaminated environments and measuring changes in the expression of genes in the plant’s roots, the researchers were able to see how plasticity in the coastal ancestors has paved the way for adaptation to take place very quickly.

    Dr Alex Papadopulos, senior lecturer at Bangor University explained:

    “Sea campion usually grow on cliffs and shingle beaches, but mining opened up a new niche for them that other plants weren’t able to exploit. Our research has shown that some of the beneficial plasticity in the coastal plants has helped the mine plants to adapt so quickly.”

    Alex added,

    “Remarkably, if a gene responds to the new environment in a beneficial way in the ancestral plants, it is much more likely that that gene will be reused in all of the lineages that are independently adapting to the new environment. Phenotypic plasticity may make it more likely that there would be the same evolutionary outcome if the tape of life were replayed. If we understand the plastic responses that species have to environmental change, we may be better equipped to predict the impacts of climate change on biodiversity.”

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    Bangor University

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  • Discovering Unique Microbes Made Easy with DOE Systems Biology Knowledgebase (KBase)

    Discovering Unique Microbes Made Easy with DOE Systems Biology Knowledgebase (KBase)

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    The Science

    Microbes are foundational for life on Earth. These tiny organisms play a major role in everything from transforming sunlight into the fundamental molecules of life. They help to produce much of the oxygen in our atmosphere. They even cycle nutrients between air and soil. Scientists are constantly finding interactions between microbes and plants, animals, and other macroscopic lifeforms. As genomic sequencing has advanced, researchers can investigate not only isolated microbes, but also whole communities of microorganisms – known as microbiomes – based on DNA found in an environment. The genomes extracted from these communities (metagenomic sequences) can identify the organisms that carry out biogeochemical processes, contribute to health or disease in human gastrointestinal microbiomes, or interact with plant roots in the rhizosphere. The Department of Energy Systems Biology Knowledgebase (KBase) recently released a suite of features and a protocol for performing sophisticated microbiome analysis that can accelerate research in microbial ecology.

    The Impact

    The widespread adoption of DNA sequencing in microbiology has generated huge amounts of genomic data. Researchers need computational tools to recover high-quality genomes from environmental samples to understand which organisms live in an environment and how they might interact. The combination of usability, data, and bioinformatics tools in a public online resource makes KBase a uniquely powerful web platform for performing this task. These new features in KBase will allow biologists to obtain genomes from microbiome sequences with easy-to-use software powered by Department of Energy computational resources. This will reduce the time required to process sequencing data and characterize genomes. Scientists can use KBase to collaboratively analyze genomics data and build research communities to solve common problems in microbial ecology.

    Summary

    Obtaining genomes of uncultivated microbes directly from the environment using DNA sequencing is a recent advance that allows scientists to discover and characterize novel organisms. Sequencing the DNA of all the microbes in a given environment produces a “metagenome.” Performing genetic analysis of metagenomes has emerged as a way to explore microbial traits and behaviors and community interactions in an environmental context. Methods for obtaining metagenome-assembled genomes (MAGs) have varying degrees of success, depending on the techniques used. An increasing number of researchers generate microbiome sequences, but many do not have ready access to the expertise, tools, and computational resources necessary to extract, evaluate, and analyze their genomes.

    The KBase team added and updated several metagenome analysis tools, data types, and execution capabilities to provide researchers the tools that accelerate the discovery of microbial genomes and uncover the genetic potential of microbial communities. A recent paper in Nature Protocols presents a series of analysis steps, using KBase apps and data products for extracting high quality MAGs from metagenomes. These capabilities, including computing, data storage, and sharing of data and analyses, are provided free to the public via the KBase web platform. This protocol allows scientists to both generate putative genomes from organisms only found in the environment and analyze them with tools to understand who they are, what they are doing, who they are interacting with, and their role in the ecosystem.

     

    Funding

    KBase is funded by the Genomic Science Program in the Department of Energy Office of Science, Office of Biological and Environmental Research.


    Journal Link: Nature Protocols

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    Department of Energy, Office of Science

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  • When bugs swipe left

    When bugs swipe left

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    Newswise — It’s almost Valentine’s Day, and love is in the air. Or in the waxy coating on your skin, if you are a vinegar fly. That’s where flies encounter pheromones that play an important role in regulating sexual attraction.

    Flies use pheromones to ensure that they court and mate with members of the same species. As new fly species split off from a common ancestor, but continue to share the same environment, they need a way to rapidly diversify their pheromones to suppress inter-species mating. When members of two related species stop finding each other attractive, this helps prevent interbreeding.

    But it’s more complicated than “she loves me, she loves me not.“

    Because the perception and production of pheromones are mediated by different tissues and cellular pathways, evolving new mating pheromones requires a coordinated evolution of both the genes responsible for sensing the pheromones as well as the genes that produce them.

    A new study in iScience led by Yehuda Ben-Shahar at Washington University in St. Louis identifies a link between the genetic instructions for the production and perception of sex pheromones. The research was conducted in collaboration with Jocelyn Millar from the University of California, Riverside.

    Researchers reported that a single protein called Gr8a is expressed in different organs in male and female flies and appears to play an inhibitory role in mating decision-making. The findings point to one of the ways that flies could put up behavioral barriers to protect against mating with the wrong kind of partner.

    “Mating pheromones often show rapid evolution,” said Ben-Shahar, a professor of biology in Arts & Sciences. “Because pheromonal communication requires a very robust and specific structural recognition of chemicals used as pheromones by the proteins that bind them in sensory neurons (chemoreceptors), it means that major molecular changes in either the receptor or the pheromone would reduce sexual attraction between males and females.”

    Ben-Shahar and his team found that Gr8a was expressed in tissues in fly mouthparts, including the proboscis, as well as in taste neurons in the forelegs of both males and females. They also found Gr8a in cells in the abdomens of males. This was important because it provided Ben-Shahar and his team the first hint that a gene that had been previously identified as a sensory chemoreceptor must also have non-neuronal functions.

    “Our findings provide a relatively simple molecular explanation for how signal production and perception are tied together in vinegar flies,” Ben-Shahar said. “A single pleiotropic protein can function as both a receptor for pheromones in sensory neurons, as well as contribute to their production in the pheromone-producing cells (oenocytes) of males, by way of a less-understood process.”

    In one of the experiments that Ben-Shahar and his team conducted, the scientists took flies that were mutant for the Gr8a receptor and reconstituted them using input from a different vinegar fly species. This experiment showed that introducing Gr8a from another species was enough to change the overall pheromone profile of the animal.

