Size-correlated division of labour and spatial distribution of workers in the driver ant, Dorylus molestus

Driver ants ( Dorylus spp.) show a high degree of worker polymorphism. Previous reports suggest that large Dorylus workers are specialised for defensive tasks. In this study, we first quantitatively tested whether there is a size-correlated division of defensive labour among workers. Second, we determined whether the spatial distribution of workers outside the nest can be predicted based on such size-specific differences in task allocation. We show that the division of defensive behaviour among different-sized workers is not strict. However, there is a significant correlation between worker size and the tendency to carry out defensive tasks. First, workers of larger size were more likely than smaller workers to participate in colony defence. Second, larger workers were more frequent near the nest containing the reproducing individuals and the brood. Finally, large workers were more common in open sections of the trail than in covered sections, which are likely to be less exposed to predators

The worldwide costs of marine protected areas

Declines in marine harvests, wildlife, and habitats have prompted calls at both the 2002 World Summit on Sustainable Development and the 2003 World Parks Congress for the establishment of a global system of marine protected areas (MPAs). MPAs that restrict fishing and other human activities conserve habitats and populations and, by exporting biomass, may sustain or increase yields of nearby fisheries. Here we provide an estimate of the costs of a global MPA network, based on a survey of the running costs of 83 MPAs worldwide. Annual running costs per unit area spanned six orders of magnitude, and were higher in MPAs that were smaller, closer to coasts, and in high-cost, developed countries. Models extrapolating these findings suggest that a global MPA network meeting the World Parks Congress target of conserving 20–30% of the world’s seas might cost between $5 billion and$19 billion annually to run and would probably create around one million jobs. Although substantial, gross network costs are less than current government expenditures on harmful subsidies to industrial fisheries. They also ignore potential private gains from improved fisheries and tourism and are dwarfed by likely social gains from increasing the sustainability of fisheries and securing vital ecosystem services

Cost–benefit analysis: a decision-support tool or a venue for contesting ecosystem knowledge?

Managing ecosystems for multiple benefits and stakeholders is a formidable challenge requiring diverse knowledge to be discovered, transmitted, and aggregated. Cost–benefit analysis (CBA) is advocated as a theoretically grounded decision-support tool, but in practice it frequently appears to exert little influence. To understand this puzzle, I consider ecosystem knowledge and CBA from both the demand and supply sides. I argue that all ecosystem knowledge is contestable, which restricts the influence of technocratic tools like CBA. On the demand side, democratic mechanisms shape decision makers' motivations and incentives, but also provide a substitute for technocratic evidence. Supply-side factors limiting the influence of CBA include the scarcity of decision-pertinent evidence and the uncertain meaning and usefulness of CBA. Demand-side factors are resistant to change; but taking account of them, I suggest some supply-side reforms, arguing that CBA is best regarded not as a tool but as a venue where ecosystem knowledge is aggregated and contested.</jats:p

(−)‐[ 18 F]Flubatine: evaluation in rhesus monkeys and a report of the first fully automated radiosynthesis validated for clinical use

Peer Reviewedhttp://deepblue.lib.umich.edu/bitstream/2027.42/101867/1/jlcr3069.pd

Work Package Report 6: Shared, plural and cultural values of ecosystems – Summary

