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1. Change in Pictures: Creating best practices in archiving ecological imagery for reuse

   https://doi.org/10.3897/biss.4.59082  

   Gries, Corinna ; Beaulieu, Stace ; Brown, Renée ; Gastil-Buhl, Gastil ; Elmendorf, Sarah ; Hsieh, Hsun-Yi ; Kui, Li ; Maurer, Greg ; Porter, John ( September 2020 , Biodiversity Information Science and Standards)

   The research data repository of the Environmental Data Initiative (EDI) is building on over 30 years of data curation research and experience in the National Science Foundation-funded US Long-Term Ecological Research (LTER) Network. It provides mature functionalities, well established workflows, and now publishes all ‘long-tail’ environmental data. High quality scientific metadata are enforced through automatic checks against community developed rules and the Ecological Metadata Language (EML) standard. Although the EDI repository is far along in making its data findable, accessible, interoperable, and reusable (FAIR), representatives from EDI and the LTER are developing best practices for the edge cases in environmental data publishing. One of these is the vast amount of imagery taken in the context of ecological research, ranging from wildlife camera traps to plankton imaging systems to aerial photography. Many images are used in biodiversity research for community analyses (e.g., individual counts, species cover, biovolume, productivity), while others are taken to study animal behavior and landscape-level change. Some examples from the LTER Network include: using photos of a heron colony to measure provisioning rates for chicks (Clarkson and Erwin 2018) or identifying changes in plant cover and functional type through time (Peters et al. 2020). Multi-spectral images are employedmore »to identify prairie species. Underwater photo quads are used to monitor changes in benthic biodiversity (Edmunds 2015). Sosik et al. (2020) used a continuous Imaging FlowCytobot to identify and measure phyto- and microzooplankton. Cameras at McMurdo Dry Valleys assess snow and ice cover on Antarctic lakes allowing estimation of primary production (Myers 2019). It has been standard practice to publish numerical data extracted from images in EDI; however, the supporting imagery generally has not been made publicly available. Our goal in developing best practices for documenting and archiving these images is for them to be discovered and re-used. Our examples demonstrate several issues. The research questions, and hence, the image subjects are variable. Images frequently come in logical sets of time series. The size of such sets can be large and only some images may be contributed to a dedicated specialized repository. Finally, these images are taken in a larger monitoring context where many other environmental data are collected at the same time and location. Currently, a typical approach to publishing image data in EDI are packages containing compressed (ZIP or tar) files with the images, a directory manifest with additional image-specific metadata, and a package-level EML metadata file. Images in the compressed archive may be organized within directories with filenames corresponding to treatments, locations, time periods, individuals, or other grouping attributes. Additionally, the directory manifest table has columns for each attribute. Package-level metadata include standard coverage elements (e.g., date, time, location) and sampling methods. This approach of archiving logical ‘sets’ of images reduces the effort of providing metadata for each image when most information would be repeated, but at the expense of not making every image individually searchable. The latter may be overcome if the provided manifest contains standard metadata that would allow searching and automatic integration with other images.« less
2. Corporate responsibility and biodiversity conservation: challenges and opportunities for companies participating in China’s Belt and Road Initiative

   https://doi.org/10.1017/S0376892921000436  

   Bohnett, Eve ; Coulibaly, Abdoulaye ; Hulse, Dave ; Hoctor, Thomas ; Ahmad, Bilal ; An, Li ; Lewison, Rebecca ( March 2022 , Environmental Conservation)

   Summary China’s Belt and Road Initiative (BRI), designed to build critical infrastructure and coordinate economic growth, is the most significant development initiative in modern history. The BRI has a documented vision for sustainability, including environmental impact assessments and responsibility tenets. Despite this, a growing body of literature has found adverse effects of BRI projects on protected land and species. To understand corporate responsibility and regulations for companies participating in the BRI, we gathered information on 260 BRI companies using the Refinitiv Eikon BRI Connect database and the China Global Investment Tracker. The results revealed a significant gap in corporate responsibility reporting for biodiversity impacts, environmental restoration, environmental project financing and the United Nations’ Sustainable Development Goals (SDG) 14 ‘Life below Water’ and 15 ‘Life on Land’. The modest fraction of companies that we found to report biodiversity accountability highlights the need to restructure and incentivize the reporting of environmental and biodiversity risks. The current evidence of limited adherence to responsibility measures highlights a clear opportunity to align BRI development with the BRI’s vision for sustainability, and to strengthen links for policy engagement within Chinese regulatory frameworks and international obligations at the United Nations within its SDG framework.
3. Plant single-cell solutions for energy and the environment

   https://doi.org/10.1038/s42003-021-02477-4  

   Cole, Benjamin ; Bergmann, Dominique ; Blaby-Haas, Crysten E. ; Blaby, Ian K. ; Bouchard, Kristofer E. ; Brady, Siobhan M. ; Ciobanu, Doina ; Coleman-Derr, Devin ; Leiboff, Samuel ; Mortimer, Jenny C. ; et al ( December 2021 , Communications Biology)

