Ecosystem Services, Climate Change, and Food Security

Food security is a rising concern around the world, especially in developing countries within arid and semi-arid regions. Ecosystem provides different services to support living and human survival, which includes some major food sources around the world like agriculture, fisheries, and livestock. With advancing times, humans improved these services and produced enough food to support the rising population. However, with increasing greenhouse gases, a new problem came into existence, commonly known as climate change (CC), which accelerated issues like food security and safety. Under such issues, people don't have access to basic facilities and food supply to survive, and with future population growth estimates, it is becoming even more difficult. Some major food sources together with alternate sources are discussed in this chapter. Upcoming CC impacts are discussed in detail in relation to major food sources and supported by world maps to provide a better picture. Major actions, government initiatives, and some suggestions are also provided to overcome this global crisis.

A Challenge of Macro-Meso-Micro Analysis Impacts on Multiracial Nationality Decision Making :Multiracial Thai-Japanese in Bangkok

Nationality decision making could impact immensely to country structural, society issues, and future population. Exploring the factors and model prediction could dramatical give benefits to Thailand-Japan or as a reference to other countries toward possibility of multiracial nationality decision making, policy approach to future population and international labor management. The case study of Thai-Japanese multiracial nationality decision making could crucial explain to 4 scenarioses under developing and developed country status contexts. The objectives in this exploratory basic factors research are (1) To study the possibility factors of multiracial decision making (2) To adjust the factors impact on multiracial decision making into a model prediction (3) To assess a model in separation of developing and developed country context toward multiracial decision making. This research conduted N=685 of multinaitonality Thai-Japanese in Bangkok (Thailand) under criteria control throught statistic processes requirement, questionnaire survey conducted in purposive sampling via online at Bangkok as the biggest majority province of Japanese migrant in Thailand (Thailand-Japan embassy,2019). PLS-SEM was considered to assess a formative measurement from lower to higher order and mediation model of macro, meso, and micro levels by using SMART-PLS 3.0. The results indicate that Thailand macro level should concern about “Political and governance”, and “Hospital and wellness” factors, Japan macro level should consider to “Economic”, and “Working environment” factors. Also, Thailand meso level have more issue on development factors than Japan, afterward meso factor as an individual background and experience reports that education and passport competency support to multiracial nationality decision making to both Thailand and Japan. As a result, Thailand macro, meso, and micro structure presents to the unrelevance between macro, meso, and micro which causes to unsupport of nationality decision making meanwhile Japan has a potential to escalate a policy toward macro and meso in better positive way with a significant support between macro, meso, and micro structure both direct and indirect to multiracial natonality decision making.

The Circle of Life: The Mathematics of Predator-Prey Relationships

Some animals hunt other animals to feed themselves; these animals are called predators. Animals who are hunted and eaten are known as prey. What do you think would happen if a predator were introduced to an ecosystem where the prey previously lived without fear of being hunted? Would the new predator eat all the prey animals until they go extinct? Actually, the relationship between predator and prey is far more interesting than this. In this article, we show what the predator-prey relationship looks like over time and explain how scientists can make predictions about future population levels, all using basic mathematics like addition, subtraction, and multiplication.

Which Residential Clusters of Walkability Affect Future Population from the Perspective of Real Estate Prices in the Osaka Metropolitan Area?

In Japan, where the population is declining and aging significantly, walkability has attracted attention as a way to improve residents’ lifestyles. Therefore, it is essential to identify the residential clusters where walkability improvement would contribute to the maintenance of the population in order to select urban areas for the implementation of walkable designs. This study aimed to identify the residential clusters in which walkability affects the future population from the perspective of real estate prices. The reason for focusing on real estate prices is that they are expected to be a confounding factor connecting walkability and the future population. The method we used was to analyze the structural equation modeling of the impact of walkability index, real estate prices, and future population change ratio. This analysis was based on the neighborhood association scale. This study clarified that effective residential clusters are the business center cluster and the sprawl cluster. In the business center cluster and the sprawl cluster, the price of apartments for sale is the real estate value, through which the walkability index positively impacts the future population change ratio. This means that it is expected to contribute to the maintenance of the future population through a combination of walkable designs and housing policies that encourage people to change their residence types to apartments for sale when rebuilding old building stock using the location optimization plan policy.

Scaling K2. IV. A Uniform Planet Sample for Campaigns 1–8 and 10–18

We provide the first full K2 transiting exoplanet sample, using photometry from Campaigns 1–8 and 10–18, derived through an entirely automated procedure. This homogeneous planet candidate catalog is crucial to perform a robust demographic analysis of transiting exoplanets with K2. We identify 747 unique planet candidates and 57 multiplanet systems. Of these candidates, 366 have not been previously identified, including one resonant multiplanet system and one system with two short-period gas giants. By automating the construction of this list, measurements of sample biases (completeness and reliability) can be quantified. We carried out a light-curve-level injection/recovery test of artificial transit signals and found a maximum completeness of 61%, a consequence of the significant detrending required for K2 data analysis. Through this operation we attained measurements of the detection efficiency as a function of signal strength, enabling future population analysis using this sample. We assessed the reliability of our planet sample by testing our vetting software EDI-Vetter against inverted transit-free light curves. We estimate that 91% of our planet candidates are real astrophysical signals, increasing up to 94% when limited to the FGKM dwarf stellar population. We also constrain the contamination rate from background eclipsing binaries to less than 5%. The presented catalog, along with the completeness and reliability measurements, enable robust exoplanet demographic studies to be carried out across the fields observed by the K2 mission for the first time.

