Diversifying academic communication in anti-racist scholarship: The value of a translingual orientation

This article develops a complex orientation to linguistic domination and resistance to demonstrate how academic communication can be diversified to facilitate anti-racist scholarship. While it draws from social sciences which provide complex theories of social structuration, it demonstrates how linguists can offer fine-grained analytical tools to track these processes across diverse scales of space, time, and institutions. The objective of this article is to introduce an orientation to language which goes beyond traditional reductive and overdetermined perspectives to accommodate its generative and resistant potential. It introduces translingual practice as accommodating the theoretical developments discussed, and demonstrates how methods of indexical analyses can help scholars study texts and communication across various spatiotemporal scales in achieving structuration. This approach is applied to the writing practice of African American scholar, Geneva Smitherman, to demonstrate how her anti-racist scholarship renegotiates established structures of academic communication and generates change. While this article will help applied linguists to develop an appreciation of writers and writing in constructing diversified academic communication, it can provide linguistic tools to social scientists for tracing the workings of structuration and change at diverse spatiotemporal and social scales of consideration.

Uncertainty, Complexity and Constraints: How Do We Robustly Assess Biological Responses under a Rapidly Changing Climate?

How robust is our assessment of impacts to ecosystems and species from a rapidly changing climate during the 21st century? We examine the challenges of uncertainty, complexity and constraints associated with applying climate projections to understanding future biological responses. This includes an evaluation of how to incorporate the uncertainty associated with different greenhouse gas emissions scenarios and climate models, and constraints of spatiotemporal scales and resolution of climate data into impact assessments. We describe the challenges of identifying relevant climate metrics for biological impact assessments and evaluate the usefulness and limitations of different methodologies of applying climate change to both quantitative and qualitative assessments. We discuss the importance of incorporating extreme climate events and their stochastic tendencies in assessing ecological impacts and transformation, and provide recommendations for better integration of complex climate–ecological interactions at relevant spatiotemporal scales. We further recognize the compounding nature of uncertainty when accounting for our limited understanding of the interactions between climate and biological processes. Given the inherent complexity in ecological processes and their interactions with climate, we recommend integrating quantitative modeling with expert elicitation from diverse disciplines and experiential understanding of recent climate-driven ecological processes to develop a more robust understanding of ecological responses under different scenarios of future climate change. Inherently complex interactions between climate and biological systems also provide an opportunity to develop wide-ranging strategies that resource managers can employ to prepare for the future.

The Spatiotemporal Characteristics and Dynamic Changes of Tidal Flats in Florida from 1984 to 2020

Tidal flats are playing a critical role in the coastal environment, which mainly rely on satellite images to map the distribution on large spatiotemporal scales. Much effort has been made to monitor and analyze the spatiotemporal dynamics of tidal flats in order to provide worthwhile references for scientists and lawmakers. Instead of considering the dynamics of tidal flats only, this study implemented a series of comprehensive analyses on the tidal flats along the coast of Florida during the period 1984–2020. First, the analyses on the pixel level examined the spatiotemporal characteristics of tidal flat dynamics and the interactions with lands and permanent water. Second, the contiguous pixels of tidal flats were assembled as objects, and two geometric attributes were calculated and used to track the temporal patterns of tidal flat dynamics on this level. Finally, the Mann–Kendall test and Sen’s slope estimator were applied to identify and quantify the significant trends of tidal flat dynamics on the two levels. The results highlighted the differences in tidal flat distributions and dynamics between the Gulf Coast and Atlantic Coast, which further verified effective GIS representations and analyses that could be applied to other coastal studies.

False biosignatures on Mars: anticipating ambiguity

It is often acknowledged that the search for life on Mars might produce false positive results, particularly via the detection of objects, patterns or substances that resemble the products of life in some way but are not biogenic. The success of major current and forthcoming rover missions now calls for significant efforts to mitigate this risk. Here, we review known processes that could have generated false biosignatures on early Mars. These examples are known largely from serendipitous discoveries rather than systematic research and remain poorly understood; they probably represent only a small subset of relevant phenomena. These phenomena tend to be driven by kinetic processes far from thermodynamic equilibrium, often in the presence of liquid water and organic matter, conditions similar to those that can actually give rise to, and support, life. We propose that strategies for assessing candidate biosignatures on Mars could be improved by new knowledge on the physics and chemistry of abiotic self-organization in geological systems. We conclude by calling for new interdisciplinary research to determine how false biosignatures may arise, focusing on geological materials, conditions and spatiotemporal scales relevant to the detection of life on Mars, as well as the early Earth and other planetary bodies.Thematic collection: This article is part of the Astrobiology: Perspectives from the Geology of Earth and the Solar System collection available at: https://www.lyellcollection.org/cc/astrobiology-perspectives-from-geology-of-earth-and-solar-system

Uncertainty, Complexity and Constraints: How do We Robustly Assess Biological Responses Under a Rapidly Changing Climate?

