tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-28312785731036623752024-03-13T09:29:34.612-07:00The human reefAriel Levi Simonshttp://www.blogger.com/profile/10736046165375267668noreply@blogger.comBlogger16125tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-2831278573103662375.post-49957648629355464772019-10-29T11:00:00.001-07:002019-10-29T11:00:14.560-07:00Where do species show up together and why it may matter.<div style="background-color: white; border: 0px; box-sizing: border-box; color: #444444; font-family: "Open Sans", serif; font-size: 15px; font-stretch: inherit; font-variant-east-asian: inherit; font-variant-numeric: inherit; line-height: 1.6; margin-bottom: 15px; outline: 0px; padding: 0px; vertical-align: baseline;">
As part of my graduate research I’ve been building some new tools to try and determine how healthy watersheds are using patterns of diversity across their constituent streams. The results, <a href="https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/full/10.1002/ece3.5751" style="border: 0px; box-sizing: border-box; color: #efa537; font-family: inherit; font-stretch: inherit; font-style: inherit; font-variant: inherit; font-weight: inherit; line-height: inherit; margin: 0px; outline: 0px; padding: 0px; text-decoration-line: none; vertical-align: baseline;">which were just published in Ecology and Evolution</a>, suggest the following:</div>
<ol style="background-color: white; border: 0px; box-sizing: border-box; color: #444444; font-family: "Open Sans", serif; font-size: 16px; font-stretch: inherit; font-variant-east-asian: inherit; font-variant-numeric: inherit; line-height: inherit; list-style-image: initial; list-style-position: initial; margin: 0px 0px 30px; outline: 0px; padding: 0px 0px 0px 35px; vertical-align: baseline;">
<li style="border: 0px; box-sizing: border-box; font-family: inherit; font-stretch: inherit; font-style: inherit; font-variant: inherit; font-weight: inherit; line-height: 1.3; margin: 0px; outline: 0px; padding: 0px; vertical-align: baseline;">A significant portion of the health of watersheds can be explained just from how likely and frequently different species invertebrates (e.g. snails, insects, etc.) will be found at the same location in a stream.</li>
<li style="border: 0px; box-sizing: border-box; font-family: inherit; font-stretch: inherit; font-style: inherit; font-variant: inherit; font-weight: inherit; line-height: 1.3; margin: 0px; outline: 0px; padding: 0px; vertical-align: baseline;">These patterns of co-occurrence are useful measures of watershed health, even if you don’t know the particular identities of the species involved.</li>
</ol>
<div style="background-color: white; border: 0px; box-sizing: border-box; color: #444444; font-family: "Open Sans", serif; font-size: 15px; font-stretch: inherit; font-variant-east-asian: inherit; font-variant-numeric: inherit; line-height: 1.6; margin-bottom: 15px; outline: 0px; padding: 0px; vertical-align: baseline;">
Without going too far into the math, this is the ecological equivalent of saying something about the social conditions of cities just from looking at the structure of their Facebook social graphs. The implication of all of this is that we may be able to start assessing the health of other types of ecological communities just from these patterns of co-occurrence between species, rather than know the particular identities of the species involved.</div>
Ariel Levi Simonshttp://www.blogger.com/profile/10736046165375267668noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-2831278573103662375.post-181814620344041522019-05-05T19:53:00.003-07:002019-05-05T19:53:59.975-07:00Using alpha, beta, and zeta diversity in describing the health of stream‐based benthic macroinvertebrate communitiesHot off the servers, my colleagues and I have recently <a href="https://esajournals.onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/full/10.1002/eap.1896">published a paper</a> on the use of diversity patterns of communities invertebrates (snails, insects, etc.) in various streams in assessing the health of entire watersheds.<br />
<br />
Here's the quick version of what we found:<br />
<br />
<ol>
<li>Streams which are downstream of areas where more of the land is dedicated to human activity tend to have fewer unique species.</li>
<li>At a larger geographic scale, in our case a regional watershed, higher upstream land use was also associated with each local stream community becoming less similar to one another in terms of the species present. This could be called an Anna Karenina principle: every community declines in its own unique way.</li>
<li>Using <a href="https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/25325751" target="_blank">zeta diversity</a>, a more general framework for assessing changes in diversity across multiple communities, we were able to construct a well-correlated proxy for the <a href="https://www.waterboards.ca.gov/water_issues/programs/swamp/bioassessment/docs/csci_tech_memo.pdf" target="_blank">California Stream Condition Index</a>, a measure of stream community health.</li>
</ol>
<div>
Any questions on our research? Please contact me at levisimons@gmail.com</div>
Ariel Levi Simonshttp://www.blogger.com/profile/10736046165375267668noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-2831278573103662375.post-46571463422685081232019-04-28T15:30:00.001-07:002019-04-28T15:31:57.721-07:00The shining coast: An ecological survey of light pollution in southern CaliforniaHumans, and some of their predecessors, have been pushing back against the night for <a href="http://www.pnas.org/content/108/13/5209">hundreds of millenia</a>. Up until the late 19th century this was confined to some form of fire. Once we figured out how to generate electricity though things really began to take off in terms of lighting up the night sky, and quick.<br />
<img alt="" class="aligncenter size-medium wp-image-10864" height="381" src="https://blog.crashspace.org/wp-content/uploads/2018/10/lightPollutionGrowthLarge-550x381.jpg" width="550" /><br />
<br />
Originally the only group of people who voiced much of any complaints about this trend were astronomers. As cities grew, and illumination technology improved in both brightness and efficiency, astronomers were forced to retreat farther and farther away from any human habitation in order to see much of anything besides the Moon.<br />
<br />
It turns out the astronomers weren't the only ones picking up and moving away from the glow of human activity. In recent decades ecologists have begun to piece together a picture of the role of light in dictating how species <a href="https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/how-and-why-do-fireflies/">communicate</a>, <a href="http://rstb.royalsocietypublishing.org/content/370/1667/20140131">avoid being eaten</a>, and <a href="https://www.coastalbiology.org/incoming/2014/7/16/the-moon-and-sea-turtles">find their way</a>. When humans started to flood large parts of the planet with artificial light we were accidentally running a planetary-scale experiment. How is all of this light affecting ecosystems in and around human settlements? Are species migrating away from humans to cope, are some attracted to all of the light, and are some even adapting? These are questions I'm hoping to address with colleagues at the University of Southern California over the next few years as we map out light pollution along the coasts of southern California.<br />
<br />
Why not just used satellite photos to do all of this? While we're using satellite images of southern California at night are readily available the data they collect on light pollution only gets what gets transmitted straight up through the sky from the surface. What you won't get from those famous photos of Earth at night is an idea of how the whole hemisphere of the sky will glow looking up from the ground, which is an issue far more important to all of us critters moving about on the surface.<br />
<br />
However getting all of those photos of the sky gets to be a labor intensive process, even with an army of graduate students. So what we're doing is imaging the night sky at approximately 500 locations along the coast from southern Orange to northern Ventura counties, combining those measurements with satellite-based measurements of brightness and cloud cover, and building a model to predict what the night sky should look like along the coast using just satellite-based measurements. Of course this means we still need to collect those 500 or so images, but that is a much easier task than 10,000.<br />
<br />
Since June of 2018 I, along with our team at USC and some awesome high school students at the LA Zoo Science Magnet, have been imaging the night sky along the coast. We should be wrapping up our photography in February 2019, but if you're interested in coming along I will be messaging the CRASH Space mailing list asking for temporary members of my science entourage.
