The researchers looked at threatened spring-run Chinook salmon in tributaries of the Sacramento River. It found that restored sites that produce lots of fish may be especially vulnerable to changes such as drought. Such sites should be coupled with other varying sites that support the salmon population in diverse ways.

“The fish need all the different opportunities,” said Flora Cordoleani, a NOAA Fisheries and University of California Santa Cruz researcher who led the research published this week in Ecosphere. “Fish with one life history that favors certain habitat are not going to save the population in the long term. We need diverse habitats to support diverse life histories that help provide resilience.”

Life history refers to salmon traits such as their juvenile migration timing, growth rates, and food preferences. For instance, some juvenile salmon migrate to the ocean in their first year, while others may spend the year growing in freshwater first. That timing may benefit them in some years, but leave them more vulnerable in others, such as during drought.

Spring Chinook salmon were once found across the state and formed the backbone of California’s commercial salmon fishery. They are now greatly diminished and survive in only a few key watersheds with worsening trends in numbers. State and federal biologists last fall collected a few remaining spring-run Chinook salmon to begin a captive broodstock that will safeguard the genetic heritage of the species.

Habitat Mix Benefits Fish

Fish benefit most when they have access to a mosaic of interconnecting habitat from streamside vegetation to open floodplains, the research found. Young salmon may grow rapidly when wet years inundate floodplains and produce plentiful food, “but that happens pretty rarely,” Cordoleani said. “The key is for the fish to have access to all those habitats, so if something happens to one of them, the fish don’t all disappear.”

The new research goes beyond earlier studies showing that later-migrating fish had better survival rates. It shows how that played out on the landscape of three creeks that feed the Sacramento River, one of the biggest salmon-producing rivers on the West Coast.

Cordoleani and her team examined Butte Creek, the focus of extensive restoration that produced a large increase in fish numbers that had access to the floodplain. They examined salmon otoliths — small ear bones — that record clues about each fish’s life history. They found few later-migrating fish, which made the fish there more vulnerable to sharp declines during drought years that may become more common with climate change.

Two other nearby streams, Mill and Deer Creek, offered different conditions and hosted more fish that migrated later as yearlings (juveniles oversummering in freshwater). While they did not see the big increases in fish abundance that Butte Creek did, their salmon better survived droughts. Combining the three sites that complement each other increases the resilience of the Central Valley spring run stock complex — the term for all the individual populations combined.

“The sum of the parts is much greater, because they are doing different things and supporting the fish in different ways,” said Rachel Johnson, the senior author of the research and scientist at NOAA Fisheries’ Southwest Fisheries Science Center. “Some of those qualities may turn out to be more or less important as the climate changes.”

But relying on these three creeks is not enough. “Spring-run Chinook are already playing the climate stock market with only a few stocks in their portfolio,” Johnson said. They were once found in every major watershed. She said a lesson of the research is that more habitat options help fish survive a volatile climate by providing more opportunities to survive and thrive.

Providing that array of options requires restoring diverse habitat areas that complement each other at the landscape scale and returning salmon to historical habitats that had long vanished. Cordoleani and her team hope that this research encourages restoration planners to implement projects that create a mosaic of different habitats across watersheds that support diverse fish survival strategies. These actions will also balance each other to help stabilize numbers in the long term.

The study was published today in Circulation Research, an official journal of the American Heart Association.

“The impact of circadian rhythms on cardiovascular function and disease development is well established,” said the study’s lead author Tobias Eckle, MD, PhD, professor of anesthesiology at the University of Colorado School of Medicine. “However, translational preclinical studies targeting the heart’s circadian biology are just now emerging and are leading to the development of a novel field of medicine termed circadian medicine.”

The senior author is Professor Tami A. Martino, PhD, distinguished chair in molecular and cardiovascular research at the University of Guelph in Ontario, Canada.

The study reviews current circadian medicine research, focusing on the use of intense light therapy following surgery, utilizing light to treat cardiac injury, exploring how cardiovascular disease can differ between men and women and administering drugs at specific times of day to coincide with the body’s internal clock to speed healing.

It also urges more aggressive use of this therapy in humans, rather than relying on mostly animal models.

“There are literally millions of patients who could benefit from this,” Eckle said. “The treatments are almost all low-risk. Some involve using light boxes and others use drugs that are already on the market.”

Circadian rhythms significantly influence how the cardiovascular system operates. Timing is everything. Blood pressure and heart rates follow distinct patterns, peaking during the day and ebbing at night. When this is disrupted, it leads to worse cardiovascular disease outcomes including myocardial infarction and heart failure.

Light is critical in maintaining the proper balance and functioning of the body. Shift employees who may work night hours then day hours often have worse cardiac outcomes.

Eckle, who has studied circadian rhythm and health for years, said intense light can help heal the body after heart surgery while protecting it from injury during surgery, including reducing the chances of cardiac ischemia.

According to the researchers, when light hits the human eye it is transmitted to the suprachiasmatic nucleus, a structure in the brain’s hypothalamus that regulates most circadian rhythms in the body. Intense light stabilizes the PER2 gene and increases levels of adenosine, which blocks electrical signals in the heart that cause irregular rhythms, making it cardiac protective.

