Early detection of pest infestation is an important first step in the adoption of control measures that can be tailored to specific local conditions. Remote sensing technology can be a helpful tool, allowing the quick scanning of large areas, but it’s not universally applicable as sometimes items can be hard to detect. Unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs), or drones, on the other hand, can help by getting closer to individual trees and detecting smaller atypical signals.
The pine processionary moth is an insect infesting trees in gardens and parks, threatening public health because of the hairs released by its larvae, which can cause a stinging or itching sensation. The pest is rapidly growing in numbers and conquering new territories, which makes it a species of concern.
In a new study, researchers tested different deep learning methods to detect the nests made by pine processionary moth larvae on pine and cedar trees. Drones flying over the trees took images, which were then analysed with the help of artificial intelligence (AI) to identify and localise the nests.
Drone images from Portugal.
The use of AI on drone images proved effective to detect pine processing moth nests on trees of different species and sizes, even under variable densities. The method can be successfully used in both forest and urban settings to help detect moth nests. That way, tree health managers can be informed about where the nests are and take appropriate measures to contain the damage and the public health risks.
“The study proved the advantage of using UAVs to document the presence of at least one nest per tree,” the researchers write in their study, which was published in a special issue of the journal NeoBiota dedicated to forest pests in Europe. “It therefore represents a substantial step forward in the integration of the UAV survey with ground observations in the monitoring of the colonies of an important forest defoliating insect in the Mediterranean area.”
image from the ground in daylightimage from the ground in infrared lightimage from drone
Furthermore, they suggest that the method can be extended to other pests.
“This technique can pave new avenues in the surveillance and management of emerging and non-native pests of trees, where early detection and early action should go together to achieve a satisfactory level of protection,” the study authors write in conclusion.
Research article:
Garcia A, Samalens J-C, Grillet A, Soares P, Branco M, van Halder I, Jactel H, Battisti A (2023) Testing early detection of pine processionary moth Thaumetopoea pityocampa nests using UAV-based methods. In: Jactel H, Orazio C, Robinet C, Douma JC, Santini A, Battisti A, Branco M, Seehausen L, Kenis M (Eds) Conceptual and technical innovations to better manage invasions of alien pests and pathogens in forests. NeoBiota 84: 267-279. https://doi.org/10.3897/neobiota.84.95692
Every year, new alien species of insects and fungi invade European forests. Some of them are exotic pests and diseases that can affect the survival and growth of trees.
To help develop strategies for monitoring and managing these non-native forest pests, a consortium of over 50 scientists representing 23 research institutions and 15 countries from across the globe joined their skills in the Horizon 2020 project HOMED “Holistic management of emerging forest pests and diseases.”
Alex Stemmelen during his presentation at the XXVI ICE Congress 2022. He is the first author of a paper on the pests of Douglas fir in NeoBiota‘s special issue.
Between 2018 and 2022, the HOMED consortium developed a full panel of scientific knowledge and practical solutions to better deal with emerging native and alien invasive pests and diseases.
Fruiting bodies of Austropuccinia psidii on Myrtus communis (symptoms of myrtle rust). Photo by Alberto Santini
This includes targeting the successive phases of invasion, and developing innovative methods for each phase: risk analysis, prevention/detection, surveillance, eradication/containment, and control.
To share the results of this cooperation and help researchers further improve the management of emerging forest pests and pathogens, HOMED has made the main outcomes of its research publically available.
They are now published in a special issue in the open-access journal NeoBiota, called “Conceptual and technical innovations to better manage invasions of alien pests and pathogens in forests”. The issue comprises 16 articles on various aspects of the ecology and management of invasive alien insects and fungal pathogens in Europe’s forests.
“Because forests provide irreplaceable goods and materials for people and the European economy, because maintaining healthy forests is essential for their contribution to climate change mitigation through sequestration and storage of atmospheric carbon, it is urgent to develop more effective protective measures against the ever-increasing threat of invasive forest pests,” the editors of the special issue write in an editorial.
More tools are needed that can help identify, prevent and monitor invasive alien species and improve early warning methods, which makes the research in this issue so crucial and timely.
The European project Homed, leaded by Hervé Jactel, gave the opportunity to produce a lot of important scientific results, these are just a part! Incredibly happy and proud!https://t.co/VeIK5zvC7I
“The role of researchers is to develop, test and promote the most relevant methods and tools at each stage of the invasion framework, i.e., for the early detection of these invasive alien organisms, for the identification of the species and for the monitoring of their damage and spread, but also for new eradication and control solutions,” the editors continue.
Hervé Jactel, Lukas Seehausen and Martin Gossner at HOMED’s and Pensoft’s stand during the XXVI ICE Congress 2022.