How robust is our assessment of impacts to ecosystems and species from a rapidly changing climate during the 21st century? We examine the challenges of uncertainty, complexity and constraints associated with applying climate projections to understanding future biological responses. This includes an evaluation of how to incorporate the uncertainty associated with different greenhouse gas emissions scenarios and climate models, and constraints of spatiotemporal scales and resolution of climate data into impact assessments. We describe the challenges of identifying relevant climate metrics for ecological models and evaluate the usefulness and limitations of different methodologies of applying climate change to both quantitative and qualitative ecological response models. We discuss the importance of incorporating extreme climate events and their stochastic tendencies in assessing ecological impacts and transformation, and provide recommendations for better integration of complex climate-ecological interactions at relevant spatiotemporal scales. We further recognize the compounding nature of uncertainty when accounting for our limited understanding of the interactions between climate and biological processes. Given the inherent complexity in ecological processes and their interactions with climate, we recommend integrating quantitative modeling with expert elicitation from diverse disciplines and experiential understanding of recent climate-driven ecological processes to develop more robust understanding of ecological responses under different scenarios of future climate change. Inherently complex interactions between climate and biological systems also provide an opportunity to develop wide-ranging strategies that resource managers can employ to prepare for the future.

Polar Ice as an Unconventional Water Resource: Opportunities and Challenges

Global water resources are under pressure due to increasing population and diminishing conventional water resources caused by global warming. Water scarcity is a daunting global problem which has prompted efforts to find unconventional resources as an appealing substitute for conventional water, particularly in arid and semiarid regions. Ice is one such unconventional water resource, which is available mainly in the Arctic and Antarctic. In this study, opportunities and challenges in iceberg utilization as a source of freshwater were investigated on the basis of a systematic literature review (SLR). A search in three databases (Scopus, Web of Science, and ProQuest) yielded 47 separate studies from 1974 to 2019. The SLR indicated that harvesting iceberg water, one of the purest sources of water, offers benefits ranging from supplying freshwater and creating new jobs to avoiding iceberg damage to offshore structures. Economic considerations and risks associated with iceberg towing were identified as the main limitations to iceberg harvesting, while environmental impacts were identified as the main challenge to exploiting this resource. Assessment of trends in ice sheets in Arctic and Antarctic across different spatiotemporal scales indicated that the main sources of icebergs showed a statistically significant (p < 0.01) decreasing trend for all months and seasons during 2005–2019.

Microscale and Mesoscale Aeolian Processes of Sandy Coastal Foredunes from Background to Extreme Conditions

Aeolian transport affects beach and foredune pre-storm morphologies, which directly contribute to storm responses. However, significant spatiotemporal variation exists within beach-dune systems regarding how biotic and abiotic factors affect topography. There are multiple metrics for quantifying topographic change, with varying pros and cons, but understanding how a system changes across spatiotemporal scales relative to varying forcings is necessary to accurately model and more effectively manage these systems. Beach and foredune micro- and mesoscale elevation changes (Δz) were quantified remotely and in situ across a mid-Atlantic coastal system. The microscale field collections consisted of 27 repeat measurements of 73 elevation pins located in vegetated, transitional, and unvegetated foredune microhabitats over three years (2015 to 2018) during seasonal, event-based, and background wind-condition collections. Unoccupied aerial System (UAS) surveys were collected to link microscale point Δz to mesoscale topographic change. Microscale measurements highlight how Δz varies more pre- to post-event than seasonally or monthly, but regardless of collection type (i.e., seasonal, monthly, or event-based), there was lower Δz in the vegetated areas than in the associated unvegetated and partially vegetated microhabitats. Despite lower Δz values per pin measurement, over the study duration, vegetated pins had a net elevation increase of ≈20 cm, whereas transitional and unvegetated microhabitats had much lower change, near-zero net gain. These results support vegetated microhabitats being more stable and having better sediment retention than unvegetated and transitional areas. Comparatively, mesoscale UAS surfaces typically overestimated Δz, such that variation stemming from vegetation across microhabitats was obscured. However, these data highlight larger mesoscale habitat impacts that cannot be determined from point measurements regarding volumetric change and feature mapping. Changes in features, such as beach access paths, that are associated with increased dynamism are quantifiable using mesoscale remote sensing methods rather than microscale methods. Regardless of the metric, maintaining baseline data is critical for assessing what is captured and missed across spatiotemporal scales and is necessary for understanding the contributors to heterogeneous topographic change in sandy coastal foredunes.

Revealing the Relevant Spatiotemporal Scale Underlying Whole-Brain Dynamics

The brain rapidly processes and adapts to new information by dynamically transitioning between whole-brain functional networks. In this whole-brain modeling study we investigate the relevance of spatiotemporal scale in whole-brain functional networks. This is achieved through estimating brain parcellations at different spatial scales (100–900 regions) and time series at different temporal scales (from milliseconds to seconds) generated by a whole-brain model fitted to fMRI data. We quantify the richness of the dynamic repertoire at each spatiotemporal scale by computing the entropy of transitions between whole-brain functional networks. The results show that the optimal relevant spatial scale is around 300 regions and a temporal scale of around 150 ms. Overall, this study provides much needed evidence for the relevant spatiotemporal scales and recommendations for analyses of brain dynamics.