The future of modern life turns in large part on making the packaging and delivery of the food and products we buy more sustainable and, eventually, environmentally neutral or positive. Our guest today, Robert Lilienfeld, is the executive director of SPRING, the Sustainable Packaging Research, Information, and Networking Group, a Denver-based think tank that provides expert advice and commentary on creating sustainable and regenerative product packaging. He discusses his work with consumer goods and food companies, the role of packaging in marketing, how e-commerce is changing packaging design, and the potential to rethink commerce’s environmental impact using subscription services.

When battle lines are drawn in the sustainability debate, we must find a way to address differences to find a path to a sustainable future. SPRING’s approach to packaging is pragmatic and driven by a dedication to dialog based on transparency and respect for everyone in the discussion, whether they agree with one another or not. You can learn more about Bob and SPRING at springpack.net.

Using commercial, high-resolution satellite images and artificial intelligence, an international team including NASA scientists mapped almost 10 billion individual trees in Africa’s drylands in order to assess the amount of carbon stored outside of the continent’s dense tropical forests. The result is the first comprehensive estimate of tree carbon density in the Saharan, Sahel, and Sudanian zones of Africa. The team reported its findings March 1 in Nature, and the data are free and publicly available.

The researchers found there are far more trees spread across semi-arid regions of Africa than previously thought, but that they also store less carbon than some models have predicted. In the new study, the team estimated roughly 0.84 petagrams of carbon are locked up in African drylands; a petagram is 1 billion metric tons.

Having an accurate tree carbon estimate is essential for climate change projections, which are influenced by how long trees and other vegetation store carbon. This “carbon residence time,” as scientists call it, is very short for grasses and bushes, which grow seasonally, but much longer for trees that grow for years. Knowing how much carbon a landscape stores is dependent on knowing exactly what is growing there.

Beyond the vast tropical forests spread across the middle of the continent, African landscapes range from dry grasslands with a few trees to savannahs with scattered trees to more humid areas with many scattered trees. This dispersed tree cover has made it difficult for scientists working to estimate the number of trees in these areas, and there have often been over- or underestimates. Yet such measurements are essential for conservation efforts and for understanding the carbon cycle on our planet.

“Our team gathered and analyzed carbon data down to the individual tree level across the vast semi-arid regions of Africa or elsewhere – something that had previously been done only on small, local scales,” said Compton Tucker, lead scientist on the project and an Earth scientist at NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center in Greenbelt, Maryland. Previous satellite-based estimates of tree carbon in Africa’s drylands often mistook grasses and shrubs for trees. “That led to over-predictions of the carbon there.”

Carbon is constantly cycling between the land, the atmosphere, the ocean, and back. Trees remove carbon dioxide – a greenhouse gas – from Earth’s atmosphere during the process of photosynthesis and store it in their roots, trunks, branches, and leaves. For this reason, increasing tree cover is often suggested as a way to offset ever-increasing carbon emissions.

In the new study, the team used sophisticated machine learning and artificial intelligence algorithms to sort through more than 326,000 commercial satellite images from the QuickBird-2, GeoEye-1, WorldView-2, and WorldView-3 satellites (operated by Maxar Technologies). The researchers acquired the images through NASA’s Center for Climate Simulation and leveraged its Explore/ADAPT Science Cloud to organize and prepare the images for machine learning processing.

Martin Brandt of the University of Copenhagen compiled AI training data from 89,000 individual trees. Colleague Ankit Kariyaa, also at Copenhagen, adapted a neural network so that computers could detect the individual trees in high-resolution 50-centimeter scale images of Africa’s drier, less verdant landscapes.

The researchers defined a “tree” as anything with a green, leafy crown and an adjacent shadow. From this, they trained the machine learning software to count the trees during millions of hours of supercomputing on the Blue Waters supercomputer at the University of Illinois. When the team compared their machine-learning results with human assessments of the landscape, the computers were 96.5% correct in measuring tree-crown area.

From measurements of tree crown area, the scientists can derive the amount of carbon in each tree’s leaves, roots, and wood using allometry – the study of how the characteristics of living creatures change with size. A group led by Pierre Hiernaux of the University of Toulouse examined 30 different species of trees to measure leaf mass, wood mass, and root mass. They assessed those masses of carbon and established a statistical relationship to tree crown area.