Key findings: Finding 1: Shared values resulting from deliberative, group-based valuation are different from individual values. Case study evidence suggests that they are more informed, considered, confident and reflective of participants’ deeper-held, transcendental values. Deliberated, group-based monetary values may be a better reflection of real welfare impacts than non-deliberated individual values, if derived through a carefully designed and managed process. Although more research is needed to expand the currently small evidence base on deliberative monetary methods, group deliberation has the potential to significantly enhance elicitation of values. Finding 2: The ethical, moral and justice dimensions of many environmental issues necessitate approaches that allow for the elicitation of shared and plural values. Key ethical concerns include: 1) providing a space and opportunity for people to identify values that they may find difficult to articulate (e.g. spiritual, identity); 2) recognising that some values cannot be traded without discussion and negotiation (e.g. the legal or felt rights of local people, intrinsic values of other species); and 3) understanding that it is often difficult to isolate valuation from decision-making processes because people feel there are strong ethical or moral issues at stake that need to be debated (e.g. the justice of the process, fairness in the distribution of benefits or disbenefits, responsibility, and issues of sustainability and future generations). Finding 3: Catalyst and/or conflict points can play a key role in the emergence and articulation of values at a societal or community level that have not previously been outwardly or explicitly articulated. Catalyst and conflict points can be symbolic and are often linked to wider contested issues and meanings about who is involved in decision-making, whose voice counts and who receives the benefits or disbenefits of environmental change. These catalyst points can potentially be connected to feelings of powerlessness that give rise to concern and protest. By recognising transcendental societal and communal values (the deeper-held and overarching values held by society and communities), it becomes possible to make these values explicit and incorporate them in decision-making to better anticipate and manage conflicts. Finding 4: There is a diversity of ways in which shared, plural, cultural and social values are used, but they are rarely conceptualised. The UK NEAFO provides a clear theoretical framework that distinguishes and categorises different dimensions and types of shared values. The proposed range of value types was both identifiable and distinguishable within case study results. This suggests that the framework provides a useful basis for operationalizing shared values for decision-making. Finding 5: Shared and social values in the sense of value to society is conceptualised very differently by conventional economics and other disciplines. Neoclassical economists have generally undertaken valuation by equating social value with the aggregate of individual values. They consider values as fundamentally commensurable. In contrast, literature from other disciplines consistently considers values as plural, not just in the sense that multiple things have value, but also that there are multiple dimensions to value that cannot necessarily be captured in a single metric. Within mainstream economics, the difficulties associated with commensurability and aggregating values have long been recognised, but have also been neglected. An interesting area for future debate between economic and non-economic views on values may be the normative nature of value-aggregation. Finding 6: A mixed method approach is required to elicit the multiple dimensions of shared values and to translate deeper-held, transcendental values into contextual values and preferences. Monetary valuation is limited to quantifying values. Other methods are needed to understand their meaning or content, and the communal, societal and transcendental values that underpin them. Psychometric, non-analytical and interpretive methods (e.g. storytelling) can reveal those shared values. They can be combined with deliberative-analytical methods (e.g. deliberative monetary valuation and multi-criteria analysis) to provide a comprehensive valuation that can quantify values, understand their individual and shared meanings and significance, and better include ethical dimensions. Finding 7: Deliberative and social learning processes help people to understand the values held by others; they can lead to increased sharing of values and/or to greater acceptance of the decisions emerging from such processes. Deliberation clearly affects what values participants express compared to non-deliberated processes. There is also a growing body of theoretical and empirical research suggesting that deliberation has the potential to affect how people understand and shape the values of others. Although rarely considered in the economic literature, the concept of social learning helps to explain some of the processes involved in deliberation. The extent to which deliberation or social learning helps participants express and shape values will depend upon the frequency and depth of interactions and the timescale over which interactions occur. Only a shift in cultural values (e.g. less emphasis on material wealth), reflected in other societal institutions (e.g. changes in the indicators used to measure national progress) is likely to achieve sustainable outcomes in the long-term. Finding 8: Media analysis is a promising avenue for characterising different types of shared values at a large scale, as well as assessing the conflicts between the communal values of different sectors of society. There has been a marked increase in public interest in environmental issues over the last decade, which is reflected in their increased media coverage. Media content and discourse analysis is able to distinguish and characterise the plurality of cultural, societal and transcendental values and their interrelationships, and can offer a picture of the self- and other-regarding values that underpin environmental issues and conflicts. Social media can provide a further forum for understanding societal and communal values surrounding environmental issues. Finding 9: Aesthetic and spiritual values of ecosystems have a strong non-instrumental component. While they benefit human well-being, they should not simply be classified as just ‘services’ or ‘benefits’. Many spiritual discourses about nature resist talk of consequentialist benefits and economic analysis. These discourses counter assertions of the disenchantment of the world, which is associated with an instrumental environmental ethic and the commodification of nature. Allowing the possibility of enchantment can be a richer way of understanding our experience of nature and alerts us to the limitations of using economic models for valuation and informing decisions about these profound cultural ecosystem ‘services’. Faith communities have experience of using these non-utilitarian values in their own decision-making and provide models that could be adapted for use in environmental decision-making. Finding 10: Subjective well-being measures provide a useful means of assessing ‘intangible’ cultural ecosystem services and their benefits. Different user groups associate common elements of subjective well-being with environmental settings, providing opportunities for development of standardised measures. In the UK NEAFO, key facets of well-being associated with places in nature across different user groups included: engagement with nature (incorporating elements of connectedness, getting to know nature and the beauty of nature, and taking care of a place); therapeutic benefits (including physical and mental aspects of health); place identity (including a sense of place and belonging); spiritual value (in the sense of feeling connected or responsible to something larger than oneself); social bonding with others; and transformative and memorable experiences. Further empirical work with different user groups and environmental settings would allow for the continued development of a standardised tool for large-scale non-monetary assessment of cultural ecosystem services

Asset-building payments for ecosystem services:Assessing landowner perceptions of reforestation incentives in Lebanon

