Accessibility to food retailers and socio‐economic deprivation in urban New Zealand

The spatial locations of food retailers are considered to be an influential aspect of population consumption patterns. Such contextual relationships are often related to socio‐economic deprivation, with disparities in accessibility having important implications. This study used Geographic Information Systems and an Enhanced Two‐Step Floating Catchment Area model of spatial accessibility to further understand such relationships within urban areas of New Zealand. Findings, while mixed, indicate that there is generally increased accessibility to all food retailers in highly deprived areas. Understanding these socio–spatial relationships in local environments has important implications for policy initiatives, health outcomes and sustainable development.     

Identifying Common Decision Problem Elements for the Management of Emerging Fungal Diseases of Wildlife

Emerging infectious diseases (EIDs) of wildlife have characteristics that make them difficult to manage, leading to reactive and often ineffective management strategies. Currently, two fungal pathogens, Pseudogymnoascus destructans (Pd) and Batrachochytrium salamandrivorans (Bsal), are causing declines in novel host species. To improve the application of management strategies addressing the risk of these pathogens to North American wildlife, we queried wildlife managers about their concerns regarding managing populations of bats and amphibians potentially impacted by Pd and Bsal. Using these responses, we identified aspects of each decision problem that were shared across pathogens, regions and agencies – and found similarities in decision-problem elements for disease management. Reframing management problems as decisions can enable managers to identify similarities across EIDs, i.e. uncertainties within management actions, and improve reactive responses if proactive management is not possible. Such an approach recognizes context-specific constraints and identifies relevant uncertainties that must be reduced in developing a response.     

Episodic riverine influence on surface DIC in the coastal Gulf of Maine

Anomalously high precipitation and river discharge during the spring of 2005 caused considerable freshening and depletion of dissolved inorganic carbon (DIC) in surface waters along the coastal Gulf of Maine. Surface pCO₂ and total alkalinity (TA) were monitored by repeated underway sampling of a cross-shelf transect in the western Gulf of Maine (GOM) during 2004–05 to examine how riverine fluxes, mixing, and subsequent biological activity exert control on surface DIC in this region. Most of the variability in surface DIC concentration was attributable to mixing of low DIC river water with higher DIC, saline GOM waters, but net biological uptake of DIC was significant especially during the spring and summer seasons. The extent and persistence of the coastal freshwater intrusion exerted considerable influence on net carbon dynamics. Integrated over the 10-m surface layer of our study region (∼5 × 10⁴ km²), net biological DIC uptake was 0.48 × 10⁸ mol C during April–July of 2004 compared to 1.33 × 10⁸ mol C during April–July of 2005. We found the temporal signature and magnitude of DIC cycling to be different in adjacent plume-influenced and non-plume regions. Extreme events such as the freshwater anomaly observed in 2005 will affect mean estimates of coastal carbon fluxes, thus budgets based on short time series of observations may be skewed and should be viewed with caution.     

A catchment water balance assessment of an abrupt shift in evapotranspiration at the Hubbard Brook Experimental Forest,New Hampshire,USA

Small catchments have served as sentinels of forest ecosystem responses to changes in air quality and climate. The Hubbard Brook Experimental Forest in New Hampshire has been tracking catchment water budgets and their controls – meteorology and vegetation – since 1956. Water budgets in four reference catchments indicated an approximately 30% increase in the evapotranspiration (ET) as estimated by the difference between precipitation (P) and runoff (RO) starting in 2010 and continuing through 2019. We analyzed the annual water budgets, cumulative deviations of the daily P, RO and water budget residual (WBR = P − RO), potential ET (PET) and indicators of subsurface storage to gain greater insight into this shift in the water budgets. The PET and the subsurface storage indicators suggest that this change in WBR was primarily due to increasing ET. While multiple long-term hydrological and micrometeorological data sets were used to detect and investigate this change in ET, additional measurements of groundwater storage and soil moisture would enable better estimation of ET within the catchment water balance. Increasing the breadth of long-term measurements across small gauged catchments allows them to serve as more effective sentinels of substantial hydrologic changes like the ET increase that we observed.     

Keck Observations of Solar System Objects: Perspectives for Extremely Large Telescopes

From differential tracking techniques, required for appulse observations of KBOs with Laser Guide Star Adaptive Optics (LGSAO), to developing methods for collecting spectra at the precise moment of a predicted impact, each Solar System observation conducted on a large telescope presents a unique set of challenges. We present operational details and some key science results from our science program, adaptive optics observations of main belt asteroids and near earth objects; as well as the technical and operational details of several Keck Solar System observations conducted by other teams: the impact of Shoemaker-Levy 9 on Jupiter, volcanoes on Io, the Deep Impact mission to Comet 9P/Tempel 1, and recent observations of Pluto’s moons Nix and Hydra. For each of these observations, we draw from our Keck experience to predict what challenges may lie ahead when similar observations are conducted on next generation telescopes.     

