Ecology

RESEARCH HIGHLIGHT
03 March 2023

Human hunt at least 19% of bat species worldwide — especially flying foxes, which can have wingspans of 1.5 metres. More

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We performed data acquisition, processing, analysis and visualization using Python23 version 3.8 with the packages Numpy24, Pandas25, Geopandas26, Matplotlib27, Selenium, Beautiful Soup28, SciPy14 and scikit-learn29. The functions used for specific tasks are explicitly mentioned to allow validation and replication studies.Data acquisition and processingHuman PUUV-incidenceHantavirus disease has been notifiable in Germany since 2001. The Robert Koch Institute collects anonymized data from the local and state public health departments and offers via the SurvStat application2 a freely available, limited version of its database for research and informative purposes. We retrieved the reported laboratory-confirmed human PUUV-infections (({text{n}}=text{11,228}) from 2006 to 2021, status: 2022-02-07). From the attributes available for each case, we retrieved the finest temporal and spatial resolution, i.e., the week and the year of notification, together with the district (named “County” in the English version of the SurvStat interface).To avoid bias through underreporting, our dataset was limited to PUUV-infections since 2006. The years 2006–2021 contain 91.9% of the total cases from 2001 to 2021. Human PUUV-incidence was calculated as the number of infections per 100,000 people, by using population data from Eurostat30. For each year, we used the population reported for the January 1 of that year. The population for 2020 was also used for 2021.In the analysis, we only included districts where the total infections were (ge {20}) and the maximum annual incidence was (ge {2}) in the period 2006–2021. The spatial information about the infections provided by the SurvStat application refers to the district where the infection was reported. Therefore, in most of the cases, the reported district corresponds to the residence of the infected person, which may differ from the district of infection. To compensate partially for differences between the reported place of residence and the place of infection, we combined most of the urban districts with their surrounding rural district. The underlying assumption was that most infections reported in urban districts occurred in the neighboring or surrounding rural district. In addition, some urban and rural districts have the same health department. Supplementary Table 1 lists the combined districts.Weather dataFrom the German Meteorological Service31 we retrieved grids of the following monthly weather parameters over Germany from 2004 to 2021: mean daily air temperature—Tmean, minimum daily air temperature—Tmin, and maximum daily air temperature—Tmax (all temperatures are the monthly averages of the corresponding daily values, in 2 m height above ground, in °C); total precipitation in mm—Pr, total sunshine duration in hours—SD, mean monthly soil temperature in 5 cm depth under uncovered typical soil of location in °C—ST, and soil moisture under grass and sandy loam in percent plant useable water—SM. The dataset version for Tmean, Tmin, Tmax, Pr, and SD was v1.0; for ST and SM the dataset version was 0. × . The spatial resolution was 1 × 1 km2.The data acquisition was performed with the Selenium package. The processing was based on the geopandas package26 using a geospatial vector layer for the district boundaries of Germany32. Each grid was processed to obtain the average value of the parameter over each district. We first used the function within to define a mask based on the grid centers contained in the district; we then applied this mask to the grid. In this method, called “central point rasterizing”33, each rectangle of the grid was assigned to a single district, the one that contained its center. The typical processing error was estimated to be about 1%, which agrees with the rasterizing error reported by Bregt et al.33; we consider that most likely this error is significantly less than the uncertainties of the grids themselves, caused by calculation, interpolation, and erroneous or missing observations.Data structureOur analysis was performed at the district level based on the annual infections, acquired by aggregating the weekly cases. From each monthly weather parameter, we created 24 records, for all months of the two previous years. Each observation in our dataset characterized one district in one year. Its target was acquired by transforming the annual incidence, as described in the following