    The scientists still have not pinpointed exactly how the chemoreceptor affects the way the signal is produced, but they do know that it causes quantitative and qualitative differences in pheromones. And even small changes in pheromones could be enough to keep closely related flies from finding each other attractive — and change their mate choice behaviors.

    The question of how closely related species evolve and maintain behavioral mating barriers is one that has implications for several different basic and applied biological research fields.

    “Based on what we have observed, mutations in a single gene could provide a molecular path for a pheromonal communication system to evolve while still maintaining the functional coupling between a pheromone and its receptor,” Ben-Shahar said. “Our research uncovers a potential avenue for pheromonal systems to rapidly evolve when new species arise.”

    —

    This work was supported by National Science Foundation grants 1322783, 1754264 and 1707221, and National Institutes of Health (NIH) grant NS089834.

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    Washington University in St. Louis

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  • Penguins, Robots, The Ocean and more

    Penguins, Robots, The Ocean and more

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    Newswise — Fieldwork in Antarctica is tricky, just ask University of Delaware scientist Matthew Breece. There is the 10-day trek to get there from Delaware, which includes a sometimes stomach-revolting four-day sail through Drake Passage, heavy research equipment to manage, limits on what you can pack. The temperatures are cool, averaging just above freezing at around 36 degrees Fahrenheit in the austral summer from October to February. Weather can change rapidly, too, relegating researchers indoors when conditions are poor and making for very long days in the field when conditions are pristine.

    But if you ask a scientist…or student…if the effort is worth it, the answer is a resounding YES!

    Marine biology students at Caesar Rodney High School in Camden, Delaware, got a firsthand look at what it’s like to conduct field research on penguins in Antarctica on Tuesday, Jan. 24, during a live video call with Matthew Breece, a research scientist in marine science and policy at the University of Delaware.

    “It’s fun, but also a lot of hard work,” said Breece, who guided the nearly 50 students through a virtual tour of Palmer Station, a United States research station situated on Anvers Island, Antarctica.

    Breece showed the students glaciers, laboratory experiments, research equipment and common areas, like the library, and shared stories and answered questions about living among wildlife including penguins, whales and seals. 

    “Wildlife have the right of way here,” said Breece, explaining how researchers were scrambling over rocks to get to their research vessels earlier in the week, while a crab-eater seal sunned itself on the boat dock. Gentoo penguins can swim 22 miles per hour, which is faster than the research boats can go, while Adélie penguins can only swim 10-12 mph.

    Breece and his colleagues are examining the feeding habits and predator-prey interactions of Adélie and Gentoo penguins in the region using an autonomous underwater vehicle (AUV). The AUV, called a REMUS, is equipped with a high-resolution echosounder that uses sonar to collect data about food resources that are available to marine animals in Palmer Deep Canyon on the West Antarctic Peninsula.

    Besides hearing from Breece, students also saw dramatic photographs from Antarctica and scientific charts used in the research.

    The new echosounder gives researchers a birds-eye view of what’s for lunch in the water. It was developed by Mark Moline, Maxwell P. and Mildred H. Harrington Professor of Marine Studies at UD and principal investigator on the project, and project co-PIs Kelly Benoit-Bird, senior scientist at Monterey Bay Aquarium Research Institute and Megan Cimino, assistant researcher at the Institute of Marine Sciences and assistant adjunct professor of ocean sciences at the University of California, Santa Cruz.

    “We switched to shorter wavelength frequencies to look at smaller things,” said Moline. “So, not only looking at the oceanography, but also the high-resolution food distribution of krill, copepods, fish and the species that eat them, like penguins.”

    The UD work complements the National Science Foundation’s ongoing Palmer Station Long-Term Ecological Research (LTER) study related to penguin population sizes and foraging ranges. The seabird component of the Palmer LTER research is led by Cimino, a UD alumna.

    Cimino has a second project with Carlos Moffat, a UD coastal physical oceanographer who also is in Antarctica serving as chief scientist of the Palmer LTER program, which has been collecting long-term ecological data for over 30 years. Collaborating institutions on the broader Palmer LTER study, led by Rutgers University and the Virginia Institute of Marine Science (VIMS), include researchers from UD, University of Virginia, Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution, University of Colorado, and University of California, Santa Cruz.

    Moffat also is conducting physical oceanography work as part of his NSF CAREER award to understand the dynamics of melting glaciers and how that impacts the ocean circulation and properties, such as salinity and temperature of the coastal ocean.

    “As the atmosphere is warming in this region of Antarctica, sea ice is decreasing and more glaciers are melting from the coast, physically changing the environment marine organisms are living in,” said Moffat. “One big question is what this means long term for marine organisms that live in these places, such as penguins, whales, seals and other wildlife. I see my contribution as trying to help them understand how the physical environment impacts the entire ecosystem.”

    From Antarctica to Delaware

    Lessons learned in Antarctica can help shed light on uncertainties about how sea level rise will evolve in other parts of the world, too. For instance, Delaware is a low-lying state with no area of the state more than eight miles from tidal waters. It is considered a big hotspot of sea level rise along the U.S. East Coast. And while sea levels are increasing on average around the world, due to ocean warming and melting ice from the continents, the distribution of sea level is very uneven. 

    “To understand what is going to happen in the future, we need to understand why sea levels are increasing and how it’s going to change over time,” said Moffat. “Antarctica is a good place to study this because change is happening very rapidly.”

    For most of the 20th century, the Palmer Station region was considered the fastest changing region in the southern hemisphere, while the Weddell Sea, which is located just around the corner of the Antarctic peninsula, had not changed as much. Over the last few years, researchers have begun to wonder whether the Weddell Sea has any influence on the West Antarctic Peninsula region or whether the regions are changing independently.

    To better understand these processes, Moffat’s team deployed two AUVs called gliders to sample the circulation close to the coast along the Antarctic peninsula, which is heavily influenced by the melting of glaciers. He and his students recovered oceanographic moorings that have been capturing data, such as water circulation currents, temperature and salinity, since early 2022. This is part of the West Antarctic Peninsula that has never been sampled before, so the team is eager to analyze the data.

    “I am particularly excited about the glider measurements, which I plan to add to my dissertation,” said Frederike (Rikki) Benz, a doctoral student in the Moffat lab. “It is especially interesting to be involved in the whole process from preparing, shipping and deploying to publishing.”

