Student perceptions and use of an assessment rubric for a group concept map in physiology

We previously reported how the opinions of second-year dentistry students and faculty members can be used to construct an assessment rubric to grade group-based concept maps in physiology. This article describes the second phase of this study of the subsequent year's cohort. A case study approach was used to investigate how groups of students used the criteria to complete their complex concept maps. Students' opinions about the assessment task and newly constructed rubric were sampled. Opinions across groups were correlated to academic achievements in the course. Two groups of four students volunteered to be videorecorded during a 4-h workshop, during which they completed their maps. The mapping task was not generally favored by students. However, those students who did favor the task achieved higher academic grades. Most students favored the newly constructed assessment rubric, commenting that it was easy to understand, fair, and appropriate, but reported that extra guidance from tutors and other resources were required. Coded videorecordings of the two observation groups revealed complex interactions around the three criteria of content, logic and understanding, and presentation. Two broad patterns of working were identified. One group distributed their efforts more evenly across the criteria, whereas the other group completed their maps by addressing the criteria in stages. These findings clearly indicate the academic challenges and social complexity in how students work in groups to complete complex concept maps in physiology.     

城市内涝与基于自然的解决方案研究综述

受全球变暖和快速城市化的影响,城市可持续发展面临重大挑战。近10年,基于自然的解决方案(Nature-based Solutions,NbS)受到广泛关注与认可,为解决城市所面临的生态环境问题、提升城市韧性和可持续性提供了新的思路和途径。本文首先回顾了NbS的提出背景与发展历程,剖析了其核心内涵与框架准则,进而以城市中日益突出的内涝问题为例,介绍了NbS在应对和解决城市典型生态环境问题中的应用;通过汇总现有实施案例、整合多方观点,对比分析了NbS与国内外城市内涝管理的常用方法在概念框架、理论内涵和应用实践等方面的区别与联系;综合论述了基于NbS开展城市内涝管理所采用的技术手段、计量方法、评价模型的发展现状;最后,对NbS在我国的应用进行了展望,认为其在适应气候变化、提高城市韧性等方面具有巨大的潜力,但大范围的推广也面临理论认知尚不深入、实践过程存在障碍、专业人才与本土研究不足等多项挑战。     

Organizational capacity and ecological restoration

Organizations entrusted with responsibilities and resources to repair ecosystems have for many decades pursued their defining purpose against long odds created by a host of inherent challenges, notably the long time frames required for ecological recovery and landscape-level stressors. Global change compounds these challenges, increasing shocks to the operating environments of these organizations. Interest in assessing organizational capacity to respond to system shocks (i.e. resilience) productively has been strong in many fields, though not in the restoration arena. The objectives of this paper are to build awareness of the importance of organizations for achieving the aims of restoration and to spur organizational research to strengthen the restoration sector. I summarize research on organizations relevant to the restoration sector and with this foundation propose a framework for assessing the capacity of restoration organizations. The proposed framework is an adaptation of models used in other sectors, based on five critical capacities: situation awareness, governance and leadership, internal resources, external relations, and change readiness. We can assess the extent to which an organization possesses each capacity by eliciting feedback about functions linked to each capacity. Devising assessment tools from this framework requires attention to key realities of the restoration sector including prevalence of short-term funding, effect of externalities on restoration outcomes, dependence on partnerships of multiple organizations for complex and large restorations. Exploration into assessment approaches for restoration organizations highlights a major knowledge gap that, if addressed, could enhance the reliability of restoration as a global and local strategy for improving ecosystems services.     

