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New global database of dams and reservoirs could transform water management

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New global database of dams and reservoirs could transform water management


New global database of dams and reservoirs could transform water management
Global distribution of river barriers and reservoirs in the GDW v1.0 database. Points with reservoir capacities Scientific Data (2024). DOI: 10.1038/s41597-024-03752-9

A database developed by the Global Dam Watch (GDW) consortium is set to transform the global understanding of dams and reservoirs.

Coordinated and led by members of a research lab at McGill University, the database integrates existing global datasets to provide the most comprehensive resource for large-scale analyses to date. The research is published in the journal Scientific Data.

River barriers, ranging from large dams to small locks, weirs, or barrages, play an essential role in water supply, flood control, hydro-electric power production and navigation, but also have ecological consequences, including fragmenting river ecosystems and disrupting sediment flow. With the GDW database, researchers and policy-makers can perform large-scale analyses of these trade-offs, leading to more sustainable and better informed water-management practices.

“The scale and depth of the data will facilitate analyses that were previously impossible, helping to strike a balance between harnessing water resources for human use and protecting the ecosystems that rely on these rivers,” said Bernhard Lehner, an Associate Professor in McGill’s Department of Geography, who oversaw the database project in his research lab over the past three years.

Of the 41,145 dams in the GDW database, 450 are in Canada, with over one-third of those built primarily for hydro power production. While these dams represent just one percent of the records in the database, they impound some of the largest reservoirs in the world and provide about 11 percent of the total global water storage capacity, highlighting Canada’s significant role in stewarding the world’s fresh water.

“This database provides a major step forward toward a comprehensive and consistent global database of river barriers and reservoirs. A wide range of hydrological and water resources analyses are now possible, with major implications for water resources management and conservation of freshwater systems—the lifeblood of humans and nature across the globe,” said Michele Thieme, Deputy Director of Freshwater at World Wildlife Fund.

The 41,145 barrier locations in version 1.0 of the GDW database are associated with 35,295 reservoirs, which create a cumulative storage capacity of 7,420 km³ and a new surface water area of 304,600 km². The data compilation also allows researchers, policymakers, and conservationists to assess the socio-economic and environmental costs and benefits of dams with unprecedented clarity.

“The Global Dam Watch (GDW) database consolidates the world’s largest open-access global datasets into a unified, comprehensive resource with consistent dam attribute information. Together with other tools available at www.globaldamwatch.org, its release aims to empower the community to enhance our understanding of the socio-economic and environmental costs and benefits of dams,” said Mark Mulligan, Professor of Physical and Environmental Geography at King’s College London and co-lead of the GDW consortium.

The project provided a diverse team of McGill undergraduate and graduate students with valuable practical experience; many students contributed significantly to the research and data-collection processes.

More information:
Bernhard Lehner et al, The Global Dam Watch database of river barrier and reservoir information for large-scale applications, Scientific Data (2024). DOI: 10.1038/s41597-024-03752-9

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New global database of dams and reservoirs could transform water management (2024, October 8)
retrieved 8 October 2024
from https://phys.org/news/2024-10-global-database-reservoirs.html

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New book brings prehistoric mammals to life

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New book brings prehistoric mammals to life


New book brings prehistoric mammals to life
Credit: Applesauce Press

After the extinction of dinosaurs came the age of mammals. A new book brings readers into this world with well-researched species profiles by Aaron Woodruff, collection manager for vertebrate paleontology at the Florida Museum of Natural History. The book also includes stunning illustrations by paleoartist Julius Csotonyi.

In “Prehistoric World: Over 1,200 Incredible Mammals and Discoveries from the Mesozoic and Cenozoic,” readers will learn about the warm-blooded animals that rose to prominence once the dinosaurs were gone. Woodruff offers incredible facts about each species, including what they ate, where they lived and how they behaved.

While the book includes new information about popular animals like woolly mammoths and saber-toothed cats, it also features many more recent discoveries that many people may not have heard of before.

“Bear-dogs are some of my personal favorite carnivores,” Woodruff said. “Before large cats evolved, they were the top predators across the Northern Hemisphere and Africa.”

The book also introduces readers to prehistoric mustelids, a family of carnivores that includes weasels, badgers and wolverines. These ancient mammals were far larger than their modern relatives. Some species that lived during the Oligocene and Miocene epochs grew to the size of today’s wolves and jaguars and were able to hunt animals the size of deer and horses.