    Classrooms beyond campus

    For students, field research offers the opportunity for hands-on experience with sophisticated research instruments, data collection and analysis, troubleshooting and networking with researchers from other institutions. Sometimes those activities occur in remote regions of the world — like Antarctica.

    “The rarity of this experience comes with a sense of humility and responsibility to not take any moment for granted, a responsibility to ensure more opportunities are available for future students and scientists,” said Evan Quinter, who is pursuing a master’s degree in physical ocean science and engineering in the Moffat Lab.

    At Caesar Rodney High School, marine biology teachers Cristine Taylor and Sandra Ramsdell have just begun covering marine animals with their students. It is a fitting coincidence that made the live call with UD researchers both timely and meaningful.

    “Spending a day in class speaking with researchers was an awesome experience for our students,” said Taylor. “We are trying to encourage them to look at everything that goes into marine careers. Not every person is a marine biologist, there are computer scientists and engineers, ship captains and crew, and so many more people who can work in marine research.”

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    University of Delaware

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  • Farming more seaweed to be food, feed and fuel

    Farming more seaweed to be food, feed and fuel

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    Newswise — A University of Queensland-led study has shown that expanding global seaweed farming could go a long way to addressing the planet’s food security, biodiversity loss and climate change challenges.

    PhD Candidate Scott Spillias, from UQ’s School of Earth and Environmental Science, said seaweed offered a sustainable alternative to land-based agricultural expansion to meet the world’s growing need for food and materials.

    “Seaweed has great commercial and environmental potential as a nutritious food and a building block for commercial products including animal feed, plastics, fibres, diesel and ethanol,” Mr Spillias said.

    “Our study found that expanding seaweed farming could help reduce demand for terrestrial crops and reduce global agricultural greenhouse gas emissions (GHG) by up to 2.6 billion tonnes of CO2-equivalent per year.”

    Researchers mapped the potential of farming more of the 34 commercially important seaweed species using the Global Biosphere Management Model.

    They estimated the environmental benefits of a range of scenarios based on land-use changes, GHG emissions, water and fertiliser use, and projected changes in species presence by 2050.

    “In one scenario where we substituted 10 per cent of human diets globally with seaweed products, the development of 110 million hectares of land for farming could be prevented,” Mr Spillias said.

    “We also identified millions of available hectares of ocean within global exclusive economic zones* (EEZs), where farming could be developed.

    “The largest share of suitable ocean was in the Indonesian EEZ, where up to 114 million hectares is estimated to be suitable for seaweed farming.

    “The Australian EEZ also shows great potential and species diversity, with at least 22 commercially viable species and an estimated 75 million hectares of ocean being suitable.”

    Mr Spillias said many native species of seaweed in Australian waters had not yet been studied from a commercial production perspective.

    “The way I like to look at this is to think about ancestral versions of everyday crops – like corn and wheat – which were uninspiring, weedy things,” he said.

    “Through thousands of years of breeding we have developed the staple crops that underpin modern societies and seaweed could very well hold similar potential in the future.”

    UQ study collaborator Professor Eve McDonald-Madden said the seaweed solution would have to be carried out with care, to avoid displacing problems from the land to the ocean.

    “Our study points out what could be done to address some of the mounting problems of global sustainability facing us, but it can’t be implemented without exercising extreme caution,” she said.

    This research was published in Nature Sustainability.

    UQ acknowledges the collaborative efforts of researchers from the International Institute for Applied Systems Analysis, CSIRO and the University of Tasmania.

    *An area of the sea in which a sovereign state has special rights regarding the exploration and use of marine resources, including energy production from water and wind.

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    University of Queensland

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  • Shark and ray populations rebounding in Northwestern Atlantic

    Shark and ray populations rebounding in Northwestern Atlantic

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    Newswise — Better fisheries management and conservation is effective at turning the tide on the shark and ray declines, according to a study from Simon Fraser University researchers.

    The fact sharks and rays are increasingly threatened by overfishing has made global headlines in recent years.

    Oceanic populations have plummeted by as much as 71 per cent in the last 50 years and one third of all sharks and rays are threatened with extinction.

    But there is hope, and proof that the declines can be reversed, according to a new study published this week in the journal Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America (PNAS).

    Lead author Nathan Pacoureau, postdoctoral research fellow at SFU, and colleagues analyzed trends in fishing pressure, fisheries management, and population status for all wide-ranging coastal sharks and rays that occur in the western Atlantic Ocean.

    They found that populations in the northwest Atlantic recovered following implementation of a U.S. fishery management plan for sharks of the Atlantic Ocean in 1993.

    Declines have been halted in three species and six species of eleven are clearly rebuilding now. This recovery has been achieved by regulation, enforcement, and monitoring.

    A strong system of regulations has been put in place for these species, including catch reporting requirements, aggregate- and species-specific quotas, and catch prohibitions for some species.

    Management is strongly enforced by US Coast Guard and law enforcement agencies, and the government continues to monitor and assess fisheries with additional regulations when needed.

    “Our findings provide hope, but are a microcosm of the wider problem faced by sharks and rays,” says Pacoureau. “Many shark and ray species range widely and successful conservation in one country can be undone by less regulated fishing areas outside those borders.”

    Using the International Union for Conservation of Nature (IUCN) Red List Index, the team showed how populations of the same species had collapsed in the southwest Atlantic due to unrestrained fishing.

    The current number of wide-ranging coastal species threatened with extinction is almost four times lower in the northwest than that in the southwest Atlantic.

    “These sensitive species have very slow life histories and are often collateral damage of sustainable target fisheries for more productive species,” says SFU professor Nick Dulvy, Canada Research Chair in Marine Biodiversity and Conservation.

    The findings highlight the need for well-enforced governance and science-based effective limits on fishing to prevent population collapses and to reduce extinction risk for many species.

    The international study also included researchers from National Marine Fisheries Service in the U.S., James Cook University in Australia and Federal University of Ceará in Brazil.

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    Simon Fraser University

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  • Comparing airfares instead of seat size fairer indicator of passenger carbon emissions

    Comparing airfares instead of seat size fairer indicator of passenger carbon emissions

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    Newswise — Allocating passenger aircraft emissions using airfares rather than travel class would give a more accurate idea of individual contributions, finds a study led by UCL.

    Emissions calculators base their estimates on travel class, assuming that someone travelling in a higher class and therefore taking up more space on the plane is responsible for more emissions.

    The study, published in Environmental Research Letters, describes how including airfares in calculations shows which passengers contribute the most revenue to the airline operating the aircraft, thereby allowing the plane to fly.

