One of the 10 most forest-rich countries in the world, about 80.9 million hectares of trees cover India — about 25% of the nation — but this is a significant decline from years past. Between the 1890s and the 1990s, a combination of rapid economic development and overexploitation of local resources led to India losing nearly 80% of its native forest area. Now, as India’s forests still continue to disappear, researchers are focused on helping preserve what remains.

“Our work was done in an effort to help India’s government and industries improve the country’s attempts at forest sustainability,” said Ying Zuo, lead author of the project and a graduate student in earth sciences at The Ohio State University.

The land use monitoring system was trained using data provided by Norway’s International Climate and Forests Initiative (NICFI), an enterprise of the Norwegian government that aims to reduce the destruction of tropical forests, in part by providing high-resolution images of the world’s tropics. The product is generated using images from PlanetScope, a constellation of satellites that takes daily images of the entire globe.

By combining the NICFI products’ data with a global land cover map produced by Tsinghua University, their deep learning model was able to acquire a more detailed type of base map of the area.

“In an effort to combine two datasets into the same system, we resampled them into the same spatial resolution and aligned each pixel to create an image-labeled paired training dataset,” said Zuo. “The process helps us to assimilate the two datasets so they can be used to train our deep learning model.” This essentially merges thousands of small pictures into one larger base map.

After training their deep learning model on these new satellite images, the team was able to process 10 base maps of the area, ranging from January to October 2022.

The research poster was presented last week at the annual meeting of the American Geophysical Union. During her presentation, Zuo said that using these maps, the team was able to detect seasonal shifts across India, such as changes to barren land, how crop land was affected by monsoons during the rainy season, and the distribution of forests in mountainous regions.

One conclusion from the study was that it is vital for ecologists to more closely study the seasonal impact of monsoons on India’s forest cover. Understanding these seasonal changes can help scientists understand the effects of climate change on forests.

“As the average temperature of our Earth increases, natural hazards will become a lot more frequent, so having these maps at our disposal benefits everyone’s understanding of how this problem affects life on Earth,” she said.

Additionally, if the team can expand the timespan of these base maps over several years instead of several months, Zuo said better results could help scientists study other annual changes around the globe, such as floods.

“The characteristics of local forests and their surrounding habitats might likely be different in other regions,” said Zuo. “But with the help of more detailed datasets, our work could easily be used in areas of the world where detecting and alerting the public to forest degradation and its side effects need to become a priority.”

Co-authors of the poster include C.K Shum, Rongjun Qin, Yuanyuan Jia, Guixiang Zhang and Shengxi Gui, all researchers at Ohio State. This work was supported by the USAID Forest Sustainability Project.

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Materials provided by Ohio State University. Original written by Tatyana Woodall. Note: Content may be edited for style and length.

The use of disposable plasticized medical gowns — both conventional and biodegradable — has surged since the onset of the COVID-19 pandemic. Landfills now brim with them.

Because the biodegradable version decomposes faster than conventional gowns, popular wisdom held that it offers a greener option by less space use and chronic emissions in landfills.

That wisdom may be wrong.

“There’s no magic bullet to this problem,” said Fengqi You, professor in energy systems engineering at Cornell University.

“Plasticized conventional medical gowns take many years to break down and the biodegradable gowns degrade much faster, but they produce gas emissions faster like added methane and carbon dioxide than regular ones in a landfill,” said You, who is a senior faculty fellow in the Cornell Atkinson Center for Sustainability. “Maybe the conventional gowns is not so bad.”

According to this research led by Cornell doctoral student Xiang Zhao, biodegradable gown production poses an additional 11% higher ecotoxicity rate than conventional alternatives.

Adopting landfill gas capture and utilization processes in biodegradable gown sanitary landfills can reduce 9.79% of greenhouse emissions, life-cycle landfill use by nearly 49%, and save at least 10% fossil resources by employing onsite power co-generation, the researchers found.

Conventional gowns are environmentally and socially sustainable because they can pose 14% less toxicity to humans, cause 10% fewer greenhouse gas emissions, and are nearly 10% less toxic to freshwater when compared to biodegradable gowns in landfills with extra gas emissions.

Improving the gas capture efficiency above 85% can make biodegradable gowns more environmentally sustainable than conventional gowns.

“It’s nice to break down the plastic into smaller things,” Zhao said. “But those small things eventually decompose into gas and if we don’t capture them, they become greenhouse gases that go into the air.”

Funding for this research was provided by the Cornell Center for Materials Research (CCMR) with funding from the NSF and New York State Empire State Development’s Division of Science, Technology, and Innovation.

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Materials provided by Cornell University. Original written by Blaine Friedlander, courtesy of the Cornell Chronicle. Note: Content may be edited for style and length.

No matter how egotistical, power hungry or greedy the person is, many of us are still attracted to their dark side — in part because we suspect some may have a redeeming quality. In fact, according to a new University of Michigan study, both adults and children more often reported that villains were inwardly good than that heroes were inwardly bad.

“In other words, people believe there is a mismatch between a villain’s outward behaviors and their inner, true self, and this is a bigger gap for villains than for heroes,” said Valerie Umscheid, U-M psychology doctoral student and the study’s lead author.

Inside, villains are a little less evil than they outwardly seem while heroes are fully good guys inside and out.

Umscheid and colleagues conducted three studies with 434 children (ages 4-12) and 277 adults to determine how individuals make sense of antisocial acts committed by evil-doers. They focused on participants’ judgments of both familiar and novel fictional villains and heroes, such as Disney’s Ursula from “The Little Mermaid” and Pixar’s Woody from “Toy Story.”

Study 1 established that children viewed villains’ actions and emotions as overwhelmingly negative. This suggests that children’s well-documented tendency to judge people as good does not prevent their appreciation of extreme forms of villainy.

Studies 2 and 3 assessed children’s and adults’ beliefs regarding heroes’ and villains’ moral character and true selves, using an array of converging evidence, including how a character felt inside, whether a character’s actions reflected their true self and whether a character’s true self could change over time.

Across these measures, the research indicated that both children and adults consistently evaluated villains’ true selves to be overwhelmingly evil and much more negative than heroes’. At the same time, researchers also detected an asymmetry in the judgments, wherein villains were more likely than heroes to have a true self that differed from their outward behavior.

Both children and adults believed characters like Ursula had some inner goodness, despite the bad/immoral actions they regularly engage in, Umscheid said.

The study, published in Cognition, was co-authored by Craig Smith, senior associate librarian, University Library; Felix Warneken and Susan Gelman, both U-M professors of psychology; and Henry Wellman, U-M professor emeritus of psychology.

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Materials provided by University of Michigan. Note: Content may be edited for style and length.