Illustrator Csotonyi recreated these animals and many more in consultation with Woodruff. “The way [Csotonyi] brought these animals to life was really good,” he said. “I think the artwork will pull many people in and get their minds going.”

Woodruff spent seven months doing the research and writing for this book before finally completing “Prehistoric World” on his birthday. Throughout the project, he remained committed to his full-time job at the museum, often using his weekends and holidays to work on the book.

“This is the kind of book that 10-year-old Aaron would have been looking at all the time,” Woodruff said. As a little kid, he was so enthusiastic about the dinosaur books his parents gave him that he would try to recreate them. “I would draw pictures of dinosaurs and write little descriptions about them and staple the pages together at the end.”

For a few of the mammals featured in “Prehistoric World,” Woodruff had very little information to work with. Some species were first discovered centuries ago and were given scientific names without an accompanying etymology, leaving Woodruff to decipher their meaning with Greek and Latin dictionaries.

He also assigned common names to animals that didn’t already have one, using information discerned from the scientific name. The extinct cat Miopanthera lorteti, for example, is called Lortet’s cat in its description and the bear Tremarctos floridanus is called the Florida spectacled bear.

“For a lot of extinct mammals, all we have are just isolated teeth,” Woodruff said. “We’re lucky if those teeth are still connected to jaws.” Fortunately, that is often enough for paleontologists like Woodruff to get an idea of a mammal’s diet, age and sometimes even sex.

Had he known that he would one day publish a book on paleontology, Woodruff says his “younger self would be over the moon with excitement.”

While “Prehistoric World” is officially marketed to children, Woodruff says readers of all ages will enjoy it. He hopes readers will come away with not only new information about prehistoric mammals, but also a deeper appreciation for those both living and extinct.

Citation:
New book brings prehistoric mammals to life (2024, October 8)
retrieved 8 October 2024
from https://phys.org/news/2024-10-prehistoric-mammals-life.html

This document is subject to copyright. Apart from any fair dealing for the purpose of private study or research, no
part may be reproduced without the written permission. The content is provided for information purposes only.





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Researchers link El Niño to accelerated ice loss in tropics

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Researchers link El Niño to accelerated ice loss in tropics


Researchers link El Niño to accelerated ice loss in tropics
Aerial view of the Quelccaya Ice Cap (QIC; 13°56′ S, 70°50′ W) from 11 October 2023. The summit of the QIC reaches 5670 m above sea level (a.s.l.) and is characterized by several outlet glaciers to the west and a steep-sided eastern portion. Credit: The Cryosphere (2024). DOI: 10.5194/tc-18-4633-2024

Natural climate patterns such as El Niño are causing tropical glaciers to lose their ice at an alarming rate, a new study has found.

A phenomenon that typically occurs every two to seven years, El Niño causes much warmer than average ocean temperatures in the eastern Pacific, significantly affecting weather around the globe.

The Quelccaya Ice Cap (QIC) in the Peruvian Andes has been shown to be sensitive to these climate shifts, but the extent to which El Niño contributes to its continued shrinkage has, to date, been unclear.

Now, using images captured by NASA Landsat satellites over the past four decades, researchers have confirmed that the regional warming periodically caused by El Niño has indeed resulted in a drastic reduction of its snow-covered area. The study, led by Kara Lamantia, a graduate student at the Byrd Polar and Climate Research Center at The Ohio State University, found that between 1985 and 2022, the QIC lost about 58% of its snow cover and about 37% of its total area.

“Our research gives us a look into a glacier’s health,” said Lamantia. “The Quelccaya glacier becomes greatly out of equilibrium during these short-term climate anomalies.”

The study, published in the journal The Cryosphere, is the first to automate the process of snow-covered area detection on the QIC. Normally, this detection is only possible through extensive field measurements or manually hand-tracing satellite images that are clear enough to detail the visual boundary between snow and ice.

Yet an algorithm this team developed processes images using near-infrared imagery, a method that utilizes wavelengths outside our visible spectrum.

“By creating a threshold for the different reflectance between snow and ice cover, we can gather a consistent and much more reliable measurement,” said Lamantia.

