Distant Environment Research Articles

Fitness variation across subtle environmental perturbations reveals local modularity and global pleiotropy of adaptation.

Building a genotype-phenotype-fitness map of adaptation is a central goal in evolutionary biology. It is difficult even when adaptive mutations are known because it is hard to enumerate which phenotypes make these mutations adaptive. We address this problem by first quantifying how the fitness of hundreds of adaptive yeast mutants responds to subtle environmental shifts. We then model the number of phenotypes these mutations collectively influence by decomposing these patterns of fitness variation. We find that a small number of inferred phenotypes can predict fitness of the adaptive mutations near their original glucose-limited evolution condition. Importantly, inferred phenotypes that matter little to fitness at or near the evolution condition can matter strongly in distant environments. This suggests that adaptive mutations are locally modular - affecting a small number of phenotypes that matter to fitness in the environment where they evolved - yet globally pleiotropic - affecting additional phenotypes that may reduce or improve fitness in new environments.

Restoring farmlands for food and nature

Changes in the intensity and extent of farmland have a profound impact on life on Earth. Although nature-rich farmlands have conservation value, their promotion competes with the protection and restoration of natural habitat. Restoring the productive capacity of existing farmland can help maximize opportunities for the restoration of both nature-rich farmlands and natural habitat.

A highly-sensitive temperature sensor based on GeO2–SiO2 long period fiber grating

A highly-sensitive long period grating temperature sensor has been introduced here, which is composed of GeO2 in the core and SiO2 in the cladding. Due to high thermo-optic coefficient contrast of the core and the cladding, the proposed sensor provides high temperature sensitivity of S = Δλ/ΔT = −2.3871 nm/°C in the temperature range of 71 °C to 406 °C. The grating period and the length of the sensor are 445.4 nm and ∼25 mm, respectively and the operating wavelength range is λ∼1.48–2.28 μm. The proposed sensor has been investigated considering material dispersion for the core and the cladding at different temperatures. Also, the conditions required for coupling of the fundamental core mode to the higher order cladding modes with respect to lattice constant have been regarded. The phase matching curves has been considered in the design of the proposed sensor and the structure has been optimized to present the maximum sensitivity, achievable in the regarded temperature range. The presented optical temperature sensor is feasible with low cost which benefits the high sensitivity, large detection range, and large operating wavelength range and it can find potential applications in the measurement of temperature in toxic, unreachable, and far distant environments such as in temperature control of lasers, and in oil or gas industries.

Antarctic desert soil bacteria exhibit high novel natural product potential, evaluated through long-read genome sequencing and comparative genomics.

Actinobacteria and Proteobacteria are important producers of bioactive natural products (NP), and these phyla dominate in the arid soils of Antarctica, where metabolic adaptations influence survival under harsh conditions. Biosynthetic gene clusters (BGCs) which encode NPs, are typically long and repetitious high G+C regions difficult to sequence with short-read technologies. We sequenced 17 Antarctic soil bacteria from multi-genome libraries, employing the long-read PacBio platform, to optimize capture of BGCs and to facilitate a comprehensive analysis of their NP capacity. We report 13 complete bacterial genomes of high quality and contiguity, representing 10 different cold-adapted genera including novel species. Antarctic BGCs exhibited low similarity to known compound BGCs (av. 31%), with an abundance of terpene, non-ribosomal peptide and polyketide-encoding clusters. Comparative genome analysis was used to map BGC variation between closely related strains from geographically distant environments. Results showed the greatest biosynthetic differences to be in a psychrotolerant Streptomyces strain, as well as a rare Actinobacteria genus, Kribbella, while two other Streptomyces spp. were surprisingly similar to known genomes. Streptomyces and Kribbella BGCs were predicted to encode antitumour, antifungal, antibacterial and biosurfactant-like compounds, and the synthesis of NPs with antibacterial, antifungal and surfactant properties was confirmed through bioactivity assays.

Reflective Hyperconnectivity of Social Networks Virtual Space as a Factor in the Design of Distant Learning Environment

In this article, topics related to the urgent transition to distance education (DE), through decisive measures taken to protect Russian university community against consequences of COVID-19 epidemic are covered. Based on semi-structured interviews with administrators, faculty, IT specialists and students, it is argued that in the force majeure circumstances the university offers for DE a standard model of one-size-fits-all curriculum though modified through information and communication technologies. The use of the Internet in a localized online space is limited to delivering courses without considering needs of individual learners, their autonomy, preferences and prior knowledge of the subject. The observation method was used by both participant and non-participant. An experiment on the teachers’ self-assessment proves that many still view the university as a source of offline information for students. The article purports to discuss ways to promote DE by the concepts of postindustrial educational space connectivism, hyperconnectivity of social networks, teachers’ reflective practice, digital nativity of teachers and students in mastering information and communication technologies. It is claimed that real transition of a Russian university to DE cannot be achieved without internet-provided increased transactional distance in the dialogue between the teacher and students mediated by technology and reflective approach.

