群居动物中的共同决策

群居的个体能够更好的躲避天敌的捕食,增强与同种其它种群的资源竞争,增加生殖机会与生殖成功率,使信息在个体之间顺畅的交流等。但是群内个体又会在有限的资源下产生群内的个体竞争,从而引起动物群的分裂,失去群居的利益。为了保持动物群的聚合力,当动物群内出现冲突时,需要在群内个体间形成协调各种冲突以及在群内达成共识的机制。依据动物社群组成的不同,领导力机制和自组织机制是协调群内冲突,形成一致决策和联合决策的两种主要机制。从行为生态学的角度入手,阐述了动物群内共同决策的类型,群内冲突的协调机制,共同决策的制定过程,比较了信息因素与利益因素在共同决策制定过程中的影响。旨在藉此推进我国相关领域研究的开展, 为群居动物社会与行为生态学研究者启发思路,并为保护群居濒危物种提供科学依据。     

Overview: Spatial information and indicators for sustainable management of natural resources

Natural resource management (NRM) is becoming increasingly important at all scales, local, regional, national and global, because of an increasing human population and increasing per capita use of resources and space. Conflicts are intensifying between different interest groups. Production and conservation aspects are particularly debated because conservation often conflicts with economic and social sustainability. There is public demand for objective decision based NRM but limitations are all pervasive due to the spatial and temporal complexity and interdisciplinary nature.This special issue explores the use of spatial data and models to overcome some limitations of NRM decision making. The papers in this issue show modern approaches of natural resources management with a particular focus on spatial data collection, analysis and the development of spatial indicators. This issue presents a balanced mix of review and research papers that give examples of how to find or improve the spatial information base for evidence-based decision making.This overview makes the argument that understanding complex spatial pattern and processes, and the development of spatial indicators, is an essential aspect of evidence-based NRM. If spatial and temporal patterns are complex, ecological evidence from field data or experiments may have limited value for NRM and observational study designs become more appropriate for understanding complex spatial pattern and processes. Data quality should be documented as a combination of accuracy and spatio-temporal representativeness in order to be useful in the NRM decision process.     

Adaptive responses and disruptive effects: how major wildfire influences kinship-based social interactions in a forest marsupial

Environmental disturbance is predicted to play a key role in the evolution of animal social behaviour. This is because disturbance affects key factors underlying social systems, such as demography, resource availability and genetic structure. However, because natural disturbances are unpredictable there is little information on their effects on social behaviour in wild populations. Here, we investigated how a major wildfire affected cooperation (sharing of hollow trees) by a hollow-dependent marsupial. We based two alternative social predictions on the impacts of fire on population density, genetic structure and resources. We predicted an adaptive social response from previous work showing that kin selection in den-sharing develops as competition for den resources increases. Thus, kin selection should occur in burnt areas because the fire caused loss of the majority of hollow-bearing trees, but no detectable mortality. Alternatively, fire may have a disruptive social effect, whereby postfire home range-shifts 'neutralize' fine-scale genetic structure, thereby removing opportunities for kin selection between neighbours. Both predictions occurred: the disruptive social effect in burnt habitat and the adaptive social response in adjacent unburnt habitat. The latter followed a massive demographic influx to unburnt 'refuge' habitat that increased competition for dens, leading to a density-related kin selection response. Our results show remarkable short-term plasticity of animal social behaviour and demonstrate how the social effects of disturbance extend into undisturbed habitat owing to landscape-scale demographic shifts. We predicted long-term changes in kinship-based cooperative behaviour resulting from the genetic and resource impacts of forecast changes to fire regimes in these forests.     