    Although in general, premium (business) seats are more expensive than economy, the researchers found when looking at data that many late bookings in economy class, often made for business trips or by high income travellers, cost as much as, or more than, premium seats.

    Lead author Dr Stijn van Ewijk (UCL Civil, Environmental & Geomatic Engineering) said: “The paper shows we should follow the money when calculating emissions of individual travellers, as it is revenue that decides whether an airline can operate a plane or not. Someone who has paid twice as much as a fellow traveller contributes twice as much to the revenue of the airline and should be allocated twice the emissions. The seat size of each travel class, which is currently used to allocate emissions, is only a rough approximation of how much passengers pay.”

    The researchers say that using airfares to calculate passenger emissions would benefit efforts to address climate change by encouraging people on all budgets to find alternative modes of transport where possible. It would also increase estimates of corporate emissions because it allocates more to expensive late bookings, which are often made for business purposes.

    Implementing a tax that is proportionate to the price of the ticket could make the total costs of flying fairer. People buying the most expensive tickets would pay the highest tax, encouraging them to seek alternatives.

    Whilst taxes differ between countries, typically the rates are the same across each travel class. Travellers buying expensive tickets, who are more likely to have higher incomes, pay a relatively low tax and are not currently discouraged from flying.

    Dr Van Ewijk added: “An equitable approach to reducing airline emissions should not just deter travellers who can only afford the cheapest early bookings but also the big spenders who bankroll the airline. By assigning emissions based on ticket prices, and taxing those emissions, we can make sure everyone pays their fair share, and is equally encouraged to look for alternatives.”

    A ticket tax should also take into account the distance flown and the model and age of plane, which can indicate how polluting it is.

    The authors used a dataset from the USA to test their fare-based allocation approach. They used the Airline Origin Survey database, which includes ticket fare data, origin and destination, travel class and fare per mile. From this, they calculated the distribution of ticket prices across all passengers on a typical flight.

    Based on the price distribution, the authors allocated emissions to passengers, and compared the results with estimates from widely used emissions calculators. Since ticket prices vary strongly by time of booking, the emissions per passenger varied too, far more than on the basis of seat size and travel class.

    Using an economic supply–demand model, the researchers estimated how a carbon tax on emissions would affect travellers, depending on whether the emissions the tax applied to were calculated from seat size and travel class, or the airfare. In all scenarios, a tax on emissions calculated from airfares had a more equitable effect because it reduced flying more evenly across income groups.

    The researchers hope to effect policy change in calculating and taxing passenger emissions, to ensure travellers on all budgets are encouraged to seek other forms of transport where possible or consider how essential the journey is.

     

    Notes to Editors

    Stijn van Ewijk, Shitiz Chaudhary, Peter Berrill; Estimating passenger emissions from airfares supports equitable climate action will be published in Environmental Research Letters on Wednesday 25th January, 12:00 UK time, 07:00 ET and is under a strict embargo until this time.

    The DOI for this paper will be 10.1088/1748-9326/acaa48

    Additional material

    Graphs and figures from the paper

    Credit: Dr Stijn Van Ewijk

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    University College London

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  • Alaskan island wolves caused a deer population to plummet

    Alaskan island wolves caused a deer population to plummet

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    Newswise —

    Historically, wolves and sea otters likely lived in the study area, Pleasant Island, which is located in an island landscape adjacent to Glacier Bay about 40 miles west of Juneau. The island is about 20 square miles, uninhabited and accessible only by boat or float plane.

    During the 1800s and much of the 1900s, populations of sea otters in this region were wiped out from fur trade hunting. Unlike wolves in the continental USA, Southeast Alaskan wolves were not hunted to local extinction. Only in recent decades, particularly with the reintroduction and legal protection of sea otters, have the populations of both species recovered and once again overlapped, providing new opportunities for predator-prey interactions between the two species.

    Wolves on an Alaskan switched to primarily eating sea otters in just a few years, a finding scientists believe is the first case of sea otters becoming the primary food source for a land-based predator. Using methods such as tracking the wolves with GPS collars and analyzing their scat, the researchers found that in 2015 deer were the primary food of the wolves. By 2017, wolves transitioned to primarily consuming sea otters while the frequency of deer declined.

    Sea otters are this famous predator in the near-shore ecosystem and wolves are one of the most famous apex predators in terrestrial systems. So, it’s pretty surprising that sea otters have become the most important resource feeding wolves. You have top predators feeding on a top predator.

    The researchers studied the wolf pack on Pleasant Island and the adjacent mainland from 2015 to 2021. Gretchen Roffler, a wildlife research biologist with the Alaska Department of Fish and Game, and others from the department collected 689 wolf scats, many along the island’s shoreline.

    Once the scat is collected, members of Levi’s lab in Oregon used molecular tools, such as DNA metabarcoding and genotyping of the scat, to identify individual wolves and determine their diets.

    Roffler also captured and placed GPS collars on four wolves on the island and nine on the mainland. The researchers were curious whether wolves were traveling between the mainland and island, considering other scientists have found they are capable of swimming up to eight miles between land masses. Both the GPS collar data and genotypes of the scats confirmed they were not, indicating that the island wolf pack is stable and that the island is not a hunting ground for mainland wolves.

    Locations from the GPS-collared wolves also provide evidence that the wolves are killing sea otters when they are in shallow water or are resting on rocks near shore exposed at low tide. Roffler and her crew have investigated wolf GPS clusters on Pleasant Island for three, 30-day field seasons since 2021 and found evidence of 28 sea otters killed by wolves.

    “The thing that really surprised me is that sea otters became the main prey of wolves on this island,” Roffler said. “Occasionally eating a sea otter that has washed up on the beach because it died, that is not unusual. But the fact that wolves are eating so many of them indicates it has become a widespread behavior pattern throughout this pack and something that they learned how to do very quickly.

    “And from the work we are doing investigating kill sites, we are learning that wolves are actively killing the sea otters. So, they aren’t just scavenging sea otters that are dead or dying, they are stalking them and hunting them and killing them and dragging them up onto the land above the high tide line to consume them.”

    Shortly after wolves colonized Pleasant Island in 2013, the deer population on the island plummeted. With the wolves having consumed most of the deer, their main food source, Levi said he would have expected the wolves to leave the island or die off. Instead, the wolves remained and the pack grew to a density not previously seen with wolf populations, Levi said. The main reason, he believes, is the availability of sea otters as a food source.

    The findings outlined by the same researchers showed that wolves were eating sea otters. This was documented throughout the Alexander Archipelago, a group of Southeastern Alaskan islands which includes Pleasant Island.

