Alexander Von Humboldt Institute Research Articles

Report on the Academic Round Table, 30 April 2024, New York City: Freedom of Online Communication Across Transatlantic Borders

Abstract The Alexander von Humboldt Institute for Internet and Society (HIIG), the Leibniz Institute for Media Research | Hans Bredow Institute (HBI), the Columbia Global Freedom of Expression and the UNESCO Chair on Freedom of Communication and Information co-hosted an academic workshop in New York City on 30 April 2024. European and US experts examined the current state of freedom of expression on digital platforms on both sides of the Atlantic. The round table took place as part of the Year of Science 2024 in Germany. To celebrate the 75th anniversary of the German Basic Law (‘Grundgesetz’), this Year of Science has ‘Freedom’ as its central theme. This provided an excellent opportunity to examine the various understandings of freedom as it relates to communication rights and free speech between the US and Europe. The full extent of mutual learning opportunities remains untapped, and the practical implications are vast.

Pandemic platform governance: Mapping the global ecosystem of COVID-19 response apps

This article provides an exploratory systematic mapping of the global ecosystem of COVID-19 pandemic response apps. After considering policy updates by Google Play’s and Apple’s App Store, we analyse all the available response apps in July 2020;their different response types;the apps’ developers and geographical distribution;the ecosystem’s ‘generativity’ and developers’ responsiveness during the unfolding pandemic;the apps’ discursive positioning;and material conditions of their development. Google and Apple are gatekeepers of these app ecosystems and exercise control on different layers, shaping the pandemic app response as well as the relationships between governments, citizens, and other actors. We suggest that this global ecosystem of pandemic responses reflects an exceptional mode of what we call ‘pandemic platform governance’, where platforms have negotiated their commercial interests and the public interest in exceptional circumstances. © 2021, Alexander von Humboldt Institute for Internet and Society. All rights reserved.

Sharing Species Pages in the Atlas of Living Costa Rica using Plinian Core

The Atlas of Living Costa Rica (www.crbio.cr) is a biodiversity data portal based on the Atlas of Living Australia (ALA) and managed by the Biodiversity Informatics Research Center (CRBio) and the National Biodiversity Institute of Costa Rica (INBio). It currently shares nearly eight million occurrence records and more than 5000 species pages about Costa Rican vertebrates, arthropods, molluscs, nematodes, plants, and fungi. These pages contain information elements pertaining to, for instance, morphological descriptions, distribution, habitat, conservation status, management, nomenclature, and multimedia (Vargas et al. 2018). In order to fully integrate species pages into the ALA architecture, CRBio is working in the adoption of the Biodiversity Information Explorer (BIE), an ALA module which manages taxonomic and species contents by integrating global resources like EOL or Wikipedia. This adoption includes the required modifications to use the data model of the Plinian Core (https://github.com/tdwg/PlinianCore), a TDWG draft standard registered as an IPT extension, oriented to share species level information from local and regional sources too (Pando 2018). The advancement of Plinian Core has been lead by INBio, the Spanish Node of GBIF (GBIF Spain), the University of Granada (UG, Spain), the Alexander von Humboldt Institute (IAvH, Colombia), the National Commission for the Knowledge and Use of Biodiversity (Conabio, Mexico) and the University of Sao Paulo (USP, Brazil). This group reviewed the existing data standards to reuse as many elements as possible and avoid redundancy. Besides the aforementioned, Plinian Core is currently used by other institutions like the Chilean Ministry of Environment. Plinian Core was designed to be easy to use, self-contained, able to support data integration from multiple databases, and having the ability to handle different levels of granularity. These requirements are the result of actual needs from content creators that, through an iterative process, have yielded a more complete and flexible exchange standard to aggregate biological and non-biological species information, used by others like IBIN, the Indian Bioresource Information Network (Saran et al. 2018). Plinian Core aims to be a component in producing multiple species catalogues developed under specific constraints to serve specific purposes, instead of focusing on a unified platform while facilitating consistent aggregation and re-utilization of information (GBIF.org 2015). We will present our implementation of the BIE module in the Atlas of Living Costa Rica, following the documented best practices when sharing species level information using Plinian Core. Our demonstration will detail our lessons learned from merging the aforementioned 5000 species pages provided by INBio with several thousand of species pages assembled from the information provided by the World Flora Online through the aggregation of different Flora resources, like Manual de Plantas de Costa Rica (Hammel et al. 2003) that provides 5,000 plants descriptions and 350 vernacular names (http://www.worldfloraonline.org/resource?query=Manual+de+Plantas+de+Costa+Rica).

Object detection from dynamic scene using joint background modeling and fast deep learning classification

In this paper, we couple effective dynamic background modeling with fast deep learning classification to develop an accurate scheme for human-animal detection from camera-trap images with cluttered moving objects. We introduce a new block-wise background model, named as Minimum Feature Difference (MFD), to model the variation of the background of the camera-trap sequences and generate the foreground object proposals. We then develop a region proposals verification to reduce the number of false alarms. Finally, we perform complexity-accuracy analysis of DCNN to construct a fast deep learning classification scheme to classify these region proposals into three categories: human, animals, and background patches. The optimized DCNN is able to maintain high level of accuracy while reducing the computational complexity by 14 times, which allows near real-time implementation of the proposed method on CPU machines. Our experimental results demonstrate that the proposed method outperforms existing methods on our and Alexander von Humboldt Institute camera-trap datasets in both foreground segmentation and object detection.