One highlight in the published research is a study exploring how using the methods of citizen science at schools can increase invasive species awareness. Another explores the efficiency of artificial intelligence in pest detection.
“The publications collected in this special issue demonstrate that current conceptual, methodological, and technological advances allow a great progress in the anticipation, monitoring and management of invasive pest species in forests,” the editors conclude.
Follow HOMED on Twitter. Follow NeoBiota on Twitter and Facebook.See the latest tweets on the special issue using the hashtag #HOMED_SI.
One million plant and animal species are threatened with extinction, many within decades, admits the global Convention on Biological Diversity (CBD) on the eve of the adoption of its boldest plan ever, the New Global Agreement to Safeguard Nature.
Europe is a major player in the political response to this global crisis mobilised through its own Biodiversity Strategy for 2030. In recognition of its global responsibilities, the EU has taken bold steps towards global leadership in setting policies and commitments.
However, political commitments are not sufficient to mitigate and reverse biodiversity loss. To secure the future of the planet and society politicians, business leaders, scientists and society leaders must all prioritise the conservation and restoration of ecosystems through strong legislation and smart decisions.
The recently adopted by the CBD Global Biodiversity Framework (GBF) provides the basis for the instruments for conservation and sustainable use of biodiversity and for equitable sharing of their benefits, including the genetic resources.
About the projects
The new Horizon Europe-funded projects CO-OP4CBD (abbreviation for Co-operation for the Convention on Biological Diversity) and BioAgora (or Bio Knowledge Agora) unite experts from renowned European organisations to enhance the coordination and strengthen the EU support for the implementation of the Convention.
Both projects will make more effective use of existing networks of experts with the aim to transform the EU policy-making process by supplying decision-makers with access to top European scientific expertise on biodiversity and social transformation.
CO-OP4CBD
Logo of the Horizon Europe project CO-OP4CBD (abbreviation for Co–operation for the Convention on Biological Diversity).
CO-OP4CBD kicked-off in December 2022 and will be running until 2026 with the grant of EUR 4 million, provided by the European Union’s Horizon Europe programme.
The project will put in place a mechanism for mobilising, engaging and sharing expertise necessary for effective participation of EU member States and bodies in the CBD policy and decision-making processes.
Experts will provide advice to the European Commission, Member States and associated countries’ delegations of negotiators and technical experts.
CO-OP4CBD kick off meeting in Brussels (Belgium), February 2023.
Furthermore, the project will increase access to European expertise through enhanced mechanisms for promoting technical and scientific cooperation not only for negotiations, but also for implementation, monitoring and review of the efforts of the Parties towards thePost-2020 Global Biodiversity Framework and the Convention on Biological Diversity.
The consortium of CO-OP4CBD comprises 9 universities and research centers from across Europe. Together, they bring together experts from various backgrounds with extensive experience in EU projects in the field of biodiversity.
Logo of the Horizon Europe project BioAgora (abbreviation for Bio Knowledge Agora).
BioAgora was launched in July 2022 and is a five-year project with nearly EUR 12 million granted from the European Union’s Horizon Europe programme.
The project is tasked to build the Science Service for Biodiversity platform (SSBD) as the scientific pillar of the EU Knowledge Centre for Biodiversity (KCBD).
The KCBD, the European Commission’s initiative on better knowledge management for policy-making on biodiversity, plays a central role in the EU biodiversity policy landscape, and therefore BioAgora will support orchestrating a harmonious dialogue among scientists, other knowledge holders and policy actors in the biodiversity policy arena.
The project partners believe that science, policy, and society need to work closer together, if they wish to enable the sustainability transformation in Europe.
BioAgora kick-off meeting, Helsinki (Finland), November 2022.
A key part of this transformation will depend on a stronger role of knowledge, whether from science or practitioner experience in decision-making and implementation of decisions on the ground. BioAgora aims to facilitate this interaction.
“Biodiversity and natural capital have to be integrated into public and business decision-making at all levels. Collective actions and pluralistic principles have to be at the core of biodiversity policy-making efforts, which is why the Science Service for Biodiversity is envisioned as a bridge between science, policy, and society.”
comments project coordinator Kati Vierikko from the Finnish Environment Institute (SYKE).
The consortium of BioAgora consists of 22 partnering organisations from thirteen European countries, all of which bring their extensive knowledge of biodiversity policy and decision-making.
As a South American herpetologist, it is inevitable to be absolutely buzzed every time I hear “Germán, you have to go to the Amazon jungle”. Going to the Amazon forest in Peru is perhaps the most joyful way to do your work. The chances to find so many frogs, lizards, snakes, turtles, and even caimans are really high, so one can’t help but get excited.
The Agua Blanca forest. Photo by Germán Chávez
The thing is, to someone like me who focuses their work on describing new species, the expectations shouldn’t be that high. The Amazon has always been a place full of mysteries, so many explorers, seduced by its enigmatic atmosphere, have gone deeper and deeper into the Amazonia. This has resulted in the description of so many species and very few unexplored places left.
