Status, Institutions, and Prospects for Global Capture Fisheries

We compile global data to examine the current status, trends, threats, and opportunities in the world's wild-capture fisheries. We find that global fisheries have largely diverged—well-managed, often industrial fisheries tend to be in reasonably good health, while coastal fisheries, often from low-governance regions, tend to be in poor health. Good governance seems to play a central role, and we summarize key findings from the literature on how effective fishery management can simultaneously increase food security, livelihoods, and conservation outcomes. Other solutions, such as marine protected areas and big data, can be useful but will not, by themselves, solve the main fishery challenges. We conclude by examining notorious threats, such as climate change and lack of governance on the high seas, and find that these can be largely neutralized with good fishery management, suggesting that overall, the future of wild fisheries can be bright with effective fishery management interventions.

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Disaster-Risk, Water Security Challenges and Strategies in Small Island Developing States (SIDS)

Water ◽

10.3390/w11040637 ◽

2019 ◽

Vol 11 (4) ◽

pp. 637 ◽

Cited By ~ 7

Author(s):

Jana Gheuens ◽

Nidhi Nagabhatla ◽

Edangodage Perera

Keyword(s):

Climate Change ◽

Good Governance ◽

Geographical Location ◽

Water Security ◽

Spillover Effects ◽

Disaster Risk ◽

Lessons Learned ◽

Current Status ◽

Small Island ◽

Small Island Developing States

Small island developing states (SIDS) are typically characterized by being environmentally and socio-economically vulnerable to disasters and climate change. Additionally, they often have limited resources for freshwater provisioning services. This article presents an assessment of disaster risk and water security-related challenges in SIDS focusing on three major dimensions: (a) how disaster risks are perceived and addressed in the SIDS context using a case study method, (b) analyzing the current status of water security in these regions using an indicator-based approach and (c) assessing gaps and needs in institutions and policies that can facilitate sustainable development goals (SDGs) and targets, adaptation and resilience building in SIDS. In this regard, information on all SIDS is collected to be able to distinguish trends in and between SIDS based on amongst others geographical location and characteristics. This synthesis noted two key observations: first, that in SIDS, the number of disasters is increasing at a higher rate than the global average, and that the frequency and intensity of the disasters will likely increase because of climate change. These combined factors will impact SIDS on the societal level and on environmental levels, reducing their adaptive capacity, resources, and resilience. Second, most SIDS are already water-scarce with low groundwater volumes. Because of increasing demand (e.g., population growth and tourism) and decreasing supply (e.g., pollution and changes in precipitation patterns) freshwater resources are becoming increasingly limited, often suffering from the spillover effects of competing and conflicting uses. Threatened ecosystems and limited economic resources further influence the adaptive capacities of communities in SIDS. In this light, key solutions to address disaster-risk and water security-related challenges can be found by sharing best practices and lessons learned—from examples of good governance, integrated policies, improved community-resilience, and capacity-building. Added to their fragile situation, SIDS struggle to find enough funding to put their development plans, programs, and policies into action.

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The capacity to adapt?: communities in a changing climate, environment, and economy on the northern Andaman coast of Thailand

10.31230/osf.io/kjfz2 ◽

2018 ◽

Author(s):

Nathan Bennett ◽

Philip Dearden ◽

Alin Kadfak

Keyword(s):

Climate Change ◽

Protected Areas ◽

Adaptive Capacity ◽

Environmental Degradation ◽

Marine Protected Areas ◽

Multiple Scales ◽

Coastal Communities ◽

Economic Opportunities ◽

Management Interventions ◽

Impacts Of Climate Change

The health and productivity of marine ecosystems, habitats, and fisheries are deteriorating on the Andaman coast of Thailand. Because of their high dependence on natural resources and proximity to the ocean, coastal communities are particularly vulnerable to climate-induced changes in the marine environment. These communities must also adapt to the impacts of management interventions and conservation initiatives, including marine protected areas, which have livelihood implications. Further, communities on the Andaman coast are also experiencing a range of new economic opportunities associated in particular with tourism and agriculture. These complex and ongoing changes require integrated assessment of, and deliberate planning to increase, the adaptive capacity of communities so that they may respond to: (1) environmental degradation and fisheries declines through effective management interventions or conservation initiatives, (2) new economic opportunities to reduce dependence on fisheries, and (3) the increasing impacts of climate change. Our results are from a mixed methods study, which used surveys and interviews to examine multiple dimensions of the adaptive capacity of seven island communities near marine protected areas on the Andaman coast of Thailand. Results show that communities had low adaptive capacity with respect to environmental degradation and fisheries declines, and to management and conservation interventions, as well as uneven levels of adaptive capacity to economic opportunities. Though communities and households were experiencing the impacts of climate change, especially storm events, changing seasons and weather patterns, and erosion, they were reacting to these changes with limited knowledge of climate change per se. We recommend interventions, in the form of policies, programs, and actions, at multiple scales for increasing the adaptive capacity of Thailand’s coastal communities to change. The analytical and methodological approach used for examining adaptive capacity could be easily modified and applied to other contexts and locales.