Evaluating the costs and benefits of systematic data acquisition for conservation assessments

Effective decision‐making in conservation often is constrained by data quality. Uncertainties associated with poor quality or sparse data can lead to the misuse of limited resources and potentially the failure of conservation practice. Data acquisition, which can help improve decision‐making, is constrained by limited budgets and time. This is especially concerning for rare species, the most in need of conservation, but the most difficult to accurately represent in conservation plans. Here we test the suitability of three different sampling design strategies (two systematic vs random) designed to improve the quality of information available for conservation planning involving rare species. We modelled the spatial distribution of freshwater fish species in a data rich area in northern Australia using a large dataset (representing the best attainable data or true distribution) and simulate increasing subsets of data acquired through the three alternative sampling designs. We then evaluated omission and commission errors in conservation planning outcomes, efficiency and return on investment of data acquisition for conservation planning outcomes obtained from the different data availability × sampling design strategies. Even though we were able to find new species more effectively through systematic sampling designs, this did not 1) translate into reduced errors in conservation planning outcomes for rare species and 2) meet our goal of enhancing cost‐effectiveness of conservation planning. Our results suggest that collecting more biodiversity data, irrespective of the sampling design used, does not necessarily reduce data uncertainty issues and could lead to the misuse of the limited resources and ultimately the failure of conservation practice.     

Towards an understanding of the evolutionary role of fire in animals

Wildfires underpin the dynamics and diversity of many ecosystems worldwide, and plants show a plethora of adaptive traits for persisting recurrent fires. Many fire-prone ecosystems also harbor a rich fauna; however, knowledge about adaptive traits to fire in animals remains poorly explored. We review existing literature and suggest that fire is an important evolutionary driver for animal diversity because (1) many animals are present in fire-prone landscapes and may have structural and phenotypic characters that contribute to adaptation to these open landscapes; and (2) in some cases, animals from fire-prone ecosystems may show specific fire adaptations. While there is limited evidence on morphological fire adaptations in animals, there is evidence suggesting that different behaviors might provide a rich source of putative fire adaptations; this is because, in contrast to plants, most animals are mobile, unitary organisms, have reduced survival when directly burnt by fire and can move away from the fire. We call for research on fire adaptations (morphological, behavioral, and physiological) in animals, and emphasize that in the animal kingdom many fire adaptations are likely to be behavioral. While it may be difficult to discern these adaptations from other animal behaviors, making this distinction is fundamental if we want to understand the role of fire in shaping biodiversity. Developing this understanding is critical to how we view and manage our ecosystems in the face of current global and fire regime changes.     

Limbic justice--amygdala involvement in immediate rejection in the Ultimatum Game

Imaging studies have revealed a putative neural account of emotional bias in decision making. However, it has been difficult in previous studies to identify the causal role of the different sub-regions involved in decision making. The Ultimatum Game (UG) is a game to study the punishment of norm-violating behavior. In a previous influential paper on UG it was suggested that frontal insular cortex has a pivotal role in the rejection response. This view has not been reconciled with a vast literature that attributes a crucial role in emotional decision making to a subcortical structure (i.e., amygdala). In this study we propose an anatomy-informed model that may join these views. We also present a design that detects the functional anatomical response to unfair proposals in a subcortical network that mediates rapid reactive responses. We used a functional MRI paradigm to study the early components of decision making and challenged our paradigm with the introduction of a pharmacological intervention to perturb the elicited behavioral and neural response. Benzodiazepine treatment decreased the rejection rate (from 37.6% to 19.0%) concomitantly with a diminished amygdala response to unfair proposals, and this in spite of an unchanged feeling of unfairness and unchanged insular response. In the control group, rejection was directly linked to an increase in amygdala activity. These results allow a functional anatomical detection of the early neural components of rejection associated with the initial reactive emotional response. Thus, the act of immediate rejection seems to be mediated by the limbic system and is not solely driven by cortical processes, as previously suggested. Our results also prompt an ethical discussion as we demonstrated that a commonly used drug influences core functions in the human brain that underlie individual autonomy and economic decision making.     