In case you are interested on where we have taken data, and where we need to do, please check out the map below. The gray-scale points are measurements of the level of light pollution we've actually taken, while the rainbow-scale points are the locations of all of the points we'll eventually image.
<iframe height="412" src="https://www.google.com/maps/d/u/0/embed?mid=1jnMUMHqCREMmd6AJLayT8vupiax29e7L" width="550"></iframe><br />
<br />
[Original published <a href="https://blog.crashspace.org/2018/10/the-shining-coast-an-ecological-survey-of-light-pollution-in-southern-california/" target="_blank">here</a> on October 19th 2018]Ariel Levi Simonshttp://www.blogger.com/profile/10736046165375267668noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-2831278573103662375.post-4450863853947985732019-04-28T15:19:00.001-07:002019-04-28T15:22:14.686-07:00The oyster gut microbiome and you.<img height="300" src="https://blog.crashspace.org/wp-content/uploads/2018/05/oysters1.jpg" width="400" /><br />
Science is about humanity's search for the answers to fundamental questions ranging from 'Why is the speed of light the same for all observers' to 'Can I eat that?'.
Two years into my graduate school career I now feel secure in knowing that I helped to contribute my little part to our collective understanding of things eating other things, as well as why you should not think too hard when eating oysters.
My part of all this is a just-published paper with the snappy title "<a href="https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/full/10.1111/1751-7915.13277">High turnover of faecal microbiome from algal feedstock experimental manipulations in the Pacific oyster (Crassostrea gigas)</a>". If you don't feel like reading the whole thing here's the tldr;
<br />
<ol>
<li>If you change the diet of an oyster its gut microbiome will change quickly, on the time scale of a week or so.</li>
<li>Different oysters will respond to changes in diet in very similar ways, at least with what is in their gut microbiome.</li>
<li>This is of relevance as it implies that if any probiotics are developed for improving oyster crops in aquaculture then they can be quickly an uniformly incorporated into multiple oyster gut microbiomes.</li>
</ol>
Actually, I would recommend cooking oysters.<br />
[Original published <a href="https://blog.crashspace.org/2018/05/the-oyster-gut-microbiome-and-you/" target="_blank">here</a> on May 11th 2018]Ariel Levi Simonshttp://www.blogger.com/profile/10736046165375267668noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-2831278573103662375.post-20202140823711966222017-02-26T08:38:00.002-08:002017-02-26T08:38:07.138-08:00Oyster pseudofeces and you.Oysters poop. This fact is one of the pillars upon which I expect to eventually rest my thesis, the gold star sticker of academic glory. In sifting through oyster feces my plan is to get a better idea of the type of microorganisms which live in their gut, the individual oyster gut microbiome, which has a good chance of being associated with the health of farmed shellfish.<br />
<br />
Once a week I head out the lab on the island, collect oyster feces, extract DNA, and run through a genetic sequencer to get a snapshot of these microbiomes. Sound easy enough right? I've got my <a href="https://mobio.com/products/dna-isolation/fecal-microbiome/powerfecalr-dna-isolation-kit.html" target="_blank">MoBio PowerFecal DNA kit</a> and everything.<br />
<br />
In science one always starts with a simple enough question, such as 'I tend to see A and B at the same time or place' (correlation), or for the more ambitious there is also the variant of 'I tend to see B given A' (causation). However, since nature abhors a vacuum, and a vacuum containing nothing is the height (depth?) of simplicity, then it can be reasoned that nature abhors simplicity. These complications, like infernal <a href="http://www.polaris.iastate.edu/EveningStar/Unit2/unit2_sub1.htm" target="_blank">epicycles</a>, will quickly work their way into any supposedly simple scientific project. In my case it turns out oyster poop is not always oyster poop.<br />
<br />
This is one of those facts I could have probably gone to the grave without knowing. It is one of those complications which comes up when you're at least three decades into life, having made peace with being unemployable, and begin reading '<a href="http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0065288108604940" target="_blank">Scatalogical Studies of the Bivalvia (Mollusca)</a>'. It turns out that shellfish, such as oysters, have the ability to detect which bits of crud they suck in from the sea are digestible and which are not.<br />
<br />
How they do this without a brain is not entirely understood, but the filters they use to ingest food can also sense if what they've drawn in is a piece of sand or a type of algae they can't break down. At this point the oyster covers all of the indigestible bits of marine flotsam in mucous and expels the mass as something called pseudofeces (Diagram below).<br />
<table align="center" cellpadding="0" cellspacing="0" class="tr-caption-container" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto; text-align: center;"><tbody>
<tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="http://www.asnailsodyssey.com/IMAGES/OYSTER/Barnard1974Fig3.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><img border="0" src="http://www.asnailsodyssey.com/IMAGES/OYSTER/Barnard1974Fig3.jpg" height="186" width="320" /></a></td></tr>
<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;">Image courtesy of A Snail's Odyssey.</td></tr>
</tbody></table>
<br />
The problem for the sad marine biologist is then trying to sort this pseudofeces out from the feces. It turns out this can be using the following procedure:<br />
1. Frown. Make sure enough people in your lab see you doing this.<br />
2. Ask someone on Twitter how to tell the difference between feces and psedofeces.<br />
3. Get an answer. Wow, Twitter, really? I thought people only used it to harass each other over gender dynamics in video games.<br />
4. Get a microscope and look at the oyster secretion under about 10x magnification. If you can still see intact cells of algae then its pseudofeces. Feces under a microscope pretty much looks like feces, so that's reassuring.<br />
5. Freeze the real feces for all of the gene sequencing later on.<br />
<br />
Well, now I've got this part of my project down.<br />
<br />
