Cascading Effects Research Articles (Page 1)

The Lepidoptera, butterflies and moths, display an astonishing diversity of spatial orientation strategies essential for survival, reproduction, and ecological success. These spatial orientation strategies range from basic taxes to light, wind, gravity, and chemical cues, to more advanced strategies such as straight-line dispersal, multigenerational migration across continents, and complex trap-lining foraging involving long-term spatial memory. These orientation behaviours are tightly integrated with the ecological roles of lepidopterans as pollinators, prey, and bioindicators, and are supported by a flexible neuronal network. Of special interest for successful orientation are higher-order integration centres like the mushroom bodies (centres for learning and memory) and the central complex (the centre for spatial orientation and locomotion). These centres support cue integration, compass orientation, memory, and directional decision-making. However, anthropogenic stressors, including habitat fragmentation, light pollution, pesticides, and electromagnetic noise, threaten both the environmental cues and the neural systems facilitating lepidopteran navigation, with potential cascading effects on biodiversity and ecosystem health. By combining insights from behavioural ecology, neurobiology, and conservation, we aim to provide a comprehensive overview of the challenges and adaptations that shape the navigational toolkit of lepidopterans, underlining their significance as animal models for studying spatial orientation in a changing world.

Multitrophic biodiversity drives soil phosphorus mobilization in subtropical ecosystems.

Flight delays during extreme weather events exhibit spatio-temporal propagation and cascading effects, posing serious challenges to the resilience of aviation systems. Existing prediction approaches often neglect dynamic dependencies across flight chains and struggle to model sparse extreme events. This study develops a data-driven framework that explicitly models delay propagation paths, incorporates historical scenario retrieval to capture rare disruption patterns, and integrates meteorological, airport operational, and flight-specific information through multi-source fusion. Using U.S. flight operations and weather records, the framework demonstrates clear advantages over established baselines in extreme-delay scenarios, achieving a MAE of 3.23 min, an RMSE of 6.25 min, and an R2 of 0.92—improving by 8.8%, 26.0%, and 5.75% compared to the best benchmark. Ablation studies confirm the contribution of the propagation modeling, historical retrieval, and multi-source integration modules, while cross-airport evaluations reveal consistent accuracy at both major hubs (e.g., Atlanta, Chicago O’Hare) and regional airports (e.g., Kona, Anchorage). These findings demonstrate that the proposed framework enables reliable forecasting of delay propagation under complex weather conditions, providing valuable support for proactive departure management and enhancing the resilience of aviation operations.

Abstract Drought events can disrupt food security and increase the risk of violent conflicts. In an interconnected global food system, countries rely on both local food production and imports to meet domestic demand. When assessing the impact of drought risk on national food security, however, imported crops are often overlooked. This study incorporates international crop trade information to understand the role of crop imports in the drought risk profile of countries. We focus on conflict-affected countries due to their reliance on food imports, and particular vulnerability to the impacts of drought events and their corresponding cascading effects. We develop a framework to quantify drought risk associated with domestic production and imports of crops (i.e. composite drought risk) by combining gridded drought risk data with crop production and trade for 23 countries. Our findings show that most conflict-affected countries face drought risk primarily through domestic production, as most consumed calories are produced locally. Nevertheless, including crop imports alters the composite drought risk profiles considerably (>10%) in 13 countries, with changes reaching 40-50% in some cases. Crop imports also carry their own external drought risk, contributing more than 10% of high drought risk in 21 countries and amounting to 80% in some cases. Furthermore, we identify critical trade connections that expose countries to concentrated drought risks from specific trading partners. We demonstrate the need to incorporate both domestic and import-related drought risks in food security assessments, and we suggest potential strategies based on countries’ composite drought risk profiles for drought resilient food security.