A multistate model for early decision-making in oncology

The development of oncology drugs progresses through multiple phases, where after each phase, a decision is made about whether to move a molecule forward. Early phase efficacy decisions are often made on the basis of single-arm studies based on a set of rules to define whether the tumor improves (“responds”), remains stable, or progresses (response evaluation criteria in solid tumors [RECIST]). These decision rules are implicitly assuming some form of surrogacy between tumor response and long-term endpoints like progression-free survival (PFS) or overall survival (OS). With the emergence of new therapies, for which the link between RECIST tumor response and long-term endpoints is either not accessible yet, or the link is weaker than with classical chemotherapies, tumor response-based rules may not be optimal. In this paper, we explore the use of a multistate model for decision-making based on single-arm early phase trials. The multistate model allows to account for more information than the simple RECIST response status, namely, the time to get to response, the duration of response, the PFS time, and time to death. We propose to base the decision on efficacy on the OS hazard ratio (HR) comparing historical control to data from the experimental treatment, with the latter predicted from a multistate model based on early phase data with limited survival follow-up. Using two case studies, we illustrate feasibility of the estimation of such an OS HR. We argue that, in the presence of limited follow-up and small sample size, and making realistic assumptions within the multistate model, the OS prediction is acceptable and may lead to better early decisions within the development of a drug.     

The effects of fire and grazing pressure on vegetation cover and small mammal populations in the Maasai Mara National Reserve

An extensive study of vegetation changes as a consequence of fire and grazing pressure and their effect on small mammal populations inside the Maasai Mara National Reserve, Kenya, was carried out during May–June 1997. Comparison of vegetation maps from 1979 and 1998 suggested that vegetation in 46% of the Reserve area converted from shrubland to grassland, possibly as a result of fire and grazing pressure. We tested the hypothesis that in areas with high fire and grazing impact the population of small mammals was negatively affected. A low density of rodents was recorded in all habitats except in areas of human activity, where artificial resources are constantly present. Capture efforts were unsuccessful in grasslands. Our results confirm those of Norton‐Griffiths (1979) and Dublin (1995) , i.e. that fire and grazing pressure impact the vegetation of the Serengeti–Mara ecosystem and limit the natural regeneration of woodlands. This indirectly affects the small mammal community, which is limited in its long‐term establishment.     

Prescribed burning of northern heathlands: <Emphasis Type="Italic">Calluna</Emphasis> <Emphasis Type="Italic">vulgaris</Emphasis> germination cues and seed-bank dynamics

The European coastal heathlands are important habitats for international conservation. Today, these low-intensity farming systems are threatened by the cessation of traditional management regimes, such as grazing and prescribed burning. In natural systems, the effects of fire on germination responses are often explained by adaptation to fire over extended periods of time. However, Northern heathlands are semi-natural systems with only a limited fire history. We investigated whether and how the keystone species in this system, Calluna vulgaris, responded to prescribed burning, based on previous findings where Calluna germinable seed-bank densities showed a pronounced peak right after fire. Our main findings were (i) an ecophysiological response to smoke; (ii) a potential explanation for this pattern, revealed by a seed-bank experiment where we managed to re-create the germination pattern experimentally by using an aqueous plant-derived smoke solution; and (iii) a history of anthropogenic use of fire and the development of heathlands in the region documented through palaeoecological investigations.     

Uncertainty and Denial: A Resource-Rational Model of the Value of Information

Classical decision theory predicts that people should be indifferent to information that is not useful for making decisions, but this model often fails to describe human behavior. Here we investigate one such scenario, where people desire information about whether an event (the gain/loss of money) will occur even though there is no obvious decision to be made on the basis of this information. We find a curious dual trend: if information is costless, as the probability of the event increases people want the information more; if information is not costless, people''s desire for the information peaks at an intermediate probability. People also want information more as the importance of the event increases, and less as the cost of the information increases. We propose a model that explains these results, based on the assumption that people have limited cognitive resources and obtain information about which events will occur so they can determine whether to expend effort planning for them.     