section. Each observation comprised all 168 available predictors from the weather parameters (7 parameters × 24 months), thereafter called “variables”. The notation for the naming of the variables follows the format Vx__, where “Vx” can be V1 or V2 that corresponds to one or two years before, respectively;  is the abbreviation of the weather parameter (see previous subsection: “Weather data”); and  is the numerical value of the month, i.e., from 1 to 12.The observations for combined districts retained the label of the rural district. For their infections and populations, we aggregated the individual values, and recalculated the incidence. For their weather variables, we assigned the mean values weighted by the area of each district.Target transformationTo consider the effects that drive the occurrence of high district-relative incidence, we discretized the incidence at the district level. The incidence scaled at its maximum value for each district showed extreme values for minima and maxima. About 49% of all observations were in the range [0, 0.1) and 8% in the range [0.9, 1] (Fig. 5). Therefore, we specifically selected to discretize the scaled incidence with two bins, i.e., to binarize it.Figure 5Histograms of the annual PUUV incidence from 2006 to 2021, scaled to its maximum value for each of the selected districts. Left: Raw incidence. Right: Log-transformed incidence, according to Eq. (6).Full size imageWe first applied a log-transformation to the incidence values34, described in Eq. (6).$${text{Log – incidence}} = log_{10} left( {{text{incidence}} + 1} right)$$
(6)
The addition of a positive constant ensured a noninfinite value for zero incidence, with 1 selected so that the log-incidence is nonnegative, and a zero incidence was transformed into a zero log-incidence. This transformation aimed to increase the influence of nonzero incidence values; values that are not pronounced, but still hint at a nonzero infection risk. Its effect is demonstrated in the right plot of Fig. 5, where the positive skewness of the original data is reduced, i.e., low incidence values are spread to higher values, resulting to more uniform bin heights in the range [0.05, 0.95] after the transformation. Formally, in this case the log-transformation achieves a more uniform distribution for the non-extreme incidence values.For the binarization, we performed unsupervised clustering of the log-transformed incidence, separately for each district, applying the function KBinsDiscretizer of the scikit-learn package29. Our selected strategy was the k-means clustering with two bins, because it does not require a pre-defined threshold, and it can operate with the same fixed number of bins for every district, by automatically adjusting the cluster centroids accordingly.Classification methodWe concentrated only on those variable combinations that led to a linear decision boundary for the classification of our selected target. We selected support vector machines (SVM)35 with a linear kernel, because they combine high performance with low model complexity, in that they return the decision boundary as a linear equation of the variables. In addition, SVM is geometrically motivated36 and expected to be less prone to outliers and overfitting than other machine-learning classification algorithms, such as the logistic regression. For the complete modelling process, the regularization parameter C was set to 1, that is the default value in the applied SVC method of the scikit-learn package29, and the weights for both risk classes were also set to 1.Feature selectionOur aim was to use the smallest possible number of weather parameters as variables for a classification model with sufficient performance. To identify the optimal variable combination, we first applied an SVM with a linear kernel for all 2-variable combinations of the monthly weather variables from V2 and V1, i.e., 168 variables (7 weather parameters × 2 years × 12 months). Only for this step, the variables were scaled to their minimum and maximum values, which significantly reduced the processing time. For all the following steps, the scaler was omitted, because the unscaled support vectors were required for the final model. From the total 14,028 models for each unique pair ((frac{168!}{2!cdot left(168-2right)!