Glaciers and ice caps gain mass by accumulating ice and snow and lose it when none is received, or more ice is lost than gained. By measuring the ratio of snow-covered area to the total area, researchers can quantify whether the QIC is gaining mass, losing it, or maintaining a steady state.

The study revealed that during El Niños, the ratio drops significantly away from the average, indicating a drastic reduction in the snow-covered area.

This extreme change in its ratio may be attributed to the wide differences between the dry and wet seasons in southern Peru, said Lamantia.

“All of the snowfall happens during the wet season, but during an El Niño, southern Peru experiences warmer and drier conditions than average, so it stays dry throughout the wet season,” she said. “That means that the snow cover will continue to decline and there might be quite a bit less snowfall to replace it.”

As climate change rapidly alters the Earth’s environment, it’s expected that El Niños are likely to be longer-lived and stronger, a factor that will accelerate ice loss. This raises the possibility of the QIC’s snow cover failing to recover during La Niñas, or periods when the oceans should be cool.

“The ice cap as a whole is on a very consistent linear decline from anthropogenic warming,” said Lamantia. “It may not matter how strong future La Niñas are; as the freezing line continues to rise and snow cover shrinks, Quelccaya will likely continue to decline.”

If this carries on, some projections suggest that snow cover on the QIC could disappear by 2080, relegating it to a wasting ice field, much like Kilimanjaro. By the end of the century, the study notes, the ice cap could be no more.

It’s difficult to discern how other short-term weather events might impact glacier vulnerability, which is something similar studies may aim to model in the future. What scientists do know is that ice loss puts high-mountain communities that depend on them in jeopardy, as snow loss can quickly diminish key water supplies.

The damage already done to the oceans and atmosphere is not something we can reverse tomorrow, Lamantia said. Using the data collected about their complex interactions, researchers may have a better chance at monitoring and mitigating the planet’s climate woes.

“The general consensus is we can expect that the likely increased intensity and duration of El Niños will cause more complications for the QIC,” said Lamantia. “We need to start being clever about how we use and conserve our water resources.”

More information:
Kara A. Lamantia et al, El Niño enhances snow-line rise and ice loss on the Quelccaya Ice Cap, Peru, The Cryosphere (2024). DOI: 10.5194/tc-18-4633-2024

Citation:
Researchers link El Niño to accelerated ice loss in tropics (2024, October 8)
retrieved 8 October 2024
from https://phys.org/news/2024-10-link-el-nio-ice-loss.html

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Why using a brand nickname in marketing is not a good idea

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Why using a brand nickname in marketing is not a good idea


bmw
Credit: CC0 Public Domain

Researchers from Western University, Stockton University, and University of Massachusetts Amherst have published a new study that examines whether firms benefit from adopting popular nicknames in their branding efforts.

The study, which appears in the Journal of Marketing, is titled “BMW is Powerful, Beemer is Not: Nickname Branding Impairs Brand Performance,” and is authored by Zhe Zhang, Ning Ye, and Matthew Thomson.

Many brands have popular nicknames that have become a part of daily conversations. BMW is commonly referred to as Beemer, Bloomingdale’s as Bloomie’s, Rolex as Rollie, Walmart as WallyWorld, and Starbucks as Starbies.

Given their popularity, some marketers have embraced these names in their own branding efforts. For instance, in 2021, Bloomingdale’s officially adopted “Bloomie’s” for its new store in Fairfax, Virginia, Target launched a style campaign in 2018 with the tagline “Fall for Tarzhay All Over Again,” and the Howard Johnson hotel chain slogan is “Go Happy. Go HoJo.”

Do firms actually benefit from adopting popular nicknames in their branding efforts? This new study finds that nickname branding is actually detrimental to brand performance. This is because brand nicknames are usually given by consumers.

Zhang explains that “accepting a consumer-generated nickname suggests that a brand implicitly admits that consumers are ‘in charge’ and that they publicly accept and promote an altered identity bestowed by consumers. When a brand starts to accept and even adopt a nickname given by consumers, it makes the brand seem less powerful.”

Nickname use by customers versus nickname use by marketers

Many brands closely follow consumers’ language use, especially on social media. However, the purpose of this monitoring should be to generate insights, not to mechanically repeat what consumers say. Brand nicknames are indeed terms of endearment, but only when they are used by the right person (i.e., consumers). When used by marketers, nicknames do not bring consumers closer to the brand. In fact, copying what might be construed as consumers’ “intellectual property” makes the brand appear weak.