Thanks goes out to <a href="https://twitter.com/carinadslr/status/541976158968229890" target="_blank">Carina M. Gsottbauer</a> for helping resolve the pseudofeces versus feces issue.Ariel Levi Simonshttp://www.blogger.com/profile/10736046165375267668noreply@blogger.com1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-2831278573103662375.post-84477178444266467852017-02-22T17:38:00.000-08:002017-02-24T06:01:24.761-08:00Everyone poops, even in science.Cities are pretty great inventions. They're places where we can conveniently find a new type of burrito every day for a month, avoid eye contact on the bus while staring intently at our phones, and have important conversation in corner cafes (I hope everyone here knows I'm working on my new screenplay!). What then does it take for a city to exist? A modern city certainly needs tons of robust materials such as concrete, along with pipes and wires to keep everything from natural gas to cell signals work. However humans have been try their hand at the urban game for roughly <a href="http://www.pnas.org/content/109/14/E778" target="_blank">six millenia</a>, long before most of what we would consider key infrastructure.<br />
<br />
What cities need, now and forever, is large-scale food production. That was true for Angor Wat and Chichen Itza, and remains so for London and Mumbai. You can't hunt and gather your way to Manhattan, and a modern city is just as reliant upon the collective stomachs of its inhabitants as any of its ancient counterparts.<br />
<br />
The most recent projections of human population growth put global population at <a href="http://www.un.org/en/development/desa/news/population/2015-report.html" target="_blank">near 10 billion</a> by mid-century. While the total population of Earth is not expected to grow beyond this point there is the expectation of an <a href="http://www.who.int/nutrition/topics/3_foodconsumption/en/index4.html" target="_blank">increase in the demand</a> for food beyond basic grains and towards foods, such as meat, which provide a much higher density of protein and fat. While it appears that we will avoid any sort of runaway population growth then we should expect agricultural demand to grow throughout this century long after any peak in human population.<br />
<br />
Where then to get this food? <a href="http://news.nationalgeographic.com/news/2005/12/1209_051209_crops_map.html" target="_blank">Close to half</a> of the planet's land is currently dedicated, in one way or another, to the production of food for human beings. While more intensive cultivation techniques, whether through changes in soil management and genetic modification, are likely to be implemented over the coming century there is a growing effort to expand our collective efforts and cultivate the sea.<br />
<br />
Now aquaculture is not new. Humans have practiced <a href="https://www.google.com/webhp?sourceid=chrome-instant&ion=1&espv=2&ie=UTF-8#q=hawaiian+fish+ponds" target="_blank">various forms</a> of it for centuries. What is new is, through a combination of the decimation of wild stocks and the expansion of cultivation in marine systems, that we have <a href="http://www.nmfs.noaa.gov/aquaculture/faqs/faq_aq_101.html" target="_blank">hit parity</a> between cultured and caught seafood. Just as we couldn't hunt or gather our way to Manhattan on land we won't be able to on the sea either. The growing demand for protein, and in particular seafood, necessitates an improvement in our practices for cultivating the sea.<br />
<br />
One such crop is the oyster. In the case of my work it is the <a href="http://www.rimeis.org/species/crassostrea.html" target="_blank">Pacific oyster</a>, the most cultivated species of the oyster family. Oysters lend themselves well to aquaculture. They are sedentary, naturally grow in dense agglomerations, and will feed themselves by continually filtering seawater. While that last part comes in handy it does mean that oyster nutrition is entirely dependent on whatever microorganisms happen to be floating by in their local patch of ocean. This does not mean the oyster is alone in its noble battle to survive off of whatever it strains from the sea, for the gut of the oyster turns out to be its own little niche for various microorganisms to thrive. This community, known as the <a href="http://www.nytimes.com/2013/05/19/magazine/say-hello-to-the-100-trillion-bacteria-that-make-up-your-microbiome.html" target="_blank">gut microbiome</a>, lives in the intestinal track of every oyster and is most likely a significant factor in how well it can digest food.<br />
<br />
I say most likely a significant factor because, while the gut microbiome of some species such as humans have been studied in great detail over the past few years, that of the Pacific oyster has only just begun to be studied. My interest in all of this is to get a better look at what lives in oyster guts because the ability to digest food is directly tied to the ability to incorporate plankton into more delicious oyster meat for humans. To start to tackle my goal of finding if there are certain bacteria, or combinations of bacteria, which can improve oyster growth rates I'm starting with three questions. One, does the diet of an oyster shape the composition of the gut microbiome, that is the relative abundance of all the different bacterial types in there? Two, will two closely related oysters also have gut microbiomes more similar than if they were unrelated? Three, is the growth rate of an oyster predictably influenced by its gut microbiome?<br />
<br />
This spring I'm starting with the first question. If the gut microbiome has any significant connection to digestion then it can be reasoned that different diets will cause different gut microbiomes in the same oyster. This means I've got the glamorous task feeding multiple oysters, in this case fifteen, a controlled diet in individual tanks and then collecting their poop on a weekly basis. The oysters are all in their individual tanks in order to prevent any microbial cross-contamination in the study.<br />
<br />
Wait, come back, this is important.<br />
<br />
Why look at poop? Well, just as everyone has a gut microbiome everyone also poops. It also turns out that collecting feces is a pretty standard method, as far as these endeavors go, of getting a snapshot of the gut microbiome that day. In collecting oyster poop I can then, with the help of a <a href="http://vlab.amrita.edu/?sub=3&brch=76&sim=1421&cnt=1" target="_blank">particular type of genetic sequencing</a>, get a census of all of the types of microorganisms living in the intestinal track on a regular basis. Every month then the diet changes for ten of the oysters while leaving five as a control. If the diet really has an effect of the gut microbiome the end result should be a stable gut microbiome for the five control oysters and a changing one for the ten experimental ones.<br />
<br />
It turns out that you may one day, by taking a good look at oyster poop, that you may get more oysters for you buck.<br />
<br />