The African tree carbon data are publicly available with a viewer app developed by the team. It allows people to view every tree in the study area and the amount of carbon it stores.

These data could be useful for scientists and students studying the carbon cycle, policymakers trying to improve conservation efforts, and farmers who want to determine the carbon stored in their farm.

Over eight years, the FlyLight Project Team and collaborators dissected, labeled, and imaged the neurons of more than 74,000 fruit fly brains, taken from more than 5,000 different genetically modified fly strains.

Now, these images are being made freely available, enabling scientists to quickly and easily find the neurons they need to test theories about how the nervous system works.

The release of the images February 23 in the journal eLife is the culmination of years of effort and contributions from dozens of Janelians, starting in 2012. It demonstrates Janelia’s commitment to creating free resources useful to the entire scientific community. It also highlights the research campus’s mission to take on projects that can’t be accomplished in a traditional research environment where these long-term efforts are often not funded or incentivized.

“It is a great resource for the community,” says Geoffrey Meissner, who was the project scientist for FlyLight and the first author of the new paper in eLife. “It’s very squarely in Janelia’s mission, and it highlights the Project Teams as a concept — of doing these big things beyond the scale of what a lab could reasonably do — and really emphasizes the open science aspect of Janelia’s goals. We want to go the extra mile to make it available to everybody, to make it easy, to make it more comprehensive.”

Using fruit flies for neuroscience research

The fruit fly Drosophila melanogaster is a staple of neuroscience research. Scientists use genetically engineered fruit flies to target the expression of certain neurons, allowing researchers to understand which brain cells control certain behaviors.

Scientists were using fruit flies to understand the nervous system when Janelia opened in 2006, but researchers did not have tools precise enough to implicate individual neurons.

That led Janelia to create the FlyLight Project Team, which set out to create genetically engineered flies that scientists could use to home in on specific neurons with more precision. In 2012, Janelia released the first generation of those fly strains, the Generation 1 GAL4 driver lines, along with microscopy images showing where in the brain specific neurons resided.

But the Generation 1 lines were still too imprecise for some neuroscience research. So FlyLight developed strains of fruit flies from these GAL4 lines using the Split-GAL4 approach that enabled scientists to identify single neurons or single cell types in the fly brain.

Since they were developed, the Split-GAL4 lines and the Split-GAL4 system have been used by researchers worldwide. But figuring out how to create a specific Split-GAL4 needed for an experiment can be challenging. To do this, researchers first need to label neurons of interest in GAL4 lines — a task that can be difficult for a single researcher.

To help, the FlyLight team used a technique called MultiColor FlpOut (MCFO), developed by Aljoscha Nern, a senior scientist in the Rubin Lab, to label individual neurons in Generation 1 GAL4 driver lines. Generating the more than 70,000 detailed images now being released required over 11 years of imaging time on 8 confocal microscopes.

Janelia’s Scientific Computing team created a freely available tool called NeuronBridge that allows researchers to search the MCFO-labeled images, along with other light and electron microscopy data, to home in on neurons of interest. It also enables researchers to predict the Split-GAL4 combinations they will need for their experiments.

“FlyLight made a lot of images, but without our close collaboration with Scientific Computing, it would just be terabytes of data sitting on a hard drive that nobody could do anything with. They played a key role in making it usable for people,” says Meissner, who is now senior manager of Project Pipeline Support, which continues to offer FlyLight pipelines to Janelia labs.

A worldwide resource

The publication in eLife marks the official release of the images, but neuroscientists all over the world have already been taking advantage of the data since their initial release in 2020.

The latest effort builds on Janelia’s reputation for developing tools that facilitate fruit fly research.

“The general feeling is that for anybody doing fly neuroscience who wants to target a neuron and learn something about it, the best way is using the GAL4 lines characterized by FlyLight,” Meissner says.

The research does not account for a simultaneous increase in human-made sources of air pollution, which has already been predicted by other studies.

“We are not looking at human emissions of air pollution, because we can change what we emit,” said James Gomez, UCR doctoral student and lead author of the study. “We can switch to electric cars. But that may not change air pollution from plants or dust.”

Details of the degradation in future air quality from these natural sources have now been published in the journal Communications Earth & Environment. About two-thirds of the future pollution is predicted to come from plants.