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Big Data and Climate Change

Big Data and Cognitive Computing ◽

10.3390/bdcc3010012 ◽

2019 ◽

Vol 3 (1) ◽

pp. 12 ◽

Cited By ~ 11

Author(s):

Hossein Hassani ◽

Xu Huang ◽

Emmanuel Silva

Keyword(s):

Climate Change ◽

Big Data ◽

Data Analytics ◽

Big Data Analytics ◽

Climate Science ◽

Current Status ◽

Future Research ◽

Climate Data ◽

Data Intensive ◽

Big Data Applications

Climate science as a data-intensive subject has overwhelmingly affected by the era of big data and relevant technological revolutions. The big successes of big data analytics in diverse areas over the past decade have also prompted the expectation of big data and its efficacy on the big problem—climate change. As an emerging topic, climate change has been at the forefront of the big climate data analytics implementations and exhaustive research have been carried out covering a variety of topics. This paper aims to present an outlook of big data in climate change studies over the recent years by investigating and summarising the current status of big data applications in climate change related studies. It is also expected to serve as a one-stop reference directory for researchers and stakeholders with an overview of this trending subject at a glance, which can be useful in guiding future research and improvements in the exploitation of big climate data.

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Learning Analytics Considered Harmful

Online Learning ◽

10.24059/olj.v16i3.272 ◽

2012 ◽

Vol 16 (3) ◽

Cited By ~ 3

Author(s):

Laurie P Dringus

Keyword(s):

Big Data ◽

Online Learning ◽

Learning Analytics ◽

Online Courses ◽

Research Community ◽

Current Status ◽

Online Course ◽

Full Potential

This essay is written to present a prospective stance on how learning analytics, as a core evaluative approach, must help instructors uncover the important trends and evidence of quality learner data in the online course. A critique is presented of strategic and tactical issues of learning analytics. The approach to the critique is taken through the lens of questioning the current status of applying learning analytics to online courses. The goal of the discussion is twofold: (1) to inform online learning practitioners (e.g., instructors and administrators) of the potential of learning analytics in online courses and (2) to broaden discussion in the research community about the advancement of learning analytics in online learning. In recognizing the full potential of formalizing big data in online coures, the community must address this issue also in the context of the potentially "harmful" application of learning analytics.

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Wald und Klimawandel in der inneralpinen Trockenregion Visp

Schweizerische Zeitschrift fur Forstwesen ◽

10.3188/szf.2012.0481 ◽

2012 ◽

Vol 163 (12) ◽

pp. 481-492

Author(s):

Andreas Rigling ◽

Ché Elkin ◽

Matthias Dobbertin ◽

Britta Eilmann ◽

Arnaud Giuggiola ◽

...

Keyword(s):

Climate Change ◽

Ecosystem Services ◽

Forest Management ◽

Forest Ecosystem ◽

Bark Beetles ◽

Forest Ecosystems ◽

Field Experiments ◽

Forest Monitoring ◽

Management Interventions ◽

Forest Ecosystem Services

Forest and climate change in the inner-Alpine dry region of Visp Over the past decades, observed increases in temperature have been particularly pronounced in mountain regions. If this trend should continue in the 21st Century, frequency and intensity of droughts will increase, and will pose major challenges for forest management. Under current conditions drought-related tree mortality is already an important factor of forest ecosystems in dry inner-Alpine valleys. Here we assess the sensitivity of forest ecosystems to climate change and evaluate alternative forest management strategies in the Visp region. We integrate data from forest monitoring plots, field experiments and dynamic forests models to evaluate how the forest ecosystem services timber production, protection against natural hazards, carbon storage and biodiver-sity will be impacted. Our results suggest that at dry low elevation sites the drought tolerance of native tree species will be exceeded so that in the longer term a transition to more drought-adapted species should be considered. At medium elevations, drought and insect disturbances as by bark beetles are projected to be important for forest development, while at high elevations forests are projected to expand and grow better. All of the ecosystem services that we considered are projected to be impacted by changing forest conditions, with the specific impacts often being elevation-dependent. In the medium term, forest management that aims to increase the resilience of forests to drought can help maintain forest ecosystem services temporarily. However, our results suggest that relatively rigid management interventions are required to achieve significant effects. By using a combination of environmental monitoring, field experiments and modeling, we are able to gain insight into how forest ecosystem, and the services they provide, will respond to future changes.