The shape of things to come: woodland herb niche contraction begins during recruitment in mesic forest microhabitat

Natural abundance is shaped by the abiotic requirements and biotic interactions that shape a species' niche, yet these influences are rarely decoupled. Moreover, most plant mortality occurs during early life stages, making seed recruitment critical in structuring plant populations. We find that natural abundance of two woodland herbs, Hexastylis arifolia and Hepatica nobilis, peaks at intermediate resource levels, a pattern probably formed by concurrent abiotic and biotic interactions. To determine how this abundance patterning reflects intrinsic physiological optima and extrinsic biotic interactions, we translocate adults and seeds to novel locations across experimentally extended abiotic gradients. These experiments indicate that the plant distributions probably reflect biotic interactions as much as physiological requirements, and that adult abundance provides a poor indication of the underlying niche requirements. The positive response exhibited by adult transplants in the wettest conditions is offset by increased fungal attack on buried seeds consistent with peak natural abundance where soil moisture is intermediate. This contraction of niche space is best described by Connell's model--species are limited by physiological tolerances where resources are low and biotic interactions where resources are high.     

How predictable are reptile responses to wildfire?

Natural disturbances are key processes in the vast majority of ecosystems and a range of ecological theories have been developed in an attempt to predict biotic responses to them. However, empirical support for these theories has been inconsistent and considerable additional work remains to be done to better understand the response of biodiversity to natural disturbance. We tested predictions from the intermediate disturbance hypothesis and the habitat accommodation model of succession for reptile responses to fire history and a single major fire event. We focused our work on a broad range of vegetation types spanning sedgeland to temperate rainforest located within a national park in south‐eastern Australia. We found no significant relationships between reptile species richness and the number of fires over the past 35 years, the time since the last fire, or the severity of a major fire in 2003. Thus, we found no strong evidence to support the intermediate disturbance hypothesis. A correspondence analysis of reptile assemblages revealed a gradient in species responses to fire history. However, we found limited evidence for an ordered succession of reptiles. Nor could the responses of individual species be readily predicted from life history attributes. Thus, our findings were generally not consistent with predictions from the habitat accommodation model of succession. A possible explanation for the absence of a predictable sequence of recovery following disturbance might be the rapidity of post‐fire recovery of many components of native vegetation cover that were found to be important for reptiles (e.g. the extent of grass cover). This would have limited the time for early successional conditions to prevail and limited opportunities for species associated with such conditions. We found that most reptile species responses were much more strongly linked to vegetation type than fire variables, emphasizing a need to understand relationships with vegetation before being able to understand possible fire effects (if and where they exist). We found the disturbance concepts we examined were limited in their ability to accurately predict reptile responses to past fire history or the impacts of a single major fire in 2003. Practical management might be best guided not by disturbance theory, but by carefully setting objectives to meet conservation goals for particular individual species of reptiles.     

台风灾害下海岸带城市社会-生态系统脆弱性评估——大数据视角

2016年莫兰蒂台风对厦门城市社会-生态系统造成重创,该系统在灾害影响下的脆弱性成为亟待研究的重要问题。基于新浪微博平台进行大数据挖掘,结合统计年鉴及空间基础数据,建立台风灾害影响下基于暴露-敏感-应对-恢复力体系的海岸带城市社会-生态系统脆弱性指标体系,评估灾前灾后台风对厦门不同地区的影响;同时根据微博大数据的定位信息,对不同受灾信息进行灾情跟踪及分析,结果表明,在本次台风灾害中思明、湖里区表现出的脆弱性较低,而海沧、集美区表现出的脆弱性较高,主要是由于思明、湖里区的应对能力明显高于其他各区,从大数据显示的恢复情况来看,除海沧区外,其他三区在电力方面的恢复速度都较为迅速。研究成果能够为台风灾害背景下的城市脆弱性评价提供新的方法与技术,为灾前防治、灾后恢复提供决策参考。     