Assessing sustainability at farm-level: Lessons learned from a comparison of tools in practice

In the past decades a wide variety of tools have been developed to assess the sustainability performance of farms. Although multiple studies have compared tools on a theoretical basis, little attention has been paid to the comparing tools in practice. This research compared indicator-based sustainability assessment tools to gain insight in practical requirements, procedures and complexity involved in applying sustainability assessment tools. In addition, the relevance of the tools, as perceived by farmers, was evaluated. An overview of 48 indicator-based sustainability assessment tools was developed to, subsequently, select tools that address the environmental, social and economic dimension of sustainability, are issued in a scientific publication and suitable for assessing the sustainability performance of livestock and arable farms in Denmark. Only four tools (RISE, SAFA, PG and IDEA) complied with the selection criteria and were used to assess the sustainability performance of five Danish farms. The tools vary widely in their scoring and aggregation method, time requirement and data input. The farmers perceived RISE as the most relevant tool to gain insight in the sustainability performance of their farm. The findings emphasize the importance of context specificity, user-friendliness, complexity of the tool, language use, and a match between value judgements of tool developers and farmers. Even though RISE was considered as the most relevant tool, the farmers expressed a hesitation to apply the outcomes of the four tools in their decision making and management. Furthermore, they identified limitations in their options to improve their sustainability performance. Additional efforts are needed to support farmers in using the outcomes in their decision making. The outcomes of sustainability assessment tools should therefore be considered as a starting point for discussion, reflection and learning.     

Capturing the cornerstones of coral reef resilience: linking theory to practice

Coral reefs can undergo unexpected and dramatic changes in community composition, so called phase shifts. This can have profound consequences for ecosystem services upon which human welfare depends. Understanding of this behavior is in many aspects still in its infancy. Resilience has been argued to provide insurance against unforeseen ecosystem responses in the face of environmental change, and has become a prime goal for the management of coral reefs. However, diverse definitions of resilience can be found in the literature, making its meaning ambiguous. Several studies have used the term as a theoretical framework and concern regarding its practical applicability has been raised. Consequently, operationalizing theory to make resilience observable is an important task, particularly for policy makers and managers dealing with pressing environmental problems. Ultimately this requires some type of empirical assessments, something that has proven difficult due to the multidimensional nature of the concept. Biodiversity, spatial heterogeneity, and connectivity have been proposed as cornerstones of resilience as they may provide insurance against ecological uncertainty. The aim of this article is to provide an overview of the divergent uses of the concept and to propose empirical indicators of the cornerstones of coral reef resilience. These indicators include functional group approaches, the ratios of “good” and “bad” colonizers of space, measurements of spatial heterogeneity, and estimates of potential space availability against grazing capacity. The essence of these operational indicators of resilience is to use them as predictive tools to recognize vulnerability before disturbance occurs that may lead to abrupt phase shifts. Moving toward operationalizing resilience theory is imperative to the successful management of coral reefs in an increasingly disturbed and human-dominated environment. Communicating by Ecology Editor Professor Peter Mumby Order of authors 2–3 is alphabetic     

Environmental change challenges decision-making during post-market environmental monitoring of transgenic crops

The ability to decide what kind of environmental changes observed during post-market environmental monitoring of genetically modified (GM) crops represent environmental harm is an essential part of most legal frameworks regulating the commercial release of GM crops into the environment. Among others, such decisions are necessary to initiate remedial measures or to sustain claims of redress linked to environmental liability. Given that consensus on criteria to evaluate ‘environmental harm’ has not yet been found, there are a number of challenges for risk managers when interpreting GM crop monitoring data for environmental decision-making. In the present paper, we argue that the challenges in decision-making have four main causes. The first three causes relate to scientific data collection and analysis, which have methodological limits. The forth cause concerns scientific data evaluation, which is controversial among the different stakeholders involved in the debate on potential impacts of GM crops on the environment. This results in controversy how the effects of GM crops should be valued and what constitutes environmental harm. This controversy may influence decision-making about triggering corrective actions by regulators. We analyse all four challenges and propose potential strategies for addressing them. We conclude that environmental monitoring has its limits in reducing uncertainties remaining from the environmental risk assessment prior to market approval. We argue that remaining uncertainties related to adverse environmental effects of GM crops would probably be assessed in a more efficient and rigorous way during pre-market risk assessment. Risk managers should acknowledge the limits of environmental monitoring programmes as a tool for decision-making.     

