Philippa Kaur

Basic characteristics of river sedimentsA considerable variation was found in the distribution of clay (81 to 48.4 g kg−1), silt (145 to 656 g kg−1), and sand (38 to 821 g kg−1) particles among sediment materials. The associated coefficient of variations (CV) was 57, 59.5, and 41%, respectively. Statistical data related to the physicochemical properties of sediments and their main elements are reported in Table 2. The variations in particle size distribution located sediment material in seven textural classes ranging from loamy sand to silty clay. The high variability in particle size distribution suggests that different sets of geogenic and anthropogenic processes are enacted in the development and distribution of sediments in the rivers. The pH and CCE ranged from 7.4 to 8.2 and 31 to 251 g kg−1, respectively, indicating the dominancy of alkaline-calcareous condition. None of the sediment samples exhibited salinity conditions (EC  > 4 dS m−1) with EC in the range of 0.3 to 1.4 dS m−1. A relatively low range of OM was found in all samples ranging from 7 to 61 g kg−1 with a mean value of 19 g kg−1. This range of OM coincides with the corresponding values in regional soils47. Except for pH, other sediments properties demonstrated above 35% of CV illustrating a wide range of variability in sediments’ physicochemical properties across the study rivers.Table 2 Summary statistics of sediment properties.Full size tableThe highest concentration among major elements was observed in SiO2, varying between 37.5 and 55.2%, with a mean percentage of 44.9%. This element followed in magnitude by Al2O3 (8.9–15.9%), CaO (5–14.3%), Fe2O3 (4.8–10%), MgO (2.4–17.2%), K2O (1.2–3.1%), Na2O (0.68–2.7%), SO3 (0.01–4.8% g kg−1) (Table 2). Considering the semi-arid climatic condition of the study region, higher levels of SiO2 and lower levels of Al2O3 may indicate that the silicate minerals forming the sediments of the area have not been subjected to severe weathering processes. Likewise, the Na2/K2O ratio was greater than 1 in the majority of sediment samples, implying an enrichment of potassium feldspar and the relatively intense weathering of Na-bearing minerals in the region48,49. The CIA value was in the range of 64.9 to 85.7% with a mean percentage of 72.9%, representing a moderate chemical weathering intensity of lithological materials (65%  Pb  > Cu  > Cd which varied largely among the sampling points. The level of Zn, Cu, Cd, Pb, and Ni varied in the ranges of 32.6–87.5, 14.2–33.3, 0.42–4.8, 14.5–69.5, and 20.1–183.5 mg kg-1, respectively, for winter, and 35.3–92.5, 15.6–35.1, 0.47–5.1, 15.5–73.1, 23.2–188.3 mg kg−1 for summer. The obtained ranges are comparable with data found in previous studies in Asia4,54,55,54.Figure 2The comparison of the mean concentration of Zn, Cu, Cd, Pb, and Ni elements in the study rivers’ sediments during summer and winter. Different letters show significant differences in metal content among rivers pooled over seasons at P  More

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Mistakes in a landmark paper that reported the first orangutan genomes might have implications for breeding programmes.Credit: Fiona Rogers/Nature Picture Library

Susie the Sumatran orangutan was a genetic pioneer — the first of her species to have her genome fully sequenced. Her genetic library, and that of ten other orangutans, appeared in a landmark paper in Nature in 20111 that has underpinned hundreds of subsequent studies.But in August, researchers revealed that eight of the sequences in this paper had mistakenly been assigned to the wrong orangutans2. Nature issued a correction from the authors of the original paper3.The scale of the errors sparked ire on social media, and some scientists have warned that the mistakes could have repercussions for orangutan breeding programmes. “Well that’s a bit of a f&£k up orang-utan genome researchers — only mildly embarrassing guys and girls”, tweeted Michael Sweet, a molecular ecologist at the University of Derby, UK.
Africa: sequence 100,000 species to safeguard biodiversity
It’s not clear how these swapped identities have affected orangutan research. But researchers involved in the new analysis believe the discovery might highlight how issues in the scientific community — including the pressure to publish and a reliance on peer review to catch mistakes — could allow such errors to slip into the scientific record.“I think there are errors like this in many, many published papers,” says Graham Banes, an evolutionary biologist formerly at the University of Wisconsin–Madison who led the reanalysis of the 2011 paper. “In some ways, we’re lucky that this was just orangutans. What if this was a biomedical paper and people were developing therapies based on published data?”“It’s fairly easy for these things to occur,” adds Robert Fulton, a genomic scientist at Washington University School of Medicine in St Louis, Missouri, who was part of the team behind the original paper and is a co-author on the reanalysis. “What’s important is that that the data are now correct.” Devin Locke, who led the preparation of the 2011 paper and was formerly a colleague of Fulton’s at Washington University, did not respond to questions about the work.Hybrid headacheDetailed ‘reference’ genomes, such as those published in the 2011 Nature paper, are a key tool for biologists. In 2017, Banes and his team were using the genomes to study what happens when different species of orangutan interbreed, a process called hybridization.They noticed that the names given to some of the samples didn’t match the animals’ reported sex. For example, the 2011 paper reported that an orangutan named Dolly was male. But according to the orangutan studbook — a record of orangutans living in zoos — Dolly was female. Even stranger, Banes found that some of the genomes marked as male lacked a Y chromosome. “There was just this series of things that didn’t make sense,” he recalls.