})), we kept the 100 models with the best F1-score, i.e., of the harmonic mean of sensitivity and precision, and counted the occurrences of each year-month combination in the variables. The best F1-score was 0.752 for the pair (V1_Tmean_9 and V2_Tmax_4); and the best sensitivity was 83% for the pair (V2_Tmax_9 and V1_ST_9).The year-month combinations with more than 10% occurrences were: V1_9 (September of the previous year, with 49% occurrences), V2_9 (September of two years before, with 12%) and V2_4 (April of two years before, with 10%). To avoid sets with highly correlated variables, we formed 3-variable combinations, with exactly one variable from each year-month combination (threefold Cartesian product). From the total 343 models (73 combinations, i.e., 7 weather parameters for 3 year-month combinations), we selected the model with the best sensitivity and at least 70% precision, i.e., the variable set (V2_ST_4, V2_SD_9, and V1_ST_9). We consider that the criteria for this selection are not particularly crucial; and we expect comparable performance for most variable sets with a high F1-score, because the variables for each dimension of the Cartesian product were highly correlated. The eight variable sets with at least 70% precision and at least 80% sensitivity are shown in Supplementary Table 2.The SVM classifier has two hyperparameters: the regularization parameter C and the class weights. By decreasing C, the decision boundary becomes softer and more misclassifications are allowed. On the other hand, increasing the high-risk class weight, the misclassifications of high-risk observations are penalized higher, which is expected to increase the sensitivity and decrease the precision. The simultaneous adjustment of both hyperparameters ensures that the resulting model has the optimal performance with respect to the preferred metric. However, in order to avoid overfitting, we considered redundant a further model optimization with these two hyperparameters. For completeness, we examined SVM models for different values of the hyperparameters and found that the global maximum for the F1-score is in the region of 0.001 for C and 1.5 for the high-risk class weight. Our selected values C = 1 and high-risk class weight equal to 1 give the second best F1-score, which is a local maximum with comparable performance, mostly insensitive to the selection of C from the range [0.2, 5.5].The addition of a fourth variable from V1_6 (June of the previous year) resulted in a model with higher sensitivity but lower precision and specificity (for V1_Pr_6). The highest F1-score was achieved for the quadruple (V2_ST_4, V2_SD_9, V1_ST_9, V1_Pr_6). Because of the increased complexity without significant improvement in the performance, we considered unnecessary a further expansion of our variable triplet. More

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Publisher’s note Springer Nature remains neutral with regard to jurisdictional claims in published maps and institutional affiliations.This is a summary of: Zhu, L. et al. Comparable biophysical and biogeochemical feedbacks on warming from tropical moist forest degradation. Nat. Geosci. https://doi.org/10.1038/s41561-023-01137-y (2023). More

All procedures involving animals were conducted in accordance with the guidelines and regulations from Institutional Animal Care and Use Committee (IACUC) of the University of Florida (protocol #201509019). Tis manuscript is reported in accordance with ARRIVE guidelines.Site descriptionThis study was carried out at the North Florida Research and Education Center, in Marianna, FL (30°46′35″N 85°14′17″W, 51 m.a.s.l). The trial was performed in two experimental years (2019 and 2020) in a greenhouse.The soil used was collected from a pasture of rhizoma peanut (Arachis glabrata Benth.) and Argentine bahiagrass (Paspalum notatum Flügge) as the main forages. Without plant and root material, only soil was placed into buckets, as described below in the bucket assemblage section. Soil was classified as Orangeburg loamy sand (fine-loamy-kaolinitic, thermic Typic Kandiudults), with a pHwater of 6.7, Mehlich-1-extratable P, K, Mg and Ca concentrations of 41, 59, 63, 368 mg kg−1, respectively. Average of minimum and maximum daily temperature and relative humidity in the greenhouse for September and November (September for beetle trial due seasonal appearance of beetles, and October and November to the Pear Millet trial) in 2019 and 2020 were 11 and 33 °C, 81%; 10 and 35 °C, 77%, respectively.Biological material determinationTo select the species of beetles, a previous dung beetle sampling was performed in the grazing experiment in the same area (grass and legume forage mixture) to determine the number of dung beetle species according to the functional groups as described by Conover et al.44. Beetles were pre-sampled from March 2017 to June 2018, where Tunnelers group were dominant and represented by Onthophagus