Intelligent Decision-Making Models for Disaster Management

ABSTRACT

Providing emergency relief to the victims of natural disasters is a hugely complex process fraught with many challenging aspects: multiple uncertainties, little reliable information, scarcity of resources, a variety of involved entities, and so on. Nowadays there is a lot of information that could be used to improve decision-making in disaster management, but usually it is not available at the right moment, in the right way, or it is partially known or vague. In this article we analyze the decision-making process for disaster management from the general view of intelligent decision-making to the specific characteristics of this context. This specificity deals with a new kind of logistics, and it is shown how this humanitarian logistics, specifically designed with the aim of alleviating suffering of vulnerable people, is a growing new research area to develop new decision aid models for disaster management, identifying new and relevant differences with other types of logistics. To illustrate these claims, two models are introduced, one for assessment of consequences in the earlier stage after a disaster (focused on the unknown, one of the main characteristics in disaster management), and another one for last mile distribution of humanitarian aid (focused on the multicriteria nature of decision-making on disaster management).     

Patterns and Limitations of Urban Human Mobility Resilience under the Influence of Multiple Types of Natural Disaster

Natural disasters pose serious threats to large urban areas, therefore understanding and predicting human movements is critical for evaluating a population’s vulnerability and resilience and developing plans for disaster evacuation, response and relief. However, only limited research has been conducted into the effect of natural disasters on human mobility. This study examines how natural disasters influence human mobility patterns in urban populations using individuals’ movement data collected from Twitter. We selected fifteen destructive cases across five types of natural disaster and analyzed the human movement data before, during, and after each event, comparing the perturbed and steady state movement data. The results suggest that the power-law can describe human mobility in most cases and that human mobility patterns observed in steady states are often correlated with those in perturbed states, highlighting their inherent resilience. However, the quantitative analysis shows that this resilience has its limits and can fail in more powerful natural disasters. The findings from this study will deepen our understanding of the interaction between urban dwellers and civil infrastructure, improve our ability to predict human movement patterns during natural disasters, and facilitate contingency planning by policymakers.     

Controlling airborne cues to study small animal navigation

Small animals such as nematodes and insects analyze airborne chemical cues to infer the direction of favorable and noxious locations. In these animals, the study of navigational behavior evoked by airborne cues has been limited by the difficulty of precisely controlling stimuli. We present a system that can be used to deliver gaseous stimuli in defined spatial and temporal patterns to freely moving small animals. We used this apparatus, in combination with machine-vision algorithms, to assess and quantify navigational decision making of Drosophila melanogaster larvae in response to ethyl acetate (a volatile attractant) and carbon dioxide (a gaseous repellant).     

Field heritability of a plant adaptation to fire in heterogeneous landscapes

The strong association observed between fire regimes and variation in plant adaptations to fire suggests a rapid response to fire as an agent of selection. It also suggests that fire‐related traits are heritable, a precondition for evolutionary change. One example is serotiny, the accumulation of seeds in unopened fruits or cones until the next fire, an important strategy for plant population persistence in fire‐prone ecosystems. Here, we evaluate the potential of this trait to respond to natural selection in its natural setting. For this, we use a SNP marker approach to estimate genetic variance and heritability of serotiny directly in the field for two Mediterranean pine species. Study populations were large and heterogeneous in climatic conditions and fire regime. We first estimated the realized relatedness among trees from genotypes, and then partitioned the phenotypic variance in serotiny using Bayesian animal models that incorporated environmental predictors. As expected, field heritability was smaller (around 0.10 for both species) than previous estimates under common garden conditions (0.20). An estimate on a subset of stands with more homogeneous environmental conditions was not different from that in the complete set of stands, suggesting that our models correctly captured the environmental variation at the spatial scale of the study. Our results highlight the importance of measuring quantitative genetic parameters in natural populations, where environmental heterogeneity is a critical aspect. The heritability of serotiny, although not high, combined with high phenotypic variance within populations, confirms the potential of this fire‐related trait for evolutionary change in the wild.     