So, when Wilmar Aznaran and I found this new species in the Amazon lowlands of central Peru, a well-visited area, we were quite surprised and kind of speechless. I have to confess that my reaction was “Bloody hell!” Externally, the frog is clearly different from any other similar species, and that was evident for us at the very moment we caught it. Indeed, the first option for the title of our new paper in Evolutionary Systematics was “Expect the unexpected: a new treefrog from the Amazon lowlands of Peru.” We could not believe that a medium-sized arboreal frog had passed in front of other researchers’ eyes, and remained unseen.
Scinax pyroinguinis. Photo by Germán Chávez
Soon we found out that it is not a common species in the area: after catching two individuals, we were unable to find more. Not ready to give up, we went once more time to that site a few months later and our efforts to find it were unsuccessful, so we suggest it is not a common frog.
At that point, we knew that we had a new species on hands, but describing it with only two specimens was challenging. Luis A. García-Ayachi went to the area and his efforts were also unsuccessful. That is when Alessandro Catenazzi joined us, so we decided to add an integrative approach to our work, basing our research on morphological and genetic differences. I can only say thanks to all our co-authors: from then on, everything started to work out.
Scinax pyroinguinis. Photo by Germán Chávez
We noticed there were wildfires in the area, are a serious threat to the frog’s habitat. So it is really curious that the orange pattern on the groins, thighs and shanks of the new species, resembles flames, like those threatening its habitat. No better name for our frog than Scinax pyroinguinis, which literally means “groins of fire”.
Scinax pyroinguinis. Photo by Germán ChávezA wildfire in the frog’s habitat. Photo by Luis A. García-Ayachi
We hope that this discovery encourages people and institutions to protect these remnant forests in central Peru, because they may yet harbour unknown species. If these forests disappear, we will probably lose a diversity that we do not even know now yet, and may never will. It is sort of a race against deforestation and habitat loss, but this doesn’t mean there’s nothing we can do. Research like ours is really important to help put the focus on this place, at least in the short term, and try to attract people to join forces in the conservation of Scinax pyroinguinis and its habitat.
Research article:
Chávez G, Aznaran W, García-Ayachi LA, Catenazzi A (2023) Rising from the ashes: A new treefrog (Anura, Hylidae, Scinax) from a wildfire-threatened area in the Amazon lowlands of central Peru. Evolutionary Systematics 7(1): 183-194. https://doi.org/10.3897/evolsyst.7.102425
To bridge the gap between authors and their readers or fellow researchers – whether humans or computers – Knowledge Pixels and Pensoft launched workflows to link scientific publications to nanopublications.
A new pilot project by Pensoft and Knowledge Pixels breaks scientific knowledge into FAIR and interlinked snippets of precise information
As you might have already heard, Knowledge Pixels: an innovative startup tech company aiming to revolutionise scientific publishing and knowledge sharing by means of nanopublications – recently launched a pilot project with the similarly pioneering open-science journal Research Ideas and Outcomes (RIO), in a first of several upcoming collaborations between the software developer and the open-access scholarly publisher Pensoft.
“The way how science is performed has dramatically changed with digitalisation, the Internet, and the vast increase in data, but the results are still shared in basically the same form and language as 300 years ago: in narrative text, like a story. These narratives are not precise and not directly interpretable by machines, thereby not FAIR. Even the latest impressive AI tools like ChatGPT can only guess (and sometimes ‘hallucinate’) what the authors meant exactly and how the results compare,”
said Philipp von Essen and Tobias Kuhn, the two founders of Knowledge Pixels in a press announcement.
So, in order to bridge the gap between authors and their readers and fellow researchers – whether humans or computers – the partners launched several workflows to bi-directionally link scientific publications from RIO Journal to nanopublications. We will explain and demonstrate these workflows in a bit.
Now, first, let’s see what nanopublications are and how they contribute to scientific knowledge, researchers and scholarship as a whole.
Basically, a nanopublication – unlike a research article – is just a tiny snippet of a scientific finding (e.g. medication X treats disease Y), which exists as a complete and straightforward piece of information stored on a decentralised server network in a specially structured format, so that it is readable for humans, but also “understandable” and actionable for computers and their algorithms.
A nanopublication may also be an assertion related to an existing research article meant to support, comment, update or complement the reported findings.
In fact, nanopublications as a concept have been with us for quite a while now. Ever since the rise of the Semantic Web, to be exact. At the end of the day, it all boils down to providing easily accessible information that is only a click away from additional useful and relevant content. The thing is, technological advancement has only recently begun to catch up with the concept of nanopublications. Today, we are one step closer to another revolution in scientific publishing, thanks to the emergence and increasing adoption of what we call knowledge graphs.