   Abstract Progress in sequencing, microfluidics, and analysis strategies has revolutionized the granularity at which multicellular organisms can be studied. In particular, single-cell transcriptomics has led to fundamental new insights into animal biology, such as the discovery of new cell types and cell type-specific disease processes. However, the application of single-cell approaches to plants, fungi, algae, or bacteria (environmental organisms) has been far more limited, largely due to the challenges posed by polysaccharide walls surrounding these species’ cells. In this perspective, we discuss opportunities afforded by single-cell technologies for energy and environmental science and grand challenges that must be tackled to apply these approaches to plants, fungi and algae. We highlight the need to develop better and more comprehensive single-cell technologies, analysis and visualization tools, and tissue preparation methods. We advocate for the creation of a centralized, open-access database to house plant single-cell data. Finally, we consider how such efforts should balance the need for deep characterization of select model species while still capturing the diversity in the plant kingdom. Investments into the development of methods, their application to relevant species, and the creation of resources to support data dissemination will enable groundbreaking insights to propel energy and environmental science forward.
4. Research Networking Activities Support Sustained Coordinated Observations of Arctic Change

   https://doi.org/10.5670/oceanog.2022.110  

   Chythlook, Craig ; Rudolf, Margaret ; Biermann, Maureen ; Eicken, Hajo ; Starkweather, Sandy ( January 2022 , Oceanography)

   Rapid Arctic environmental change requires improved collaboration across observing activities that support adaptation and response from local to pan-Arctic scales. The Research Networking Activities in Support of Sustained Coordinated Observations of Arctic Change (RNA CoOBs), in partnership with the Food Security Working Group (FSWG), supports an Indigenous-led project on food security. These efforts tie into the broader goals of the Sustaining Arctic Observing Networks (SAON) Roadmap for Arctic Observing and Data Systems (ROADS). SAON is an open initiative of the International Arctic Science Committee and the Arctic Council, uniting Arctic and non-Arctic countries and Indigenous, regional, and global organizations that support improved observing network development and integration. SAON has been advancing a partnership development framework under ROADS that adds value to different observing activities by providing common context and identifying shared goals.
5. Size variation in populatinos of Tetraclaenodon (Mammalia, 'Condylarthra'), from the Torrejonian NALMA of the San Juan Basin, New Mexico, reveals new insights into their evolution and paleoenvironment

   Holpin, S. ; Williamson, T. E. ; Shelley, S. L. ; Brusatte, S. L. ( October 2019 , Society of Vertebrate Paleontology, Abstracts and Programs)

   After the end-Cretaceous mass extinction, approximately 75% of life on land and in the sea disappeared. The mammals of the early Cenozoic rapidly diversified and dispersed, rising to numerical and ecological dominance beyond their Mesozoic norms. Among those initial groups that ushered in the Age of Mammals, Paleocene and Eocene ‘condylarths’ are thought to include the ancestors of modern odd-toed ungulates (horses, tapirs, rhinos). Tetraclaenodon is the oldest genus of the ‘condylarth’ group Phenacodontidae and one of the most abundant fossils from the San Juan Basin (SJB) of New Mexico. Tetraclaenodon was a medium sized (mean body mass ca. 10kg), terrestrial mammal which was lightly built and had an omnivorous to herbivorous bunodont dentition. Here we use multivariate and statistical analyses to investigate body mass and dental variation in 110 teeth of Tetraclaenodon spanning the Torrejonian (Paleocene) interval of the SJB. The specimens were grouped into six time bins by their biostratigraphical reference, from Tj1 (~63.8 Ma) through Tj6 (~62.7 Ma). Measurements of the length, mesial and distal width of the lower first molars (m1) were subject to principal component analysis (PCA), and m1 area was used to predict body mass using a regression equation. The PCA morphospace ordinates specimensmore »along a PC1 axis that accounts for 90.05% of total variance and is significantly correlated with body size. A PERMANOVA test finds a significant difference in morphospace occupation (non-overlap) between clusters of specimens from Tj1-3 and Tj4-6, but there are no significant differences between the individual time bins within each cluster. This trend is also seen in the body size estimates: Mann-Whitney tests recover significant differences between the two clusters. These results suggest that Torrejonian populations of Tetraclaenodon were relatively constant in size throughout Tj1-3, but between Tj3 and Tj4 underwent an increase in body mass and subsequently stabilized (at this resolution) for the remainder of the Torrejonian. A similar trend is seen in contemporary populations of the periptychid ‘condylarth’ Periptychus, suggesting that there were selective environmental pressures acting on these herbivorous species. These body size differences may reflect the emergence of a new, larger Tetraclaenodon species in Tj4, or may be associated to an environmental change, perhaps relating to climate or vegetation. In either case, this illustrates dynamic evolution of mammals during the few million years after the extinction. Grant Information: European Research Council Starting Grant (ERC StG 2017, 756226, PalM), National Science Foundation (EAR- 1654952)« less