It’s found on farms, in woods, landscapes, fields, hiking trails and other open spaces. So, if you go to those places, you’re susceptible to irritation caused by poison ivy, which can lead to reactions that require medical attention. Worse, most people don’t know poison ivy when they see it.

To find poison ivy before it finds you, University of Florida scientists published a new study in which they use artificial intelligence to confirm that an app can identify poison ivy.

Nathan Boyd, a professor of horticultural sciences at the UF/IFAS Gulf Coast Research and Education Center near Tampa, led the research. Renato Herrig, a post-doctoral researcher in Boyd’s lab, designed the app.

“We were the first to do this, and it was designed as a tool for hikers or others working outdoors,” Boyd said. “The app uses a camera to identify in real-time if poison ivy is present and provides you with a measure of certainty for the detection. It also functions even if you don’t have connectivity to the internet.”

The next step is to make the app commercially available, and there’s no timetable for that yet, Boyd said.

For the study, researchers collected thousands of images of poison ivy from five locations: Alderman’s Ford Conservation Park and Hillsborough River State Park, both in Florida; Eufala National Wildlife Refuge in Alabama; York River State Park in Virgina and Fall Creek Falls State Park in Tennessee.

They labeled images, and in each image, scientists put boxes around the leaves and stems of the plant. The boxed images were critical because poison ivy has a unique leaf arrangement and shape. Scientists use those characteristics to identify the plant.

They then ran the images through AI programs and taught a computer to recognize which plants are poison ivy. They also included images of plants that are not poison ivy or plants that look like poison ivy to be certain the computer learns to distinguish them.

“We believe that by integrating an object-detection algorithm, public health and plant science, our research can encourage and support further investigations to understand poison ivy distribution and minimize health concerns,” Boyd said. In their future work UF/IFAS researchers hope to expand the use of the app to identify more noxious plants.

The fires four years ago triggered widespread tourism shutdowns in many parts of the country in the lead up to the peak Christmas and New Year season, resulting in $1.7 billion direct losses to the tourism industry, which triggered the larger drop in supply chain output.

“These results are an illustration of what can be expected in the future not only in Australia, but in other nations that are vulnerable to climate-change driven disasters,” said Vivienne Reiner, a PhD student with the Centre for Integrated Sustainability Analysis in the Faculty of Science and lead author of the study, published in Economics of Disasters and Climate Change.

“It’s important to note that our study, which measured tourism’s losses through Australian supply chains, did not quantify other economic costs, such as the supply-chain impacts of losses from agriculture or forestry, which were also substantially impacted by the fires,” she said.

While the fires had the biggest impact on Australia’s east coast, the impact from tourism losses was national and felt across the economy, the researchers found.

“Tourism is a vital Australian industry. Before the fires that started in 2019, statistics showed that in rural areas 8 percent, or almost one in 12 people, were employed in jobs connected to the tourism industry,” Ms Reiner said. “As well, tourism is a top export, with travel services responsible for more export income than natural gas in 2018-19.”

Associate Professor Arunima Malik, a co-author who heads the Centre for Integrated Sustainability Analysis and is also affiliated with the Business School, said: “With bushfires increasing compared to other natural disasters and expected to intensify due to climate change, it is important for countries such as Australia to quantify their economic impact as part of routine practice, including supply-chain spillovers.”

Co-author Professor Manfred Lenzen, also with ISA in the School of Physics, said: “Although the losses we calculated only represented a small fraction of the nation’s economic output, Australia’s reputation as a pristine destination could become permanently damaged under global warming, with fewer people travelling within and to Australia in our peak holiday season.”

The research showed varied impact nationwide across the supply chain, including in job losses:

• New South Wales: 3171 jobs
• Victoria: 1430 jobs
• Queensland: 1499 jobs
• South Australia: 516 jobs
• Western Australia: 479 jobs
• Tasmania: 13 jobs
• Australian Capital Territory: 110 jobs
• Northern Territory: 75 jobs.