Reducing greenhouse gas emissions and adapting agricultural management for climate change in developing countries: providing the basis for action

Agriculture in developing countries has attracted increasing attention in international negotiations within the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change for both adaptation to climate change and greenhouse gas mitigation. However, there is limited understanding about potential complementarity between management practices that promote adaptation and mitigation, and limited basis to account for greenhouse gas emission reductions in this sector. The good news is that the global research community could provide the support needed to address these issues through further research linking adaptation and mitigation. In addition, a small shift in strategy by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) and ongoing assistance from agricultural organizations could produce a framework to move the research and development from concept to reality. In turn, significant progress is possible in the near term providing the basis for UNFCCC negotiations to move beyond discussion to action for the agricultural sector in developing countries.     

韧性科学的回顾与展望:从生态理论到城市实践

城市韧性的概念在生态与环境领域正在兴起,如何将城市的结构复杂性和功能多样性与自然、经济和社会要科学地耦合尤为重要。实践方面,城市韧性在国际组织、政府机构和私人基金会等计划的支持下得到世界各地城市的日益重视。对此,回顾了韧性在生态系统科学中的概念起源及其在工程技术与社会学科的应用发展;整合了城市系统的科学知识,以进一步阐述城市韧性的概念及理论发展;举例了目前联合国、洛克菲勒基金会和跨国企业所构建的全球合作网络中韧性城市的实践。基于城市韧性理论的回顾和韧性城市实践,结合城市系统在生态、经济和社会维度的差异性,就我国城市以韧性为导向的转型发展过程中存在的机遇、挑战及解决途径提出了参考建议。     

From a crisis to an opportunity: Eight insights for doing science in the COVID‐19 era and beyond

The COVID‐19 crisis has forced researchers in Ecology to change the way we work almost overnight. Nonetheless, the pandemic has provided us with several novel components for a new way of conducting science. In this perspective piece, we summarize eight central insights that are helping us, as early career researchers, navigate the uncertainties, fears, and challenges of advancing science during the COVID‐19 pandemic. We highlight how innovative, collaborative, and often Open Science‐driven developments that have arisen from this crisis can form a blueprint for a community reinvention in academia. Our insights include personal approaches to managing our new reality, maintaining capacity to focus and resilience in our projects, and a variety of tools that facilitate remote collaboration. We also highlight how, at a community level, we can take advantage of online communication platforms for gaining accessibility to conferences and meetings, and for maintaining research networks and community engagement while promoting a more diverse and inclusive community. Overall, we are confident that these practices can support a more inclusive and kinder scientific culture for the longer term.     

Publics and vaccinomics: beyond public understanding of science

Vaccines have been among the most effective tools for addressing global public health challenges. With the advent of genomics, novel approaches for vaccine discovery are opening up new opportunities for vaccine development and applications, particularly with the expectation of personalized vaccines and the possibility of addressing a broader range of infectious diseases. In this context, it is useful to reflect on the social contexts of vaccine development as these have been influenced by social, ethical, political challenges. This article discusses the historical context of vaccine controversies and factors that help explain public acceptance and resistance, illustrating that these challenges go well beyond simple public misunderstandings. The broader vaccine challenges evident along the innovation trajectory, from development to commercialization and implementation include problems in research and development, organizational issues, and legal and regulatory challenges that may collectively contribute to public resistance or confidence. The recent history of genomics provides further lessons that the developing field of vaccinomics can learn from.     