Second time I hear about nanopublications in biodiversity in 3 days -1st by @rdmpage + now by @Pensoft#ECN2016
“As pioneers in the semantic open access scientific publishing field for over a decade now, at Pensoft we are deeply engaged with making research work actually available at anyone’s fingertips. What once started as breaking down paywalls to research articles and adding the right hyperlinks in the right places, is time to be built upon,”
said Prof. Lyubomir Penev, founder and CEO at Pensoft: the open-access scholarly publisher behind the very first semantically enhanced research article in the biodiversity domain, published back in 2010 in the ZooKeys journal.
Why nanopublications?
Apart from enabling computer algorithms with wholesome access to published research findings, nanopublications allow for the knowledge snippets that they are intended to communicate to be fully understandable and actionable. With nanopublications, each byte of knowledge is interconnected and traceable back to its author(s) and scientific evidence.
Nanopublications present a complete and straightforward piece of information stored on a decentralised server network in a specially structured format, so that it is readable for humans, but also “understandable” and actionable for computers and their algorithms. Illustration by Knowledge Pixels.
By granting computers the capability of exchanging information between users and platforms, these data become Interoperable (as in the Iin FAIR), so that they can be delivered to the right user, at the right time, in the right place.
Another issue nanopublications are designed to address is research scrutiny. Today, scientific publications are produced at an unprecedented rate that is unlikely to cease in the years to come, as scholarship embraces the dissemination of early research outputs, including preprints, accepted manuscripts and non-conventional papers.
By linking assertions to a publication by means of nanopublications allows the original authors and their fellow researchers to keep knowledge up to date as new findings emerge either in support or contradiction to previous information.
A network of interlinked nanopublications could also provide a valuable forum for scientists to test, compare, complement and build on each other’s results and approaches to a common scientific problem, while retaining the record of their cooperation each step along the way.
A scientific issue that would definitely benefit from an additional layer of provenance and, specifically, a workflow allowing for new updates to be linked to previous publications is the biodiversity domain, where species treatments, taxon names, biotic interactions and phylogenies are continuously being updated, reworked and even discarded for good. This is why an upcoming collaboration between Pensoft and Knowledge Pixels will also involve the Biodiversity Data Journal (stay tuned!)
What can you do in RIO?
Now, let’s have a look at the *nano*opportunities already available at RIO Journal.
The integration between RIO and Nanodash: the environment developed by Knowledge Pixels where users edit and publish their nanopublications is available at any article published in the journal.
Add reaction to article
This function allows any reader to evaluate and record an opinion about any article using a simple template. The opinion is posted as a nanopublication displayed on the article page, bearing the timestamp and the name of the creator.
All one needs to do is go to a paper, locate the Nanopubs tab in the menu on the left and click on the Add reaction command to navigate to the Nanodash workspace accessible to anyone registered on ORCiD.
To access the Nanodash workspace, where you can fill in a ready-to-use, partially filled in nanopublication template, simply go to the Nanopubs tab in the menu of any article published in RIO Journal and click Add reaction to this article (see example).
Within the simple Nanodash workspace, the user can provide the text of the nanopublication; define its relation to the linked paper using the Citation Typing Ontology (CiTO); update its provenance and add information (e.g. licence, extra creators) by inserting extra elements.
To do this, the Knowledge Pixels team has created a ready-to-use nanopublication template, where the necessary details for the RIO paper and the author that secure the linkage have already been pre-filled.
Post an inline comment as a nanopublication
Another opportunity for readers and authors to add further meaningful information or feedback to an already published paper is by attaching an inline comment and then exporting it to Nanodash, so that it becomes a nanopublication. To do this, users will simply need to select some text with a left click, type in the comment, and click OK. Now, their input will be available in the Comment tab designed to host simple comments addressing the authors of the publication.
While RIO has long been supporting features allowing for readers to publicly share comments and even CrossRef-registered post-publication peer reviews along the articles, the nanopublications integration adds to the versatile open science-driven arsenal of feedback tools. More precisely, the novel workflow is especially useful for comments that provide a particularly valuable contribution to a research topic.
To make a comment into a nanopublication the user needs to locate the comment in the tab, and click on the Post as Nanopub command to access the Nanodash environment.
Add a nanopublication while writing your manuscript
A functionality available from ARPHA Writing Tool – the online collaborative authoring environment that underpins the manuscript submission process at several journals published by Pensoft, including RIO Journal – allows for researchers to create a list of nanopublications within their manuscripts.
By doing so, not only do authors get to highlight their key statements in a tabular view within a separate pre-designated Nanopublications section, but they also make it easier for reviewers and scientific editors to focus on and evaluate the very foundations of the paper.