The researchers warn that the Australian economy could face further losses as the effects from climate change increase.

Ms Reiner said: “As part of the Asia Pacific — the world’s most disaster-prone region — Australian tourism has a lot to gain from climate-change mitigation. In terms of responses, studies such as ours also help indicate hotspots in supply chains where rebuilding may be required in communities and industries.

“By including the entire supply chain in our research, using input-output analysis, we calculated total output losses of $2.8 billion, which is a 61 percent increase on direct damages identified.”

Researchers sometimes grow the cells in a 3D scaffold called a “hydrogel.” This network of proteins or molecules mimics the environment the cells would live in inside the body.

New research led by the University of Washington demonstrates a new class of hydrogels that can form not just outside cells, but also inside of them. The team created these hydrogels from protein building blocks designed using a computer to form a specific structure. These hydrogels exhibited similar mechanical properties both inside and outside of cells, providing researchers with a new tool to group proteins together inside of cells.

The team published these results Jan. 30 in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.

“In the past 10 years, there’s been a shift in the world of cell biology,” said co-senior author Cole DeForest, a UW associate professor of chemical engineering and of bioengineering. “Classically, folks have attributed much of the cell’s interior organization to membrane-bound organelles, such as mitochondria or the nucleus. But now scientists are realizing that the cell actually has other ways to locally concentrate certain molecules or proteins without using membranes, for example, by protein-protein interactions. This concentrating allows the cell to turn on or off specific functions that can be helpful or ultimately lead to disease.”

DeForest continued: “What I think is pretty exciting here is that we have good mechanical control of our hydrogels — even when they are made inside human cells. This means we can tune them to essentially function as a synthetic version of whatever sequestering phenomenon we want to study, such as how protein aggregation can lead to Alzheimer’s.”

One key element of this research was that the protein building blocks were designed from scratch — they don’t exist anywhere in nature — using computers.

“You can imagine a protein as a string of subunits called amino acids. That string folds up to form a three-dimensional structure. There are 20 different amino acids, and a typical protein is made up of 100 to 200 of them. That makes the system very complex, because how do you know how it’s going to fold?” said co-lead author Rubul Mout, who completed this research as a UW postdoctoral researcher at the Institute for Protein Design and is now a research fellow at Harvard Medical School and Boston Children’s Hospital. “That’s where the computer comes into play — it does calculations to estimate the most likely three-dimensional shape. And similarly, you can tell it what shape you want and it tells you what sequence you need to build the protein.”

To make a variety of hydrogels with different properties, the team used computational design to control how floppy or rigid the protein building blocks were and how the building blocks organized and connected to create the hydrogel. The researchers also used two different methods to link the building blocks together: One linked them irreversibly and the other allowed the proteins to disconnect and reconnect.

“Irreversibly crosslinked systems are going to be intrinsically more stable, making them better for long-term cell culture and functional tissue engineering,” said DeForest, who is also a faculty member with the UW Molecular Engineering and Sciences Institute and the UW Institute for Stem Cell and Regenerative Medicine. “But the reversibly crosslinked systems are more fluid, which may be better for driving specific protein-protein interactions within living cells.”

To determine if the hydrogels in cells had similar characteristics compared to their extracellular counterparts, the researchers examined whether building blocks within the hydrogels could move around. A stiffer hydrogel would be more likely to trap the proteins in one position compared to a more fluid gel. The mechanical properties of each type of hydrogel remained even when inside a cell.

The team plans to further explore this system, including being able to better control how hydrogels form and localize within cells.

The most crucial part of this project, the researchers said, was the collaboration between protein designers and chemical and biological engineers.

“Our cross-disciplinary collaboration with Cole’s group has been very exciting, and has opened up routes to new classes of biomaterials with a wide range of applications,” said co-senior author David Baker, the director of the Institute for Protein Design.

