Natural disasters that cause tremendous material harm and threaten human lives, infrastructure, and economic and social activities become more frequent. While most
material and human casualties are ...the effects of sudden and brief natural disasters, it is not possible to disregard long-term disasters, most frequently triggered by climate change. Damage from long-term disasters is quite significant and hampers the sustainability of the economy and life in densely populated cities. Following climate change, it is concluded that special attention should be paid to coastal cities, cities along rivers and the potential risks of possible disasters should be reduced before they materialize. The reduction of disaster risk is an endeavor involving various professional fields, viewpoints, and stakeholders. An integrated approach that brings together all the necessary elements is therefore required. The planning for protection against natural disasters and in the very moments when it occurs, it is necessary to quickly obtain reliable data to coordinate activities in the field well. However, there are problems in the field with the availability, access, and spatial data use. In this sense, the Spatial Data Infrastructure (SDI) can provide an appropriate framework for sharing spatial data through the cooperation of administration, public, and private institutions and citizens.
Young adult-born granule cells (abGCs) in the dentate gyrus (DG) have a profound impact on cognition and mood. However, it remains unclear how abGCs distinctively contribute to local DG information ...processing. We found that the actions of abGCs in the DG depend on the origin of incoming afferents. In response to lateral entorhinal cortex (LEC) inputs, abGCs exert monosynaptic inhibition of mature granule cells (mGCs) through group II metabotropic glutamate receptors. By contrast, in response to medial entorhinal cortex (MEC) inputs, abGCs directly excite mGCs through
-methyl-d-aspartate receptors. Thus, a critical function of abGCs may be to regulate the relative synaptic strengths of LEC-driven contextual information versus MEC-driven spatial information to shape distinct neural representations in the DG.
Understanding the content of memory is essential to teasing apart its underlying mechanisms. While recognition tests have commonly been used to probe memory, it is difficult to establish what ...specific content is driving performance. Here, we instead focus on free recall of real-world scenes, and quantify the content of memory using a drawing task. Participants studied 30 scenes and, after a distractor task, drew as many images in as much detail as possible from memory. The resulting memory-based drawings were scored by thousands of online observers, revealing numerous objects, few memory intrusions, and precise spatial information. Further, we find that visual saliency and meaning maps can explain aspects of memory performance and observe no relationship between recall and recognition for individual images. Our findings show that not only is it possible to quantify the content of memory during free recall, but those memories contain detailed representations of our visual experiences.
Using high spatial and temporal data from the New Vacuum Solar Telescope and the Solar Dynamics Observatory, we present unambiguous observations of recurrent two-sided loop jets caused by magnetic ...reconnection between erupting minifilaments and a nearby large filament. The observations demonstrate that three two-sided loop jets, which ejected along the large filament in opposite directions, were similar in appearance and originated from the same region. We find that a minifilament erupted and drove the first jet. It reformed at the same neutral line later, and then underwent partial and total eruptions, driving the second and third jets, respectively. In the course of the jets, cool plasma was injected into the large filament. Furthermore, persistent magnetic flux cancellation occurred at the neutral line under the minifilament before its eruption and continued until the end of the observation. We infer that magnetic flux cancellation may account for building and then triggering the minifilament to erupt to produce the two-sided loop jets. This observation not only indicates that two-sided loop jets can be driven by minifilament eruptions, but also sheds new light on our understanding of the recurrent mechanism of two-sided loop jets.
A sudden change in global and regional environmental conditions has triggered the invasion of Sargassum algae in parts of the Caribbean coasts since 2014. To date, it has not been possible to revert ...the trend of seasonal Sargassum invasion, but some public institutions of subtropical countries are in the process of building monitoring systems based on satellite earth observation. Algorithms applied on high spatial resolution (but low revisiting frequency) data have been reported successful for Sargassum detection. GOES-16, MODIS (Aqua & Terra) and VIIRS imagery are acquired daily at the reception station of the National Laboratory for Earth Observation (LANOT), hosted in the Geography Institute, National Autonomous University of Mexico (UNAM). In this research, we implement a near real time Sargassum monitoring platform off the shore of Honduras, Belize and Mexico, based on the above-mentioned satellite imagery. The system design of this platform is first described, including the Big Data infrastructure for image acquisition and storage. Then, Sargassum potential presence is mapped from each of the three sensors, using Python-based processing tools and Sargassum detection algorithms. The coarse spatial resolution products obtained could complement higher spatial resolution studies by providing inputs for temporal modelling of propagation and onshore accumulation of Sargassum.
Management of marine ecosystems requires spatial information on current impacts. In several marine regions, including the Mediterranean and Black Sea, legal mandates and agreements to implement ...ecosystem-based management and spatial plans provide new opportunities to balance uses and protection of marine ecosystems. Analyses of the intensity and distribution of cumulative impacts of human activities directly connected to the ecological goals of these policy efforts are critically needed. Quantification and mapping of the cumulative impact of 22 drivers to 17 marine ecosystems reveals that 20% of the entire basin and 60-99% of the territorial waters of EU member states are heavily impacted, with high human impact occurring in all ecoregions and territorial waters. Less than 1% of these regions are relatively unaffected. This high impact results from multiple drivers, rather than one individual use or stressor, with climatic drivers (increasing temperature and UV, and acidification), demersal fishing, ship traffic, and, in coastal areas, pollution from land accounting for a majority of cumulative impacts. These results show that coordinated management of key areas and activities could significantly improve the condition of these marine ecosystems.
