“Let’s see if you can see me”: Making connections with Google Earth™ in a preschool classroom

Bringing a social interaction approach to children’s geographies to investigate how children accomplish place in everyday lives, we draw on ethnomethodological and conversation analytic approaches that recognize children’s competence to manipulate their social and digital worlds. An investigation of preschool-aged children engaged with Google Earth™ shows how they both claimed and displayed technological understandings and practices such as maneuvering the mouse and screen, and referenced place through relationships with local landmarks and familiar settings such as their school. At times, the children’s competing agendas required orientation to each other’s ideas, and shared negotiation to come to resolution. A focus on children’s use of digital technologies as they make meaning of the world around them makes possible new understandings of place within the geographies of childhood and education.

Fine-tuning of unmanned aerial surveillance for ecological systems

Much of our understanding and management of ecological processes requires knowledge of the distribution and abundance of species. Reliable abundance or density estimates are essential for managing both threatened and invasive populations, yet are often challenging to obtain. Recent and emerging technological advances, particularly in unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs), provide exciting opportunities to overcome these challenges in ecological surveillance. UAVs can provide automated, cost-effective surveillance and offer repeat surveys for pest incursions at an invasion front. They can capitalise on manoeuvrability and advanced imagery options to detect species that are cryptic due to behaviour, life-history or inaccessible habitat. UAVs may also cause less disturbance, in magnitude and duration, for sensitive fauna than other survey methods such as transect counting by humans or sniffer dogs. The surveillance approach depends upon the particular ecological context and the objective. For example, animal, plant and microbial target species differ in their movement, spread and observability. Lag-times may exist between a pest species presence at a site and its detectability, prompting a need for repeat surveys. Operationally, however, the frequency and coverage of UAV surveys may be limited by financial and other constraints, leading to errors in estimating species occurrence or density. We use simulation modelling to investigate how movement ecology should influence fine-scale decisions regarding ecological surveillance using UAVs. Movement and dispersal parameter choices allow contrasts between locally mobile but slow-dispersing populations, and species that are locally more static but invasive at the landscape scale. We find that low and slow UAV flights may offer the best monitoring strategy to predict local population densities in transects, but that the consequent reduction in overall area sampled may sacrifice the ability to reliably predict regional population density. Alternative flight plans may perform better, but this is also dependent on movement ecology and the magnitude of relative detection errors for different flight choices. Simulated investigations such as this will become increasingly useful to reveal how spatio-temporal extent and resolution of UAV monitoring should be adjusted to reduce observation errors and thus provide better population estimates, maximising the efficacy and efficiency of unmanned aerial surveys.

Effective earth and space science analogies

There are several good reasons why Earth and Space Science should be a part of any science curriculum. Nearly everything we do each day is connected in some way to the Earth: to its land, oceans, atmosphere, plants and animals. By 2025, eight billion people will live on Earth. If we are to continue extracting resources to maintain a high quality of life, then it is important that our children are scientifically literate in a way that allows them to exploit the Earth’s resources in a sustainable way. People who understand how earth systems work can make informed decisions and may be able to help resolve issues surrounding clean water, urban planning and development, global climate change and the use and management of natural resources.

Trehalose accumulation triggers autophagy during plant desiccation

Global climate change, increasingly erratic weather and a burgeoning global population are significant threats to the sustainability of future crop production. There is an urgent need for the development of robust measures that enable crops to withstand the uncertainty of climate change whilst still producing maximum yields. Resurrection plants possess the unique ability to withstand desiccation for prolonged periods, can be restored upon watering and represent great potential for the development of stress tolerant crops. Here, we describe the remarkable stress characteristics of Tripogon loliiformis, an uncharacterised resurrection grass and close relative of the economically important cereals, rice, sorghum, and maize. We show that T. loliiformis survives extreme environmental stress by implementing autophagy to prevent Programmed Cell Death. Notably, we identified a novel role for trehalose in the regulation of autophagy in T.loliiformis. Transcriptome, Gas Chromatography Mass Spectrometry, immunoblotting and confocal microscopy analyses directly linked the accumulation of trehalose with the onset of autophagy in dehydrating and desiccated T. loliiformis shoots. These results were supported in vitro with the observation of autophagosomes in trehalose treated T. loliiformis leaves; autophagosomes were not detected in untreated samples. Presumably, once induced, autophagy promotes desiccation tolerance in T.loliiformis , by removal of cellular toxins to suppress programmed cell death and the recycling of nutrients to delay the onset of senescence. These findings illustrate how resurrection plants manipulate sugar metabolism to promote desiccation tolerance and may provide candidate genes that are potentially useful for the development of stress tolerant crops.

Pivotal principles for digital earth development in the 21st century

Reductionist thinking will no longer suffice to address contemporary, complex challenges that defy sectoral, national, or disciplinary boundaries. Furthermore, lessons learned from the past cannot be confidently used to predict outcomes or help guide future actions. The authors propose that the confluence of a number of technology and social disruptors presents a pivotal moment in history to enable real-time, accelerated and integrated action that can adequately support a ‘future earth’ through transformational solutions. Building on more than a decade of dialogues hosted by the International Society for Digital Earth (ISDE), and evolving a briefing note presented to delegates of Pivotal2015, the paper presents an emergent context for collectively addressing spatial information, sustainable development and good governance through three guiding principles for enabling prosperous living in the 21st Century. These are: (1) open data, (2) real world context and (3) informed visualization for decision support. The paper synthesizes an interdisciplinary dialogue to create a credible and positive future vision of collaborative and transparent action for the betterment of humanity and planet. It is intended that the three Pivotal Principles can be used as an elegant framework for action towards the Digital Earth vision, across local, regional, and international communities and organizations.

Observation of sea-salt fraction in sub-100 nm diameter particles at Cape Grim

Volatility-hygroscopicity tandem differential mobility analyzer measurements were used to infer the composition of sub-100 nm diameter Southern Ocean marine aerosols at Cape Grim in November and December 2007. This study focuses on a short-lived high sea spray aerosol (SSA) event on 7–8 December with two externally mixed modes in the Hygroscopic Growth Factor (HGF) distributions (90% relative humidity (RH)), one at HGF > 2 and another at HGF~1.5. The particles with HGF > 2 displayed a deliquescent transition at 73–75% RH and were nonvolatile up to 280°C, which identified them as SSA particles with a large inorganic sea-salt fraction. SSA HGFs were 3–13% below those for pure sea-salt particles, indicating an organic volume fraction (OVF) of up to 11–46%. Observed high inorganic fractions in sub-100 nm SSA is contrary to similar, earlier studies. HGFs increased with decreasing particle diameter over the range 16–97 nm, suggesting a decreased OVF, again contrary to earlier studies. SSA comprised up to 69% of the sub-100 nm particle number, corresponding to concentrations of 110–290 cm−3. Air mass back trajectories indicate that SSA particles were produced 1500 km, 20–40 h upwind of Cape Grim. Transmission electron microscopy (TEM) and X-ray spectrometry measurements of sub-100 nm aerosols collected from the same location, and at the same time, displayed a distinct lack of sea salt. Results herein highlight the potential for biases in TEM analysis of the chemical composition of marine aerosols.