Incorporating Legacy Soil pH Databases into Digital Soil Maps

Soil data and reliable soil maps are imperative for environmental management. conservation and policy. Data from historical point surveys, e.g. experiment site data and farmers fields can serve this purpose. However, legacy soil information is not necessarily collected for spatial analysis and mapping such that the data may not have immediately useful geo-references. Methods are required to utilise these historical soil databases so that we can produce quantitative maps of soil propel-ties to assess spatial and temporal trends but also to assess where future sampling is required. This paper discusses two such databases: the Representative Soil Sampling Scheme which has monitored the agricultural soil in England and Wales from 1969 to 2003 (between 400 and 900 bulked soil samples were taken annually from different agricultural fields); and the former State Chemistry Laboratory, Victoria, Australia where between 1973 and 1994 approximately 80,000 soil samples were submitted for analysis by farmers. Previous statistical analyses have been performed using administrative regions (with sharp boundaries) for both databases, which are largely unrelated to natural features. For a more detailed spatial analysis that call be linked to climate and terrain attributes, gradual variation of these soil properties should be described. Geostatistical techniques such as ordinary kriging are suited to this. This paper describes the format of the databases and initial approaches as to how they can be used for digital soil mapping. For this paper we have selected soil pH to illustrate the analyses for both databases.

The life history legacy of evolutionary body size change in carnivores

We estimate the body sizes of direct ancestors of extant carnivores, and examine selected aspects of life history as a function not only of species' current size, but also of recent changes in size. Carnivore species that have undergone marked recent evolutionary size change show life history characteristics typically associated with species closer to the ancestral body size. Thus, phyletic giants tend to mature earlier and have larger litters of smaller offspring at shorter intervals than do species of the same body size that are not phyletic giants. Phyletic dwarfs, by contrast, have slower life histories than nondwarf species of the same body size. We discuss two possible mechanisms for the legacy of recent size change: lag (in which life history variables cannot evolve as quickly as body size, leading to species having the 'wrong' life history for their body size) and body size optimization (in which life history and hence body size evolve in response to changes in energy availability); at present, we cannot distinguish between these alternatives. Our finding that recent body size changes help explain residual variation around life history allometries shows that a more dynamic view of character change enables comparative studies to make more precise predictions about species traits in the context of their evolutionary background.

Building a left coast: the legacy of the California Popular Front and the challenge to Cold War liberalism in the post-world war two era

The Cold War in the late 1940s blunted attempts by the Truman administration to extend the scope of government in areas such as health care and civil rights. In California, the combined weakness of the Democratic Party in electoral politics and the importance of fellow travelers and communists in state liberal politics made the problem of how to advance the left at a time of heightened Cold War tensions particularly acute. Yet by the early 1960s a new generation of liberal politicians had gained political power in the Golden State and was constructing a greatly expanded welfare system as a way of cementing their hold on power. In this article I argue that the New Politics of the 1970s, shaped nationally by Vietnam and by the social upheavals of the 1960s over questions of race, gender, sexuality, and economic rights, possessed particular power in California because many activists drew on the longer-term experiences of a liberal politics receptive to earlier anti-Cold War struggles. A desire to use political involvement as a form of social networking had given California a strong Popular Front, and in some respects the power of new liberalism was an offspring of those earlier battles.

The cloud chamber and CTR Wilson’s legacy to atmospheric science

2011 is the centenary year of the short paper (Wilson,1911) first describing the cloud chamber, the device for visualising high-energy charged particles which earned the Scottish physicist Charles Thomas Rees (‘CTR’) Wilson the 1927 Nobel Prize for physics. His many achievements in atmospheric science, some of which have current relevance, are briefly reviewed here. CTR Wilson’s lifetime of scientific research work was principally in atmospheric electricity at the Cavendish Laboratory, Cambridge; he was Reader in Electrical Meteorology from 1918 and Jacksonian Professor from 1925 to 1935. However, he is immortalised in physics for his invention of the cloud chamber, because of its great significance as an early visualisation tool for particles such as cosmic rays1 (Galison, 1997). Sir Lawrence Bragg summarised its importance:

Disability [sport] and discourse: stories within the Paralympic legacy

This paper aims to encourage critical reflection on what are key and pressing social and political issues surrounding the Paralympics Games. The focus of the paper is personal narratives of six current elite Paralympic athletes who have participated in at least one Paralympic Games. In response to critical stimuli presented in the form of five ‘unfinished stories’, the self-reflexive, personal, compelling narrative reflections of these individuals were (re)presented for each of the stories as a composite narrative. The stories expose questions over fear, despair, freedom, hope, love, oppression, hatred, hurt, terror, (in)equality, peace, performance and impairment. To really learn from London and reflect for Rio, we need academic work that can understand sport, sporting bodies and physical activity as important ‘sites’ through which social forces, discourses, institutions and processes congregate, congeal and are contested in a manner that contributes to the shaping of human relations, subjectivities, and experiences in particular, contextually contingent ways.