Oh, and in case you're wondering, the ones you do eat have been eating at restaurants have been <a href="http://extension.oregonstate.edu/news/release/2013/03/osu-makes-oysters-safer-eat-improved-purification-method" target="_blank">depurated</a>. This is a fancy word to work into your next conversation meaning 'pooped empty'.<br />
<br />
<br />Ariel Levi Simonshttp://www.blogger.com/profile/10736046165375267668noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-2831278573103662375.post-5976132443458133992016-06-09T14:53:00.003-07:002016-06-09T14:53:40.680-07:00The Pangea of Commerce Part 2: Is it alive?I've <a href="http://humanreef.blogspot.com/2016/06/the-pangea-of-commerce-part-1-what.html" target="_blank">recently begun</a> putting together the pieces of what will be my thesis project as a graduate student in marine and environmental biology over at USC. In this project I will be testing the idea that the networks formed by ocean shipping traffic will have a measurable impact on the biodiversity in the waters in and around the ports in question. My hypothesis is that the similarity in the composition marine microbial communities, that is the type and relative abundance of species, between two ports will track the rise and fall of shipping traffic between them. My prediction then is that a rise in shipping between two port, say Los Angeles and San Diego, will cause the microbial communities in both ports to look more similar than before.<br />
<br />
Seems straightforward enough, at least given modern <a href="http://www.marinetraffic.com/" target="_blank">ship tracking</a> and <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ribosomal_DNA" target="_blank">genomic sequencing</a>, but there are a number of complications which are going to arise in getting meaning out of this data. One such complication is that sequencing the genomes of all the microbes in a sample of water will give you a census of microbial populations, but it will not tell you how active any of the species may be, or even if they're alive at the time of sampling.<br />
<br />
Over the years a number of methods have been developed to try and measure the metabolic activity of microorganisms. <a href="http://aem.asm.org/content/77/22/8009.full" target="_blank">One method</a> involves feeding sugars, with altered isotopic ratios, to a sample of microbes and measuring how quickly the altered sugars are incorporated into organic material of the microbes. This can involve shifting the amount of carbon-12 to carbon-13, or oxygen-18 to oxygen-16. Once a group of microbes has been feeding on foods with different isotopic ratios a microbiologist can send a sample of their biological material through a <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mass_spectrometry" target="_blank">mass spectrometer</a> and see how much of the altered carbon, oxygen, etc has been incorporated into the microbes' body masses. This gives a good measure of how quickly the microbes are eating in the first place. This method has been useful in studying microbes which can be readily cultured in the lab, however many of the species I will be looking at in ocean water are not readily cultured. Also, I will probably be studying dozens, if not hundreds, of total samples. This method will probably not scale very well on account of these issues.<br />
<br />
Is there a method for measuring the activity levels of a large number of microbial samples, even when a number of the species involved cannot be readily cultured in the lab? It turns out that there is, sort of.<br />
<br />
In <a href="http://humanreef.blogspot.com/2016/06/the-pangea-of-commerce-part-1-what.html" target="_blank">part 1</a> I mentioned the use of sequencing ribosomal genes as as method for determining the relative populations of microbes in a sample of water. These genes are coded in DNA, which is the molecule that stores the raw instructional information for cells. In this case the genes which code for an organisms ribosomes are known as ribosomal DNA (rDNA). The way this information is then executed in a cell is through the use of <a href="http://www.rnasociety.org/about/what-is-rna/" target="_blank">RNA</a>. RNA is used to make copies of particular genes, which are written in DNA as <a href="http://www.nature.com/scitable/definition/mrna-messenger-rna-160" target="_blank">messenger RNA (mRNA)</a> with the assistance of <a href="http://www.nature.com/scitable/definition/trna-transfer-rna-256" target="_blank">transfer RNA (tRNA)</a> . This mRNA then works with a series of structures in the cell known as ribosomes, which are composed of ribosomal RNA (rRNA), to synthesize the proteins which perform all of the functions of life. This process results in large variations in the amount of rRNA versus the corresponding rDNA.<br />
<br />
As protein synthesis is associated with the activity of a cell it was then assumed that measuring the amount of rRNA versus rDNA would give a straightforward picture of how active a population of cells were. If this were the case I could add some very precise activity data on top of microbial census. Unfortunately <a href="http://www.nature.com/ismej/journal/v7/n11/full/ismej2013102a.html" target="_blank">it turns out that there is no set relationship between the level of rRNA versus rDNA and cell activity</a>. The rRNA to rDNA ratio varies between species, and doesn't even scale linearly with metabolic activity and cell division rates. It also turns out that cells can have a high rRNA to rDNA ratio while they are currently in a state of low metabolic activity as a way for a cell to prepare for times of high metabolism, even if they are currently in a dormant period.<br />
<br />
What does this mean? The rRNA to rDNA ratio does increase during times of high growth and metabolism as cells are busy synthesizing proteins. However the rate is non-linear and varies from species to species. In addition to that there is a temporal uncertainty as it cannot be determined from one measurement if the cells are currently active or preparing for being active. Will it then be worth sequencing the rRNA component of all of these cells along with their rDNA component? Yes, if only because I plan to look at samples from the same ports on a repeated basis. My hope is that repeated measurements will help to reduce some of the uncertainty in time, especially in differentiating currently active from potentially active cells. At the very least this data may turn out to be quite useful for some aspect of my project yet unconsidered.<br />
<br />
How then to determine the frequency and duration of measuring these populations? I will try and address this matter in part 3.<br />
<br />
<table align="center" cellpadding="0" cellspacing="0" class="tr-caption-container" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto; text-align: center;"><tbody>
<tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="http://2.bp.blogspot.com/-a1idohPVPFM/UNQ9KqrQHoI/AAAAAAAAASY/rvpAqwKn_ic/s1600/figure+1.png" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><img border="0" src="http://2.bp.blogspot.com/-a1idohPVPFM/UNQ9KqrQHoI/AAAAAAAAASY/rvpAqwKn_ic/s1600/figure+1.png" height="262" width="320" /></a></td></tr>
<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;">The process of mRNA, tRNA, and rRNA synthesizing proteins.</td></tr>
</tbody></table>
<br />Ariel Levi Simonshttp://www.blogger.com/profile/10736046165375267668noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-2831278573103662375.post-34641604883411494452016-06-02T19:25:00.002-07:002016-06-02T19:26:47.876-07:00The Pangea of Commerce Part 1: What lives here?What is the impact of trade on biodiversity?<br />
<br />
Over the past few years <a href="http://humanreef.blogspot.com/2015/05/the-ecology-of-connected-world.html" target="_blank">I've become interested in this question</a>. I've become interested enough that I've decided to pursue this topic as a graduate student in the Marine and Environmental Biology department at the University of Southern California. I've decided to start writing out the process of putting this project together, as well as everything involved in carrying it out, for two reasons. One, if I try and explain what I'm working on I should hopefully get a better idea of what it is I'm doing in the first place. Two, I'm interested in this topic I just like to share my work on it.<br />
<br />
Now the impact of trade on biodiversity is a really broad topic. In the interest of getting a thesis completed at some point in my lifetime I'm going to need to define some terms and narrow the scope of what I want to look for.<br />
<br />
First, how to define trade? Humans have been exchanging goods and services, often with some medium of exchange like cash, for millenia. Since current data is often the easiest to collect I'm going to go with studying the most common current form of trade, cargo ships. At this point in human history about <a href="http://www.gfptt.org/node/67" target="_blank">80% of the volume of global trade is carried on ships</a>, and it turns out the bulk of those ships can be tracked in near real time using <a href="http://www.marinetraffic.com/" target="_blank">various databases</a>.<br />
<br />
Now how to define biodiversity? There are a <a href="http://www.zoology.ubc.ca/~krebs/downloads/krebs_chapter_12_2014.pdf" target="_blank">number of metrics used in ecology to quantify biodiversity</a>, but does it make sense to look at the biodiversity of every organism at every location. Again, I have the issue of a finite lifespan so I will need to narrow the scope here a few more times. If I'm focusing on marine shipping traffic I can assume that the impact on biodiversity should be greatest, geographically speaking, where there is the highest level of shipping traffic. This then means I should be focusing in on the marine environment immediately in and around ports. As for what type of organisms to focus on, given what can be done in a few years, I would want to focus on what will respond the fastest to changes in the environment. In marine environments, or really any environment, this means focusing on single-celled organisms. Marine microbes have <a href="http://www.annualreviews.org/doi/abs/10.1146/annurev-marine-122414-033938?journalCode=marine" target="_blank">generation times on the order of a day</a>. This means one can study populations of microbes in harbor waters over the course of a few years and expect to go through about 1000 generations of microorganisms, enough time to see the evolution of individual species and shifts in the populations of species.<br />
<br />
Now microorganisms, by definition, are incredibly small. If I'm going to measure their diversity in a port's waters how would I go about even telling what was there in the first place? After all humans have a hard enough time counting other humans, and we have the benefit of being visible. Thankfully there have been a few key developments in biology over the past few decades that make this a very manageable problem. The first is <a href="http://learn.genetics.utah.edu/content/labs/pcr/" target="_blank">PCR</a>, which allows for a large number of copies of a particular strand of DNA to made in order for there to be enough genetic material to study. The second is <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/16S_ribosomal_RNA" target="_blank">16S</a> and <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/18S_ribosomal_RNA" target="_blank">18S</a> rDNA sequencing.<br />
<br />
Both 16S and and 18S are short sequences of genes which are involved in coding for ribosomes, structures which help convert the instructions from DNA into proteins. While 16S genes are found in prokaryotic cells, those which lack a nucleus, and 18S genes are found in eukaryotic cells, those with a nucleus, all cells have to synthesize proteins. This means that anything you scoop out of the sea will have some version of these genes. What is even more useful to biologists is that every species has a unique version of these genes, which means you can identify every species found in a sample of seawater. A number of research groups have been doing this in recent years, uploading their data to various public servers such as <a href="http://www.arb-silva.de/" target="_blank">Silva</a>. Performing such sequencing on a sample also gives the relative levels of each unique 16S / 18S gene sequence, which in turn gives both the relative number of each species found in that particular volume of water.<br />
<br />
Now I've started to get a handle on how to get a microbial census in a port's water, which in turn is an indicator of the biodiversity in that region.<br />
<br />
Next up, how to tell if what you're sequencing is living it up or <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=npjOSLCR2hE" target="_blank">pining for the fjords</a>.<br />
<br />
<table align="center" cellpadding="0" cellspacing="0" class="tr-caption-container" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto; text-align: center;"><tbody>
<tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="http://factfile.org/wp-content/uploads/2015/03/Pic-of-Archaea.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><img border="0" src="http://factfile.org/wp-content/uploads/2015/03/Pic-of-Archaea.jpg" height="186" width="320" /></a></td></tr>
<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;">Market research suggest that people like pictures.<br />
Please enjoy this image of some charismatic microbes.</td></tr>
</tbody></table>