    The research has now expanded to study wolves and sea otters in Katmai National Park & Preserve, which is in southwest Alaska, about 700 miles from Pleasant Island. Early research indicates that wolves are also eating sea otters there. In fact, at that location three wolves were killing a sea otter near the shore.

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    Oregon State University

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  • Reduced krill lead to fewer pregnancies in humpback whales

    Reduced krill lead to fewer pregnancies in humpback whales

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    New collaborative research led by scientists at the University of California, Santa Cruz, shows reduced krill supplies lead to fewer pregnancies in humpback whales—a finding that could have major implications for industrial krill fishing.

    The study, published January 15 in Global Change Biology, is based on eight years of data on humpback whale pregnancies (2013 to 2020) in waters along the Western Antarctic Peninsula, where krill fishing is concentrated.

    Krill availability in the year before a humpback pregnancy is crucial because females need to increase their energy stores to support the upcoming pregnancy. In 2017, after a year in which krill were abundant, 86% of the humpback females sampled were pregnant. But in 2020, following a year in which krill were less plentiful, only 29% of humpback females were pregnant.

    Lead author Logan Pallin, a postdoctoral researcher in the Ocean Sciences Department at UC Santa Cruz, said the study demonstrates for the first time the link between population growth and krill availability in Antarctic whales.

    “This is significant because until now, it was thought that krill were essentially an unlimited food source for whales in the Antarctic,” said Pallin, who earned his Ph.D. in ecology and evolutionary biology at UCSC while working on this study. “Continued warming and increased fishing along the Western Antarctic Peninsula, which continue to reduce krill stocks, will likely impact this humpback whale population and other krill predators in the region.”

    “This information is critical as we can now be proactive about managing how, when, and how much krill is taken from the Antarctic Peninsula,” he added. “In years of poor krill recruitment, we should not compound this by removing krill from critical foraging areas for baleen whales.”

    Coauthor Ari Friedlaender, professor of ocean sciences at UC Santa Cruz, said the Western Antarctic Peninsula is experiencing some of the fastest climatic warming of any region on the planet. Winter air temperatures have risen significantly since the 1950s, and the annual sea ice extent is, on average, 80 days shorter than four decades ago.

    “Krill supplies vary depending on the amount of sea ice because juvenile krill feed on algae growing on sea ice and also rely on the ice for shelter,” Friedlaender said. “In years with less sea ice in the winter, fewer juvenile krill survive to the following year. The impacts of climate change and likely the krill fishery are contributing to a decrease in humpback whale reproductive rates in years with less krill available for whales.”

    Coauthor Chris Johnson, the global lead of the World Wide Fund for Nature’s Protecting Whales & Dolphins Initiative, said this research shows that highly precautionary management measures are needed to protect all Antarctic marine life that depends on krill for its survival, including blue, fin, humpback, minke, and southern right whales, as well as other krill predators such as penguins, seabirds, seals, and fish.

    “Krill are not an inexhaustible resource, and there is a growing overlap between industrial krill fishing and whales feeding at the same time,” Johnson said. “Humpback whales feed in the Antarctic for a handful of months a year to fuel their annual energetic needs for migration that spans thousands of kilometers. We need to tread carefully and protect this unique part of the world, which will benefit whales across their entire range.”

    Pallin and Friedlaender collaborated on this research with coauthors from multiple national and international universities, NGOs, non-profits, and government agencies. This work was supported in part by the National Science Foundation, National Geographic Society, and Marine Mammal Commission.

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    University of California, Santa Cruz

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  • Researchers find that traded species have distinctive life histories with extended reproductive lifecycles

    Researchers find that traded species have distinctive life histories with extended reproductive lifecycles

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    Newswise — A new study by researchers from Durham University, UK, Queen’s University Belfast, UK, University of Extremadura, Spain and Swansea University, UK have revealed that vertebrate species involved in the live wildlife trade have distinctive life history traits, biological characteristics that determine the frequency and timing of reproduction.

    Researchers discovered that traded species produce large numbers of offspring across long reproductive lifespans, an unusual profile that is likely financially advantageous for trades involving captive breeding such as the pet, food and fur/skin trades.

    Traded species that have also been introduced into non-native areas have a more extreme version of this same life history profile, suggesting that species most likely to become problematic invaders are at a heightened risk of trade and release.

    The study suggests that humans favour species with high reproductive output for trade and release, which are the very species likely to become problematic invaders in future.

    Researchers point out that life history traits are therefore potentially useful for predicting future invasions.

    Full study results have been published in the journal Nature Communications.

    Reflecting on the study results, first author Dr Sally Street of Durham University, said: “Invasive species can cause huge environmental problems but are challenging to manage once established. This means it is really important to try to identify characteristics that increase the risk of species passing through the earliest stages of the invasion pathway, transportation and introduction, which have been relatively understudied.

    “We show that not only are life history traits useful for identifying species at risk of trade, introduction and ultimately invasion, human activities unfortunately seem to favour trade in species that are most likely to succeed if released. We hope our study will contribute to the management and mitigation of future invasions and the damage they can cause to biodiversity.”

    Co-author of the study, Dr Isabella Capellini of Queen’s University Belfast, said: “The rate of traded species is rapidly increasing worldwide; some of these species are accidentally or deliberately introduced and may become problematic invaders damaging native ecosystems. Given the high costs of managing alien invasive species, preventing the release of potentially invasive species may help protect native biodiversity.

    “To help achieve this, in our study we have also identified some vertebrate species at risk of becoming future invaders should they be traded and recommend such species to be monitored and banned from trade.”

    The researchers studied trade data from the United States Fish and Wildlife Service (USFWS), Law Enforcement Management Information System (LEMIS) and the International Union for Conservation of Nature (IUCN).

    They analysed the role of life history traits in the probability that mammals, reptiles and amphibians are involved in the wildlife trade and that these species have been released outside of their native ranges.

    Invasive species can cause huge environmental problems and monetary costs. Once established, invasive populations can be difficult or impossible to manage.

    Therefore, understanding the early stages of invasion and predicting future invasions is crucial to minimising this harm.

    The researchers call for increased regulation of the live wildlife trade that is likely crucial for preventing future invasions.

    ENDS

     

     

    Source

    “Human activities favour prolific life histories in both traded and introduced vertebrates”, (2023), S. Street, J. Gutierrez, W. Allen and I. Capellini, Nature Communications.