Marketers should recognize that there is a difference between a consumer using a nickname and companies using that nickname for branding. The research team says that because consumer nickname use does not signal that a brand submits to consumer influence, it is less likely to weaken perceptions of brand power. In fact, prior research has shown that brand nicknames may lead to desirable consequences when they are used by consumers.

“Marketers should recognize the differences in nickname use by consumers versus by marketers,” says Thomson. “While one may want to avoid adopting a nickname for marketing, nickname use within the consumer community should not be discouraged.”

In addition, brands must carefully evaluate their brand stereotype (i.e., competent vs. warm) and message type (transactional vs. communal) before adopting a nickname. It seems plausible that some brands may benefit from using their nicknames under certain conditions.

For example, when a small-town, family-owned restaurant adopts a popular nickname given by the locals for fundraising for the community library, people may not necessarily feel it is inappropriate because the business was not meant to be powerful and its motive is to benefit the community. Instead, the nickname may become an emotional tie that activates consumers’ community identity and could attract more donations for the local community.

Furthermore, it is important for marketers to evaluate the meaningfulness of their brand name change. For example, Apple Computer became Apple, IHOP temporarily became IHOb, and Dunkin’ Donuts became Dunkin’. These were meaningful name changes and part of the brands’ repositioning strategies.

The new names clearly tell consumers what the brand wants to be: Apple offers more than personal computers, Dunkin’ offers more than just donuts, and IHOb burgers should be taken seriously. These are internally initiated alterations that signal the brand’s new identity and market position, unlike nickname branding activities that are initiated externally.

Thomson says that “if nickname branding is not accompanied by substantial changes to the brand’s core identity, it may appear to be a relatively superficial effort to flatter consumers.” For example, Radio Shack’s adoption of a nickname (e.g., tagline: “Our friends call us the Shack”) was a high-profile example of explicitly submitting to consumer influence and credited with hastening the company’s trajectory towards bankruptcy.

Lessons for chief marketing officers

  • Marketers need to be careful about appropriating consumers’ language.
  • Marketers should recognize the difference between consumer nickname use versus nickname branding. For example, when General Motors banned the use of the “Chevy” nickname within the organization in 2010, the company received enormous criticism for not being consumer-oriented. However, critics overlooked the fact that the policy was meant to reduce the internal use of the nickname (e.g., when a salesperson talks to consumers) and not to stop consumers from using it externally.
  • Some brands may benefit from using their nicknames under certain conditions.
  • Renaming a brand may be necessary as a brand grows. However, if nickname branding is not accompanied by substantial changes to the brand‘s core identity, it may appear to be a superficial effort to flatter consumers.

More information:
Zhe Zhang et al, BMW Is Powerful, Beemer Is Not: Nickname Branding Impairs Brand Performance, Journal of Marketing (2024). DOI: 10.1177/00222429241266586

Citation:
Why using a brand nickname in marketing is not a good idea (2024, October 8)
retrieved 8 October 2024
from https://phys.org/news/2024-10-brand-nickname-good-idea.html

This document is subject to copyright. Apart from any fair dealing for the purpose of private study or research, no
part may be reproduced without the written permission. The content is provided for information purposes only.





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Reconstruction of fruit fly’s anterior visual pathway may lead to insights into animal navigation

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Reconstruction of fruit fly’s anterior visual pathway may lead to insights into animal navigation


Researchers' reconstruction of fruit fly's anterior visual pathway may lead to insights into animal navigation
Overviews of parallel AVPs. Credit: Nature (2024). DOI: 10.1038/s41586-024-07967-z

UC Santa Barbara neuroscientists have reconstructed the entire anterior visual pathway of a fruit fly, a complex series of connections between the insect’s eyes and the navigation center of its brain.

With the help of artificial intelligence and manual proofreading, systems biologist Sung Soo Kim’s research group and collaborators worked out the relationships between more than 3,000 neurons with unprecedented detail.

These insights into the fruit fly’s anterior visual pathway contribute to a suite of nine papers reporting the neuronal wiring of the entire fruit fly brain, published in the journal Nature.