Major wildlife report struggles to tally humanity’s exploitation of species
Banes and his colleagues eventually found that the 2011 paper had misidentified all but two of the orangutan genomes. Some mistakes seem to be the result of typos. In one case, a sample from a male orangutan was given an ID number that actually corresponded to a sample from an African pig in a tissue repository. Other samples seem to have had their identities swapped during laboratory work. The 2011 study helped to pin down when Bornean and Sumatran orangutans split into separate species, and compared their genomes with those of other primates. These conclusions are largely uncompromised by the mix-up. But Banes says that the errors could have implications for other research, including his own.Banes uses genetic data to provide zoos with recommendations about their captive breeding programmes. Zoos try to avoid crossbreeding orangutan species, partly to mimic wild populations and also because hybrids can suffer high rates of miscarriage and birth defects, says Banes. While re-examining the samples from the 2011 paper, the team realized that one of the sequences thought to be Sumatran (Pongo abelii) was actually Tapanuli (Pongo tapanuliensis), a third species of orangutan that was only described in 20174.Unfortunately, the 2011 paper had wrongly assigned the Tapanuli genome to Baldy, a male orangutan, rather than its actual owner, a female orangutan named Bubbles (both are now dead). Banes says that his team came “perilously close” to announcing in a paper that Baldy was Tapanuli.Although Baldy has no living descendants, Bubbles has several offspring at zoos around the world, all of which are Sumatran–Tapanuli hybrids. Zookeepers will now have to decide whether to stop breeding Bubbles’ descendants to avoid further hybridization, says Vincent Nijman, an anthropologist at Oxford Brookes University, UK.‘Bigger concerns’However, Nijman also argues that the errors will have little effect on orangutan conservation as a whole. Zoos often bill their animals as a back-up for endangered species, but conservationists are much more focused on the thousands of orangutans in the wild that are threatened by deforestation. “I think we have bigger concerns than some mixed-up samples,” says Erik Meijaard, a conservation scientist at Borneo Futures, a conservation consultancy company based in Bandar Seri Begawan, Brunei.
Scientists warn deal to save biodiversity is in jeopardy
Michael Krützen, an evolutionary geneticist at the University of Zurich in Switzerland, agrees that although the errors are “annoying”, their impact on downstream research is probably minimal. However, he says that the problems might be an example of how academia’s publish-or-perish environment could lead to “sloppy” work, as researchers race to publish their work in high-tier journals.Banes agrees that this kind of pressure — along with an over-reliance on a peer-review system that does not offer its volunteer reviewers tangible financial or professional benefits — could lead to errors slipping into published manuscripts.A spokesperson for Nature declined to comment on why the errors in the 2011 paper were not caught by peer review, citing concerns about confidentiality. (Nature’s news team is editorially independent of its academic publishing operation). “However, we would like to stress that we take our responsibility to maintain the accuracy of the scientific record very seriously,” they wrote in an e-mail. “If issues are raised about any paper we have published, we will look into them carefully and update the literature where appropriate.”Banes says that it’s important not to blame individual scientists for such errors, not least because it could discourage efforts to correct mistakes in future. “I think any scientist could have made these mistakes,” he says. “But if we all jump out and say, ‘oh my god, how could they have been so stupid?’, no one is ever going to correct anything. That shame is detrimental to science.” More

This study quantitatively assessed waterbody loss due to urban expansion of large Chinese cities. We first extracted multi-temporal urban boundaries to determine the expansion of cities of over one million in population from 1990 to 2018. The monthly surface-water dataset was then used to identify surface waterbodies in the study period. Depending on the ratio of surface waterbody area to urban area, cities were further divided into three categories (i.e. water-abundant, water-medium, water-deficient). Finally, we quantified the rate of waterbody loss and evaluated the spatial and temporal variation of waterbody loss as a function of urban expansion and according to city type.GUB datasetThe Global Urban Boundary (GUB) dataset (http://data.ess.tsinghua.edu.cn) was used to determine urban expansion. GUB provides data on built-up areas over 30 years, with a spatial resolution of 30 m. In the GUB dataset, nonurban areas (such as green space and water space) surrounded by artificial impervious areas are filled within the urban boundary and removed by the algorithm, which is consistent with global mapping methods. The continuous urban boundary was demarcated by morphological image processing methods, which have an overall accuracy of over 90%. In this dataset, extensive water and forests are excluded, and the impervious surface within the urban boundaries