Transnational Communities of Practice: Their Development, Operation, and Contribution

Critical to the successful maintenance and survival of a transnational education partnership is the role of faculty. Our study documents the operational and social relationships between faculty teaching transnationally. Through interviews and observation, we find that informal communities of practice (CoP) spontaneously evolve, serving to improve faculty’s teaching and learning practice while in situ. The key to CoP effectiveness is members’ cultural intelligence and adoption of a reflective practice. These findings have significant implications for university internationalization practices. CoP should be nurtured and encouraged to develop organically in a transnational environment, and formally supported by university systems and processes. Furthermore, we recommend universities facilitate development of faculty cross-cultural capabilities. Our study contributes to international education and CoP literature through its rich and detailed portrayal of the development and operation of CoP, and mapped member participation, in a culturally distant situated learning environment.

The ARCHES Space-Analogue Demonstration Mission: Towards Heterogeneous Teams of Autonomous Robots for Collaborative Scientific Sampling in Planetary Exploration

Teams of mobile robots will play a crucial role in future missions to explore the surfaces of extraterrestrial bodies. Setting up infrastructure and taking scientific samples are expensive tasks when operating in distant, challenging, and unknown environments. In contrast to current single-robot space missions, future heterogeneous robotic teams will increase efficiency via enhanced autonomy and parallelization, improve robustness via functional redundancy, as well as benefit from complementary capabilities of the individual robots. In this letter, we present our heterogeneous robotic team, consisting of flying and driving robots that we plan to deploy on scientific sampling demonstration missions at a Moon-analogue site on Mt. Etna, Sicily, Italy in 2021 as part of the ARCHES project. We describe the robots' individual capabilities and their roles in two mission scenarios. We then present components and experiments on important tasks therein: automated task planning, high-level mission control, spectral rock analysis, radio-based localization, collaborative multi-robot 6D SLAM in Moon-analogue and Mars-like scenarios, and demonstrations of autonomous sample return.

Drivers’ car-following behaviours in low-illumination conditions

Low illumination is a special driving condition that negatively affects drivers’ vision, information acquisition (IA) ability, distance recognition and risk perception. This study evaluated drivers’ car-following behaviours and characteristics using questionnaire-based research conducted among 214 drivers in Hefei. In this study, exploratory factor analysis (EFA) was used to determine the factor structure of the scale, and the internal consistency of all factors was good. The results show that low illumination strongly influences drivers’ following behaviour and that they tend to choose safe and conservative ways to follow leading vehicles. Street lights are beneficial, aiding drivers’ IA and their grasp of surrounding or distant environments. Myopic drivers performed worse in car following when driving in a low illumination environment, regardless of the presence of street lights. Drivers with astigmatism performed worse when street lights were present. Drivers who reported more aberrant behaviours were more aggressive when driving and tended to adopt shorter following distances at night. Practitioner summary: This study developed two scales to evaluate drivers’ car-following behaviours and characteristics. A total of 214 drivers participated in the survey. Low illumination strongly influences drivers’ following behaviour. Drivers who reported more aberrant behaviours were more aggressive when driving and tended to adopt shorter following distances at night.

Associations of Green Spaces and Streets in the Living Environment with Outdoor Activity, Media Use, Overweight/Obesity and Emotional Wellbeing in Children and Adolescents.

Aspects of the living environment can affect health and wellbeing of children and adolescents. Whereas most previous studies assessed the more distant residential urban environment, less is known on possible effects of the close environment. The present study investigated associations of the proportion of streets and green spaces in the immediate urban living environment (50, 100 and 400 m around the home) with media use, outdoor activity, overweight/obesity and emotional problems in two samples of younger (age 3–10, n = 395) and older children (age 10–19, n = 405). Independently of socioeconomic parameters, a higher proportion of streets was associated with overweight/obesity (in younger and older children), higher media use (in younger children), less outdoor activity and more emotional problems (in older children). Older children’s outdoor activity in winter increased with increasing proportions of green spaces. The observations suggest that the immediate urban living environment is a factor that can affect leisure behavior and health in children.