    Full paper is available online: https://doi.org/10.1038/s41467-022-35765-6

    Graphics

    Associated images are available via the following link: https://dmscdn.vuelio.co.uk/publicitem/3e635e6d-e204-4145-acfa-e373c2368f2e

    Useful Web Links 

    Dr Sally Street staff profile: https://www.durham.ac.uk/staff/sally-e-street/

    Dr Isabella Capellini staff profile: https://pure.qub.ac.uk/en/persons/isabella-capellini

    Department of Anthropology: https://www.durham.ac.uk/anthropology/

    Durham Cultural Evolution Research Centre: https://www.durham.ac.uk/dcerc/

    About Queen’s University Belfast

    Queen’s University Belfast is one of the top 200 universities in the world. A member of the Russell Group UK’s 24 leading research-intensive universities, Queen’s is an international centre of research and education, with a student-centred ethos.

    Queen’s is ranked 17th in the world for international outlook (Times Higher Education World University Rankings 2022), 1st in the UK for entrepreneurial impact (Octopus Ventures, 2020) and 24th in the UK for Research Power (REF 2021/ Times Higher Education). Our research shapes worlds and continues to make a difference to lives and livelihoods, with 88% assessed at world leading or internationally excellent.

    The university is a lead partner in the Belfast Region City Deal which will unlock £1 billion of transformative co-investment, bringing forward projects in advanced manufacturing, clinical research and secure, connected digital technologies.

    About Durham University

    Durham University is a globally outstanding centre of teaching and research based in historic Durham City in the UK.

    We are a collegiate university committed to inspiring our people to do outstanding things at Durham and in the world.

    We conduct boundary-breaking research that improves lives globally and we are ranked as a world top 100 university with an international reputation in research and education (QS World University Rankings 2023).

    We are a member of the Russell Group of leading research-intensive UK universities and we are consistently ranked as a top 10 university in national league tables (Times and Sunday Times Good University Guide, Guardian University Guide and The Complete University Guide).

    For more information about Durham University visit: www.durham.ac.uk/about/

    END OF MEDIA RELEASE – issued by Durham University Communications Office

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    Durham University

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  • We need to learn to live with less steel

    We need to learn to live with less steel

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    Newswise — Steel is one of the most important materials in the world, integral to the cars we drive, the buildings we inhabit, and the infrastructure that allows us to travel from place to place. Steel is also responsible for 7% of global greenhouse gas emissions. In 2021, 45 countries made a commitment to pursue near-zero-emission steel in the next decade. But how possible is it to produce the steel we need in society with zero emissions?

    A new study focused on the Japanese steel industry shows that if we are truly committed to reaching zero emissions, we must be prepared for a scenario where the amount of steel we can produce is lower. Japan has set a target for a 46% reduction in emissions from steel by 2030, and zero emissions by 2050. So far, the roadmap for achieving this relies heavily on future innovations in technology. Hope is held out for developments in carbon capture and storage (CCS) and hydrogen-based technologies.

    In the study, Dr. Takuma Watari, a researcher at the National Institute for Environmental Studies, Japan, currently working with the University of Cambridge, argues that there is no silver bullet. He says that current plans to cut carbon emissions underestimate how difficult it will be to develop CCS and hydrogen technologies and deploy them widely: “These technologies still face serious technical, economic, and social challenges, and have yet to be implemented at scale. And importantly, it is highly uncertain whether there will be sufficient non-emitting electricity to use these technologies.” We need to confront the possibility that technological innovations might not be ready in time to allow us to maintain current levels of steel production whilst cutting emissions to zero.

    The research involved mapping the current flows of steel in Japan’s industry and using a model to explore how the industry might change if a strict carbon budget were applied in future. Dr. Watari explains that with current practice, the quantity and quality of steel produced would dramatically decrease under a zero-emission carbon budget. This is because of a lack of resources and the practice of downcycling, in which scraps of steel containing impurities are used to make new products. It is difficult to remove these impurities, so the new products have different quality and functionality from the original steel.

    According to Dr. Watari, “zero-emission steel production is possible by 2050, but in limited quantity and quality compared to current total production. This is due to the limited availability of zero-emission compatible resources and downcycling practices of scrap steel.”

    The research indicates that with a carbon budget of zero emissions, the production of steel goods would be dramatically restricted compared to today, reaching about half the current levels at best. In this case, higher-quality steel production (e.g., sheet steel) would be especially hard hit.

    The implication is clear. It is not enough to rely on a technological silver bullet materialising to transform the supply of steel. We also need to look seriously at strategies to reduce demand by shifting our culture of steel use and improving our material efficiency. We also need to pursue upcycling to produce high-grade steel from scrap steel.

    This will require collaboration from those who use steel as well as those who produce it. Steel products could be made more resource efficient if they are designed to last longer or to be lightweight. Once steel products reach the end of their life, upcycling could be achieved through advanced sorting and shredding to remove impurities from scrap steel. As a society, Japan may also have to become less steel-dependent and shift to a model of ‘service use’ rather than ownership of products. Unlike today, when steel is abundant and cheap, a net-zero future will require us to use scarcer, more expensive steel resources with greater efficiency.

    Dr. Watari concludes that we do need to invest in technological innovations, but we cannot simply wait for them to appear. Instead, steel users need to prepare for a world where there is less steel available: “We do not deny the need to invest in innovative production technologies. Rather, what we want to highlight is that we should look for far more strategic options, instead of simply relying on silver bullet production technologies. Placing material efficiency and upcycling at the heart of decarbonisation plans can reduce the over-reliance on innovative production technologies and prepare for the risk that these technologies may not scale up sufficiently in time.”

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    National Institute for Environmental Studies

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  • Family tree secrets: Island tree populations older, more diverse than expected

    Family tree secrets: Island tree populations older, more diverse than expected

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    Newswise — Tsukuba, Japan—It’s often assumed that island plant and animal populations are just the simple, fragile cousins of those on the mainland. But now, researchers from Japan have discovered that island populations may be a lot tougher and more complex than previously thought.

    In a recently published study, a research group led by the University of Tsukuba has revealed that the northernmost island populations of Siebold’s beech, Fagus crenata, are older and genetically more diverse than expected.

    Island and mainland populations often differ as a result of islands’ geographical isolation, which is often assumed to restrict the genetic diversity of their populations. However, a number of studies on land plants have shown that island populations have considerable genetic diversity despite their remoteness, indicating that the processes underlying their diversity are more complex than previously thought.