Aim of study: Incentivising landowners to supply ecosystem services remains challenging, especially when this requires long-term investments such as reforestation. We investigated how landowners perceive, and would respond to, distinct types of incentives for planting diverse native trees on private lands in Lebanon. Our aim was to understand landowners’ attitudes towards hypothetical Payments for Ecosystem Services (PES) contracts options; their likely participation; and the potential additionality they would provide.  Area of study: Highland villages situated within eight of Lebanon’s 20 Important Plant Areas  Materials and methods: Mixed-methods surveys were conducted with 34 landowners to determine past, present and future land-use strategies. Study participants were presented with three differently structured reforestation contract options (or schemes). The three schemes (results-based loan, action-based grant, and results-based payments) differed in their expected risks and benefits to landowners. Qualitative debriefing questions followed each of the schemes presented.  Main results: Although the results-based loan did deter uptake relative to the lower risk action-based grant, results-based payments did not significantly increase uptake or planting area, suggesting asymmetric attitudes to risk. Qualitative probing revealed economic, social (e.g. trust) and institutional factors (e.g. legal implications of planting forest trees on private land) that limited willingness to participate in the results-based contract option.  Research highlights: This study demonstrates the importance of combining qualitative and quantitative methods to better understand landowner perceptions of incentives and risks, particularly in challenging socio-political contexts

Gap-induced reductions of evoked potentials in the auditory cortex: a possible objective marker for the presence of tinnitus in animals

Animal models of tinnitus are essential for determining the underlying mechanisms and testing pharmacotherapies. However, there is doubt over the validity of current behavioural methods for detecting tinnitus. Here, we applied a stimulus paradigm widely used in a behavioural test (gap-induced inhibition of the acoustic startle reflex GPIAS) while recording from the auditory cortex, and showed neural response changes that mirror those found in the behavioural tests. We implanted guinea pigs (GPs) with electrocorticographic (ECoG) arrays and recorded baseline auditory cortical responses to a startling stimulus. When a gap was inserted in otherwise continuous background noise prior to the startling stimulus, there was a clear reduction in the subsequent evoked response (termed gap-induced reductions in evoked potentials; GIREP), suggestive of a neural analogue of the GPIAS test. We then unilaterally exposed guinea pigs to narrowband noise (left ear; 8-10 kHz; 1 hour) at one of two different sound levels - either 105 dB SPL or 120 dB SPL – and recorded the same responses seven-to-ten weeks following the noise exposure. Significant deficits in GIREP were observed for all areas of the auditory cortex (AC) in the 120 dB-exposed GPs, but not in the 105 dB-exposed GPs. These deficits could not simply be accounted for by changes in response amplitudes. Furthermore, in the contralateral (right) caudal AC we observed a significant increase in evoked potential amplitudes across narrowband background frequencies in both 105 dB and 120 dB-exposed GPs. Taken in the context of the large body of literature that has used the behavioural test as a demonstration of the presence of tinnitus, these results are suggestive of objective neural correlates of the presence of noise-induced tinnitus and hyperacusis

Public preferences for multiple dimensions of bird biodiversity at the coast: insights for the cultural ecosystem services framework

This work was funded by the NERC Research project Coastal Biodiversity and Ecosystem Services (CBESS) project Grant NE/J015644/1 with support from the Biodiversity and Ecosystem Service Sustainability (BESS) programme. BESS is a six-year programme (2011–2017) funded by the UK Natural Environment Research Council (NERC) and the Biotechnology and Biological Sciences Research Council (BBSRC) as part of the UK's Living with Environmental Change (LWEC) programme.Biodiversity is valuable to society, including through its contribution to cultural benefits: “the non-material benefits people obtain from biodiversity and ecosystem services through spiritual enrichment, cognitive development, reflection, recreation, and aesthetic experiences”. Biodiversity encompasses numerous measures, but the distinct values of these measures have been little studied. We conducted a discrete choice experiment to elicit respondents’ (n = 3,000) willingness to pay for increases in four measures of bird diversity in UK coastal ecosystems: number of bird species (species richness), number of individual birds (abundance), probability of seeing rare or unusual bird species, and probability of seeing large flocks of birds (wildlife spectacles). Respondents had a positive willingness to pay (through one-time voluntary donations) for increases in all four measures (mean £3 to £5 per household). However, using latent class analysis we found considerable heterogeneity of preferences, identifying four classes of respondents with strikingly different levels of marginal willingness to pay for the four measures. Income, age, environmental activity, visits to environmental settings, and gender were important determinants of class membership. While focusing on birds, our results demonstrate the importance of a multi-dimensional conceptualisation of biodiversity in broader ecosystem management, rather than focussing on a single aspect such as species richness or abundance. Our findings also highlight the implications of heterogeneous public preferences for biodiversity for conservationists, planners, shoreline managers and developers. These need to be considered in the development of new frameworks for ecosystem services, and when planning and funding conservation actions so that the cultural benefits will accrue across a range of social groups.PostprintPeer reviewe