Wolves in the Amazon? Child perceptions of a distant natural environment in an English primary school

By analysing an academic exhibition on the Amazon region made by Year 5 children from an Oxford-based primary school, this qualitative study explores the ways that children perceive a representation of a natural environment geographically distant from their home context. The phenomenographic analysis of written and visual documentary sources focuses on incorporated biophysical and socio-cultural elements. Three hierarchically inclusive ways of perceiving the Amazon were identified: (1) Nature as species of wild fauna and their habitat; (2) Nature as political economy; and (3) Nature as an imaginative world. Correspondingly, findings highlighted: (1) children’s affiliation to other living organisms; (2) children’s stereotypical constructs in relation to developing countries; and (3) nature as a concept that is actively constructed by children, including the conjuring of imagined ‘natural’ worlds. The findings have implications for interdisciplinary approaches to Environmental Education in primary contexts.

The role of host environment in cancer evolution

AbstractSomatic mutations in oncogene and tumor suppressor genes accumulate in healthy tissues throughout life and delineate clones with limited expansion. Lifestyle‐related toxic insults increase the size and number of these clones that participate to tissue aging. Their identification has blurred the boundaries between clonal expansion and malignant tumor and has drawn more attention to the role of the host environment in tumor emergence and progression. Local tissue factors such as disrupted cell interactions and stromal cell senescence combine with systemic and distant alterations to initiate the reiterative process of clonal expansion, multilayer intrinsic diversification and clonal selection that eventually characterize overt tumor evolution. In turn, tumors remodel their close and distant environments, establishing positive feedback loops that contribute to disease progression. Strategies emerge to preserve the tumor suppressive properties of healthy tissue landscapes and delay age‐induced changes that eventually lead to cancer.

Emerging market multinationals’ firm-specific advantages, institutional distance, and foreign acquisition location choice

How do emerging market multinational enterprises’ (EMNEs’) firm-specific advantages (FSAs) drive their foreign acquisition location choice? We theorize EMNE FSAs as important contingencies influencing the effect of institutional distance (ID) on EMNE foreign acquisition location choice. As a baseline main effect, we expect ID to positively influence EMNE location choice, as well-developed institutionally distant host-country environments are attractive to EMNEs. This effect is reduced by EMNE FSAs shaped by home-country conditions, such as success in navigating institutional voids and superior human resource management, which are more competitive in institutionally closer countries. Conversely, this effect is heightened by EMNE FSAs shaped by investment choices for knowledge and for international venturing. Based on analyses of 278 EMNE acquisitions by EMNEs from nine emerging markets, our findings largely support our hypotheses. Our study extends research on EMNE FSAs, which often have been compared only with those of developed-country multinational enterprises.

A Rhetoric of Walking and Reading: Immersion in Environmental Ambient Literature

ABSTRACT Duncan Speakman’s ambient literature, It Must Have Been Dark by Then (2017), is a paperback book that is read in tandem with a smartphone app to create an immersive experience for readers. Readers walk local landscapes and create an individual map via the Global Positioning System, while listening to narratives of climate change from Latvia, Louisiana, and Tunisia. This essay completes a rhetorical critique and econarratologically close reading of Speakman’s book, and refers to rhetorical theories on walking by de Certeau, Mountford, Topinka, and Kalin and Frith. The essay concludes that Speakman’s readers immerse themselves in print, digital narrative, and actual environments, becoming performers and cocreators of individual narratives. The readers’ embodied immersion in the story allows it to transport them into distant environments affected by climate change.

Genomic and physiological resilience in extreme environments are associated with a secure attachment style

Understanding individual capability to adjust to protracted confinement and isolation may inform adaptive plasticity and disease vulnerability/resilience, and may have long-term implications for operations requiring prolonged presence in distant and restricted environments. Individual coping depends on many different factors encompassing psychological dispositional traits, endocrine reactivity and their underlying molecular mechanisms (e.g. gene expression). A positive view of self and others (secure attachment style) has been proposed to promote individual resilience under extreme environmental conditions. Here, we tested this hypothesis and investigated the underlying molecular mechanisms in 13 healthy volunteers confined and isolated for 12 months in a research station located 1670 km away from the south geographic pole on the Antarctic Plateau at 3233 m above sea level. Study participants, stratified for attachment style, were characterised longitudinally (before, during and after confinement) for their psychological appraisal of the stressful nature of the expedition, diurnal fluctuations in endocrine stress reactivity, and gene expression profiling (transcriptomics). Predictably, a secure attachment style was associated with reduced psychological distress and endocrine vulnerability to stress. In addition, while prolonged confinement and isolation remarkably altered overall patterns of gene expression, such alteration was largely reduced in individuals characterised by a secure attachment style. Furthermore, increased resilience was associated with a reduced expression of genes involved in energy metabolism (mitochondrial function and oxidative phosphorylation). Ultimately, our data indicate that a secure attachment style may favour individual resilience in extreme environments and that such resilience can be mapped onto identifiable molecular substrates.