By incorporating a machine algorithm-friendly structure for the main findings of their research paper, authors ensure that AI assistants, for example, will be more likely to correctly ‘read’, ‘interpret’ and deliver the knowledge reported in the publication for the next users and their prompts. Furthermore, fellow researchers who might want to cite the paper will also have an easier time citing the specific statement from within the cited source, so that their own readers – be it human, or AI – will make the right links and conclusions.
Within a pre-designated article template at RIO – regardless of the paper type selected – authors have the option to either paste a link to an already available nanopublication or manage their nanopublication via the Nanodash environment by following a link. Customised for the purposes of RIO, the Nanodash workspace will provide them with all the information needed to guide them through the creation and publication of their nanopublications.
Why Research Ideas and Outcomes, a.k.a. RIO Journal?
Why did Knowledge Pixels and Pensoft opt to run their joint pilot at no other journal within the Pensoft portfolio of open-access scientific journals but the Research Ideas and Outcomes (RIO)?
Well, one may argue that there simply was no better choice than an academic outlet that was initially designed to serve as “the open-science journal”: something it has been honourably recognised for by SPARC in 2016, only one year since its launch.
Innovative since day #1, back in 2015, RIO surfaced as an academic outlet to publish a whole lot of article types, reporting on scientific work from across the research process, starting from research ideas, grant proposals and workshop reports.
After all, back in 2015, when it was only a handful of funders who required Data and Software Management Plans to be made openly and publicly, RIO was already providing a platform to publish those as easily citable research outputs, complete with DOI and registration on Crossref. In the spirit of transparency, RIO has always operated an open and public by default peer review policy.
More recently, RIO introduced a novel collections workflow which allows, for example, project coordinators, to provide a one-stop access point for publications and all kinds of valuable outputs resulting from their projects regardless of their publication source.
Bottom line is, RIO has always stood for innovation, transparency, openness and FAIRness in scholarly publishing and communication, so it was indeed the best fit for the nanopublication pilot with Knowledge Pixels.
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We encourage you to try the nanopublications workflow yourself by going to https://riojournal.com/articles, and posting your own assertion to an article of your choice!
Don’t forget to also sign up for the RIO Journal’s newsletter via the Email alert form on the journal’s website and follow it on Twitter, Facebook, Linkedin and Mastodon.
The latest issue published in African Invertebrates is a special one: it honours the career and achievements of South African entomologist Dr Jason G. H. Londt. In celebration of Londt’s prolific and inspiring work, the issue was published to coincide with his 80th birthday in 2023.
For more than 50 years, Londt has made a notable impact on South African and international entomology, collecting large numbers of Diptera and other insect orders. He has made outstanding contributions to the entomological research on flies, especially assassin or robber flies (Diptera, Asilidae), on hangingflies (Mecoptera, Bittacidae), and field collections of insects, primarily in South Africa.
Throughout his career, he has described more species of Afrotropical Asilidae and Bittacidae (Mecoptera) than any other author.
“Today, some 952 Asilidae species are recognised from southern Africa and thanks to Jason’s exceptional collecting efforts and detailed revisionary taxonomic publications these species can be easily identified,“ write African Invertebrates editors John Midgley and Torsten Dikow in the editorial to the Festschrift.
The Festschrift includes nine articles celebrating Dr Londt’s career by authors from three continents, covering the broad contributions that he has made to Afrotropical entomology. It also introduces five new species described in his honour, one hangingfly and four true flies.
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For updates about African Invertebrates and its latest publications, follow the journal on Twitter and Facebook. You can also sign up for the journal’s newsletter from the Email alert panel accessible from the homepage.
As an expert in science communication, dissemination and exploitation, Pensoft joins TRANSPATH for transformative changes at consumer, producer and organisational levels.
As an expert in science communication, dissemination and exploitation, Pensoft joins the Horizon-funded project TRANSPATH to identify leverage points and interventions for triggering transformative changes at consumer, producer and organisational levels.
Why TRANSPATH?
The magnitude of biodiversity loss and climate crisis has grown exponentially in recent years, which will inevitably lead to serious consequences at a global scale. Although reversing the degradation of ecosystems and reducing greenhouse gas emissions are top priorities for the European Union, science and policy communities are united in the belief that conventional policies alone are not enough to halt biodiversity loss or mitigate climate change.
In order to achieve climate neutrality by 2050, whilst simultaneously reshaping people’s relations with nature, we need transformative changes in our economies and societies urgently.
How?
TRANSPATH (short for TRANSformative PATHways for synergising just biodiversity and climate actions) – a new European Union-funded project, plans to satisfy this need by accelerating diverse transformative pathways towards biodiversity-positive and climate-proofed societies, with sensitivity to social-cultural contexts and rights.