accounts for about 60% of the total surface area47. Compared with urban boundaries obtained from night-time light, GUB better separates urban areas from surrounding nonurban areas.Monthly waterbody datasetWe selected the JRC Monthly Water History V1.3 dataset(https://global-surface-water.appspot.com/), which is available from the Google Earth Engine, as the basis for representing surface waterbodies48. This data collection, which was produced by using images from the Landsat series, contains 442 images of global monthly waterbody area from March 1984 to December 2020. In this dataset, the validation confirmed that fewer than 1% of waterbodies were incorrectly detected, and fewer than 5% of waterbodies were missed altogether. We chose this dataset due to the long-term spatial distribution of waterbodies and due to mountain shadows and urban-constructions masking, which reflects the real changes in waterbodies.Theoretical backgroundIt is well known that cities have high concentrations of population and resources and expand spatially during development. There are many different perspectives on the size of cities, and studies have mostly used urban density and population to characterize them. However, because it is challenging to standardize data sources and quality, there is no unified quantitative standard49. Urban construction has concentrated human activity and brought about changes in land types. Cities are also identified as physical spaces, which can be defined as the built environment50,51. The built environment, which includes structures like buildings, roads, and other artificial constructions, is sometimes referred to as a non-natural environment52.Rural is the antithesis of urban. As large cities have spread outward in developing nations like Asia, a transitional fringe has been created by the gradual blurring of the line separating urban and rural areas53. According to McGee, good locations, easy access, and sizable agricultural land all contribute to the development potential of large cities. Thus, between urban and rural areas, there are transitional areas of active spatial morphological change known as desakota33,54. The peri-urban areas, like desakota, are gradually developed and incorporated into original built-up urban areas in urbanization. The original landscape, which included agricultural land, vegetation, and waterbodies, gradually changed into an urban land use type, i.e. impervious surface, and thus the city continues to expand outwards. Waterbody, an essential ecological element, has been heavily developed or filled in during urbanization, which may present dangerous ecological risks. In this paper, we identified the urban boundaries based on physical space to explore the encroachment activities on waterbodies during the urbanization of large cities. We determined whether existing waterbodies were transformed into urban waterbodies or encroached upon and whether waterbodies were increased in the expansion of urban boundaries, thus proposing strategies for protecting waterbodies in the future.Extracting the extent of large Chinese cities from GUB datasetTo characterize urban expansion, GUB data are selected as the original data for urban boundary selection. The Chinese administrative scale of municipalities is not exclusively urban, but also includes rural areas. In our study, cities were defined as municipal districts excluding the vast countryside within the administrative boundaries of prefecture-level cities. We identified urban areas based on the physical boundaries from the perspective of remote sensing, which can precisely track urban expansion51.In this work, we selected 159 cities with a population of over one million in 2018 based on the average annual population of urban districts from the 2019 China City Statistical Yearbook (Fig. S1). Taiwan, Hong Kong, and Macau are omitted. According to statistics, China had 160 cities with populations exceeding one million in 2018. However, due to the lack of data for the built-up area in 1990, Guang’an was not included in the study. We thus obtained 159 cities from the GUB dataset. Due to numerous fragmented patches within the administrative boundary, the population identified the main urban areas, and max patch areas were comprehensively based on the urban boundaries. Through manual detection and adjustment of the map, we determined that the location of the extracted urban area was consistent with that of the municipal government, and the boundary was extracted for each period. We took the growth area as the expansion area, with the original area being the city at the onset of each period (Fig. S3).We used the average annual urban growth (AUG) rate to characterize the rate of urban expansion, as is widely done to evaluate urban expansion55,56. It is calculated as$${text{AUG}} = left[ {frac{{Land_{t1} }}{{Land_{t0} }}^{{frac{1}{t1 – t0}}} – 1} right] times 100% ,$$