Checklist of ‘Psocoptera’ (Psocodea) of Colombia and identification key to the families

We present a list of 720 species of ‘Psocoptera’ recorded in Colombia, based on the examination of specimens deposited in the collections of the Alexander von Humboldt Institute and in the Entomological Museum of the Universidad del Valle. We include records of specimens recently collected in several National Natural Parks and other natural areas in Colombia. Species previously recorded in the literature are also listed here. The number of psocids recorded in Colombia until 2002 (79 species) corresponded to only 11.0% of what is currently known based on our study. We highlight that about 60% of the species recorded since 2010 were undescribed, 135 of which have been recently described by our research group. An identification key to the 28 psocid families known in Colombia is included. Even though psocids have been largely ignored from the taxonomic research in Colombia, we show that the group diversity is still to be uncovered in the country. Further studies must be conducted to understand the distribution of psocids among and within localities, and emphasize that additional extensive fieldwork is highly required.

Mariposas-polilla gigantes (Lepidoptera: Castniidae: Castniinae) en la Colección Entomológica del Instituto de Investigación de Recursos biológicos Alexander Von Humboldt

A revision of the giant butterfly-moths (Castniidae: Castniinae) of deposited specimens in the entomological collection of the Alexander von Humboldt Institute was made. 13 specimens belonging to 7 species within 4 genera were found. General comments of the biology and presence in Colombia of the specimens are presented. Also, a brief history of the entomological collection of the Alexander von Humboldt Institute is included.

Resultados del Convenio de Cooperación Nº 17 -16- 062- 022CE entre el Instituto de Investigación de Recursos Biológicos Alexander von Humboldt (IAvH) y la Sociedad Colombiana de Mastozoología (SCMas)

El Sistema de Información sobre Biodiversidad de Colombia – SiB, el Instituto Alexander von Humboldt (IAvH) y la Sociedad Colombiana de Mastozoología (SCMas) unieron esfuerzos técnicos, administrativos y financieros, para sumar al inventario de la biodiversidad nacional información referente a los mamíferos que en el país ocurren, a través del convenio de cooperación No. 17 -16- 062- 022CE. Los productos de dicho convenio serán descritos en la presente correspondencia y abarcan la actualización de la última lista de referencia de especies (Ramírez-Chaves et al. 2016), la realización de 50 fichas de especies y la publicación de más de 3500 registros biológicos de mamíferos en la plataforma SiB bajo el estándar Darwin Core. Empleamos como herramienta de trabajo un proceso concertado, colaborativo y dinámico entre Universidades públicas y privadas, Colecciones Biológicas en cabeza de sus Curadores, Organizaciones No Gubernamentales, becarios y socios de la SCMas.

FENOLOGÍA DE DOS PLANTAS NUTRICIAS, Centrosema triquetrum Y Rorippa indica, PARA PRODUCCIÓN COMERCIAL DE MARIPOSAS EN LA RESERVA PAWAY, EN EL MUNICIPIO DE MOCOA (PUTUMAYO)

The Alexander von Humboldt Institute records about 3800 species of butterflies for Colombia and in particular 350 for the Amazon which, due to their characteristics, have been positioned as a biocommerce alternative though a limitation for reproduction is the selectivity in their diet (monophagous). Therefore, the phenology study of two nutritious plants Centrosema triquetrum, and Rorippa indica was carried out, for the commercial production of Morpho helenor, Ascia monuste and Leptophobia aripa butterflies in the Paway natural park (Mocoa - Putumayo), to plan production, ensuring quality and quantity. Four phases (germination, emergence, leaf development and flowering-maturity) and two environmental variables (temperature and humidity) were taken into account for the phenology assessment. Food intake was carried out supplying green fodder during larval development cycle of butterflies in groups of five caterpillars per species. Alongside the percentage of dry matter for each species was calculated. It was determined that Rorippa indica presents a phenology cycle of 74 days, Centrosema triquetrum after a year had not bloomed. The humidity presented a highly significant correlation (p ≤ 0.01) for the development of the two vegetal species and temperature (p ≤ 0.01) for C. triquetrum. The Morpho helenor larval cycle was 86 Days, 20 for Ascia monuste and Leptophobia aripa, period in which green forage of the respective nutritional plant was supplied, consuming on average 22.9 grams.

What Are We Trying to Conserve?

William F. Laurance (bill.laurance@jcu. edu.au) is a distinguished research professor and Australian laureate with the Centre for Tropical Environmental and Sustainability Science and with the School of Marine and Tropical Biology at James Cook University in Cairns, Queensland, Australia. D. Carolina Useche is a biodiversity and climate change researcher at the Alexander von Humboldt Institute on Biological Resources Colombia, in Bogota. Susan G. Laurance is a tropical leader and associate professor at James Cook University and president of the Association for Tropical Biology and Conservation. Corey J. A. Bradshaw is a professor with the Environment Institute and the School of Earth and Environmental Sciences at the University of Adelaide, in Australia.