All plants produce chemicals called biogenic volatile organic compounds, or BVOCs. “The smell of a just-mowed lawn, or the sweetness of a ripe strawberry, those are BVOCs. Plants are constantly emitting them,” Gomez said.

On their own, BVOCs are benign. However, once they react with oxygen, they produce organic aerosols. As they’re inhaled, these aerosols can cause infant mortality and childhood asthma, as well as heart disease and lung cancer in adults.

There are two reasons plants increase BVOC production: increases in atmospheric carbon dioxide and increases in temperatures. Both of these factors are projected to continue increasing.

To be clear, growing plants is a net positive for the environment. They reduce the amount of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere, which helps control global warming. BVOCs from small gardens will not harm people.

“Your lawn, for example, won’t produce enough BVOCs to make you sick,” Gomez explained. “It’s the large-scale increase in carbon dioxide that contributes to the biosphere increasing BVOCs, and then organic aerosols.”

The second-largest contributor to future air pollution is likely to be dust from the Saharan desert. “In our models, an increase in winds is projected to loft more dust into the atmosphere,” said Robert Allen, associate professor of Earth and Planetary Sciences at UCR and co-author of the study.

As the climate warms, increased Saharan dust is likely to get blown around the globe, with higher levels of dust in Africa, the eastern U.S., and the Caribbean. Dust over Northern Africa, including the Sahel and the Sahara, is likely to increase due to more intense West African monsoons.

Both organic aerosols and dust, as well as sea salt, black carbon, and sulfate, fall into a category of airborne pollutants known as PM2.5, because they have a diameter of 2.5 micrometers or less. The increase in naturally sourced PM2.5 pollution increased, in this study, in direct proportion to CO₂ levels.

“The more we increase CO₂, the more PM2.5 we see being put into the atmosphere, and the inverse is also true. The more we reduce, the better the air quality gets,” Gomez said.

For example, if the climate warms only 2 degrees Celsius, the study found only a 7% increase in PM2.5. All of these results only apply to changes found in air quality over land, as the study is focused on human health impacts.

The researchers hope the potential to improve air quality will inspire swift and decisive action to decrease CO₂ emissions. Without it, temperatures may increase 4 degrees C by the end of this century, though it’s possible for the increase to happen sooner.

Gomez warns that CO₂ emissions will have to decrease sharply to have a positive effect on future air quality.

“The results of this experiment may even be a bit conservative because we did not include climate-dependent changes in wildfire emissions as a factor,” Gomez said. “In the future, make sure you get an air purifier.”

POSTECH’S research team led by Professor Jonghun Kam (Division of Environmental Science and Engineering) and post-graduate researcher Shahid Ali assessed the past and future changes in streamflow timing of the four major river basins of Pakistan including Upper Indus, Kabul, Jhelum, and Chenab River basins. The research team used observational data and bias-corrected hydrological projections. This study was recently published in the Journal of Hydrology.

Hydrology mainly deals with the cycle of water on Earth and the use of surface water. As the science explores the complexity of the natural water flow, various assumptions, statistics, and mathematical techniques, instead of reproduction in the lab, are used to study precipitation, runoff, infiltration, and streamflow and provide basic knowledge and data for the use of water resources. However, climate change and human activities are changing the water cycle itself, rendering it difficult to solve future problems with past knowledge and data.

Pakistan is a representative example of a country suffering severe seasonal changes in streamflow, causing a lack of available water resources for agriculture. To make it worse, the Indus River was inundated over the downstream regions of Pakistan last year, causing catastrophic effects on regional communities. However, understanding of future seasonal changes in streamflow over Pakistan remains limited.

The researchers simulated the VIC-river routing model forced by surface and runoff data from six regional climate models. They later corrected the minimum and seasonality bias against observational records. To quantify seasonal changes in the hydrologic regime, they computed half of the annual cumulative streamflows (HSCs) and the dates of reaching to the first quartile (25th percentile), that is, center-of-volume dates (CVDs) from observed and bias-corrected simulated streamflow data.

Observational records (1962-2019) showed a significant decreasing trend in CVD by a range between -4.5 and -12.6 days across the three river basins, except for Chenab River basin. Bias-corrected hydrologic projections showed decreased CVD by −4.2 to −6.3 days during the observational period. The four study river basins showed that the decreased CVDs range from −5 to −20 days in the near future (the 2050 to 2059 average) and −11 days to −37 days in the far future (the 2090 to 2099 average).