The recombination landscapes of spiny lizards (genus Sceloporus)

Despite playing a critical role in evolutionary processes and outcomes, relatively little is known about rates of recombination in the vast majority of species, including squamate reptiles—the second largest order of extant vertebrates, many species of which serve as important model organisms in evolutionary and ecological studies. This paucity of data has resulted in limited resolution on questions related to the causes and consequences of rate variation between species and populations, the determinants of within-genome rate variation, as well as the general tempo of recombination rate evolution on this branch of the tree of life. In order to address these questions, it is thus necessary to begin broadening our phylogenetic sampling. We here provide the first fine-scale recombination maps for two species of spiny lizards, Sceloporus jarrovii and Sceloporus megalepidurus, which diverged at least 12 Mya. As might be expected from similarities in karyotype, population-scaled recombination landscapes are largely conserved on the broad-scale. At the same time, considerable variation exists at the fine-scale, highlighting the importance of incorporating species-specific recombination maps in future population genomic studies.

Compression with unified and accessible byte blocks to enhance management and analyses of UKBB-scale genotypes

Whole-genome sequencing projects of millions of persons contain enormous genotypes, entailing a huge memory burden and time overhead during computation. Here, we introduce Genotype Blocking Compressor (GBC), a method for rapidly compressing large-scale genotypes into a fast-accessible and highly parallelizable format. We demonstrate that GBC has a competitive compression ratio to help save storage space. Furthermore, GBC is the fastest method to access and manage compressed large-scale genotype files (sorting, merging, splitting, etc.). Our results indicate that GBC can help resolve the fundamental problem of time- and space-consuming computation with large-scale genotypes, and conventional analysis would be substantially enhanced if integrated with GBC to access genotypes. Therefore, GBC's advanced data structure and algorithms will accelerate future population-based biomedical research involving big genomics data.

Models of poisoning effects on vulture populations show that small but frequent episodes have a larger effect than large but rare ones

Vultures are among the most threatened avian taxa in the world. When vultures aggregate in large numbers to feed, poisoned carcasses can extirpate entire populations at once. In the light of shrinking numbers worldwide, restocking and reintroduction projects, where wild or captive-bred vultures are released back into nature, constitute a crucial management tool, successfully implemented in many countries. However, reestablishment of sustainable vulture populations to their historical ranges remains a serious challenge, especially if the threat of poisoning persists, which is usually the case. In this study, we model the outcome of a restocking project where an initial colony is subject to repeated poisoning events. We use as an example the isolated population of the griffon vulture (Gyps fulvus) in Cyprus. Mathematical considerations and model simulations show that the probability of colony persistence depends on the initial population size and the intensity and frequency of the poisoning incidents. This type of scenario creates an Allee effect that requires a colony to exceed a minimum size in order to survive. Also in this scenario, a sequence of small but frequent poisoning episodes is worse on average than a few large and rare ones of the same cumulative mortality. Future population reinforcement efforts for vultures should focus on the release of adult birds in adequate numbers for the successful establishment of sustainable colonies and should involve a reduction in small but persistent sources of mortality such as the poison baiting of small canids that until now has been neglected by conservation scientists.

Population Forecast with Focus on Emigration: Scenarios for the Case of Peripheral Region

Sustainable decision-making and policies for regional development need clear understanding of future trends in population change. Emigration as one of the core factors of population change causes the greatest uncertainty in the demographic forecasts. Population change due to emigration is bright especially in peripheral regions what strengthens their unfavourable socio-economic conditions. Within the present study, the authors forecast population change due to emigration in peripheral region with high emigration rates. The authors offer three scenarios – current, half of current, and zero emigration, which demonstrate how differentiated population change due to emigration may be in case of different suppositions. Such approach focuses on the issue at local level. For numerical expression of population change, the authors apply simulation model based on system dynamics methods. Forecast results of future population change due to emigration in each scenario may be as a basis for timely inclusion of issues in regional development policies.

Coupled social and land use dynamics affect dietary choice and agricultural land-use extent

Dietary patterns have long been a driver of global land use. Increasingly, they also respond to it, in part because of social processes that support adoption of eco-conscious diets. Here we develop a coupled social-and-land use mathematical model parameterised for 153 countries. We project global land use for future population, income, and agricultural yield using our coupled dynamical model. We find that coupled social-and-land feedbacks can alter the peak global land use for agriculture by up to 2 billion hectares, depending on the parameter regime. Across all yield scenarios, the model projects that social dynamics will cause an increase in eco-conscious dietary behaviour until the middle of the 21st century, after which it will decline in response to declining land use caused by a shrinking global population. The model also exhibits a regime of synergistic effects whereby simultaneous changes to multiple socio-economic parameters are required to change land use projections. This research demonstrates the value of including coupled social-and-land feedbacks in land use projections.