taurus (Schreber), Digitonthophagus gazella (Fabricius), Phanaeus vindex (MacLeay), Onthophagus oklahomensis (Brown), and Euniticellus intermedius (Reiche). Other species were present but not abundant, including Aphodius psudolividus (Linnaeus), Aphodius carolinus (Linnaeus), and Canthon pilularius (Linnaeus) identified as Dweller and Roller groups, respectively. The pre-sampling indicated three species from the Tunneler group were more abundant, and thereby, were chosen to compose the experimental treatments (Fig. 4).Figure 4Most abundant dung beetle species in Marianna, FL used in the current study. Credits: Carlos C.V. García.Full size imageBeetles collection and experimental treatmentsThree species of common communal dung beetles were used: O. taurus (1), D. gazella (2), and P. vindex (3). Treatments included two treatments containing only soil and soil + dung without beetles were considered as Control 1 (T1) and Control 2 (T2), respectively. Isolated species T3 = 1, T4 = 2, T5 = 3 and their combinations T6 = 1 + 2 and T7 = 1 + 2 + 3. Dung beetles were trapped in the pasture with grazing animals using the standard cattle-dung-baited pitfall traps, as described by Bertone et al.41. To avoid losing samples due to cattle trampling, 18 traps were randomized in nine paddocks (two traps per paddock) and installed protected by metal cages, and after a 24-h period, beetles were collected, and the traps removed. Table 1 shows the number of dung beetles, their total mass (used to standardize treatments) per treatment, and the average mass per species. To keep uniformity across treatments we kept beetle biomass constant across species at roughly 1.7 to 1.8 g per assemblage (Table 1). Twenty-four hours after retrieving the beetles from the field traps, they were separated using an insect rearing cage, classified, and thereafter stored in small glass bottles provided with a stopper and linked to a mesh to keep the ventilation and maintaining the beetles alive.Table 1 Total number and biomass of dung beetles per treatment.Full size tableBuckets assemblageThe soil used in the buckets was collected from the grazing trial in two experimental years (August 2019 and August 2020) across nine paddocks (0.9 ha each). The 21 plastic buckets had a 23-cm diameter and 30-cm (0.034 m2) and each received 10 kg of soil (Fig. 5). At the bottom of the recipient, seven holes were made for water drainage using a metallic mesh with 1-mm diameter above the surface of the holes to prevent dung beetles from escaping. Water was added every four days to maintain the natural soil conditions at 60% of the soil (i.e., bucket) field capacity (measured with the soil weight and water holding capacity of the soil). Because soil from the three paddocks had a slightly different texture (sandy clay and sandy clay loam), we used them as the blocking factor.Figure 5Bucket plastic bucket details for dung beetle trial.Full size imageThe fresh dung amount used in the trial was determined based on the average area covered by dung and dung weight (0.05 to 0.09 m2 and 1.5 to 2.7 kg) from cattle in grazing systems, as suggested by Carpinelli et al.45. Fresh dung was collected from Angus steers grazing warm-season grass (bahiagrass) pastures and stored in fridge for 24 h, prior to start the experiment. A total of 16.2 kg of fresh dung was collected, in which 0.9 kg were used in each bucket. After the dung application, dung beetles were added to the bucket. To prevent dung beetles from escaping, a mobile plastic mesh with 0.5 mm diameter was placed covering the buckets before and after each evaluation. The experiment lasted for 24 days in each experimental year (2019 and 2020), with average temperature 28 °C and relative humidity of 79%, acquired information from the Florida Automated Weather Network (FAWN).Chamber measurementsThe gas fluxes from treatments were evaluated using the static chamber technique46. The chambers were circular, with a radius of 10.5 cm (0.034 m2). Chamber bases and lids were made of polyvinyl chloride (PVC), and the lid were lined with an acrylic sheet to avoid any reactions of gases of interest with chamber material (Fig. 6). The chamber lids were covered with reflective tape to provide insulation, and equipped with a rubber septum for sampling47. The lid was fitted with a 6-mm diameter, 10-cm length copper venting tube to ensure adequate air pressure inside the chamber during measurements, considering an average wind speed of 1.7 m s−148,49. During measurements, chamber lids and bases were kept sealed by fitting bicycle tire inner tubes tightly over the area separating the lid and