“Community Work” in a Climate of Adaptation: Responding to Change in Rural Alaska

We draw on our research experiences with municipal workers in Alaska, where the impacts of climate change are already extensive, to examine adaptation and related concepts, such as resilience and vulnerability, which have become widely used in science and policy formulation for addressing climate change despite also being subject to multiple critiques. We use local people’s experiences with environmental challenges to illustrate limitations of the climate change adaptation paradigm, and offer the additional concept of “community work” — analogous to niche construction — as a counterpart to the adaptive process at the community level. Whereas climate change adaptation insinuates active and purposive change, the reality we have repeatedly encountered is that people in these communities focus not on changing but on building and maintaining capacity and achieving stability: keeping aging and overtaxed infrastructure running while also working toward improving quality of life and services in their communities. We discuss how these findings are congruent with recent calls to better situate climate change adaptation policy in the context of community development, and argue that scientists and policymakers need to understand this context of community work to avoid the pitfalls that potentially accompany the adaptation paradigm.     

城市韧性概念、影响因素及其评估研究进展

在城市化快速进程中,不确定性的多元干扰对城市发展造成威胁,如何增强城市吸收、抵御、适应与学习能力是亟待解决的热点议题。韧性城市作为城市应对不确定性风险的新兴理念范式,对提高城市韧性水平与应变能力具备指导意义。对韧性概念进行辨析,阐述了城市韧性的概念,并提出多要素融合、多能力转变与多时空尺度的城市韧性概念见解。基于所提出的城市韧性概念,从过程化视角系统总结了多元干扰、城市系统状态、城市应对能力对城市韧性的影响。对单领域和多领域评估进行梳理,针对基于城市韧性要素、韧性特征、韧性实现过程的三种评估指标进行具体探讨,总结与比较了定性和定量的城市韧性评估方法。基于上述分析,提出当前存在缺乏城市如何实现韧性的研究、评估指标较少关注组织要素、多干扰和多主体、评估方法缺乏机理与动态模拟的应用、理论与落地实践脱轨等问题。最后提出未来展望,即注重城市韧性过程分析,设计更具完整性与针对性的指标体系,推动研究方法科学化与动态化改进,加强形成“机制-评估-管理”的可操作性闭环。     

Building Capacity in Small-Scale Mining Communities: Health,Ecosystem Sustainability,and the Global Mercury Project

The Global Mercury Project (GMP) is an initiative of the United Nations in collaboration with numerous government and nongovernment organizations to promote knowledge and capacity building on the links between small-scale gold mining practices and health, ecosystem, and social factors, and to implement interventions that reduce mercury pollution and exposure caused by mining activities in developing countries. Knowledge regarding the use of mercury and the dynamics of complex environmental, health, socioeconomic, and cultural conditions in and surrounding small-scale mining sites is particularly needed for the purpose of developing appropriate community-based measures to reduce mercury-related problems. GMP strategies aim to build upon local knowledge and practices to train miners on the use of cleaner and affordable technologies of mining and mineral processing in order to minimize negative impacts. The initiative is especially proactive in facilitating transdisciplinary and participatory models of community interaction, involving local, regional, and international stakeholders in each of the strategy design, community assessment, and community intervention phases. The six participating countries are Brazil, Indonesia, Lao People’s Democratic Republic, Sudan, Tanzania, and Zimbabwe. This article outlines GMP’s objectives and scope of activities and also highlights achievements, challenges, and opportunities for future development.     

Bioimage informatics: a new area of engineering biology

In recent years, the deluge of complicated molecular and cellular microscopic images creates compelling challenges for the image computing community. There has been an increasing focus on developing novel image processing, data mining, database and visualization techniques to extract, compare, search and manage the biological knowledge in these data-intensive problems. This emerging new area of bioinformatics can be called 'bioimage informatics'. This article reviews the advances of this field from several aspects, including applications, key techniques, available tools and resources. Application examples such as high-throughput/high-content phenotyping and atlas building for model organisms demonstrate the importance of bioimage informatics. The essential techniques to the success of these applications, such as bioimage feature identification, segmentation and tracking, registration, annotation, mining, image data management and visualization, are further summarized, along with a brief overview of the available bioimage databases, analysis tools and other resources.     