Climate change and biodiversity loss are among the most urgent challenges, with ecosystems rapidly responding to pressures such as rising temperatures and plant invasions. Plant community composition plays a key role in ecosystem carbon and energy flows, water balance, nutrient cycling, and pest control—directly affecting ecosystem services. We synthesize how climate change influences plant invasions across ecological scales. Climate change interacts with invasive species traits—such as high genetic and phenotypic plasticity, rapid reproduction, and generalist interactions—to facilitate invader transport, establishment, and spread, enabling them to outcompete native plants. Using field experiments, we illustrate the impacts at the community level, including effects on native plants, pollinators, seed dispersers, soil microbial communities, pests, and pathogens. Together, climate change and plant invasions destabilize ecological networks, reduce biodiversity, and trigger cascading effects on socio-ecological systems. Addressing these challenges requires inclusive, integrative approaches that prioritize emission reductions, biosecurity, conservation, and ecological restoration.

Piezocatalytic therapy has emerged as a noninvasive therapeutic strategy. However, its therapeutic effect is limited by the low separation efficiency of carriers (electrons and holes) in piezoelectric materials. Rare-earth hexagonal manganite materials might be good candidates for efficient piezocatalytic therapy because of their high piezoelectric response, Curie temperature, and relatively narrow optical bandgaps. Herein, we report the design of a rare-earth hexagonal manganite material [iron (Fe)-doped yttrium manganite (YMnO3) nanoparticles (YMnO3:Fe NPs)] for piezocatalytic therapy. The introduction of Fe dopants through polarization engineering increased the tilt angle in the manganese oxide (MnO5) triangular bipyramidal structure in the YMnO3:Fe lattice, enhancing the crystal asymmetry, spontaneous polarization, and piezoelectric performance. Concurrently, density functional theory calculation revealed that Mn-O covalency increased and Fe-O-Mn bond angle distortion reduced energy barriers synergistically, enabling directional electron migration for minimizing efficiency loss. Under ultrasound irradiation, YMnO3:Fe NPs exhibited a dual enzymatic-piezocatalytic catalytic amplification effect to trigger tumor-cell apoptosis. This cascade effect increased the generation of intracellular reactive oxygen species triggered apoptosis and ferroptosis via glutathione peroxidase 4 suppression and acyl-CoA synthetase long-chain family member 4 upregulation, which inhibited in vivo tumor growth. These findings highlighted the significant potential of rare-earth hexagonal manganite materials for the advancement of cancer therapeutic strategies.

Infectious disease is a major driver of biodiversity loss, but how disease threatens pollinator communities remains poorly understood. Here, we review the plant–pollinator–pathogen literature to identify mechanisms by which plant and pollinator traits and community composition influence pathogen transmission and assess consequences of transmission on plant and pollinator fitness. We find that plant and pollinator traits that increase floral contact can amplify transmission, but community-level factors such as plant and pollinator abundance are often correlated and can counteract one another. Although disease reduces pollinator fitness in some species, little research has assessed cascading effects on pollination, and taxonomic representation outside of honey bees and bumble bees remains poor. Major open challenges include ( a ) disentangling correlations between plant and pollinator abundance to understand how community composition impacts pathogen transmission and ( b ) distinguishing when pathogen transmission results in disease. Addressing these issues, as well as expanding taxonomic representation of pollinators, will deepen our understanding of how pathogens impact diverse pollinator communities.

Modern power distribution systems are increasingly stressed as they operate closer to their voltage stability limits, driven by growing electricity demand, complex load behaviors, and the evolving structure of power networks. Radial distribution systems, in particular, are highly susceptible to voltage instability under critical loading conditions, where even minor load increases can trigger voltage collapse. Such events threaten the continuity and quality of power supply and can cause damage to infrastructure and sensitive equipment. While large-scale cascading failures are typically associated with transmission systems, localized cascading effects such as sequential voltage drops, feeder outages, and protective device operations can still occur in distribution networks, especially under high loading. Therefore, reliable and timely voltage stability assessment is essential to maintain system reliability and prevent disruptions. This study presents a comprehensive comparative analysis of four voltage stability indices designed for radial distribution networks. The performance of these indices is evaluated on the IEEE 33-bus and 69-bus test systems under various critical loading conditions and multiple static load models, including Constant Power Load (CPL), Constant Current Load (CIL), Constant Impedance Load (CZL), Composite Load (COML), and Exponential Load (EXL). The analysis investigates each index’s effectiveness in identifying voltage collapse points, estimating critical load levels, and calculating load margins, while also evaluating their robustness across diverse operating scenarios. The findings offer practical insights and serve as a valuable benchmark for selecting suitable voltage stability indicators to support monitoring and planning in modern distribution networks.