where (Land_{t0}) and (Land_{t1}) represent the urban land area at time t0 and t1, where t0 and t1 are the start and end of the given study period.Identification of urban waterbodiesUrban waterbodies contain all the components of urban flow networks above the ground and include natural waterbodies such as lakes, rivers, streams, and wetlands and artificial waterbodies such as parks and ponds48. We identified all waterbodies existing within the urban boundary as urban waterbody. Considering urban expansion, urban waterbodies vary as urban boundary shift at different stages. Our study explored how the original waterbodies changed under urban expansion, including whether they were kept as urban waterbodies or encroached upon. Considering the dryness or wetness of each year, we used the data for 3 years (36 months) around each period (1990, 1995, 2000, 2005, 2010, 2015, and 2018) to describe the waterbody. Not all waterbodies could be detected for each month of the year; for example, freezing may prevent waterbodies from being detected. To cover seasonal and permanent waterbodies, we used the waterbody frequency index (WFI), which is calculated as the fraction of waterbody months within the 3 years to identify stable waterbodies pixel by pixel57. The spatial distribution of each waterbody was then mapped comprehensively for each period. By comparing the extracted waterbody with the long-time-series high-resolution remote-sensing images from Google Earth, we found that the extracted waterbodies fit the actual waterbody distribution quite well (Fig. S2):$$WFIleft( i right) = frac{WMleft( i right)}{{DMleft( i right)}}$$
where WFI(i) is the water occurrence for pixel i in the images before and after the given year, and i is the pixel number for the study area. WM(i) is the number of months during which the waterbody is detected in i pixel over the 3 years. DM(i) is the number of months during which the data are available in pixel i. If the waterbody frequency index of a pixel is greater than 25%, this pixel is considered as a waterbody; otherwise, it is not.City classification based on surface waterbodyCities with over one million in population may not be short of waterbodies, but significant differences remain in surface waterbody abundance. Due to large differences in city size, it is inappropriate to use waterbody area as a criterion. Considering the influence of urban expansion, we ranked 159 cities according to the indicator of waterbody fraction (WF), namely the fraction of the original surface water within the urban boundary in 2018. Waterbodies not impacted by urbanization were taken as the original surface waterbody, which used the average surface waterbody from 1985 to 1991 as baseline. We used the natural break method to divide cities into abundant, moderate, and deficient levels (referred to as Type I, Type II, and Type III, respectively) and evaluate the abundance of waterbodies in cities. Based on the waterbody fraction (WF) value, which is calculated as follows:$${text{WF}} = frac{{Water_{origin} }}{{Land_{2018} }}$$
where WF is used to judge the urban waterbody abundance in cities. (Water_{1990}) is the origin surface waterbody area (used the year in 1985–1991) in the urban boundary of 2018, (Land_{2018}) the urban land area in the urban boundary of 2018.Temporal characteristic of waterbody loss and gainTo understand the spatial–temporal features of surface waterbodies, we used five normalized indicators to compare waterbody variations between cities during urban expansion from the overall perspective and from the city perspective.The variation in original natural waterbodies reflects the intensity of the natural resource development in urban expansion. We summarized the reduction and preservation of original waterbodies in urban expansion areas with a population of over one million to represent the encroachment of urban expansion on waterbodies:$$WL = frac{{sum NWL_{t0_t1} left( i right)}}{{sum W_{t0} left( i right)}} times 100%$$$$WP = frac{{sum (W_{t0} left( i right) – NWL_{t0_t1} left( i right))}}{{sum W_{t0} left( i right)}} times 100%$$
where i labels the city within the 159 cities, WL and WP are the fractions of waterbody loss and preservation in urban expansion areas of all cities, (NWL_{t0_t1}) is the net waterbody loss during period t0–t1 (, and W_{t0}) is the natural waterbody in the urban expansion area at time t0.To estimate the net waterbody loss caused by urban expansion at various stages, we used the standardized indicator, annual average net waterbody loss rate (ANWL), to compare waterbody loss speeds over time. This indicator is independent of the difference in waterbody abundance and can be compared over time. Waterbody loss is one part of the impact of urbanization; the other is waterbody gain. We used the same method to evaluate the annual average net waterbody gain rate (ANWG). The formulas are$$A{text{NWL}} = frac{{NWL_{t0_t1} }}{{W_{t0} left( {t1 – t0} right)}} times 100%$$$$ANWG = frac{{NWG_{t0 – t1} }}{{W_{t0} left( {t1 – t0} right)}} times 100%$$
where NWL and NWG are the net waterbody loss and gain, respectively, and the other abbreviations are the same as above.Considering the direct impact of urban expansion, we used a normalized indicator, the average net waterbody loss velocity of urban expansion ((AWLV)), which refers to the amount of waterbody encroachment per unit urban expansion area. It quantifies the time-heterogeneity of waterbody loss due to urban expansion and is calculated as follows:$$AWLV = frac{{NWL_{t0_t1} }}{{Land_{t1} – Land_{t0} }}$$We calculated these indicators for the six expansion periods (1990–1995, 1995–2000, 2000–2005, 2005–2010, 2010–2015, and 2015–2018) (Fig. 3). In the study, if the waterbody pixel count is zero at the onset of the period, the indicator for the period is abnormal and thus excluded. More