TRANSPATH will identify leverage points and interventions for triggering transformative changes at consumer, producer and organisational levels. A research team, consisting of leading academics, science-policy experts, and early-career professionals, will directly engage with diverse stakeholders, who affect and are affected by trade regimes and associated ‘greening’ mechanisms.
As a leader of WP5: Dissemination, outreach and catalysing transformative pathways, Pensoft is responsible for providinga dissemination and communication strategy, as well as taking care of the project branding and website. In addition, the Pensoft team is to organise joint activities with other projects or initiatives on transformative change and related topics.
What?
Funded by the European Union’s Horizon Europe research and innovation programme, TRANSPATH was launched on 1st November 2022 and will be running until October 2026. The official kick-off of the project took place online and was followed by an in-person kick-off meeting of all consortium members on the 2nd and 3rd February 2023 in Wageningen, the Netherlands.
For the next four years TRANSPATH will be focussing on the design and integrated assessment of a suite of transformative pathways that hold potential to accelerate shifts in unsustainable patterns of extraction, production, consumption and trade. The project’s mission will be achieved by four objectives:
Set up a Policy Board and Science-policy-practitioner Labs at multiple scales to engage and jointly deliberate on implications of diverse visions and pathways of change.
Identify and characterise leverage points for diverse contexts that lead to positive synergies between biodiversity, climate and trade domains.
Integrate and customise European and global pathways by considering coupled biodiversity-climate actions and critical leverage points.
Identify and test alternative interventions at global and European scales that can trigger transformative change at the level of consumers, producers and organisations.
TRANSPATH will bring together and advance several strands of recent research, which hold potential for triggering and accelerating transformative changes that can restrain biodiversity loss and climate change.
The project will draw on diverse contexts in Eastern and Western Europe, Africa and Latin America, to engage with policy makers and practitioners, individuals, Civil Society Organisations (CSOs), small- and medium-sized enterprises (SMEs) and multinational corporations.
In addition, policy packages and other interventions will be designed to facilitate the emergence of leverage points at different scales of action in ways that change the decision-making framework of everyday choices.
These interventions take into account the synergies and trade-offs of actions across multiple individuals and locations, as well as the role of incentives and political obstacles to implementation.
The EU project will provide a suite of Transformative Pathways along with a Toolbox of Transformative Interventions to trigger and enable these pathways. The Transformative Navigation Toolkit assists practitioners in enabling and navigating these pathways, acknowledging that determining what constitutes a ‘transformative pathway’ is also a product of an iterative and adaptive process that emerges and evolves over time.
Whom?
The TRANSPATH project brings together leading academics, science-policy experts, and young professionals from different social-cultural origins across Eastern and Western Europe, Africa and Latin America. Represented by nine countries and twelve nationalities, the consortium comprises a diverse range of scientific disciplines in environments, economics, and social sciences.
Dedicated to ensuring sufficient engagement from local to global levels in this project, the experts are focused on integrated and inclusive deliberation that is essential for identifying, legitimising, and navigating transformative pathways.
You can find more about the project on the TRANSPATH website: transpath.eu. Stay up to date with the project’s progress on Twitter (@TRANSPATH_EU) and Linkedin (/transpath-project).
MINNEAPOLIS/ST. PAUL (05/11/2023) — Researchers at the University of Minnesota have discovered a new species of tiny parasitic wasp that might prove beneficial to managing soybean gall midge, a recently emerged pest in Midwest soybean fields that can have devastating impacts on plant production.
Synopeas maximum. Credit: Elijah Talamas, Florida Department of Agriculture and Consumer Services
Since the appearance of the midge in 2018, growers have struggled to manage this insect, prompting researchers to seek effective and environmentally-friendly ways to help soybean farmers protect their crop. One approach is biological control, using natural enemies to kill pests. However, because soybean gall midge is new, very little is known about which species might prove to be good allies to growers in the fight against this damaging insect.
Amelia Lindsey, an assistant professor in the Department of Entomology, and Robert Koch, an associate professor in the Department of Entomology and an Extension entomologist, led the team at the University of Minnesota. They focused on searching for parasitoids — insects that lay their eggs in or on another insect — of soybean gall midge. Juveniles of the parasitoid develop inside the other insect, eventually killing them.
To find such parasitic insects, a graduate student in the Lindsey and Koch labs, Gloria Melotto, collected soybean gall midge-infested plants from a Minnesota farm and waited to see which adult insects emerged from the plants.
The researchers found:
In addition to a lot of soybean gall midges, there were a number of tiny parasitoid wasps.
In collaboration with two taxonomists who specialize in this group of insects—Jessica Awad, doctoral researcher, State Museum of Natural History Stuttgart, and Elijah Talamas, Florida Department of Agriculture and Consumer Services—it became clear that there was no information on this wasp anywhere in the scientific record. It is a new-to-science species.