<br />Ariel Levi Simonshttp://www.blogger.com/profile/10736046165375267668noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-2831278573103662375.post-84498523307242409532016-02-07T13:30:00.003-08:002016-02-07T13:30:24.977-08:00Gaia: Hedge Fund ManagerConsider the matter of when you'd want to retire. The default age in many rich countries is somewhere between 60 and 70, although the decision usually involves some combination of current and desired future income, pension management, as well as the type of work one is engaged in. Underpinning all of these matters is the more practical, albeit macabre, reality of one's mortality. Retirement in many ways is a modern luxury derived from our ability to push average life spans to 80 years and beyond.<br />
<br />
Would you still want to retire at 65 if you knew you'd live to 100? How would you manage your financial and personal affairs if you had a reasonable expectation of living in good health to 200 years, 500 years, or indefinitely? The prospects for radical life extension aside this is a similar issue, writ large, faced by civilizations.<br />
<br />
How long can a civilization last? Without written records it becomes a matter of inference, but hunter-gatherers can maintain their lifestyle for millenia. As we go up in social complexity and population size this lifespan seems to diminish. Earth is strewn with the monuments of large civilizations, from Angkor Wat to the Mayan city states, where enough people died and/or networks disintegrated that the complexity necessary for maintenance couldn't be kept up.<br />
<br />
Is this the result of some Faustian bargain where the rewards of living in a complex society are traded for that society's longevity? The structure of a hunter-gatherer society may have fewer moving parts than an agricultural or industrial civilization, but this is no resilient idyll; most likely these societies too are vulnerable to shifts in local climate and natural disasters. The main difference probably lies in the relationship between social complexity and the rate of resource extraction.<br />
<br />
All civilizations rely on one form or another of resource extraction. Some of these resources, such iron ore, are often found on privately held land. The extraction of these resources, in theory, are governed by a contract and a larger code of law. However, a large number of the resources our civilization relies upon are extracted from what is considered to be the commons. All too often this then leads to <a href="http://science.sciencemag.org/content/162/3859/1243" target="_blank">the tragedy of the commons</a>, where communally held resources are treated as a free good. In all likelihood this then leads to the unsustainable extraction of resources, leaving the civilization more vulnerable to external shocks.<br />
<br />
Is there a way around this problem? Consider the case of two resources, fish and water.<br />
<br />
Most seafood, despite millenia of agriculture and aquaculture, is still caught in open water. As most open water is treated as a commons its resources are likely to be over-exploited. Those trying to make a living from fishing are then often in a version of the prisoners' dilemma: if you don't catch as much as possible today it can be caught by your rivals tomorrow. As a result we get the collapse of major fisheries, such as the <a href="http://www.sjsu.edu/faculty/watkins/grandbanks.htm" target="_blank">cod fisheries</a> off the coast of eastern Canada. Some attempts have been made to up fish production through fish farming, such as with salmon, but this often leads to a <a href="http://www.annualreviews.org/doi/abs/10.1146/annurev-marine-010814-015646" target="_blank">whole host of issues</a> ranging from effluent and disease stemming from high densities of open water fish. Some seafood species, such as mussels and oysters, naturally live in dense colonies, but will probably not replace overall demand for finned fish such as tuna and cod.<br />
<br />
To overcome the issues then of treating fish as part of the commons why not sell off the commons? Starting in the late 1970s a few fishing markets, such as Iceland's, started allocating the right to shares of a fish catch rather than the right to fish. This system, now known as an <a href="https://www.fraserinstitute.org/sites/default/files/FishorCutBaitIndividualTransferableQuotas.pdf" target="_blank">Individual Transferable Quota</a> (ITQ), would designate an amount of fish which could be sustainably caught in a year and then give ships rights to a fraction of this potential catch. In such a system fishing crews have a greater incentive to manage their catch rate as they can hold a guaranteed right to a fraction of the fish stock. Crews that would overfish in such a system will decrease their potential future earnings as they would cause a drop in the size of the potential catch. As the ITQs themselves have value they are bought and sold, <a href="http://www.fao.org/docrep/005/y2684e/y2684e05.htm" target="_blank">creating a market</a> whose value depends on the sustainable extraction of resources.<br />
<br />
Water is a resource so fundamental to life that it seems inherently wrong to treat it as a commodity to be bought and sold. Unfortunately this sentiment has often led to the treatment of potable water as being unlimited, or at least heavily subsidized. This has been the case with situations as varied as <a href="http://www.ppic.org/main/publication_show.asp?i=1106" target="_blank">groundwater pumping</a> in the central valley of California and the <a href="http://www.economist.com/node/15211690" target="_blank">subsidization of water</a> in China. In many of these cases water is being drawn from reservoirs faster than their replenishment rate; the very definition of unsustainable.<br />
<br />
Australia until recently was similar to most of the world in its treatment of water resources. This status quo though became noticeably unsustainable due to both to Australia's relatively low precipitation, even its relatively verdant east, as well as <a href="http://www.australia.gov.au/about-australia/australian-story/natural-disasters" target="_blank">periods of extreme drought</a>. Given that agriculture, as in the rest of the world, is the <a href="http://www.abs.gov.au/ausstats/abs@.nsf/latestProducts/4610.0Media%20Release12013-14" target="_blank">primary consumer</a> of water these factors would repeatedly threaten the viability of farming in Australia.<br />
<br />
What Australia did in 2007 to cope with these stresses was to set up an agency, the <a href="http://www.mdba.gov.au/about-us" target="_blank">Murray-Darling authority</a>, to oversee the management of the largest watershed in the southeast of the country. Their management technique first involved the determination of what could be sustainably withdrawn from the watershed, then the allocation of shares of this total to the farmers of the Murray-Darling. The farmers own their shares, and have <a href="http://www.npr.org/sections/thesalt/2015/08/19/432885101/in-search-of-salvation-from-drought-california-looks-down-under" target="_blank">the right to buy and sell</a> them in addition to simply withdrawing their annual water right.<br />
