Seminar: sensory objects in progress

Researchers and Co-researchers present talks and demonstrations about the Sensory Objects project to 65 people on Tuesday 10th of June, the Seminar is part of Universities Week.

Interactive sensory objects for and by people with learning disabilities

This project engages people with learning disabilities to participate as co-researchers and explore museum interpretation through multisensory workshops using microcontrollers and sensors to enable alternative interactive visitor experiences in museums and heritage sites. This article describes how the project brings together artists, engineers, and experts in multimedia advocacy, as well as people with learning disabilities in the co-design of interactive multisensory objects that replicate or respond to objects of cultural significance in our national collections. Through a series of staged multi-sensory art and electronics workshops, people with learning disabilities explore how the different senses could be utilised to augment existing artefacts or create entirely new ones. The co-researchers employ multimedia advocacy tools to reflect on and to communicate their experiences and findings.

Sensory objects at the British Museum

The Sensory Objects project creates multisensory interactive artworks that respond to museum collections and generate alternative ideas for museum interpretation.

Seminar: sensory objects

Seminar exploring the Sensory Objects Project at the British Museum for 65 delegates.

High-throughput monitoring of wild bee diversity and abundance via mitogenomics

1. Bee populations and other pollinators face multiple, synergistically acting threats, which have led to population declines, loss of local species richness and pollination services, and extinctions. However, our understanding of the degree, distribution and causes of declines is patchy, in part due to inadequate monitoring systems, with the challenge of taxonomic identification posing a major logistical barrier. Pollinator conservation would benefit from a high-throughput identification pipeline. 2. We show that the metagenomic mining and resequencing of mitochondrial genomes (mitogenomics) can be applied successfully to bulk samples of wild bees. We assembled the mitogenomes of 48 UK bee species and then shotgun-sequenced total DNA extracted from 204 whole bees that had been collected in 10 pan-trap samples from farms in England and been identified morphologically to 33 species. Each sample data set was mapped against the 48 reference mitogenomes. 3. The morphological and mitogenomic data sets were highly congruent. Out of 63 total species detections in the morphological data set, the mitogenomic data set made 59 correct detections (93�7% detection rate) and detected six more species (putative false positives). Direct inspection and an analysis with species-specific primers suggested that these putative false positives were most likely due to incorrect morphological IDs. Read frequency significantly predicted species biomass frequency (R2 = 24�9%). Species lists, biomass frequencies, extrapolated species richness and community structure were recovered with less error than in a metabarcoding pipeline. 4. Mitogenomics automates the onerous task of taxonomic identification, even for cryptic species, allowing the tracking of changes in species richness and istributions. A mitogenomic pipeline should thus be able to contain costs, maintain consistently high-quality data over long time series, incorporate retrospective taxonomic revisions and provide an auditable evidence trail. Mitogenomic data sets also provide estimates of species counts within samples and thus have potential for tracking population trajectories.

Seminar: access all areas

Sensory Objects presented their research and their Sensory Labels for the British Museum at a seminar called Access All Areas organised by the Visitor Users Group.

Ecological and social drivers of coffee pollination in Santander, Colombia

Bees and other insects provide pollination services that are key to determining the fruit set on coffee plantations. These pollination services are influenced by local ecology as well as human factors, both social and economic. To better understand these different factors, we assessed their effect on pollinators and coffee pollination services in Santander, Colombia. We quantified the effect of key ecological drivers on pollinator community composition, such as the method of farm management (either conventional or organic) and the surrounding landscape composition, specifically the proximity to forest. We found that ambient levels of pollination services provided by the local pollinator fauna (open pollination) accounted for a 10.5 ± 2.0% increase in final coffee fruit set, and that the various pollinators are affected differently by the differing factors. For example, our findings indicate that conventional farm management, using synthetic inputs, can promote pollinators, especially if they are in close proximity to natural forest fragments. This is particularly true for stingless bees. Honeybee visitation to coffee is also positively influenced by the conventional management of farms. Factors associated with greater numbers of stingless bees on farms include greater shade cover, lower tree densities, smaller numbers and types of trees in bloom, and younger coffee plantations. A forested landscape close to farms appears to enhance these factors, giving increased stability and resilience to the pollinating bees and insects. However we found that organic farms also support diverse pollinator communities, even if distant from forest fragments. The contribution of honeybees to pollination value (US$129.6/ha of coffee) is greater than that of stingless bees (US$16.5/ha of coffee). Since the method of farm management has a major impact on the numbers and types of pollinators attracted to farms, we have analysed the statistically significant social factors that influence farmers’ decisions on whether to adopt organic or conventional practices. These include the availability of technology, the type of landowner (whether married couples or individual owners), the number of years of farmers’ formal education, the role of institutions, membership of community organizations, farm size, coffee productivity and the number of coffee plots per farm. It is hoped that the use of our holistic approach, which combines investigation of the social as well as the ecological drivers of pollination, will help provide evidence to underpin the development of best practices for integrating the management of pollination into sustainable agricultural practices.

