Pollution or Protection - What Early Survey Data Shows on Rapid Waterbird Utilisation of a Newly Established Sewage Treatment Plant in Urban Ghana, West Africa?

Heavy urbanisation increasingly isolates and exerts pressure on natural wetlands, particularly in rapidly growing tropical developing countries, including West Africa. Constructed wetlands such as sewage treatment plants, may unintendedly offer wildlife protection due to prohibitive access control and limited use, thereby attracting wary and specialised waterbirds, otherwise heavily disturbed in formally protected wetlands with less polluted waterbodies. We present data from a rapid survey on 1-year post-opening colonisation and use of waterbirds in a recently constructed 11 ha restricted-access sewage treatment plant situated in Ghana’s capital, Accra. During November-December 2013 and January 2014, nine daily counts in each month produced an accumulated count of >4200 observations belonging to 26 species of waterbirds, including several important Afro-Palaearctic and intra-African migrants, hereunder ardeids, piscivorous divers, waterfowl and waders. The distributional patterns of waterbirds clearly reflected local foraging opportunities and water quality parameters in the system of 12 inter-connected waste stabilisation ponds. A nearby semi-natural wetland with cleaner waterbodies, but higher levels of human interference, supported half as many waterbirds, predominantly commensal gregarious species. Our data suggests that strict protection from disturbances outweighs possible negative implications attributed to mere pollution of waterbodies supporting various waterbird guilds, thus highlighting the potential importance of non-formally protected sewage treatment plants distributed in functional networks, as a complement to designated wetlands. We contemplate that establishing similar or larger plants jointly will improve sewage treatment and waterbird conservation in urban Ghana, and West Africa in general.

Early Survey Results and Broader Viewpoints for Promoting Inclusive Conferences in the Earth and Space Sciences

<p>From the 1948 Universal Declaration of Human Rights to current diversity statements, science entities in the U.S. and globally promote and enhance diversity and equity. For example, EGU, AGU, and Europlanet aim to ‘improve equality of opportunity and diversity’, ‘foster an inclusive environment where science and scientific careers can flourish’, and ‘build a diverse inclusive community,’ respectively. One of these areas is in scientific conferences, not only in the participation in the conference but also engagement and representation at every level.</p><p>Observations were made and strategies employed while hosting (together with colleagues) four AGU Chapman conferences between 2011-2016. As we focused on intentionally increasing inclusion, the first conference was exploratory, the second observational, the third was not intervened, and for the fourth conference, efforts were made at each step, e.g. increased representation of women at 20%, support diverse country and socioeconomic participation, etc. All four conferences aimed to promote interdisciplinary scientific discussions among solar and heliospheric scientists, and magnetospheric and ionospheric scientists for Earth and other planets with icebreaker activities and cultural programs from four different global regions: (1) Alaska, (2) Iceland, (3) South Korea, and (4) Croatia. Each conference posed new challenges.</p><p>Within the social ecological framework, individual and interpersonal inner-level determinants were our primary target leading us to seek broader viewpoints through an internationally distributed survey. In this presentation, we describe challenges, best-practice interventions, and share some early survey results about what constitutes an inclusive conference. We continue to seek and share INCLUSIVE strategies to promote advocacy for policy changes and for additional measures that could be applied at the conference initiation. </p>

The UTMOST survey for magnetars, intermittent pulsars, RRATs, and FRBs – I. System description and overview

ABSTRACT We describe the ongoing ‘survey for magnetars, intermittent pulsars, rotating radio transients, and fast radio bursts’ (SMIRF), performed using the newly refurbished UTMOST telescope. SMIRF repeatedly sweeps the southern Galactic plane performing real-time periodicity and single pulse searches, and is the first survey of its kind carried out with an interferometer. SMIRF is facilitated by a robotic scheduler which is capable of fully autonomous commensal operations. We report on the SMIRF observational parameters, the data analysis methods, the survey’s sensitivity to pulsars, techniques to mitigate radio frequency interference, and present some early survey results. UTMOST’s wide field of view permits a full sweep of the Galactic plane to be performed every fortnight, two orders of magnitude faster than previous surveys. In six months of operations from 2018 January to June, we have performed ∼10 sweeps of the Galactic plane with SMIRF. Notable blind redetections include the magnetar PSR J1622−4950, the RRAT PSR J0941−3942 and the eclipsing pulsar PSR J1748−2446A. We also report the discovery of a new pulsar, PSR J1659−54. Our follow-up of this pulsar at an average flux limit of ≤20 mJy, categorizes this as an intermittent pulsar with a high nulling fraction of <0.002.

Perfect 1-factorizations

LetGbe a graph with vertex-setV=V(G) and edge-setE=E(G). A 1-factorofG(also calledperfect matching) is a factor ofGof degree 1, that is, a set of pairwise disjoint edges which partitionsV. A 1-factorizationofGis a partition of its edge-setEinto 1-factors. For a graphGto have a 1-factor, |V(G)| must be even, and for a graphGto admit a 1-factorization,Gmust be regular of degreer, 1 ≤r≤ |V| − 1.One can find in the literature at least two extensive surveys [69] and [89] and also a whole book [90] devoted to 1-factorizations of (mainly) complete graphs.A 1-factorization ofGis said to beperfectif the union of any two of its distinct 1-factors is a Hamiltonian cycle ofG. An early survey on perfect 1-factorizations (abbreviated as P1F) of complete graphs is [83]. In the book [90] a whole chapter (Chapter 16) is devoted to perfect 1-factorizations of complete graphs.It is the purpose of this article to present what is known to-date on P1Fs, not only of complete graphs but also of other regular graphs, primarily cubic graphs.