<br />
In both cases, with Australian water shares and Icelandic ITQs, a system based on the extraction of resources from a commons was replaced by a system of shares. The shares being a right, but not an obligation, to use a designated fraction of a given resource. The term 'share' is being used deliberately in reference to the idea of shares in financial markets, where a share designates a part ownership in a larger entity. Both of these cases also suggest a way towards a more sustainable management of resources.<br />
<br />
The idea of nature is of the world outside of human control. It is a romantic notion which feels counter to the tools of capitalism. However, just as the development of financial tools such as the <a href="http://www.ushistory.org/us/2b.asp" target="_blank">joint-stock company</a> gave individuals the ability to accumulate wealth through a vested long-term interest it may be in our best long-term interest as a species to define and manage a new share system with our relationship with the rest of nature. Capitalism is not without flaws, but it has allowed for billions of people to move out of material poverty. It should also be noted that the most complex modern systems are as reliant upon the natural world as the builders of Angkor Wat and Chichen Itza were in previous centuries. For the long haul our civilization should scrap the idea of the commons and move towards a system of shares based on sustainable extraction rights. If we really want to last perhaps we should consider Earth as a joint venture. One with, to quote Warren Buffett, a holding period of forever.Ariel Levi Simonshttp://www.blogger.com/profile/10736046165375267668noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-2831278573103662375.post-34469021076473291932015-06-23T09:46:00.001-07:002015-06-23T10:36:50.484-07:00Are food deserts also food monocultures? Part 4: United States case study<a href="https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/thumb/3/3d/New_crops-Chicago_urban_farm.jpg/250px-New_crops-Chicago_urban_farm.jpg" style="clear: left; float: left; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" src="https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/thumb/3/3d/New_crops-Chicago_urban_farm.jpg/250px-New_crops-Chicago_urban_farm.jpg" /></a><br />
<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;">
</div>
Are places with a lower diversity of food venues in a given area more likely to be to be food deserts? This is a question I've been researching (<a href="http://humanreef.blogspot.com/2015/05/are-food-deserts-also-food-monocultures.html">Part 1</a>, <a href="http://humanreef.blogspot.com/2015/05/are-food-deserts-also-food-monocultures_23.html">Part 2</a>, <a href="http://humanreef.blogspot.com/2015/05/are-food-deserts-also-food-monocultures_27.html">Part 3</a>) with different commercial data sets as well as the <a href="http://www.ers.usda.gov/data-products/food-access-research-atlas/go-to-the-atlas.aspx">USDA's map of food deserts</a>.<div>
<br />The original supposition in this model is the analogy between the competition of species in an ecosystem and the competition of food venues in a marketplace. Just as the diversity of species in an ecosystem can be described by the <a href="http://www.tiem.utk.edu/~gross/bioed/bealsmodules/shannonDI.html">Shannon index</a> my second supposition is that the diversity of food venues can be described in an identical way.</div>
<div>
<br />One of the questions I’m interested in addressing is how this local measure of diversity relates to the presence of what the US Department of Agriculture (USDA) denotes as <a href="http://www.ers.usda.gov/data-products/food-access-research-atlas/go-to-the-atlas.aspx">food deserts</a>; an idea which I originally posted <a href="https://medium.com/@levisimons/are-food-deserts-also-food-monocultures-31de780a6db4">here</a>. An area, in this case a <a href="https://www.census.gov/geo/reference/gtc/gtc_ct.html">census tract</a>, can be defined to be a food desert if it falls within the USDA’s definition of low income and one of three different criteria for low access:</div>
<div>
<br />Criterion 1. No access to a grocery store within 1 mile of residence, if in an urban area, or 10 miles if in a rural area. This is the original criteria.<br />Criterion 2. No access to a grocery store within 0.5 miles of residence, if in an urban area, or 10 miles if in a rural area.<br />Criterion 3. No access to a grocery store within 1 mile of residence, if in an urban area, or 20 miles if in a rural area</div>
<div>
<br /></div>
<div>
To help in addressing my original question on the relationship between food venue diversity I was given access to the United States' business database for 2011. This data set contains information on the location and type of every registered business in the state at that time. Off all of the businesses listed I only selected those with <a href="http://www.census.gov/eos/www/naics/">NAICS</a> codes (North American Industry Classification System) which corresponded to food venues (A full list of food venue categories is available on the output data set <a href="https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/1tnq5GJOnJbzuJWUUMpVE8rJ8guvICnPBB8o1lAy8meA/edit#gid=50540107">here</a>.). This includes a number of different food venue categories, such as convenience stores and produce markets. A <a href="https://github.com/LAMakerspce/Economics/blob/master/FoodDiversity3.py">script</a> was then written to do the following analysis:</div>
<div>
<br />1. Count all of the food venues of a specific type for a given area and calculate the Shannon index and the Shannon equitability index. The Shannon index is a raw measure of diversity, but it does not factor in differences in the number of businesses for a given area. The Shannon equitability index adjusts for the number of businesses in a given area by checking how diverse a population is against a theoretical maximum diversity. If this ratio is 0 then the population is a pure monoculture, if it is 1 then every member of the population is unique.</div>
<div>
<br />2. This information was then combined with the most recent food desert data from the USDA so that every census tract would have a food desert score, according to each of the three criteria, as well as the number of categorized food venues, their Shannon index, and Shannon equitability index. Maps of this diversity and equitability data can be found <a href="http://scienceland.wikispaces.com/FoodDiversity">here</a>.</div>
<div>
