Anticipating anthropogenic threats in acquiring new protected areas.

Biodiversity continues to decline despite protected area expansion and global conservation commitments. Biodiversity losses occur in existing protected areas, yet common methods used to select protected areas ignore postimplementation threats that reduce effectiveness. We developed a conservation planning framework that considers the ongoing anthropogenic threats within protected areas when selecting sites and the value of planning for costly threat-mitigating activities (i.e., enforcement) at the time of siting decisions. We applied the framework to a set of landscapes that contained the range of possible correlations between species richness and threat. Accounting for threats and implementing enforcement activities increased benefits from protected areas without increasing budgets. Threat information was valuable in conserving more species per spending level even without enforcement, especially on landscapes with randomly distributed threats. Benefits from including threat information and enforcement were greatest when human threats peaked in areas of high species richness and were lowest where human threats were negatively associated with species richness. Because acquiring information on threats and using threat-mitigating activities are costly, our findings can guide decision-makers regarding the settings in which to pursue these planning steps.

Anticipación de las amenazas antropogénicas durante la adquisición de áreas protegidas nuevas Resumen La biodiversidad sigue declinando a pesar de la expansión de áreas protegidas y los compromisos mundiales con la conservación. La pérdida de la biodiversidad ocurre en las áreas protegidas existentes, y todavía los métodos comunes usados para seleccionar las áreas protegidas ignoran las amenazas posteriores a la implementación, las cuales reducen la efectividad. Desarrollamos un marco de planeación de la conservación que considera las amenazas antropogénicas actuales dentro de las áreas protegidas durante la selección de sitios y el valor de la planeación de actividades mitigantes costosas, como la aplicación, al momento de decidir. Aplicamos nuestro marco a un conjunto de paisajes que comprende el rango de correlaciones posibles entre las amenazas y la riqueza de especies. Si consideramos las amenazas y la implementación de actividades de aplicación, los beneficios de las áreas protegidas incrementan sin incrementar el presupuesto. La información sobre las amenazas fue importante para la conservación de especies por nivel de gasto incluso sin la aplicación, especialmente en paisajes con amenazas distribuidas de forma azarosa. Los beneficios de incluir la información sobre las amenazas y la aplicación fueron mayores cuando las amenazas humanas llegaron a su tope en áreas con gran riqueza de especies y alcanzaron su punto más bajo cuando las amenazas humanas estaban asociadas negativamente con la riqueza de especies. Ya que es costoso adquirir información sobre las amenazas y mitigar las amenazas con actividades, nuestros descubrimientos pueden informar a los tomadores de decisiones con respecto al entorno para seguir los pasos de la planeación.

Properties of extruded vital wheat gluten sheets with sodium hydroxide and salicylic acid.

This paper presents a novel approach to improve the barrier and mechanical properties of extruded glycerol-plasticized vital wheat gluten sheets. The sheets were extruded with a single screw extruder at alkaline conditions using 3-5 wt % NaOH. Salicylic acid (SA), known to improve the extrudability of wheat gluten, was also added alone or in combination with NaOH. Oxygen transmission rate and volatile mass measurements, tensile tests, protein solubility, glycerol migration, infrared spectroscopy, and electrophoresis were used to assess the properties of the extrudate. Electrophoresis showed that the gluten/glycerol sheet and the sheet with 3 wt % NaOH and 1 wt % SA contained the same building blocks in terms of proteins and protein subunits, although the protein solubility in these samples was different. The oxygen barrier, at dry conditions, was improved significantly with the addition of NaOH. On the other hand, the addition of salicylic acid yielded poorer barrier properties. The extrudate was placed on a blotting paper and its aging properties were investigated during the first 120 days. It was observed that the extrudate with 3 wt % NaOH had the most suitable combination of properties (low oxygen permeability, large strain at break, and relatively small aging-induced changes in mechanical properties); the reason is probably due to low plasticizer migration and an optimal protein aggregation/polymerization.

Measuring the value of accurate link prediction for network seeding.

MERGING TWO CLASSIC QUESTIONS: The influence-maximization literature seeks small sets of individuals whose structural placement in the social network can drive large cascades of behavior. Optimization efforts to find the best seed set often assume perfect knowledge of the network topology. Unfortunately, social network links are rarely known in an exact way. When do seeding strategies based on less-than-accurate link prediction provide valuable insight? OUR CONTRIBUTION: We introduce optimized-against-a-sample ([Formula: see text]) performance to measure the value of optimizing seeding based on a noisy observation of a network. Our computational study investigates [Formula: see text] under several threshold-spread models in synthetic and real-world networks. Our focus is on measuring the value of imprecise link information. The level of investment in link prediction that is strategic appears to depend closely on spread model: in some parameter ranges investments in improving link prediction can pay substantial premiums in cascade size. For other ranges, such investments would be wasted. Several trends were remarkably consistent across topologies.