These Webb images are part of a large, long-standing project, the Physics at High Angular resolution in Nearby GalaxieS (PHANGS) program, which is supported by more than 150 astronomers worldwide. Before Webb took these images, PHANGS was already brimming with data from NASA’s Hubble Space Telescope, the Very Large Telescope’s Multi-Unit Spectroscopic Explorer, and the Atacama Large Millimeter/submillimeter Array, including observations in ultraviolet, visible, and radio light. Webb’s near- and mid-infrared contributions have provided several new puzzle pieces.

“Webb’s new images are extraordinary,” said Janice Lee, a project scientist for strategic initiatives at the Space Telescope Science Institute in Baltimore. “They’re mind-blowing even for researchers who have studied these same galaxies for decades. Bubbles and filaments are resolved down to the smallest scales ever observed, and tell a story about the star formation cycle.”

Excitement rapidly spread throughout the team as the Webb images flooded in. “I feel like our team lives in a constant state of being overwhelmed — in a positive way — by the amount of detail in these images,” added Thomas Williams, a postdoctoral researcher at the University of Oxford in the United Kingdom.

Follow the Spiral Arms

It’s oh-so-easy to be absolutely mesmerized by these spiral galaxies. Follow their clearly defined arms, which are brimming with stars, to their centers, where there may be old star clusters and — sometimes — active supermassive black holes. Only NASA’s James Webb Space Telescope can deliver highly detailed scenes of nearby galaxies in a combination of near- and mid-infrared light.

Webb’s NIRCam (Near-Infrared Camera) captured millions of stars in these images, which sparkle in blue tones. Some stars are spread throughout the spiral arms, but others are clumped tightly together in star clusters.

The telescope’s MIRI (Mid-Infrared Instrument) data highlights glowing dust, showing us where it exists around and between stars. It also spotlights stars that haven’t yet fully formed — they are still encased in the gas and dust that feed their growth, like bright red seeds at the tips of dusty peaks. “These are where we can find the newest, most massive stars in the galaxies,” said Erik Rosolowsky, a professor of physics at the University of Alberta in Edmonton, Canada.

Something else that amazed astronomers? Webb’s images show large, spherical shells in the gas and dust. “These holes may have been created by one or more stars that exploded, carving out giant holes in the interstellar material,” explained Adam Leroy, a professor of astronomy at the Ohio State University in Columbus.

Now, trace the spiral arms to find extended regions of gas that appear red and orange. “These structures tend to follow the same pattern in certain parts of the galaxies,” Rosolowsky added. “We think of these like waves, and their spacing tells us a lot about how a galaxy distributes its gas and dust.” Study of these structures will provide key insights about how galaxies build, maintain, and shut off star formation.

Dive Into the Interior

Evidence shows that galaxies grow from inside out — star formation begins at galaxies’ cores and spreads along their arms, spiraling away from the center. The farther a star is from the galaxy’s core, the more likely it is to be younger. In contrast, the areas near the cores that look lit by a blue spotlight are populations of older stars.

What about galaxy cores that are awash in pink-and-red diffraction spikes? “That’s a clear sign that there may be an active supermassive black hole,” said Eva Schinnerer, a staff scientist at the Max Planck Institute for Astronomy in Heidelberg, Germany. “Or, the star clusters toward the center are so bright that they have saturated that area of the image.”

Research Galore

There are many avenues of research that scientists can begin to pursue with the combined PHANGS data, but the unprecedented number of stars Webb resolved are a great place to begin. “Stars can live for billions or trillions of years,” Leroy said. “By precisely cataloging all types of stars, we can build a more reliable, holistic view of their life cycles.”

In addition to immediately releasing these images, the PHANGS team has also released the largest catalog to date of roughly 100,000 star clusters. “The amount of analysis that can be done with these images is vastly larger than anything our team could possibly handle,” Rosolowsky emphasized. “We’re excited to support the community so all researchers can contribute.”