Led by Princeton neuroscientists Mala Murthy and Sebastian Seung, this landmark achievement—an account of the largest, most complex brain to be so thoroughly mapped so far—brings us closer to understanding the intricacies of animal brains and is a stepping stone toward ultimately understanding how the human brain is wired.

“In systems neuroscience, the question is how neurons interact and generate perception, cognition, motor commands and so on,” said Kim, a co-author of two studies (one as a co-corresponding author) appearing in the journal Nature. “But the major problem here is that we don’t know how the neurons are connected to each other. So it’s difficult to understand what’s really going on in the neural network.”

Indeed, depending on a variety of contexts, a single stimulus can result in a wide array of responses, as the information moves from the initial, sensory stage to the deeper, cognitive and motor stages of the brain.

For instance, if you feel something pressing into your skin, your peripheral neurons will be the first to pick up the pressure, Kim explained. But, as that touch information rapidly makes its way through the brain, it is modified by myriad other factors, including mood, activity and the source of that pressure, just to name a few. As a result, your reaction to that touch can vary wildly.

“There are so many different connections and feedback connections that the brain is processing, so that this single touch could have totally different representations in the brain,” Kim said.

Such is the case with navigation, a fundamental, goal-oriented behavior that most animals engage in. Using a constant stream of sensory cues and feedback information, we make representations of our environments and decisions about how to get to where we want to go.







Back-tracing from an ER4d neuron to MeTu1 neurons. From this reconstruction, we infer that ER4d neurons respond to vertically elongated visual fields. Credit: Nature (2024). DOI: 10.1038/s41586-024-07967-z

In fruit flies, approximately 50 “compass neurons”—neurons that tile together to form a ring within the donut-shaped “ellipsoid body” deep in their brains—are responsible for encoding a fly’s sense of direction. This relatively simple structure makes their brains a good candidate for working out the neural circuitry between what they see with their eyes, and how that information travels to the deeper areas of their brains.

“It’s a lot easier to look at these pathways in the fly’s brain,” said co-lead author Dustin Garner, of the Kim Lab. A few years ago, scientists at the Janelia Research Campus at Howard Hughes Medical Institute took 7,050 sections of a single fly’s brain, took 21 million electron microscope images, and compiled them into a publicly available database.

Groups at Princeton University took this data and trained an AI to recognize sections of individual neurons across these images, which then led to a 3D reconstruction of the entire neural network of that fly’s brain. But it was not perfect and still needed human eyes to confirm it. Garner’s job was to proofread the AI’s output with regard to the fly’s anterior visual pathway.

“It was great to be able to see the individual neuron-by-neuron specifics,” he said. “And we actually found multiple parallel pathways that had similar types of neurons, but were slightly different in both form and function.” Garner’s analysis included classifications of these different types of neurons, and predicted their functions from the connectivity.

Meanwhile, Kim Lab colleague and co-lead author Jennifer Lai confirmed some of these predictions experimentally, using the lab’s virtual reality arena for flies, a highly controlled environment projecting light in the fly-visible spectrum (UV to amber), in order to apply stimuli to a tethered fruit fly and observe its brain activity.

In particular, they watched for which neurons fire based on what is being presented to the fly’s visual system, be it multiple small dots or vertically oriented objects.

“We had two major predictions,” she said. “One was the shape of the visual area that each neuron responds to. Some of them respond to vertically elongated visual areas, like columns in a Greek temple, whereas others respond to smaller and more circular visual areas, which we presented in this paper.”

The other, she said, is the color sensitivity of the “ring neurons,” which are the last relay in the anterior visual pathway before visual information is integrated by the compass neurons to generate a directional sense. That, she said, is still a work in progress.

This detailed connectivity data can be used to create computational models that may shed light on how animals navigate and could serve as a model for autonomous vehicle navigation, without relying on GPS.

More information:
Dustin Garner et al, Connectomic reconstruction predicts visual features used for navigation, Nature (2024). DOI: 10.1038/s41586-024-07967-z

Citation:
Reconstruction of fruit fly’s anterior visual pathway may lead to insights into animal navigation (2024, October 8)
retrieved 8 October 2024
from https://phys.org/news/2024-10-reconstruction-fruit-fly-anterior-visual.html

This document is subject to copyright. Apart from any fair dealing for the purpose of private study or research, no
part may be reproduced without the written permission. The content is provided for information purposes only.





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