    “Although many island populations have existed for thousands of years or longer, the origins of some of them are still unknown,” says Professor Yoshiaki Tsuda, the main author of the study. “This includes Japan’s northernmost island populations of the native species F. crenata.”

    The research group investigated populations of F. crenata on Okushiri Island in the Japan Sea, which is thought to have broken away from the mainland in the Middle Pleistocene (the Ice Age, which occurred 2.58 million to 11,700 years ago), and remained separate ever since. The northward spread of this species began on the mainland approximately 6,000 years ago, after the last glacial maximum (LGM). The researchers studied the genetics of the island’s populations and those of nearby regions, and found that the island’s populations had high genetic diversity, and may not have arisen from a single colonization event.

    The Okushiri Island populations had a comparable number of private alleles (genetic sequences that are present in a single population and essentially absent in other populations) to the populations studied on nearby Hokkaido, which points to the existence of relict populations on Okushiri Island. A relict is a population of organisms that was more widespread or more diverse in the past in a restricted area.

    Taken together with palaeoecological and vegetation studies, as well as the island’s geology, these results indicate that F. crenata persisted in cryptic refugia (places where climatically sensitive species can survive regardless of incompatibility with the regional climate) on the island.

    “Our evidence indicates that populations of this species already existed on Okushiri Island prior to the LGM, and persisted there for longer than previously thought,” explains Professor Tsuda. The results of this study contribute to a growing body of evidence that island plant populations are more genetically diverse than previously estimated, which has implications for research and management of island species conservation, and the study of gene flow between island and mainland populations.

    ###
    This study was supported by JSPS KAKENHI (JP17K07852 and JP20K06152) and Core-to-Core Program (Asia-Africa Science Platforms: JPJSCCB20220007) from the Japan Society for the Promotion of Science and the 27th Pro Natura Fund Grant Program from the Pro Natura Foundation Japan.
     

    Original Paper

    The article, “Possible northern persistence of Siebold’s beech, Fagus crenata, at its northernmost distribution limit on an island in Japan Sea: Okushiri Island, Hokkaido,” was published in Frontiers in Plant Science at DOI: 10.3389/fpls.2022.990927

    Correspondence

    Associate Professor TSUDA Yoshiaki
    Faculty of Life and Environmental Sciences, University of Tsukuba

    Related Link

    Faculty of Life and Environmental Sciences
    Sugadaira Research Station, Mountain Science Center

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    University of Tsukuba

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  • Just one degree can change a species

    Just one degree can change a species

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    Newswise — It is not exactly a surprise that climate affects life on earth. At least major changes in climate make a difference. We know that not all species thrive everywhere on the planet.

    “The climate affects the life cycle of species, the number of individuals of a species, the overall number of species and the composition and distribution of species in an area,” says James D. M. Speed, a professor ​​in the Department of Natural History at the Norwegian University of Science and Technology’s (NTNU) University Museum.

    How small or large a change in temperature is needed to change any of this is less easy to estimate, however, and varies a lot from species to species. Some species thrive over a large and varied area, while others only thrive in very limited areas.

    Difficult to find answers

    Finding relevant answers can be difficult when looking at how the climate affects species. Researchers often investigate many different questions in a large geographical area. They may also use several different methods that make results from different surveys difficult to compare.

    These factors make it difficult or impossible to measure a local effect of climate change.

    Publication bias can also affect our overall impression. This bias happens when research results that show no effect – or perhaps even the opposite effect than is expected – are simply not published, and are thereby not available to other researchers. Getting a study published is easier when the results actually show an effect than when researchers find no change whatsoever.

    Thus, not all investigations are equally relevant, and it’s possible to fall into several traps.

    Examined local collection gathered over 250 years

    Researchers from several institutions, including the NTNU University Museum, found a helpful method to check how species in a specific area have been affected by temperatures over a longer period of time.

    “We used museum collections that have been built up over 250 years to measure the ecological response to climate change in central Norway,” says Speed. “We looked at a number of species, including vertebrates, invertebrates, plants and fungi.

    These museum collections are archives of the life in an area over a long period of time. But they are not just thousands of dead animals and plants for particularly interested collectors. They can actually give us valuable information about how the world is today and about how we can expect the world to be affected by climate change and the actions we humans choose to take.

    “What these data and the objects in the museum collections have in common is that studying climate change was not one of their purposes when they were collected. Only now are we seeing that the collections are relevant and that we can use them for such a purpose,” says Tommy Prestø, the senior engineer who is responsible for the day-to-day operation of the botanical collections at the NTNU University Museum.

    “It’s really interesting to be able to show that we can use the museum collections in new and innovative ways,” says Prestø, who has spent a lot of time making the collections accessible to a wider audience.

    Some of the results are very clear and show that even small changes can have quite a big impact.

    Sometimes one degree is enough

    For each degree the temperature rises, researchers find that:

    • The number of zooplankton decreases by almost 7700 individuals per cubic metre of water per degree warmer in Jonsvatnet, a lake in Trondheim.
    • The number of nesting birds is decreasing by two fewer breeding territories per square kilometre per degree warmer in Budalen in Trøndelag county.
    • Flowering plants bloom earlier throughout Trøndelag, on average two days earlier per degree warmer.

    When some species change, the life cycle of other species may change as well, for example species that eat zooplankton, birds or plants.

    “We can see a clear, regional connection with the climate,” says Speed.

    “For certain plant species, we’ve found that they’re flowering on average nine days earlier per century. This means that some of our plant species bloom three weeks earlier now than they did 250 years ago,” says Prestø.

    Stable species composition over time

    “But not everything changes with the climate. Some aspects of nature are more resilient. Overall, the distribution of species and species diversity stays stable over time. That surprised us,” says Speed.

    The fluctuations in the number of animals and species composition do not directly follow fluctuations in temperature, either. The relatively long period of 250 years can have both periods of warming and a stable climate.

    The species response may thus be delayed in relation to the changes in the climate. They could also be affected by other causes like changing land use, which is the biggest environmental problem, according to the International Nature Panel IPBES.

    Collections are a unique source for researchers

    These are insights we wouldn’t have gained without the fact that several generations of researchers, from botanist Bishop Gunnerus in the 1700s to the present day, had collected material and information about nature.

    “Natural history collections can provide unique insight into a wide range of ecological responses over a period of time that is much greater than what most ecological monitoring programmes manage. So the collections are an essential and invaluable source for ecological research over time,” says Speed.

