Subdaily precipitation extremes are high-impact events that can result in flash floods, sewer system overload, or landslides. Several studies have reported an intensification of projected ...short-duration extreme rainfall in a warmer future climate. Traditionally, regional climate models (RCMs) are run at a coarse resolution using deep-convection parameterization for these extreme events. As computational resources are continuously ramping up, these models are run at convection-permitting resolution, thereby partly resolving the small-scale precipitation events explicitly. To date, a comprehensive evaluation of convection-permitting models is still missing. We propose an evaluation strategy for simulated subdaily rainfall extremes that summarizes the overall RCM performance. More specifically, the following metrics are addressed: the seasonal/diurnal cycle, temperature and humidity dependency, temporal scaling, and spatiotemporal clustering. The aim of this paper is as follows: (i) to provide a statistical modeling framework for some of the metrics, based on extreme value analysis, (ii) to apply the evaluation metrics to a microensemble of convection-permitting RCM simulations over Belgium against high-frequency observations, and (iii) to investigate the added value of convection-permitting scales with respect to coarser 12-km resolution. We find that convection-permitting models improved precipitation extremes on shorter time scales (i.e., hourly or 2 hourly), but not on 6–24-h time scales. Some metrics such as the diurnal cycle or the Clausius–Clapeyron rate are improved by convection-permitting models, whereas the seasonal cycle appears to be robust across spatial scales. On the other hand, the spatial dependence is poorly represented at both convection-permitting scales and coarser scales. Our framework provides perspectives for improving high-resolution atmospheric numerical modeling and datasets for hydrological applications.
Here, we present the first combined results of N₂ fixation rates (15N₂ assay), dissolved iron (dFe, < 0.2 μm), and primary production (PP) (14C assay) in the northwestern South China Sea (NWSCS) ...coastal upwelling region during summer. Surface N₂ fixation rate ranged between 0.1 nmol N L−1 d−1 and 5.6 nmol N L−1 d−1 (average 1.0 nmol N L−1 d−1, n = 50) under nonbloom conditions. At a Trichodesmium bloom station, N₂ fixation rate was ∼ 3 orders of magnitude higher. Depth-integrated N₂ fixation rate ranged between 7.5 μmol N m−2 d−1 and 163.1 μmol N m−2 d−1 (average 46.4 μmol N m−2 d−1). Our results indicate that N₂ fixation is unlikely limited by Fe availability in the NWSCS continental waters, instead, the coastal upwelling-induced combined effects of physical and biological processes may have played a decisive role. With the upwelled cold, dFe-rich, nutrient-replete waters, nondiazotrophic phytoplankton growth would be preferentially enhanced while N₂ fixation was hindered due to relative deficiency of phosphate caused by massive phytoplankton utilization in the coastal upwelling. By comparison, N₂ fixation was notably elevated along with decreased PP in the offshore waters, probably due to a shift from P-deficiency to N-deficiency. Consistently, the contribution of N₂ fixation to PP (0.01–2.52%) also increased toward the open waters. As a significant external N source, summertime N₂ fixation is estimated to contribute a flux of 1.4 Gmol N to this area under nonbloom conditions. This study adds to the knowledge of N₂ fixation in the rarely studied subtropical coastal upwellings, and highlights the necessity of future comprehensive studies in such highly dynamic environments.
Like the federal government, states can apply their laws to people beyond their borders. Statutes can reach out-of-state conduct, such as fraud, that has effects within the state, and in some ...circumstances, states can prosecute their own citizens for out-of-state conduct. Many applications of extraterritorial jurisdiction are well established and uncontroversial; state common law and the Model Penal Code provide for such authority. The practice draws little attention when states’ criminal laws are broadly similar and treat the same activities as crimes. In the wake of the Supreme Court’s decision in Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health Organization, however, state laws now sharply conflict over conduct related to abortion services. In addition to prohibiting in-state activities that facilitate access to abortions, some state legislatures and local prosecutors seek to extend criminal liability to persons acting in states in which their conduct is legal. Louisiana, for example, made it a crime for anyone outside of Louisiana to ship “abortion-inducing drugs” to a Louisiana resident.