Professor Kam explained, “In late winter, accelerated snow melting processes over mountainous regions in Pakistan can cause changes in available water resources for crop planting in spring. This study highlights diversity in the hydrologic response to a similar magnitude of surface warming in the future climate projection.” He added, “there is an urgent need to prepare basin-specific water resources management and policies in order to adapt to climate change.”

This study was supported by the Mid-Career Researcher Program of the National Research Foundation of Korea and the Global Korea Scholarship (GKS) Program of the National Institute for International Education (NIIED), a branch of the Ministry of Education in the Republic of Korea.

A study from the University of California, Davis, synthesizes climate trends across the Western U.S. during a relatively young period of Earth’s history — the Holocene Era, which stretches from the present day to the past 11,000 years. This look at the really Old West shows that the hallmarks of California’s climate — the foggy coastlines that gave rise to towering redwoods, the ocean upwelling that spawned productive fisheries, the warm summers and mild winters — began around 4,000 years ago.

It also reveals a time when the Pacific Northwest was warm and dry and the Southwest was warm and wet.

An understudied era: The current one

Published in Climate of the Past, a journal of the European Geosciences Union, the study provides a baseline against which modern climate change in the region can be considered. It also sheds light on a lesser-studied geological epoch — the current one, the Holocene.

“We kept looking for this paper, and it didn’t exist,” said lead author Hannah Palmer, who recently earned her Ph.D. from the UC Davis Department of Earth and Planetary Sciences. “There are many records of past climate for a single location, but no one had put it all together to understand the big picture. So we decided to write it.”

The authors analyzed more than 40 published studies, examining the interplay among land and sea temperature, hydroclimate and fire activity across three distinct phases.

The study found:

• Compared to pre-Holocene conditions (the last Glacial period), the Early Holocene (11,700-8,200 years ago) was a time of warm seas, a warm and dry Pacific Northwest, a warm and wet Southwest and fairly low fire activity.
• By the Middle Holocene (8,200-4,200 years ago), that pattern reversed: The ocean’s surface cooled, the Pacific Northwest became cool and wet, and the Southwest became drier.
• The Late Holocene (4,200 years ago-present) is the most climatically variable period. It marks a period when the “modern” climate and temperature patterns are established. The study noted a defined interval of fire activity over the past two centuries that is linked to human activity.

Unprecedented interval

The study also considered the impact of humans on environmental changes at the time, noting that the Era of Colonization (1850-present) represents an unprecedented environmental interval in the climate records.

“Humans have been living here throughout the entire Holocene,” Palmer said. “The climate impacted them, and they impacted the climate, especially in recent centuries. This paper shows how that push and pull has changed over the past 11,000 years.”

Different responses

“Sometimes people point to recent rain or cold snaps as evidence against climate change,” said co-author Veronica Padilla Vriesman, a recent Ph.D. graduate from UC Davis Department of Earth and Planetary Sciences. “This study illustrates how different regions respond differently to global climate changes. That long-term perspective helps us understand the historical climate of the western U.S. and how it may respond moving forward.”

The study stemmed from a graduate seminar about the Holocene period led by Tessa Hill, a professor in the Department of Earth and Planetary Sciences and associate vice provost of Public Scholarship and Engagement. Additional co-authors include Caitlin Livsey and Carina Fish. All authors were part of Hill’s Ocean Climate Lab at the UC Davis Bodega Marine Laboratory in the Department of Earth and Planetary Sciences.

“Climate records from the Holocene provide a valuable window into the context of human-caused climate change,” said Hill. “They provide an opportunity for us to understand places that may be more or less resilient to change in the future.”

The study was funded by the National Science Foundation.

Planners in suburban and rural communities should focus more on promoting recreational programs, expanding transportation options and creating safer environments to help an aging population get more exercise, according to the researchers’ analysis of more than 1,300 U.S. counties and cities.

“These are things we can think about doing in any community,” said Mildred Warner, professor of global development and of city and regional planning. “If your community is investing in recreation and social activity, they’re more likely to address obesity and other problems linked to physical inactivity.”