COMPARISON OF DIATOMS IN WELL AND DRENOVAĈA SWAMP IN VELINO SELO VILLAGE, IN BOSNIA AND HERZEGOVINA

<p>Parallel with the research of Bacillariophyta flora in the well with shadoof on the area of Semberija was researched Bacillariophyta flora of other freshwater systems that are located in the near or distant environment from the researched wells, such as Drenovaĉa swamp, Sava river, Jelaz canal, artesian wells and ephemeral swamps. It is very interesting to compare Bacillariophyta flora that inhabits wells and Bacillariophyta flora of Drenovaĉa swamp that is only a dozen meters away from the researched well of Lazić Mijo, a local in the village Velino Selo.</p><p>All identified Bacillariophyta in researched well belong to aerophile, which indicates on certain ecology of the well, that is a specific life conditions that are present in wells as anthropogenic creations. Contrary to the well flora, Bacillariophyta flora of Drenovaĉa swamp is composed party of algae belonging to benthos. In Lazić Mijo well were identified 33Bacillariophyta, all aerophile, while in Drenovaĉa swamp were identified 57 Bacillariophyta, from which only 18 are aerophile and others belong to benthos.</p><p>Considering that Bacillariophyta is a component of aeroplankton, and that via air currents can be transmitted over long distances, it is assumed that similarly aerophile Bacillariophyta were transmitted on mosses associations on the well wall, manifested their adaptive attributes in such biotopes, and by that became autochthonous flora of the well. Large qualitative differences in Bacillariophyta flora in wells with shadoof and in Bacillariophyta flora of Drenovaĉa swamp also indicate on autochthony of Bacillariophyta flora of the well, which means that species were not transmitted from the neighborhood.</p>

Games of policy and practice: multi-level dynamics and the role of universities in knowledge transfer processes

This paper adopts a multilevel, longitudinal case study approach to analyze universities’ institutional role and their contributions to society. It explores third mission policies and practices enacted within the University of Bologna from 1996 to 2016, presenting a detailed account of their interaction within the university and with regional and national regulatory initiatives. The aim is to highlight the relevance of a joint analysis of three dynamics. The first dynamic relates to how norms and practices oscillate between formal and informal codification and how strategic initiatives, either led from the top down or driven from the bottom up, develop in a non-linear fashion. The second dynamic describes the ways within which the structural definition of roles falls short in providing a full understanding of the changes in policies and attitudes related to knowledge transfer activities and their need to be complemented by a process analysis of the relationships among actors at different levels. The third dynamic relates to how multiple institutional logics evolve and change over time through a combination of dedicated structures and spaces of interaction in which the logics meet, sometimes aligning, sometimes compromising, and sometimes clashing. This three-pronged approach offers a novel contribution to the understanding of how universities interact with close and distant environments and their impacts on society.

Spherical Gaussian Light‐field Textures for Fast Precomputed Global Illumination

AbstractWe describe a method to use Spherical Gaussians with free directions and arbitrary sharpness and amplitude to approximate the precomputed local light field for any point on a surface in a scene. This allows for a high‐quality reconstruction of these light fields in a manner that can be used to render the surfaces with precomputed global illumination in real‐time with very low cost both in memory and performance. We also extend this concept to represent the illumination‐weighted environment visibility, allowing for high‐quality reflections of the distant environment with both surface‐material properties and visibility taken into account. We treat obtaining the Spherical Gaussians as an optimization problem for which we train a Convolutional Neural Network to produce appropriate values for each of the Spherical Gaussians' parameters. We define this CNN in such a way that the produced parameters can be interpolated between adjacent local light fields while keeping the illumination in the intermediate points coherent.