This article analyzes the principles of state extraterritorial criminal jurisdiction and the longstanding state laws that authorize criminal jurisdiction over actors in other states. It then turns to the existing and proposed state criminal laws that target abortion services beyond a state’s own borders. In some cases, such laws are well grounded; for others, the validity of extraterritorial application is unclear. But even for statutes with valid extraterritorial reach, barriers to enforcement remain. In many circumstances, cross-border enforcement depends on state cooperation, especially in extraditing defendants and obtaining out-of-state evidence and witness testimony. Federal law requires states to fulfill other states’ extradition requests only for “fugitives,” which creates a gap between the law of extradition and of extraterritorial jurisdiction. Those who violate one state’s criminal law while in another state are not fugitives, which means pro-choice states can refuse to extradite their residents for other states’ abortion-related prosecutions. A few states have already changed their laws to permit this kind of resistance—another sign of diminished comity between states. Finally, the article briefly surveys constitutional doctrines that might constrain extraterritorial prosecutions. Few of those doctrines provide clear limits, suggesting that, if the post-Dobbs world leads to extraterritorial prosecutions, the constitutional parameters for that practice will be one of the new battlegrounds.
Most criminal prosecutions occur at a level that is both neglected by many legal scholars and central to the lives of most people entangled in the criminal legal system: the level of the state. State ...v. Citizen prosecutions, which encompass most crimes ranging from robbery to homicide, are governed both by the federal constitution and by the constitution of the prosecuting state.
This is no less true for sentences than for prosecutions. When it comes to sentences, state courts are bound by the Eighth Amendment to the United States Constitution, which famously proclaims that no American shall be subjected to “cruel and unusual punishment.” But state constitutions may go further than the federal constitution. States may adopt constitutional provisions analogous to the Eighth Amendment that establish even more effective guards against unreasonable or vindictive punishments.
One state—Illinois—has so chosen. At Illinois’s most recent constitutional convention in 1970, a group of statewide delegates agreed to reconsider the limits set by the state’s constitution on criminal punishments.
From that convention emerged a revolutionary idea: that Illinois should adopt in its constitution the strongest known language in the nation limiting a government’s ability to mete out extreme punishments to those citizens who have transgressed the criminal law—and clearly identifying the purpose of those criminal sentences as rehabilitation. Thus was born what appears in Illinois’s constitution today: the so-called proportionate-penalties clause. That clause, codified in 1970 as Article 1, Section 11 of the Illinois Constitution, proclaims that “all penalties shall be determined both according to the seriousness of the offense and with the objective of restoring the offender to useful citizenship. No conviction shall work corruption of blood or forfeiture of estate. No person shall be transported out of the State for an offense committed within the State.”
This Article traces the origins of the proportionate-penalties clause back to the 1970 constitutional convention, using floor debate transcripts and other contemporaneous sources to establish that its authors did, indeed, intend Illinois sentences to serve rehabilitative purposes. To interrogate the context of those documents, this Article also examines the surrounding historical events of late 1960s-era Chicago, as well the lives and identities of the delegates who propelled this clause forward.
This Article uses the authors’ words as prescient calls for a new interpretation of the proportionate-penalties clause that hews to their vision —and that can serve as a model for rethinking the guardrails around criminal punishments nationwide. Indeed, a constitutional scheme that insists that criminal penalties be directed at rehabilitative ends can and must carry implications for many of the statutes and rules that sustain our current system of mass incarceration.
Spatial optimization approaches that were originally developed to help conservation organizations determine protection decisions over small spatial scales are now used to inform global or continental ...scale priority setting. However, the different decision contexts involved in large-scale resource allocation need to be considered.We present a continuous optimization approach in which a decision-maker allocates funding to regional offices. Local decision-makers then use these funds to implement habitat protection efforts with varying effectiveness when evaluated in terms of the funder's goals.We illustrate this continuous formulation by examining the relative priority that should be given to different counties in the coterminous United States when acquiring land to establish new protected areas. If weighting all species equally, counties in the southwest United States, where large areas can be bought cheaply, are priorities for protection. If focusing only on species of conservation concern, priorities shift to locations rich in such species, particularly near expanding exurban areas facing high rates of future habitat conversion (e.g., south-central Texas). Priorities for protection are sensitive to what is assumed about local ecological and decision-making processes. For example, decision-makers who doubt the efficacy of local land protection efforts should focus on a few key areas, while optimistic decision-makers should disperse funding more widely. Efforts to inform large-scale conservation priorities should reflect better the types of choice that decision-makers actually face when working over these scales. They also need to report the sensitivity of recommended priorities to what are often unstated assumptions about local processes affecting conservation outcomes.