Interactive sensory objects for and by people with learning disabilities

This project engages people with learning disabilities to participate as co-researchers and explore museum interpretation through multisensory workshops using microcontrollers and sensors to enable alternative interactive visitor experiences in museums and heritage sites. This article describes how the project brings together artists, engineers, and experts in multimedia advocacy, as well as people with learning disabilities in the co-design of interactive multisensory objects that replicate or respond to objects of cultural significance in our national collections. Through a series of staged multi-sensory art and electronics workshops, people with learning disabilities explore how the different senses could be utilised to augment existing artefacts or create entirely new ones. The co-researchers employ multimedia advocacy tools to reflect on and to communicate their experiences and findings.

I killed my father, I ate human flesh, I quiver with joy: an obsession with Pier Paolo Pasolini

Group show, curated by Invisible Exports Gallery. Featuring work by Michael Bilsborough, Lizzi Bougatsos, BREYER P-ORRIDGE, Asger Carlsen, Troels Carlsen, Walt Cassidy, Andy Coolquitt, Vaginal Davis, Carlton DeWoody, Joey Frank, Paul Gabrielli, Ludovica Gioscia, Luis Gispert, Terence Hannum, Karen Heagle, Timothy Hull, Doug Ischar, Brian Kenny, Jeremy Kost, Aaron Krach, Yeni Mao, Leigha Mason, Mark McCoy, Robert Melee, Lucas Michael, Jennifer Needleman, Brent Owens, Paul P., Paolo Di Paolo, Franklin Preston, John Russell, Xaviera Simmons, Duston Spear, Scott Treleaven, Ramon Vega, Jordan Wolfson, Dustin Yellin

Plague of diagrams

Group exhibition curated by Plastique Fantastique. Organised by David Burrows and Dean Kenning in collaboration with Ami Clarke, Andrew Conio, John Cussans and David Osbaldeston. Contributors: David Burrows, Rachel Cattle & Jenna Collins, Neil Chapman & Gillian Wylde, Ami Clarke, Richard Cochrane, Andrew Conio, John Cussans, David Burrows, Benedict Drew, English Heretic, Nikolaus Gansterer, Joey Holder, Dean Kenning, Christoph Lueder, Stine Llungdalh, Adelheid Mers, Mike Nelson, Paul O'Kane, David Osbaldeston, Plastique Fantastique, Patricia Reed, John Russell, Erica Scourti, Andy Sharp, Kamini Vellodi, Martin Westwood and Carey Young.

Susceptibility of faba bean (Vicia faba L.) to heat stress during floral development and anthesis

Experiments were conducted over two years to quantify the response of faba bean (Vicia faba L.) to heat stress. Potted winter faba bean plants (cv. Wizard) were exposed to temperature treatments (18/10; 22/14; 26/18; 30/22; 34/26°C day/night) for five days during floral development and anthesis. Developmental stages of all flowers were scored prior to stress, plants were grown in exclusion from insect pollinators to prevent pollen movement between flowers, and yield was harvested at an individual pod scale, enabling effects of heat stress to be investigated at a high resolution. Susceptibility to stress differed between floral stages, flowers were most affected during initial green-bud stages. Yield and pollen germination of flowers present before stress showed threshold relationships to stress, with lethal temperatures (t50) ~28°C and ~32°C, while whole plant yield showed a linear negative relationship to stress with high plasticity in yield allocation, such that yield lost at lower nodes was partially compensated at higher nodal positions. Faba bean has many beneficial attributes for sustainable modern cropping systems but these results suggest that yield will be limited by projected climate change, necessitating the development of heat tolerant cultivars, or improved resilience by other mechanisms such as earlier flowering times.

Ecological traits affect the sensitivity of bees to land-use pressures in European agricultural landscapes

1. Bees are a functionally important and economically valuable group, but are threatened byland-use conversion and intensification. Such pressures are not expected to affect all species identically; rather, they are likely to be mediated by the species’ ecological traits. 2. Understanding which types of species are most vulnerable under which land uses is an important step towards effective conservation planning.3. We collated occurrence and abundance data for 257 bee species at 1584 European sites from surveys reported in 30 published papers (70 056 records) and combined them with species-level ecological trait data. We used mixed-effects models to assess the importance of land use (land-use class, agricultural use-intensity and a remotely-sensed measure of vegetation),traits and trait 9 land-use interactions, in explaining species occurrence and abundance.4. Species’ sensitivity to land use was most strongly influenced by flight season duration and foraging range, but also by niche breadth, reproductive strategy and phenology, with effects that differed among cropland, pastoral and urban habitats.5. Synthesis and applications. Rather than targeting particular species or settings, conservation action s may be more effective if focused on mitigating situations where species’ traits strongly and negatively interact with land-use pressures. We find evidence that low-intensity agriculture can maintain relatively diverse bee communities; in more intensive settings, added floral resources may be beneficial, but will require careful placement with respect to foraging ranges of smaller bee species. Protection of semi-natural habitats is essential, however; in particular, conversion to urban environments could have severe effects on bee diversity and pollination services. Our results highlight the importance of exploring how ecological traits mediate species responses to human impacts, but further research is needed to enhance the predictive ability of such analyses.