The team used DNA sequencing data and physical characteristics of the wasps to formally describe the specimens and give them a scientific name: Synopeas maximum.
The findings point toward this newly described parasitoid wasp species being a likely natural enemy of soybean gall midge.
The head of Synopeas maximum.
“Unidentified and undescribed parasitoid micro-wasps are all around us. Although they are tiny, they play a huge role in regulating the populations of other insects, including pests. It’s really exciting to discover a new parasitoid species in such an important crop system,” said Awad.
“Effective management of soybean gall midge has proven challenging. Identification of a new species of parasitic wasp attacking this pest is an exciting breakthrough,” said Koch.
Ongoing work from the team includes a deeper dive into the biology of the wasp and the soybean gall midge to see how often this wasp attacks the pest, and how widespread this potential beneficial insect is across the midwest. Ultimately, the goal is to develop strategies for incorporating the natural enemy into management plans for safe and effective control of soybean gall midge infestations.
This research was supported by the Minnesota Rapid Agricultural Response Fund.
Mangrove forests are an essential component of the coastal zones in tropical and subtropical areas, providing a wide range of goods and ecosystem services that play a vital role in ecology. They are also threatened, disappearing, and degraded across the globe.
One way to stimulate effective mangrove conservation and encourage policies for their protection is to carefully assess mangrove habitats and how they change, and identify fragmented areas. But obtaining this kind of information is not always an easy task.
“Since mangrove forests are located in tidal zones and marshy areas, they are hardly accessible,” says Dr. Neda Bihamta Toosi, postdoc at Isfahan University of Technology in Iran working on landscape pattern changes using remote sensing. In a recent study in the journal Nature Conservation, together with a team of authors, she explored ways to classify these fragile ecosystems using machine learning.
Comparing the performance of different combinations of satellite images and classification techniques, the researchers looked at how good each method was at mapping mangrove ecosystems.
“We developed a novel method with a focus on landscape ecology for mapping the spatial disturbance of mangrove ecosystems,” she explains. “The provided disturbance maps facilitate future management and planning activities for mangrove ecosystems in an efficient way, thus supporting the sustainable conservation of these coastal areas.”
The results of the study showed that object-oriented classification of fused Sentinel images can significantly improve the accuracy of mangrove land use/land cover classification.
“Assessing and monitoring the condition of such ecosystems using model-based landscape metrics and principal component analysis techniques is a time- and cost-effective approach. The use of multispectral remote sensing data to generate a detailed land cover map was essential, and freely available Sentinel-2 data will guarantee its continuity in future,” explains Dr. Bihamta Toosi.
The research team hopes this approach can be used to provide information on the trend of changes in land cover that affect the development and management of mangrove ecosystems, supporting better planning and decision-making.
“Our results on the mapping of mangrove ecosystems can contribute to the improvement of management and conservation strategies for these ecosystems impacted by human activities,“ they write in their study.
Research article:
Soffianian AR, Toosi NB, Asgarian A, Regnauld H, Fakheran S, Waser LT (2023) Evaluating resampled and fused Sentinel-2 data and machine-learning algorithms for mangrove mapping in the northern coast of Qeshm island, Iran. Nature Conservation 52: 1-22. https://doi.org/10.3897/natureconservation.52.89639
Mention fungi, and most people will probably think of the mushrooms they pick in fall, or maybe the yeast they add when baking or making wine. Others will perhaps recall last week’s mouldy bread – or cucumbers gone bad in the refrigerator. Indeed, mycologists have studied these fungi as sources of food and fermentation but also decay and disease for centuries.
Sampling soil and sediments for fungal diversity not far from Göteborg, Sweden. Photo by Henrik Nilsson
But while we’re used to thinking of fungi as organisms that form physical structures such as fruiting bodies, or yeast-like life forms that we can grow in our kitchens or laboratories, it is gradually becoming clear that fungi don’t readily assort into only these two groups. DNA sequencing studies of environmental substrates such as soil are finding massive evidence of large groups of fungi that do not seem to form fruiting bodies and that we seem unable to grow in the lab – but that are there nonetheless. These groups are often called “dark fungi,” in analogy with the concept of “dark matter” in astronomy – something we know is out there, but that we cannot directly observe right now.
A new study in MycoKeys contrasts the accumulation of fungal species recovered using traditional mycological approaches with those recovered using environmental DNA sequencing over time. Even when allowing for various kinds of biases, the authors found that species discovery through environmental sequencing vastly outpaces traditional species recovery in a strongly increasing trend over the last five years. The authors conclude that dark fungi form a defining feature of the fungal kingdom.