Eckle has used light therapy with patients after surgery and seen positive results including lower levels of troponin, a key protein whose elevation can signal a heart attack or stroke.

Given the mounting evidence that intense light and timed drug treatments are effective, he said, it is time to move forward with more clinical trials.

“Circadian rhythms play a crucial role in cardiovascular health, influencing the timing of onset and severity of cardiovascular events and contributing to the healing process from disease,” Eckle said. “Studies in humans are clearly required. Regarding intense light therapy, chronotherapy and restricted feeding are low-risk strategies that should be tested sooner than later.”

“Much of the physics of the known universe already have fundamental solutions or are too complex to get an exact answer,” said Willie Padilla, professor of electrical and computer engineering at Duke. “In any field, finding a truly novel, fundamental, exact result like this is rare.”

The research appeared online March 8in the journal Nanophotonics.

Whether building an antenna or developing sunscreen, there are many instances where certain types of light need to be absorbed. One trick to maximizing that amount is increasing the thickness of the material absorbing the energy.

However, the needed thickness for a transparent material to provide that absorption was unknown till now.

More than 20 years ago, Konstantin N. Rozanov of the Institute for Theoretical and Applied Electrodynamics in Moscow, Russia, figured out the most light over a range of wavelengths that a device of a certain thickness could absorb if one side was lined with metal. This scenario creates a boundary on one side where all light either reflects back or is absorbed, providing a constraint that allows a certain mathematical approach to crack the problem.

Taking away that metal edge and allowing the light to continue through, however, is a horse of an entirely different color on the electromagnetic spectrum.

“Rozanov used a clever trick where he worked in wavelength instead of frequency,” said Yang Deng, a research assistant working in Padilla’s laboratory. “But several researchers have since tried using that approach to this problem and failed.”

To come up with a new mathematical approach, Padilla and Deng collaborated with Vahid Tarokh, the Rhodes Family Professor of Electrical and Computer Engineering at Duke. Tarokh’s research spans a wide range of topics while pursuing new formulations and approaches to getting the most out of datasets.

Without getting too deep into the mathematical weeds, it can be said that Tarokh was able to figure out how to shape the problem so that it could be solved, pulling a rabbit from a mathematical hat.

“Hindsight is 20/20, but even mathematicians call these creative strategies ‘tricks,'” Padilla said.

Beyond the novelty of solving a long-sought-after problem, the researchers say their work has practical implications in several areas. Metal-backed absorbers won’t let any type of electromagnetic energy pass through. But there are certain applications where you might want to block some frequencies while letting others pass.

For example, cellular phones might want to be able to block certain types of harmful electromagnetic radiation while letting others like GPS or Bluetooth through. Knowing what the fundamental limits of this type of goal will allow engineers to know when more work optimizing their design will not be worth the effort.

This research was supported by the Department of Energy (DESC0014372).

The study, published in Nature, is the first to chart “indirect economic losses” from climate change on global supply chains that will affect regions that would have been less affected by projected warming temperatures.

These previously unquantified disruptions in supply chains will further exacerbate projected economic losses due to climate change, bringing a projected net economic loss of between $3.75 trillion and $24.7 trillion in adjusted 2020 dollars by 2060, depending on how much carbon dioxide gets emitted.

Senior author Professor Dabo Guan (UCL Bartlett School of Sustainable Construction) said: “These projected economic impacts are staggering. These losses get worse the more the planet warms, and when you factor in the effects on global supply chains it shows how everywhere is at economic risk.”

As the global economy has grown more interconnected, disruptions in one part of the world have knock-on effects elsewhere in the world, sometimes in unexpected ways. Crop failures, labour slowdowns and other economic disruptions in one region can affect the supplies of raw materials flowing to other parts of the world that depend on them, disrupting manufacturing and trade in faraway regions. This is the first study to analyse and quantify the propagation of these disruptions from climate change, as well as their economic impacts.

As the Earth warms, the worse off economically it becomes, with compounding damage and economic losses climbing exponentially as time goes on and the hotter it gets. Climate change disrupts the global economy primarily by health costs from people suffering from heat exposure, work stoppages when it’s too hot to work, and economic disruptions cascading through supply chains.

The researchers compared expected economic losses across three projected global warming scenarios, called “Shared Socioeconomic Pathways,” based on low, medium and high projected global emissions levels. The best-case scenario would see global temperatures rise by only 1.5 degrees C over preindustrial levels by 2060, the middle track, which most experts believe Earth is on now, would see global temperatures rise by around 3 degrees C, and the worst-case scenario would see global temperatures rise by 7 degrees C.

By 2060, projected economic losses will be nearly five times as much under the highest emissions path than the lowest, with economic losses getting progressively worse the warmer it gets. By 2060, total GDP losses will amount to 0.8% under 1.5 degrees of warming, 2.0% under 3 degrees of warming and 3.9% under 7 degrees of warming.