Availability of a pediatric trauma center in a disaster surge decreases triage time of the pediatric surge population: a population kinetics model

Background

The concept of disaster surge has arisen in recent years to describe the phenomenon of severely increased demands on healthcare systems resulting from catastrophic mass casualty events (MCEs) such as natural disasters and terrorist attacks. The major challenge in dealing with a disaster surge is the efficient triage and utilization of the healthcare resources appropriate to the magnitude and character of the affected population in terms of its demographics and the types of injuries that have been sustained.

Results

In this paper a deterministic population kinetics model is used to predict the effect of the availability of a pediatric trauma center (PTC) upon the response to an arbitrary disaster surge as a function of the rates of pediatric patients' admission to adult and pediatric centers and the corresponding discharge rates of these centers. We find that adding a hypothetical pediatric trauma center to the response documented in an historical example (the Israeli Defense Forces field hospital that responded to the Haiti earthquake of 2010) would have allowed for a significant increase in the overall rate of admission of the pediatric surge cohort. This would have reduced the time to treatment in this example by approximately half. The time needed to completely treat all children affected by the disaster would have decreased by slightly more than a third, with the caveat that the PTC would have to have been approximately as fast as the adult center in discharging its patients. Lastly, if disaster death rates from other events reported in the literature are included in the model, availability of a PTC would result in a relative mortality risk reduction of 37%.

Conclusions

Our model provides a mathematical justification for aggressive inclusion of PTCs in planning for disasters by public health agencies.     

灾害威胁下的山地世界遗产:以瓦斯卡兰为例

山脉一直激励着人们前行，并且常常被认为是神圣的所在。近40年间，山地世界遗产的完整性受到自然灾害的威胁，不仅破坏了山地上游的生物多样性、地质多样性和特殊的自然特征，更迫使下游原住民（山地景观的保护者）和当地社区变得更加脆弱。以常年遭受雪崩、洪水、地震灾害威胁的秘鲁安第斯山地区域上游瓦斯卡兰国家公园及其下游城市瓦拉斯为研究对象，分析其灾害史，并通过遥感可视化技术对其地表温度以及水文进行解析，为瓦斯卡兰及其下游城市探索合理的山地遗产灾害风险管控和生态自愈途径，为全球山地世界遗产地上游区域恢复宝贵的可再生自然资源，更为山地下游城市村落创造真正的安全家园打下牢固的基础，探索人与自然共同抵御灾害的潜能。     

Posttraumatic stress symptoms after exposure to two fire disasters: comparative study

This study investigated traumatic stress symptoms in severely burned survivors of two fire disasters and two comparison groups of patients with "non-disaster" burn injuries, as well as risk factors associated with acute and chronic stress symptoms. Patients were admitted to one out of eight burn centers in the Netherlands or Belgium. The Impact of Event Scale (IES) was administered to 61 and 33 survivors respectively of two fire disasters and 54 and 57 patients with "non-disaster" burn etiologies at 2 weeks, 3, 6, 12 and 24 months after the event. We used latent growth modeling (LGM) analyses to investigate the stress trajectories and predictors in the two disaster and two comparison groups. The results showed that initial traumatic stress reactions in disaster survivors with severe burns are more intense and prolonged during several months relative to survivors of "non-disaster" burn injuries. Excluding the industrial fire group, all participants' symptoms on average decreased over the two year period. Burn severity, peritraumatic anxiety and dissociation predicted the long-term negative outcomes only in the industrial fire group. In conclusion, fire disaster survivors appear to experience higher levels of traumatic stress symptoms on the short term, but the long-term outcome appears dependent on factors different from the first response. Likely, the younger age, and several beneficial post-disaster factors such as psychosocial aftercare and social support, along with swift judicial procedures, contributed to the positive outcome in one disaster cohort.