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LNTP-MDBN: Big Data Integrated Learning Framework for Heterogeneous Image Set Classification

Current Medical Imaging Formerly Current Medical Imaging Reviews ◽

10.2174/1573405613666170721103949 ◽

2019 ◽

Vol 15 (2) ◽

pp. 227-236

Author(s):

D. Franklin Vinod ◽

V. Vasudevan

Keyword(s):

Big Data ◽

Medical Image ◽

Research Study ◽

Big Data Analytics ◽

Learning Framework ◽

Image Set Classification ◽

Filtering Technique ◽

Image Set ◽

Hidden Patterns ◽

Global Data

Background: With the explosive growth of global data, the term Big Data describes the enormous size of dataset through the detailed analysis. The big data analytics revealed the hidden patterns and secret correlations among the values. The major challenges in Big data analysis are due to increase of volume, variety, and velocity. The capturing of images with multi-directional views initiates the image set classification which is an attractive research study in the volumetricbased medical image processing. Methods: This paper proposes the Local N-ary Ternary Patterns (LNTP) and Modified Deep Belief Network (MDBN) to alleviate the dimensionality and robustness issues. Initially, the proposed LNTP-MDBN utilizes the filtering technique to identify and remove the dependent and independent noise from the images. Then, the application of smoothening and the normalization techniques on the filtered image improves the intensity of the images. Results: The LNTP-based feature extraction categorizes the heterogeneous images into different categories and extracts the features from each category. Based on the extracted features, the modified DBN classifies the normal and abnormal categories in the image set finally. Conclusion: The comparative analysis of proposed LNTP-MDBN with the existing pattern extraction and DBN learning models regarding classification accuracy and runtime confirms the effectiveness in mining applications.

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DaLiF: a data lifecycle framework for data-driven governments

Journal Of Big Data ◽

10.1186/s40537-021-00481-3 ◽

2021 ◽

Vol 8 (1) ◽

Author(s):

Syed Iftikhar Hussain Shah ◽

Vassilios Peristeras ◽

Ioannis Magnisalis

Keyword(s):

Big Data ◽

Data Management ◽

Good Governance ◽

Business Community ◽

Data Driven ◽

Governmental Organizations ◽

Data Lifecycle ◽

The Government ◽

Data Ecosystem ◽

Governance Transparency

AbstractThe public sector, private firms, business community, and civil society are generating data that is high in volume, veracity, velocity and comes from a diversity of sources. This kind of data is known as big data. Public Administrations (PAs) pursue big data as “new oil” and implement data-centric policies to transform data into knowledge, to promote good governance, transparency, innovative digital services, and citizens’ engagement in public policy. From the above, the Government Big Data Ecosystem (GBDE) emerges. Managing big data throughout its lifecycle becomes a challenging task for governmental organizations. Despite the vast interest in this ecosystem, appropriate big data management is still a challenge. This study intends to fill the above-mentioned gap by proposing a data lifecycle framework for data-driven governments. Through a Systematic Literature Review, we identified and analysed 76 data lifecycles models to propose a data lifecycle framework for data-driven governments (DaliF). In this way, we contribute to the ongoing discussion around big data management, which attracts researchers’ and practitioners’ interest.

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Immunomodulating Effects of Fungal Beta-Glucans: From Traditional Use to Medicine

Nutrients ◽

10.3390/nu13041333 ◽

2021 ◽

Vol 13 (4) ◽

pp. 1333

Author(s):

Hidde P. van Steenwijk ◽

Aalt Bast ◽

Alie de Boer

Keyword(s):

Immune System ◽

Good Health ◽

Evidence Base ◽

Health Claims ◽

Bioactive Molecules ◽

Current Status ◽

Beta Glucan ◽

Traditional Use ◽

Beta Glucans ◽

And Function

The importance of a well-functioning and balanced immune system has become more apparent in recent decades. Various elements have however not yet been uncovered as shown, for example, in the uncertainty on immune system responses to COVID-19. Fungal beta-glucans are bioactive molecules with immunomodulating properties. Insights into the effects and function of beta-glucans, which have been used in traditional Chinese medicine for centuries, advances with the help of modern immunological and biotechnological methods. However, it is still unclear into which area beta-glucans fit best: supplements or medicine? This review has highlighted the potential application of fungal beta-glucans in nutrition and medicine, reviewing their formulation, efficacy, safety profile, and immunomodulating effects. The current status of dietary fungal glucans with respect to the European scientific requirements for health claims related to the immune system and defense against pathogens has been reviewed. Comparing the evidence base of the putative health effects of fungal beta-glucan supplements with the published guidance documents by EFSA on substantiating immune stimulation and pathogen defense by food products shows that fungal beta-glucans could play a role in supporting and maintaining health and, thus, can be seen as a good health-promoting substance from food, which could mean that this effect may also be claimed if approved. In addition to these developments related to food uses of beta-glucan-containing supplements, beta-glucans could also hold a novel position in Western medicine as the concept of trained immunity is relatively new and has not been investigated to a large extent. These innovative concepts, together with the emerging success of modern immunological and biotechnological methods, suggest that fungal glucans may play a promising role in both perspectives, and that there are possibilities for traditional medicine to provide an immunological application in both medicine and nutrition.

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