Natural populations are increasingly threatened with collapse at the hands of anthropogenic effects. Predicting population collapse with the help of generic early warning signals (EWS) may provide a ...prospective tool for identifying species or populations at highest risk. However, pattern-to-process methods such as EWS have a multitude of challenges to overcome to be useful, including the low signal-to-noise ratio of ecological systems and the need for high quality time series data. The inclusion of trait dynamics with EWS has been proposed as a more robust tool to predict population collapse. However, the length and resolution of available time series are highly variable from one system to another, especially when generation time is considered. As yet, it remains unknown how this variability with regards to generation time will alter the efficacy of EWS. Here we take both a simulation- and experimental-based approach to assess the impacts of relative time series length and resolution on the forecasting ability of EWS. We show that EWS’ performance decreases with decreasing time-series length. However, there was no evident decrease in EWS performance as resolution decreased. Our simulations suggest a relative time series length between 10 and five generations as a minimum requirement for accurate forecasting by abundance-based EWS. However, when trait information is included alongside abundance-based EWS, we find positive signals at lengths one-half of what was required without them. We suggest that, in systems where specific traits are known to affect demography, trait data should be monitored and included alongside abundance data to improve forecasting reliability.
Individual variation in reproductive ability is a key component of natural selection within populations, driving the evolution of life histories and population responses to changing environmental ...conditions. Evidence that population density affects individual-level fitness in wild populations is limited, particularly for long-lived animals, which are difficult to observe on a biologically relevant scale. We tested for individual heterogeneity in reproductive performance in female grey seals (Halichoerus grypus) using 35 yr of mark–resighting data at Sable Island, Canada (43.93° N 59.91° W). We used Bayesian generalized linear mixed-effect models and multistate open robust design mark–resight models to investigate whether population size negatively influences individual reproductive performance. We measured reproductive performance in two ways: reproductive frequency (the probability of returning to the island to breed) and annual provisioning performance (the probability of successfully weaning a pup given a female bred). Sighting histories of 1,655 known-aged females with a total of 22,961 pupping events were used for analysis. After accounting for effects of female age, parity, and random year effects, we found that both provisioning performance and reproductive frequency demonstrated a strong, positive correlation with population size. Among-individual variance in reproductive traits and responses to population size indicated considerable heterogeneity in overall reproductive performance. As population size grew, “robust” females increased their reproductive performance more than their more “frail” conspecifics in both reproductive traits, resulting in an amplification of differences among individuals. Consequently, simulations from posterior distributions revealed a large fitness consequence of heterogeneity in this population, with “frail” individuals having 47.1% fewer successful pups than more “robust” females (mean reproductive output ± SD: 9.12 ± 3.77 pups for frail individuals, 16.97 ± 2.94 for robust individuals). Repeatability of overall reproductive performance across environments indicates individual quality may be more influential to lifetime reproductive success than costs associated with reproductive investment. This quantification of relative fitness and its dynamics is crucial to understanding broad evolutionary processes in natural populations.
In this study we examined language learners’ attentional processing of a target syntactic construction in written L2 input in different input conditions, the change in learners’ knowledge of the ...targeted construction in these conditions, and the relationship between the change in knowledge and attentional processing. One hundred L2 learners of English in Sri Lanka were divided into four experimental groups and control group: input flood, input enhancement, a specific instruction to pay attention to the target grammatical construction in the input, and an explicit metalinguistic explanation of the target construction. Eye tracking was used to collect data on the attentional processing of 45 participants in the sample. The eye-tracking measures of learners who received a specific instruction to pay attention to the target structure and an explicit metalinguistic explanation indicated increased attentional processing. The learners in these groups also improved their knowledge of the target structure significantly. The results suggest that increased attentional processing is needed for development in L2 grammatical knowledge and that explicit instruction to pay attention to the input and metalinguistic explanation are successful in directing learners’ attentional resources toward novel grammatical constructions in the input.
This study develops a dynamic perspective on how elected state officials’ political incentives shape the behavior and performance of organizations, particularly state-owned enterprises (SOEs). ...Drawing on theoretical views about the relationship between politicians and firms, I argue that state officials seeking votes manipulate SOEs to boost employment before elections. As a result, SOEs exhibit both higher employment levels and lower financial performance in election years. The positive relationship between elections and SOE employment, however, is not uniform across firms and geographic communities: it is likely to be stronger in economically disadvantaged communities and weaker for SOEs with private investors. Data from Brazil’s water sector—an industry managing a crucial societal resource—support these predictions. These results shed light on the mechanisms linking officials’ political incentives and SOE behavior and show that SOE performance is politically contingent and thus varies systematically over time. More broadly, this study reveals how firms’ responses to political pressures depend on both organizational and community attributes and highlights how the interplay of election cycles, organizations, and communities shapes the performance of organizations in state capitalism.
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