This paper examines whether experience of extreme weather events—such as excessive heat, droughts, flooding, and hurricanes—increases an individual’s level concern about climate change. We bring ...together micro-level geospatial data on extreme weather events from NOAA’s Storm Events Database with public opinion data from multiple years of the Cooperative Congressional Election Study to study this question. We find evidence of a modest, but discernible positive relationship between experiencing extreme weather activity and expressions of concern about climate change. However, the effect only materializes for recent extreme weather activity; activity that occurred over longer periods of time does not affect public opinion. These results are generally robust to various measurement strategies and model specifications. Our findings contribute to the public opinion literature on the importance of local environmental conditions on attitude formation.
Pedestrian network is an important part of urban transportation systems. The connectivity among networks substantially influences the residential access to surrounding amenity resources. Although ...studies to date have explored the evaluation and analysis of connectivity in pedestrian networks, the impact of mobility associated with network, e.g., public transport transfer, was not captured. In this study, we built a novel model that integrates network structural complexity and public transport transfer into connectivity index (CIi). The structural complexity of pedestrian networks as the first factor for the proposed model is calculated using the LNR (Link- Node Ratio) method. The degree of public transport transfer freedom as the second factor is quantified based on the number of public transport stations and their categories. We applied this model to the city of Wuhan, and the correlation between pedestrian network connectivity and urban amenities is further explored using Spearmans’ rank correlation coefficient. This study provides two findings: first, difference in connectivity was identified in some residential areas after considering public transport transfer freedom, compared with traditional LNR. Denser pedestrian network and transit stops were revealed in the locations with higher CIi, with differences between old and new districts. Second, newly proposed CIi improved the significance in the association between connectivity and urban amenities. In residential areas with advanced connectivity, urban planners are expected to expand urban amenities to improve the living environmental.
•A pedestrian network connectivity assessment model was proposed.•Difference in connectivity was identified in some residential areas after considering public transport transfer freedom.•The relationship between the connectivity and the distribution of urban amenities was studied.•Newly proposed CIi improved the significance in the association between connectivity and urban amenities.
Physical exercise is a robust lifestyle intervention. Among its many benefits, it is known for its enhancement of cognitive abilities. Nevertheless, the extent to which these benefits can be ...transmitted across generations (intergenerational inheritance to F1, and transgenerational to F2 and beyond) remains a topic of limited comprehension. We have already shown that cognitive improvements resulting from physical exercise can be inherited from parents to their offspring, proving intergenerational effects. So, we set out to explore whether these enhancements might extend transgenerationally, impacting the F2 generation. In this study, we initially examined the behavioral traits of second-generation (F2) male mice, whose grandfathers (F0) had an exercise intervention. Our findings revealed that F2 mice with physically active F0 grandparents displayed significantly improved memory recall, encompassing both spatial and non-spatial information when compared to their counterparts from sedentary F0 progenitors, and proving for the first time the transgenerational inheritance of physical exercise-induced cognitive enhancement. Surprisingly, while F2 memory improved (as in F1), adult hippocampal neurogenesis remained unchanged between experimental and control groups (unlike in F1). Additionally, our analysis of smallRNA sequences in hippocampus identified 35 differentially expressed miRNAs linked to important brain function categories. Notably, two of these miRNAs, miRNA-144 and miRNA-298, displayed robust negative correlation with cognitive performance. These findings highlight enduring transgenerational transmission of cognitive benefits associated with exercise, even after two generations. Furthermore, they suggest that moderate exercise training can have lasting positive effects, possibly orchestrated by a specific set of miRNAs that exert their influence across multiple generations.
Physical exercise is well known by its positive effects on body health and specifically on brain functioning and health. Here we test whether those effects are inherited from exercised grandparents to the second generation. We report here for the first time the transgenerational inheritance of moderate exercise-induced grandpaternal traits in grandson's cognition, even though some of the cellular changes induced in F1 vanish in F2, and suggesting that moderate exercise training has a longer-lasting effect than previously thought, most probably mediated by a small group of microRNAs acting across generations.
Hyperspectral image (HSI) classification is one of the most important tasks in hyperspectral data analysis. Convolutional neural networks (CNN) have been introduced to HSI classification and achieved ...good performance. In this article, an effective and efficient CNN-based spectral partitioning residual network (SPRN) is proposed for HSI classification. The SPRN splits the input spectral bands into several nonoverlapping continuous subbands and uses cascaded parallel improved residual blocks to extract spectral-spatial features from these subbands, respectively. Finally, the features are fused and fed into a classifier. By equivalently using grouped convolutions, the spectral partition and feature extraction are embedded into an end-to-end network. Experimental results show that the proposed SPRN achieves state-of-the-art performance, meanwhile, with relatively fewer parameters and computational costs. Usually, the CNN takes a patch that contains continuous spatial information as the input and results in a class label of the center pixel. The large size of the input patch includes more spatial information, whereas also introduces interfering pixels that may lead to a degradation of classification accuracies. For that reason, we propose a novel spatial attention module named homogeneous pixel detection module (HPDM). The module alleviates the degradation of performance as the input patch size increases by capturing the homogeneous pixels in the input patch. The module can be integrated into any CNN-based HSI classification framework.
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