the base. Bases of chambers were installed on top of the buckets to an 8-cm depth, with 5 cm extending above ground level. Bases were removed in the last evaluation day (24th) of each experimental year.Figure 6Static chamber details and instruments for GHG collection in the dung beetle trial.Full size imageGas fluxes measurementsThe gas fluxes were measured at 1000 h following sampling recommendations by Parkin & Venterea50, on seven occasions from August 28th to September 22nd in both years (2019 and 2020), being days 0, 1, 2, 3, 6, 12, and 24 after dung application. For each chamber, gas samples were taken using a 60-mL syringe at 15-min intervals (t0, t15, and t30). The gas was immediately flushed into pre-evacuated 30-mL glass vials equipped with a butyl rubber stopper sealed with an aluminium septum (this procedure was made twice per vial and per collection time). Time zero (t0) represented the gas collected out of the buckets (before closing the chamber). Immediately thereafter, the bucket lid was tightly closed by fitting the lid to the base with the bicycle inner tube, followed by the next sample deployment times.Gas sample analyses were conducted using a gas chromatograph (Trace 1310 Gas Chromatograph, Thermo Scientific, Waltham, MA). For N2O, an electron capture detector (350 °C) and a capillary column (J&W GC packed column in stainless steel tubing, length 6.56 ft (2 M), 1/8 in. OD, 2 mm ID, Hayesep D packing, mesh size 80/100, pre-conditioned, Agilent Technologies) were used. Temperature of the injector and columns were 80 and 200 °C, respectively. Daily flux of N2O-N (g ha−1 day−1) was calculated as described in Eq. (1):$${text{F}}, = ,{text{A}}*{text{dC}}/{text{dt}}$$
(1)
where F is flux of N2O (g ha−1 day−1), A is the area of the chamber, and dC/dt is the change of concentration in time calculated using a linear method of integration by Venterea et al.49.Ammonia volatilization measurementAmmonia volatilization was measured using the open chamber technique, as described by Araújo et al.51. The ammonia chamber was made of a 2-L volume polyethylene terephthalate (PET) bottle. The bottom of the bottle was removed and used as a cap above the top opening to keep the environment controlled, free of insects and other sources of contamination. An iron wire was used to support the plastic jar. A strip of polyfoam (250 mm in length, 25 mm wide, and 3 mm thick) was soaked in 20 ml of acid solution (H2SO4 1 mol dm−3 + glycerine 2% v/v) and fastened to the top, with the bottom end of the foam remaining inside the plastic jar. Inside each chamber there was a 250-mm long wire designed with a hook to support it from the top of the bottle, and wire basket at the bottom end to support a plastic jar (25 mL) that contained the acid solution to keep the foam strip moist during sampling periods (Fig. 7). The ammonia chambers were placed installed in the bucket located in the middle of each experimental block after the last gas sampling of the day and removed before the start of the next gas sampling.Figure 7Mobile ammonia chamber details for ammonia measurement in dung beetle trial. Adapted from Araújo et al.51.Full size imageNutrient cyclingPhotographs of the soil and dung portion of each bucket were taken twenty-four hours after the last day of gas flux measurement sampling to determine the dung removal from single beetle species and their combination. In the section on statistical analysis, the programming and statistical procedures are described. After this procedure, seeds of pearl millet were planted in each bucket. After 5 days of seed germination plants were thinned, maintaining four plants per bucket. Additionally, plants were clipped twice in a five-week interval, with the first cut occurring on October 23rd and the second cut occurring on November 24th, in both experimental years. Before each harvest, plant height was measured twice in the last week. In the harvest day all plants were clipped 10 cm above the ground level. Samples were dried at 55 °C in a forced-air oven until constant weight and ball-milled using a Mixer Mill MM 400 (Retsch, Newton, PA, USA) for 9 min at 25 Hz, and analyzed for total N concentration using a C, H, N, and S analyzer by the Dumas dry combustion method (Vario Micro Cube; Elementar, Hanau, Germany).Statistical analysisTreatments were distributed in a randomized complete block design (RCBD), with three replications. Data were analyzed using the Mixed Procedure from SAS (ver. 9.4., SAS Inst., Cary, NC) and LSMEANS compared using PDIFF adjusted by the t-test (P  More

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