The team calculated that supply chain disruptions also get progressively worse the warmer the climate gets, accounting for a greater and greater proportion of economic losses. By 2060, supply chain losses will amount to 0.1% of total global GDP (13% of the total GDP lost) under 1.5 degrees of warming, 0.5% of total GDP (25% of the total GDP lost) under 3 degrees, and 1.5% of total GDP (38% of the total GDP lost) under 7 degrees.

Co-lead author, Dr Daoping Wang of King’s College London, said: “The negative impacts of extreme heat sometimes occur quietly on global supply chains, even escaping our notice altogether. Our developed Disaster Footprint model tracks and visually represents these impacts, underlining the imperative for global collaborative efforts in adapting to extreme heat.”

For example, although extreme heat events occur more often in low-latitude countries, high-latitude regions, such as Europe or the United States, are also at significant risk. Future extreme heat is likely to cost Europe and the US about 2.2% and about 3.5% of their GDP respectively under the high emission scenario. The UK would lose about 1.5% of its GDP, with chemical products, tourism and electrical equipment industries suffering the greatest losses. Some of these losses originate from supply chain fluctuations caused by extreme heat in countries close to the equator.

The direct human cost is likewise significant. Even under the lowest path, 2060 will see 24% more days of extreme heatwaves and an additional 590,000 heatwave deaths annually, while under the highest path there would be more than twice as many heatwaves and an expected 1.12 million additional annual heatwave deaths. These impacts will not be evenly distributed around the world, but countries situated near to the equator will bear the brunt of climate change, particularly developing countries.

Co-lead author, Yida Sun from Tsinghua University said: “Developing countries suffer disproportionate economic losses compared to their carbon emissions. As multiple nodes in developing countries are hit simultaneously, economic damage can spread rapidly through the global value chain.”

The researchers highlighted two illustrative examples of industries that are part of supply chains at risk from climate change: Indian food production and tourism in the Dominican Republic.

The Indian food industry is heavily reliant on imports of fats and oils from Indonesia and Malaysia, Brazilian sugar, as well as vegetables, fruits and nuts from Southeast Asia and Africa. These supplier countries are among those most affected by climate change, diminishing India’s access to raw materials, which will diminish its food exports. As a result, the economies of countries reliant on these foods will feel the pinch of diminished supply and higher prices.

The Dominican Republic is expected to see a decline in its tourism as its climate grows too warm to attract vacationers. A nation whose economy is heavily reliant on tourism, this slowdown will hurt tourism-reliant industries including manufacturing, construction, insurance, financial services, and electronic equipment.

Professor Guan said: “This research is an important reminder that preventing every additional degree of climate change is critical. Understanding what nations and industries are most vulnerable is crucial for devising effective and targeted adaption strategies.”

The three journals that published the initiative papers are School-University Partnerships, Journal of Practitioner Research and Journal of Teacher Education. JTE, as it’s known, is widely considered the top-ranked research journal in the field of teacher education. Some of the scholars who independently reviewed the papers described the initiative’s research-based, nonpartisan approach, which combines practitioner inquiry with trauma-informed and asset-based practices, as novel, innovative and widely needed.

“We spend a great deal of energy and time conducting rigorous research into our work for several reasons,” said Boaz Dvir, the initiative’s director and an associate professor in the Donald P. Bellisario College of Communications. “These include improving our programs, strengthening our approach, collaborating with partners and participants, and sharing our findings with the world so others can challenge and/or adopt our approach.”

The initiative partners with educational entities such as school districts to offer customized professional learning opportunities to K-12 educators in Pennsylvania and around the country. Program participants identify difficult issues in their curriculum or setting, come up with compelling questions about these issues, seek credible sources, collect and analyze data, investigate their findings with colleagues and initiative facilitators, and design and implement classroom- or school-application plans.

The initiative offers year- and semester-long programs, workshops and asynchronous, self-paced online modules.

To examine the initiative’s yearlong program, the researchers interviewed participating teachers, generated field notes, collected program artifacts, reviewed teachers’ lesson plans and conducted classroom observations.

The core research team included Dvir; initiative affiliate faculty member Logan Rutten, a University of North Dakota assistant professor; and Danielle Butville, the initiative’s assistant director. The team collaborated with educators from Pennsylvania’s Red Lion Area School District — Wendy Smith, a veteran fifth-grade teacher, and Eric Wilson, who at the time served as the district’s chief instructional officer — to co-author two of the publications.

All three journals provide open access, so readers can download the papers for free. As much as possible, the initiative aims to publish its research in such accessible spaces.

“These papers carve a distinctive niche in the research on teachers’ professional learning,” Rutten said. “At a time when many teachers are seeking support to address the difficult topics they face in their curriculum and school communities, our research clearly illustrates how inquiry-based approaches can offer a hopeful path forward.”

The initiative team continues to examine various key aspects of its work.

“In our ongoing and future research, we are studying the impact of our programs on collective K-12 teachers’ efficacy and students’ learning experiences, as well as our learning as facilitators and teacher educators,” Butville said.

Based in Penn State’s Bellisario College, the Hammel Family Human Rights Initiative and the Holocaust, Genocide and Human Rights Education Initiative offer intensive professional learning programs throughout Pennsylvania and around the country to support educators in their instruction of a variety of difficult issues.