Jacob-ogre's Musings

I subscribe to RSS feeds for dozens of journals and (usually) review those feeds every morning and every evening. There is usually at least one paper each day that I share with colleagues via email. But I miss people who might find a paper interesting, and mass emails to #STAFF would be annoying. Plus, there might be people out “there,” somewhere, who aren’t coworkers but who might find these discoveries interesting. Instead of bombarding people who may never find those papers of interest with emails they do not want, and to make my time reviewing more worthwhile, I will try out the GitHub Pages blog for sharing on a regular basis. Each post will contain records for each paper I find of interest, including:

• the title of the paper of interest;
• link(s) to the paper, including the journal page and, as needed and avaialable, a link to the full text;
• a short summary of the paper;
• a brief comment about why I flagged the paper, e.g., potential for future work.

Most of the time, I will have not read the full paper before posting, so please excuse any errors or misunderstandings.

In this initial post I will just highlight two papers as a test…

Papers

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Retrospective Analysis of Heavy Metal Contamination in Rhode Island Based on Old and New Herbarium Specimens

URL http://www.bioone.org/doi/10.3732/apps.1600108 (OA)

Summary The authors compare the concentrations of lead, copper, and zinc in historical herbarium specimens (1846 - 1916) to levels in contemporary specimens. The area they sampled in Rhode Island is of interest because some of the sites were the focus of heavy industrialization, and some of those were subject to more recent remediation.

Comment I think a project using this approach at a multi-watershed scale could be really interesting for building a map of contaminant changes. For example, many Endangered Species Act-listed species, such as fishes and mussels, face contamination threats. Although direct comparisons with, e.g., EPA’s water quality assessments are probably a stretch, historical data from herbarium specimens might add useful context for understanding how conditions have changed over a longer time-frame.

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3D-printed eagle eye: Compound microlens system for foveated imaging

URL http://advances.sciencemag.org/content/3/2/e1602655?rss=1 (OA)

Summary The authors report printing tiny - ca. 100 micron diameter - lenses of various focal lengths. When placed on an imaging sensor, these microlenses capture compound images that can be combined to create foveated images.

Comment Next, insect-sized drones that can image an area without getting in the way or being conspicuous. Could take monitoring to a new level. That is a ways off, but this strikes me as really cool.

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Policy impacts of ecosystem services knowledge

URL http://www.pnas.org/content/113/7/1760 (OA)

Summary The authors evaluate the factors that affect the extent to which ecosystem services research shapes policy. The find that work with greater legitimacy - in terms of considering input from different stakeholders - has the biggest effect.

Comment This ia a paper from early 2016, but came back up because the authors are presenting at the National Academy of Sciences meeting this week.

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