The James Webb Space Telescope is the world’s premier space science observatory. Webb is solving mysteries in our solar system, looking beyond to distant worlds around other stars, and probing the mysterious structures and origins of our universe and our place in it. Webb is an international program led by NASA with its partners, ESA (European Space Agency) and the Canadian Space Agency.

But the problem is, there’s a huge difference between simply planting a tree and making sure that trees survive and grow over the long-term. And without the necessary ecological understanding or long-term planning and follow-up that goes into successful reforestation projects, tree-planting efforts can end up being useless, wasteful, or even actively harmful to people and the planet.

That’s why restoration ecologists, like UC Santa Cruz Environmental Studies Professor Karen Holl, have been working to educate tree-planting organizations and the public about best practices for successful reforestation. The latest paper by Holl’s research team set out to examine the possible impact of those education efforts.

“One of the common problems is that organizations will just say, ‘We’re going to put this many trees in the ground,’ but the important question is, ‘What comes afterward?’,” Holl said. “There are many documented failures from tree-planting campaigns, so we would hope to see organizations improving their practices and taking on more accountability, including through publicly reporting data.”

To examine these issues, UCSC postdoctoral researcher Spencer Schubert led an analysis of publicly available web content for 99 organizations that coordinate large-scale tree-planting programs around the globe. The research team, which included three undergraduates and one graduate student from UCSC, rated each organization based on how well their public information demonstrated a commitment to best practices.

“We reviewed websites as well as annual reports and other linked documents to really get a broad view of the information that organizations reveal to the public,” Schubert said. “We wanted to focus on how transparent organizations are about their practices, because that’s what allows potential donors or investors to evaluate what these organizations are promising.”

Specifically, researchers rated the organizations against a set of 10 guidelines established by Holl’s prior work. Those guidelines focus on community engagement, addressing underlying causes of deforestation, preventing unintended harms, and committing to long-term management and monitoring of projects. The more specific an organization was about their goals and demonstrating their impacts in these areas, the higher they were rated.

Study shows some progress, but many challenges remain

Researchers compared the findings of their analysis with those of prior research to see how trends in application of best practices have changed over time. One improvement area was community involvement, which critics have often called out as a missing element. The team’s analysis showed that 91% of organizations now recognize community involvement as a key component of successful reforestation, and almost all organizations discussed benefits that their projects would provide to local communities. However only 38% of organizations actually reported data demonstrating how communities benefited from projects.

Meanwhile, 78% of organizations successfully provided information about specific drivers of deforestation in their working regions, and 75% of those discussed how they would address these issues. The study showed some positive progress around monitoring of projects. A 2021 study had previously found that only 18% of organizations mentioned monitoring on their websites, but in the current study, that measure had risen to 70%.

However, only 41% of organizations actually reported data on tree survival rates, and 61% of all organizations failed to specify how long projects would be maintained, monitored, or financed. Only 10% of organizations mentioned required commitments to their projects beyond 10 years. And only 19% discussed any potential negative consequences of tree planting, although those that did also presented strategies to avoid those issues.

“Overall, there are still many gaps in the details and data that we’re seeing,” Schubert said. “That and the general lack of clarity about long-term management, financing, and protection for these projects raises some serious concerns. This doesn’t necessarily mean that reforestation is not being successful, but there is a lot of uncertainty about whether these emerging global tree growing efforts will achieve their desired long-term benefits.”

Holl said she did find it heartening that some organizations are clearly beginning to pay more attention to recommendations from the scientific community, and she hopes that trend will continue.

“Things are moving in the right direction with some of these organizations,” Holl said. “The next step they’ll need to take is to go beyond generalities and be more specific about how they’re going to implement best practices, including making longer term commitments and focusing on data collection to back up what they’re saying they’re going to do.”

By deepening their focus on improving practices, tree-planting organizations and their supporters will have the best possible chance of achieving positive impact and avoiding unintended consequences.