Field work on the Tibetan Plateau. Photo by Wengang Kang
“And that’s where it gets interesting”, Henrik Nilsson at the University of Gothenburg, Sweden, and the lead author of the study, says. “Under the current rules of nomenclature, these fungi cannot be given scientific names – they cannot be described formally. And species and groups that cannot be named formally, well, they tend to fall between the cracks. They’re typically not considered in nature conservation initiatives. They are often left out from efforts to estimate the evolutionary history of fungi, and their ecological roles and associations are largely overlooked when we try to figure out how mass and energy flow in ecosystems. They’re essentially treated as if they didn’t exist.”
Examining minute fungal fruiting bodies not far from Stockholm, Sweden. Photo by Kristina Stenmarck
Second author Martin Ryberg at the University of Uppsala, Sweden chimes in, “And it’s not like we’re adding the few missing pieces to an otherwise nearly complete jigsaw puzzle. It seems to be the other way around. We’re talking about tens of large groups of fungi – and thousands upon thousands of species, some of which seem to be so common that we have yet to find a soil sample from which they’re absent. Indeed, we’re talking about what could well prove to be the dominant life style in the fungal kingdom.”
The mycological community has been debating whether the rules of fungal nomenclature should be modified to allow formal description of these dark fungi. So far, the matter has not been resolved in the affirmative. “I think our study shows that it’s time to stop that debate, like, right away,” Nilsson says. “What we should be debating is how we should describe them. What criteria must be fulfilled for a dark fungus to be given a formal scientific name? Clearly, formation of a fruiting body or growth in the laboratory can’t be part of those criteria.”
Field work in New Caledonia. Photo by Sten Anslan
Co-author Alice Retter of the University of Vienna, Austria explains, “We figured we’d kickstart the how debate by listing criteria that we think make sense – criteria that would be stringent enough to allow for only particularly well-vetted dark fungi to be described, upholding a high level of scientific rigor and reproducibility in the process. We blended our own observations with suggestions from the mycological community, culled from depositing a preprint of the manuscript at bioRxiv. We’re certainly not claiming that our suggestions form the final word in the debate. It’s more like they’re the first. We’re thinking that the mycological community will jointly be able to come up with a set of sound guiding principles on the matter – and here comes an initial set of well-meaning observations for nucleation.”
Field work in the German Alps. Photo by Vanessa Schulz
The authors advocate gentle modifications to the nomenclatural rules governing the naming of fungi to allow giving formal names to at least the most well-documented species and groups of dark fungi. The suggested modifications would, at present, exclude many rare or otherwise less well-documented dark fungi from formal description.
“But you don’t have to have a theory of everything to have a theory of something,” senior author Kessy Abarenkov of the Tartu Natural History Museum, Estonia asserts. “By establishing rules for what’s needed to describe dark fungi, and specifying when we’ll have to refrain from describing such species at present, mycologists can do what they do best: doggedly gather enough research data to warrant naming of the dark fungi, group by group, and species by species. It’s what mycology has excelled at for hundreds of years. It’s just the setting that’s a bit new.”
Drying soil samples immediately upon collection under field conditions in Norway. Photo by Sten Anslan
Sten Anslan, University of Tartu, continues: “Much is at stake, obviously. The current rules governing the naming of fungi have served mycology well for a long time. We don’t want to upend or overthrow them. But we fear that if they’re not updated in this particular regard, there’s a risk that they grow increasingly obsolete over time. Having a book of rules that govern maybe only some few percent of the organisms it was originally conceived to govern – the fungal kingdom – would seem untenable in the long run.”
Getting ready for DNA extraction from soil samples. Photo by Sten Anslan
Marisol Sanchez-Garcia of the Swedish Agricultural University concludes: “The nomenclatural aspects of dark fungi will presumably be discussed at some length at next year’s international mycological congress in Maastricht, the Netherlands. We’re hopeful that the mycological community will reach meaningful agreement on integration of the dark fungi into the rules of nomenclature. After all, mycologists are used to negotiating and solving non-trivial questions on a day-to-day basis, and this one is hardly any different. Being part of tackling a huge, more or less unknown group of organisms where precious little is set in stone and where the rules will have to be adapted over time for the endeavour to stay attuned to recent developments, well, that’s what makes being a mycologist so interesting and rewarding in my eyes.”
Research article:
Nilsson RH, Ryberg M, Wurzbacher C, Tedersoo L, Anslan S, Põlme S, Spirin V, Mikryukov V, Svantesson S, Hartmann M, Lennartsdotter C, Belford P, Khomich M, Retter A, Corcoll N, Gómez Martinez D, Jansson T, Ghobad-Nejhad M, Vu D, Sanchez-Garcia M, Kristiansson E, Abarenkov K (2023) How, not if, is the question mycologists should be asking about DNA-based typification. MycoKeys 96: 143-157. https://doi.org/10.3897/mycokeys.96.102669