Introduction: race critical public scholarship

In a climate marked by expanding scholarship in ethnic and racial studies alongside sweeping changes in universities and the conditions of academic work, we seek to explore the nature of and challenges for critically engaged research, teaching and scholarship on race and racism. In particular, we look at the connection between academic scholarship and political engagement and activity that we are calling race critical public scholarship. We situate the discussion within various recent debates about universities and ‘publics’, and the public orientation and reach of academic work. We set out three frames for these issues: the impact of social movements in establishing race and racism as legitimate topics of academic investigation and setting the agenda for race research; the differing role of academics as public intellectuals and scholar-activists in addressing and engaging with publics and race issues; and the scope and limits of public sociology in addressing the responsibilities and institutionalized power of the academy. We argue that each of these frames offers a partial insight, but that further work is needed based on cases and examples that explore the facility for and challenges of undertaking race critical scholarship.     

Online tools to support literature-based discovery in the life sciences

In biomedical research, the amount of experimental data and published scientific information is overwhelming and ever increasing, which may inhibit rather than stimulate scientific progress. Not only are text-mining and information extraction tools needed to render the biomedical literature accessible but the results of these tools can also assist researchers in the formulation and evaluation of novel hypotheses. This requires an additional set of technological approaches that are defined here as literature-based discovery (LBD) tools. Recently, several LBD tools have been developed for this purpose and a few well-motivated, specific and directly testable hypotheses have been published, some of which have even been validated experimentally. This paper presents an overview of recent LBD research and discusses methodology, results and online tools that are available to the scientific community.     

Scientific requirements for ecosystem-based management in the restoration of Chesapeake Bay and Coastal Louisiana

Ecosystem-based management requires integration of multiple system components and uses, identifying and striving for sustainable outcomes, precaution in avoiding deleterious actions, and adaptation based on experience to achieve effective solutions. Efforts underway or in planning to restore and manage two major coastal ecosystems, the Chesapeake Bay (Chesapeake Bay Program) and coastal Louisiana (Louisiana Coastal Area Plan and Gulf Hypoxia Action Plan), are examined with respect to these four principles. These multifaceted restoration programs represent among the foremost challenges for science and coastal management in the United States and, thereby, have important implications for addressing the coastal environmental crises being experienced throughout the world. Although frameworks exist for integration of management objectives in both regions, the technical ability for the quantitatively integrated assessment of multiple stressors and strategies is still in an early stage of development. Science is also being challenged to identify sustainable futures, but emerging concepts of ecosystem resilience offer some promising approaches. Precautionary management is best conceived with regard to fisheries, but should become a more explicit consideration for managing risks and avoiding unanticipated consequences of restoration activities. Adaptive management is embraced as a central process in coastal Louisiana ecosystem restoration, but has not formally been implemented in the more mature Chesapeake Bay restoration. Based on these experiences, ecosystem-based management could be advanced by: (1) orienting more scientific activity to providing the solutions needed for ecosystem restoration; (2) building bridges crossing scientific and management barriers to more effectively integrate science and management; (3) directing more attention to understanding and predicting achievable restoration outcomes that consider possible state changes and ecosystem resilience; (4) improving the capacity of science to characterize and effectively communicate uncertainty; and (5) fully integrating modeling, observations, and research to facilitate more adaptive management.     

Image-based modeling for better understanding and assessment of atherosclerotic plaque progression and vulnerability: Data,modeling, validation,uncertainty and predictions

Medical imaging and image-based modeling have made considerable progress in recent years in identifying atherosclerotic plaque morphological and mechanical risk factors which may be used in developing improved patient screening strategies. However, a clear understanding is needed about what we have achieved and what is really needed to translate research to actual clinical practices and bring benefits to public health. Lack of in vivo data and clinical events to serve as gold standard to validate model predictions is a severe limitation. While this perspective paper provides a review of the key steps and findings of our group in image-based models for human carotid and coronary plaques and a limited review of related work by other groups, we also focus on grand challenges and uncertainties facing the researchers in the field to develop more accurate and predictive patient screening tools.