The 6dF Galaxy Survey: final redshift release (DR3) and southern large-scale structures

We report the final redshift release of the 6dF Galaxy Survey (6dFGS), a combined redshift and peculiar velocity survey over the southern sky  (| b | > 10°)  . Its 136 304 spectra have yielded 110 256 new extragalactic redshifts and a new catalogue of 125 071 galaxies making near-complete samples with  ( K , H , J , r _F, b _J) ≤ (12.65, 12.95, 13.75, 15.60, 16.75)  . The median redshift of the survey is 0.053. Survey data, including images, spectra, photometry and redshifts, are available through an online data base. We describe changes to the information in the data base since earlier interim data releases. Future releases will include velocity dispersions, distances and peculiar velocities for the brightest early-type galaxies, comprising about 10 per cent of the sample. Here we provide redshift maps of the southern local Universe with   z ≤ 0.1  , showing nearby large-scale structures in hitherto unseen detail. A number of regions known previously to have a paucity of galaxies are confirmed as significantly underdense regions. The URL of the 6dFGS data base is http://www-wfau.roe.ac.uk/6dFGS .     

Keeping the stress off the sheep? Agricultural intensification, neoliberalism, and ‘good’ farming in New Zealand

Under neoliberal schemes like audit systems, consumer demands born of concerns about food safety, the environment and animal welfare are theoretically poised to influence agricultural production systems (Campbell and Le Heron, 2007). Whether such influences might reverse or redirect the trend toward environmentally-damaging rampant productivism of the 20th century hinges in part on the subjective positions of farmers and the ways in which they inform how farmers respond to policy and market signals.In this paper we argue the need for a genuine engagement with both the complexities of farmer subjectivity and the interactions amongst farmer subjectivity and agro-ecologies, and animal bodies in particular. This paper presents a case study of sheep farmers on the South Island that reveals contestation and transitions in traditional markers of “good farming”, particularly animal health. We observe how such transitions arise from reconfigurations of the relationships between agro-ecological, political and social histories. In this paper’s formulation, neither state subsidies nor neoliberalism in agriculture is primary cause or ultimate effect of the transformation of agricultural practice. Rather, changes in the political economy expose contradictions in farmer subjectivities, the resolution of which may block or reinforce trends suggested by the political economy. We suggest that contested ideas about animal health within the social field of pastoral farming in New Zealand makes it possible that New Zealand’s sheep growers may take the high road of best environmental practice via highly audited environmental standards of production demanded by elite consumer markets, or that they may remain in the intensifying trajectory of continuing to drive the sheep’s body to its maximum possible intensity of production. The mixed legacy of neoliberal reform is that it has simultaneously enabled both of these contradictory trajectories in New Zealand pastoralism.     

Predicting high-frequency variation in stream solute concentrations with water quality sensors and machine learning

Stream solute monitoring has produced many insights into ecosystem and Earth system functions. Although new sensors have provided novel information about the fine-scale temporal variation of some stream water solutes, we lack adequate sensor technology to gain the same insights for many other solutes. We used two machine learning algorithms – Support Vector Machine and Random Forest – to predict concentrations at 15-min resolution for 10 solutes, of which eight lack specific sensors. The algorithms were trained with data from intensive stream sensing and manual stream sampling (weekly) for four full years in a hydrologic reference stream within the Hubbard Brook Experimental Forest in New Hampshire, USA. The Random Forest algorithm was slightly better at predicting solute concentrations than the Support Vector Machine algorithm (Nash-Sutcliffe efficiencies ranged from 0.35 to 0.78 for Random Forest compared to 0.29 to 0.79 for Support Vector Machine). Solute predictions were most sensitive to the removal of fluorescent dissolved organic matter, pH and specific conductance as independent variables for both algorithms, and least sensitive to dissolved oxygen and turbidity. The predicted concentrations of calcium and monomeric aluminium were used to estimate catchment solute yield, which changed most dramatically for aluminium because it concentrates with stream discharge. These results show great promise for using a combined approach of stream sensing and intensive stream discrete sampling to build information about the high-frequency variation of solutes for which an appropriate sensor or proxy is not available.