    Reference: Speed, J. D. M., Evankow, A. M., Petersen, T. K., Ranke, P. S., Nilsen, N. H., Turner, G., Aagaard, K., Bakken, T., Davidsen, J. G., Dunshea, G., Finstad, A. G., Hassel, K., Husby, M., Hårsaker, K., Koksvik, J. I., Prestø, T., & Vange, V. (2022). A regionally coherent ecological fingerprint of climate change, evidenced from natural history collections. Ecology and Evolution, 12, e9471.

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    Norwegian University of Science and Technology (NTNU)

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  • Forests face fierce threats from multiple industries, not just agricultural expansion

    Forests face fierce threats from multiple industries, not just agricultural expansion

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    Newswise — Intact forests are important climate regulators and harbors of biodiversity, but they are rapidly disappearing. Agriculture is commonly considered to be the major culprit behind forest loss, but the authors of a new paper publishing on January 20 in the journal One Earth show that agriculture isn’t solely to blame. For forest loss associated with the 2014 world economy, over 60% was related to final consumption of non-agricultural products, such as minerals, metals and wood-related goods, and the authors argue that we must consider international trade markets when designing conservation strategies.

    “Regional land use change is no longer simply driven by local demand; it is also indirectly influenced by international markets and the surging consumption of land-based products,” say the authors, led by Bin Chen, a postdoctoral fellow at Fudan University. “Countries with forest conservation goals can import finished land-based products via global supply chains, displacing land-use pressure and related eco-environmental impacts outside their own territory borders.”

    The researchers used multi-source geographic information data and economic modeling to evaluate the direct and indirect causes of intact forest landscape loss. Intact forests support more diverse species, are more resilient to natural disturbances such as wildfires, and in Africa and South America, can store more than three times the amount of carbon per hectare compared to disturbed or managed forests.

    Previous studies have focused on deforestation—the complete removal of tree cover—but focusing on intact forests instead allowed the authors to shine a spotlight on the insidious roles played by degradation and fragmentation.

     “Even the removal of narrow tracts of forests can affect overall forest structure and composition,” say the authors. “Considering the exceptional conservation value of intact forest landscapes in terms of stabilizing terrestrial carbon stocks and harboring biodiversity, intact forest landscapes loss displacement can also reflect potential indirect driving forces behind carbon emissions and biodiversity loss.”

    “It is widely thought that beef production drives deforestation in the Amazon, but it is hard for consumers to realize that the production of highly processed equipment may involve timber and metals produced at the expense of intact forest and that services provided by tertiary sectors may be supported by electricity generated from oil and gas associated with this loss” the authors say. “The more dispersed nature of intact forest loss drivers and their indirect links to individual final consumers call for stronger government engagement and supply-chain interventions.”

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    Cell Press

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  • Science is the best (local, regional, national, global) policy

    Science is the best (local, regional, national, global) policy

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    By Eleanor Eckel, BRI Communications Coordinator

    Newswise — A coyote’s lone cry punctuated the darkness as the two biologists hiked the wooded trail, parkas tightly zipped against the chill October night. They had been trekking this route every hour since dusk, winding their way to the mist nets they had set up earlier in the day. Once at a net, they slowly walked along its 36-foot length. When they discovered a northern saw-whet owl lying passively in one of the net pockets, they worked quickly, expertly untangling, banding, sampling, and measuring the tiny raptor in just minutes.

    Since 2009, BRI wildlife biologist Kate Williams and others have studied the migration and movement patterns of birds and bats over the Gulf of Maine and elsewhere on the Atlantic coast. BRI biologists documented that migratory owls fly over open water, taking advantage of islands as stopover sites, and that migratory falcons will fly hundreds of miles out over the Atlantic on their way south to the Caribbean and South America. This new information initiated important discussions about how migrating birds and bats might be affected by offshore structures, such as wind turbines.

    Careful siting of renewable energy development seems to play a key role in minimizing impacts to wildlife, but this requires detailed knowledge of where animals breed, winter, and migrate. To address this need, BRI established a wildlife and renewable energy program in 2009, which has evolved over the past 12 years into BRI’s Center for Research on Offshore Wind and the Environment (CROWE). Offshore wind energy is an essential component of plans to reduce reliance on fossil fuels and mitigate the effects of climate change on wildlife and ecosystems. According to the 2022 International Panel on Climate Change report, it is now “unequivocal” that human influence has warmed the atmosphere. Fossil fuel use has significantly contributed to the acceleration of climate change impacts, and now the “scale of recent changes across the climate system as a whole – and the present state of many aspects of the climate system – are unprecedented over many centuries to many thousands of years.” A path forward involves increased renewable energy technology to limit cumulative CO2 emissions.

    However, as with other energy sources, offshore wind can also present risks to wildlife and their environment. BRI biologists continue to work to understand wildlife distributions and movements and to identify ways to minimize risks from offshore wind energy development.

    CROWE director Kate Williams recognizes the need for rapid, renewable energy development as well as thorough wildlife risk assessments and monitoring. “We are trying to figure out how to mitigate sort of, local scale impacts to wildlife from these developments…but trying to figure out how to minimize that as much as possible for this sort of greater good of trying to figure out how to mitigate climate change to the point that we’re not going to see sort of large-scale extinctions, which is what they’re predicting right now.”

    Specific research conducted by BRI staff intended to determine potential risks to wildlife from offshore wind development include bird field studies and assessments for seabirds, waterfowl, shorebirds, songbirds, and raptors, acoustic studies, transmitter deployment and tracking, observational surveys (vessel- and plane-based), digital aerial surveys, stakeholder engagement and coordination, and development of siting strategies and monitoring and mitigation plans.

    As with all BRI research centers and programs, the offshore wind team utilizes innovative science and cutting-edge technology to provide accurate information. High-definition digital aerial surveys involve survey planes with an array of cameras that point down to the ocean’s surface which can identify species seen in the video. Aerial surveys allow researchers to determine which species are most at risk in areas designated for proposed wind arrays, and that information can be passed on to decision makers and developers. BRI also houses a Quantitative Wildlife Ecology Research Laboratory (QWERL) that provides large scale population and distribution models that help understand population dynamics in or near offshore wind arrays. Williams notes, “it’s a rare skillset to have that degree of mathematical expertise and also have the ecological expertise to understand how to apply it.” Cutting-edge science, combined with a wide range of ecological expertise, will continue to guide BRI’s wind energy research to provide accurate information to stakeholders and policy makers.

     

    More stories on https://briwildlife.org/bri-blog/.

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    Biodiversity Research Institute (BRI)

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