The recovery of large carnivores offers unique opportunities to study their cascading impacts on plant population dynamics. Medium‐sized carnivores, both prey and seed dispersers, are suppressed by apex predators, indirectly increasing seed‐eating rodent's populations and potentially altering plant establishment. We investigated how natural variation in the presence of the Iberian lynx Lynx pardinus , a top predator in southern Spain, triggered cascading effects on the recruitment of the Iberian pear Pyrus bourgaeana through altered seed dispersal patterns by mesopredators and post‐dispersal seed predation by rodents. To assess whether and how the seed‐dispersal effectiveness of the Iberian pear was influenced by lynx presence across different habitats (open, forest) and microsites (shrub, rock and open), we conducted field experiments and observations spanning multiple life‐cycle stages of this fleshy‐fruited tree mainly dispersed by carnivorous mammals. Path analysis revealed that lynx presence decreased seed dispersal by 80% and biased it toward forests, where seedling survival was extremely low (1%). Most of the seeds were delivered in open microsites (61%), particularly in lynx absence by the red fox. Although we detected no direct effect of lynx presence on post‐dispersal seed predation, rodents removed 49 and 116% more seeds under shrubs than in rock and open interspaces, respectively, negatively affecting plant recruitment. Since shrubs provided the most favourable conditions for seedling survival, particularly in open habitats, these results expose a seed‐seedling conflict, whereby microsites with the highest seed predation are also those that maximize seedling establishment. This may limit the expansion potential of the Iberian pear and likely other fleshy‐fruited species given the current global rewilding context. Reintroduction programs of threatened carnivores should account for trophic cascades that may disrupt frugivory interactions and ultimately shape plant recruitment and establishment. This is especially relevant in defaunated ecosystems, where plant–animal mutualisms are often compromised.

Bridge design typically uses load-based design criteria focused on risk thresholds from engineering practice and standards, overlooking cascading effects on connected infrastructure and regional economies. We argue for a systems-based design that balances risk reduction with resilience — the capacity to recover from disruptions. Using the Francis Scott Key Bridge collapse as a case study, we estimate economic impacts assuming impact on local transportation networks only as well as integrating cascading failures on surrounding infrastructure (e.g., closure of the Port of Baltimore), employing the regional economic model TranSight. Results show combined bridge-and-port disruptions produce substantially larger losses in GDP, employment, disposable income, and labor force, with some indicators not recovering until 2040. The Baltimore region exhibits lower resilience to compounding shocks, highlighting the need for a resilience-based framework that considers interconnected infrastructure. We conclude infrastructure design must move beyond component-focused risk criteria toward an explicit, quantifiable resilience framework.

ABSTRACT Extensive literature has examined the evolution of the labor income share in the context of the digital economy. However, most studies emphasize the role of digital technologies while overlooking the potential influence of digital institutional arrangements. This study conceptualizes data element marketization as an institutional innovation in the digital economy, exploiting the quasi-natural experiment of “data trading platform pilots” and applying a Difference-in-Differences (DID) model to evaluate its impact on the labor income share. Our study finds that data element marketization significantly increases the labor income share, and this effect operates through expanding employment scale, reducing capital deepening, and weakening enterprise market power, with cascading effects among these mechanisms. Heterogeneity analysis reveals that the positive impact of data element marketization on the labor income share is more pronounced among mature, capital-intensive, private, and large-scaled enterprises, while it remains insignificant for other firm types. Our study suggests that data element marketization fosters a more equitable income distribution. Subsequent policies should strengthen institutional frameworks for data trading, provide targeted support for enterprises in need, and guide data-AI integration toward labor-friendly directions to sustain growth in the labor income share, ensuring that the benefits of data element marketization reach a broader labor force.