Warner and Xue Zhang, a postdoctoral scholar at Syracuse University, are co-authors of “Linking Urban Planning, Community Environment and Physical Activity: A Socio-ecological Approach,” published in the International Journal of Environmental Research and Public Health.

The scholars’ recommendations emerged from models they developed to identify the most important factors — individual, community and policy — influencing physical activity.

Demographic factors mattered most, the models showed. For example, communities with higher minority populations exercised less, likely due to lower incomes and longer commutes, Zhang said. Rural communities, whose populations on average are older and less affluent, similarly report less physical activity.

To better support rural and under-resourced communities, the researchers said, planners should work to broaden transportation options and promote recreation services, emphasizing the importance of collaboration across public health, planning, transportation and parks and recreation agencies. They should also give more attention to concerns about traffic safety and crime, in addition to policies promoting complete streets or mixed-use neighborhoods.

“Our models show safety is as important as transportation and more important than the built environment,” the scholars wrote.

Examples of planning and policy changes that Warner and Zhang have explored in related research could include lowering the speed limit on rural roads to make them safer for walking or biking. Partnerships enabling schools, libraries and fire departments to share facilities for recreation programs, transportation or food distribution could also help overcome limitations in the built environment.

The COVID-19 pandemic, Warner said, demonstrated many local governments’ ability to pivot overnight to alternative ways of doing business, and that spirit of collaboration and creativity will be needed as the U.S. population grays.

“As more of us get older, we’ve got to start designing our communities for everybody,” Warner said. “We can’t just have urban-based recommendations; we also need to think about what you would do in other places.”

The research was supported by a grant from U.S. Department of Agriculture’s National Institute of Food and Agriculture.

Sea level rise due to melting glaciers on Greenland and in the Arctic and Antarctic could force the relocation of 267 million people and entire cities located less than 2 meters — 6.5 feet — from today’s waterline by 2100. Oceanographer John Englander has raised the alarm about sea level rise in his books, High Tide on Main Street and Moving to Higher Ground. John runs the Rising Seas Institute and leads regular visits to Greenland to spur awareness of the accelerating loss of its glaciers. We talked with him in 2021, when Moving to Higher Ground was released, and he returns to the show to share an update on the pace of warming, the Thwaites Glacier and Ice Shelf in Antarctica, Greenland’s rapid loss of ice, and the preparations necessary for adaptation to a world of constantly rising seas.

NASA warns that continuing warming could raise sea levels by 5 meters (more than 16 feet) by 2300. The early damage will be felt across more than twice the expected coastal land than previously expected, according to a January 2023 Dutch research study published in the journal Earth’s Future, because previous satellite analysis misestimated the altitude of heavily forested land. The potential cost of protecting seaside cities and raising port facilities will run into the trillions of dollars. Perhaps that spending can be an opportunity to rethink our infrastructure comprehensively, but in the midst of a crisis people are not prone to be very forward-looking.

John Englander’s books are available online. Look for “Moving to Higher Ground: Rising Seal Level and the Path Forward” at Amazon and Powell’s Books and “High Tide on Main Street: Rising Sea Level and the Coming Coastal Crisis” (Amazon; Powell’s Books). You can learn more about John and his work at johnenglander.net.

This magnetic sense, or ‘magnetoreception’, was first noticed in birds, and particularly in migratory songbirds. It has now been observed in many other species including mammals, fish and insects. However, the exact relationship between the magnetic field and the behaviour is difficult to pin down because it can be masked by other environmental factors. Experiments must be very carefully designed if their results are to be statistically sound.

“We aim to provide a balanced overview for researchers who wish to enter this exciting area of sensory biology,” explains Schneider. He and his co-authors outlined a range of methods that are used to deduce whether an animal’s behaviour is affected by a magnetic field. These include using GPS to mark animals’ alignment with the Earth’s field during normal activities, such as cows grazing; observing behaviour after tissues thought to be responsible for magnetoreception have been removed, or genes knocked out; and attaching small magnets on or near the animals’ bodies to disrupt the mechanism. Further work by animal physiologists, neuroscientists, geneticists and others will also be necessary to truly understand this phenomenon.

And this research is not only of academic interest. “Understanding animal magnetoreception will help us to protect animals released into unknown environments in the wild,” adds Lindecke.