Testing whether ensemble modelling is advantageous for maximising predictive performance of species distribution models

Predictive performance is important to many applications of species distribution models (SDMs). The SDM ‘ensemble’ approach, which combines predictions across different modelling methods, is believed to improve predictive performance, and is used in many recent SDM studies. Here, we aim to compare the predictive performance of ensemble species distribution models to that of individual models, using a large presence–absence dataset of eucalypt tree species. To test model performance, we divided our dataset into calibration and evaluation folds using two spatial blocking strategies (checkerboard‐pattern and latitudinal slicing). We calibrated and cross‐validated all models within the calibration folds, using both repeated random division of data (a common approach) and spatial blocking. Ensembles were built using the software package ‘biomod2’, with standard (‘untuned’) settings. Boosted regression tree (BRT) models were also fitted to the same data, tuned according to published procedures. We then used evaluation folds to compare ensembles against both their component untuned individual models, and against the BRTs. We used area under the receiver‐operating characteristic curve (AUC) and log‐likelihood for assessing model performance. In all our tests, ensemble models performed well, but not consistently better than their component untuned individual models or tuned BRTs across all tests. Moreover, choosing untuned individual models with best cross‐validation performance also yielded good external performance, with blocked cross‐validation proving better suited for this choice, in this study, than repeated random cross‐validation. The latitudinal slice test was only possible for four species; this showed some individual models, and particularly the tuned one, performing better than ensembles. This study shows no particular benefit to using ensembles over individual tuned models. It also suggests that further robust testing of performance is required for situations where models are used to predict to distant places or environments.

Середовище дистанційної підтримки у процесі підготовки майбутніх учителів природничих наук до організації безпечної життєдіяльності учнів

A social role of Natural Sciences teachers has been becoming of particular importance in the context of dynamic changes occurring in the modern educational space. Therefore, the professional training of students, in particular, to organize safe life activities of high school students should be grounded on the combining of deep mastering of the basics of theoretical professional knowledge and skills in applying this knowledge in their future educational activities. Thus, there arises a problem of forming the readiness of future Natural Sciences teachers to organize high school students’ safe life activities. The aim of the study is to substantiate theoretically the pedagogical condition for training future teachers of Natural Sciences to organize high school students’ safe life – to create an environment of remote (distant) support for students in the process of training them to organize of high school students’ safe life activities. It has been found out that the environment of remote support of students in the process of training them to organize of high school students’ safe life activities should be considered as an integrated environment of information and educational resources, software, telecommunication means, rules for their administration and use which provide opportunities for interaction during their learning and self-guided work. It has been proved that creating a remote support environment for students in the process of training them to organize of high school students’ safe life activities (distance course + virtual class), using the services GoogleSites and Google Classroom, will improve the efficiency and quality of the training aimed at future Natural Sciences teachers to organize high school students’ safe life activities, expand the educational and methodological basis, implement an individual approach to learning, provide an interactive control over the fulfilment of tasks alongside with the use of the individual and group methods within the online environment, increase the motivation to learn. Keywords: future teachers, Natural Sciences, safe life activities, pupils, distant education, remote / distant support environment.

Progress and Challenges in Quantifying Wildfire Smoke Emissions, Their Properties, Transport, and Atmospheric Impacts

AbstractWildfire is a natural and integral ecosystem process that is necessary to maintain species composition, structure, and ecosystem function. Extreme fires have been increasing over the last decades, which have a substantial impact on air quality, human health, the environment, and climate systems. Smoke aerosols can be transported over large distances, acting as pollutants that affect adjacent and distant downwind communities and environments. Fire emissions are a complicated mixture of trace gases and aerosols, many of which are short‐lived and chemically reactive, and this mixture affects atmospheric composition in complex ways that are not completely understood. We present a review of the current state of knowledge of smoke aerosol emissions originating from wildfires. Satellite observations, from both passive and active instruments, are critical to providing the ability to view the large‐scale influence of fire, smoke, and their impacts. Progress in the development of fire emission estimates to regional and global chemical transport models has advanced, although significant challenges remain, such as connecting ecosystems and fuels burned with dependent atmospheric chemistry. Knowledge of the impact of smoke on radiation, clouds, and precipitation has progressed and is an essential topical research area. However, current measurements and parameterizations are not adequate to describe the impacts on clouds of smoke particles (e.g., CNN, INP) from fire emissions in the range of representative environmental conditions necessary to advance science or modeling. We conclude by providing recommendations to the community that we believe will advance the science and understanding of the impact of fire smoke emissions on human and environmental health, as well as feedback with climate systems.