Responses of different life stages of Physa acuta (Draparnaud, 1805) to the pesticides imidacloprid and tebuconazole: effects on growth, reproduction, and behavior.

Nonlinear ozone response to extreme high temperature in a subtropical megacity basin: Integrated observation and modeling analysis.

Unprecedented high-temperature triggers a rapid shift in ecological characteristics of phytoplankton succession in the southern coastal waters of Korea.

Job loss is a major collateral consequence of pretrial detention. It frequently results from even short periods of detention and can have cascading and long term effects on income, housing security, family stability, and likelihood of incarceration—all despite the fact that people in pretrial detention are entitled to a presumption of innocence and indeed may never be found guilty of an offense. Given existing racial disparities in arrests, bail determinations, and bail amounts, job loss from pretrial detention further drives racial inequalities in employment and income. While job loss from pretrial detention inflicts substantial social harms and undermines due process, current policy solutions, such as ban-the-box laws, fail to address it. This Article proposes a novel solution, reframing the issue as a matter of protected leave rather than traditional employment discrimination law, and drawing on the unexpected source of the Uniformed Services Employment and Reemployment Rights Act of 1994 (“USERRA”). USERRA guarantees deployed service members a right to reemployment upon return from tours of duty. This Article proposes a similar right to reemployment for people released from pretrial detention whose charges are still pending or have resulted in a disposition other than conviction, subject to certain limitations present in USERRA and potential carve-outs for certain charges or job types. Eighty years of experience under USERRA and its predecessors demonstrate that a right to reemployment is practicable for employers and an effective mechanism to ensure job stability during periods of often sudden and unpredictable leave. Such a right would promote fundamental, widely held due process values and counteract the substantial social harms of job loss from pretrial detention.

Small-scale fishery as a driver of habitat loss in marine protected areas.

The effect of ocean alkalinity enhancement on zooplankton standing stock and community composition in the Eastern Mediterranean Sea: a mesocosm study.

Touch facilitates newborns' self-regulation: Systematic review of multidimensional arousal outcomes.

Why do different lake types exist in the same climatic zone? A case study from the arid region of northern China.

Abstract The escalating frequency and magnitude of floods pose significant challenges to traditional flood control measures with fixed defense capacities, such as levees, dams, and reservoirs. Flood Detention Areas (FDAs) have been widely implemented in many countries as solutions to extreme flood events, functioning by temporarily holding excess floodwaters and serving as farmland and residential zones during periods of inactivity. However, uncertainties regarding their flood control effectiveness, concerns over post‐activation livelihood recovery, and the lack of management guidelines have limited their broader adoption and effective utilization. Here we proposed an innovative remote sensing and AI based framework to derive the lifespan of 3D flood structure incorporating flood extent and depth. Taking the once‐in‐a‐century flood in China's Hai River Basin (HRB) in 2023 as example, the thrived two‐month‐long catchment‐scale 229,000‐km 2 3D flood structure enabled the first quantitative evaluation to the flood control and drainage capacities of FDAs. The results revealed that eight activated FDAs detained 2.7 billion m 3 of floodwaters, with most of the water drained within two weeks. River conveyance capacity was identified as a pivotal factor in the flood drainage process. The 3D flood structure further highlights disparities in detention processes between upstream and downstream FDAs due to cascade effects, providing valuable guidance for their management. These findings resolve the key uncertainties and debates regarding FDAs, providing insights to enhance FDA management, and supporting their broader implementation in flood‐prone regions with extensive agricultural land use and dense populations, thereby mitigating future flood risks and minimizing associated losses.