<br />3. These data sets were then combined to produce the following <a href="https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/1tnq5GJOnJbzuJWUUMpVE8rJ8guvICnPBB8o1lAy8meA/edit?usp=sharing">table</a>. This table shows the average Shannon equitability index for census tract areas denoted, and not denoted, as food deserts according to all three criteria.<br /><br />After combing through thousands of entries what do <a href="https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/1tnq5GJOnJbzuJWUUMpVE8rJ8guvICnPBB8o1lAy8meA/edit#gid=50540107">these results</a> mean? Using both the first and third criteria for food deserts shows very little difference in food venue equitability. This implies that census tracts where city dwellers are within a mile of a grocery store, and people living in rural areas are within twenty miles of a grocery store, live in areas with very similar levels of food venue diversity as to people in areas which fail these access thresholds.<br /><br />Where the difference is notable is when the second criteria for defining a food desert. These results indicate people living in urban areas without access to a grocery story within 0.5 miles of their home, or rural residents within 10 miles, have access to a significantly lower level of food venue diversity. The difference is notable in that food desert census tracts have a Shannon equitability index, on average, only about a quarter of the size for census tracts falling outside of this threshold. This holds true independent of food venue category.<br /><br />This of course leads to a whole host of other questions, such as what happens between 0.5 and 1 mile in food access which is associated with such a dramatic drop in food venue diversity. This analysis also only includes commercial data. It would be interesting to see what role community gardens and food trucks may also play in this type of geospatial anaysis. I believe much more work should be done on this topic, and I welcome feedback and ideas for collaboration. This analysis shows that the whole United States shows the same pattern as California: food deserts may appear to be food monocultures.<br /><br />Questions and comments: levisimons@gmail.com .</div>
Ariel Levi Simonshttp://www.blogger.com/profile/10736046165375267668noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-2831278573103662375.post-73935977935102553972015-05-23T10:10:00.000-07:002015-05-23T10:10:04.407-07:00Are food deserts also food monocultures? Part 3: California case study.<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;">
<a href="https://d262ilb51hltx0.cloudfront.net/max/800/1*RtBZNzS2K_NqBvebxYqnWA.jpeg" imageanchor="1" style="clear: left; float: left; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" height="211" src="https://d262ilb51hltx0.cloudfront.net/max/800/1*RtBZNzS2K_NqBvebxYqnWA.jpeg" width="320" /></a></div>
<div class="graf--p" id="8e38" name="8e38" style="background-color: white; color: rgba(0, 0, 0, 0.952941); font-family: freight-text-pro, Georgia, Cambria, 'Times New Roman', Times, serif; font-size: 22px; letter-spacing: 0.159999996423721px; line-height: 33px; margin-bottom: 30px;">
Over the past six months, starting with <a class="markup--anchor markup--p-anchor" data-href="https://medium.com/@levisimons/are-food-deserts-also-food-monocultures-31de780a6db4" href="https://medium.com/@levisimons/are-food-deserts-also-food-monocultures-31de780a6db4" style="background-color: transparent; background-image: linear-gradient(rgba(0, 0, 0, 0) 50%, rgba(0, 0, 0, 0.6) 50%); background-position: 0px 23px; background-repeat: repeat-x; background-size: 2px 2px; text-decoration: none;">this article</a>, I’ve been interested in the idea of modelling our food infrastructure as an ecosystem. The original supposition in this model is the anology between the competition of species in an ecosystem and the competition of food venues in a marketplace. Just as the diversity of species in an ecosystem can be described by the <a class="markup--anchor markup--p-anchor" data-href="http://www.tiem.utk.edu/~gross/bioed/bealsmodules/shannonDI.html" href="http://www.tiem.utk.edu/~gross/bioed/bealsmodules/shannonDI.html" rel="nofollow" style="background-color: transparent; background-image: linear-gradient(rgba(0, 0, 0, 0) 50%, rgba(0, 0, 0, 0.6) 50%); background-position: 0px 23px; background-repeat: repeat-x; background-size: 2px 2px; text-decoration: none;">Shannon index</a> my second supposition is that the diversity of food venues can be described in an identical way.</div>
<div class="graf--p" id="fb16" name="fb16" style="background-color: white; color: rgba(0, 0, 0, 0.952941); font-family: freight-text-pro, Georgia, Cambria, 'Times New Roman', Times, serif; font-size: 22px; letter-spacing: 0.159999996423721px; line-height: 33px; margin-bottom: 30px;">
One of the questions I’m interested in addressing is how this local measure of diversity relates to the presence of what the US Department of Agriculture (USDA) denotes as <a class="markup--anchor markup--p-anchor" data-href="http://www.ers.usda.gov/data-products/food-access-research-atlas/go-to-the-atlas.aspx" href="http://www.ers.usda.gov/data-products/food-access-research-atlas/go-to-the-atlas.aspx" rel="nofollow" style="background-color: transparent; background-image: linear-gradient(rgba(0, 0, 0, 0) 50%, rgba(0, 0, 0, 0.6) 50%); background-position: 0px 23px; background-repeat: repeat-x; background-size: 2px 2px; text-decoration: none;">food deserts</a>; an idea which I originally posted <a class="markup--anchor markup--p-anchor" data-href="https://medium.com/@levisimons/are-food-deserts-also-food-monocultures-31de780a6db4" href="https://medium.com/@levisimons/are-food-deserts-also-food-monocultures-31de780a6db4" style="background-color: transparent; background-image: linear-gradient(rgba(0, 0, 0, 0) 50%, rgba(0, 0, 0, 0.6) 50%); background-position: 0px 23px; background-repeat: repeat-x; background-size: 2px 2px; text-decoration: none;">here</a>. An area, in this case a <a class="markup--anchor markup--p-anchor" data-href="https://www.census.gov/geo/reference/gtc/gtc_ct.html" href="https://www.census.gov/geo/reference/gtc/gtc_ct.html" rel="nofollow" style="background-color: transparent; background-image: linear-gradient(rgba(0, 0, 0, 0) 50%, rgba(0, 0, 0, 0.6) 50%); background-position: 0px 23px; background-repeat: repeat-x; background-size: 2px 2px; text-decoration: none;">census tract</a>, can be defined to be a food desert if it falls within the USDA’s definition of low income and one of three different criteria for low access:</div>
<ol class="postList" style="background-color: white; color: rgba(0, 0, 0, 0.952941); counter-reset: post 0; font-family: freight-text-pro, Georgia, Cambria, 'Times New Roman', Times, serif; font-size: 22px; letter-spacing: 0.159999996423721px; line-height: 33px; list-style: none none; margin: 0px 0px 30px; padding: 0px;">
<li class="graf--li" id="cd9f" name="cd9f" style="margin-bottom: 12px; margin-left: 30px; padding-top: 2px;">No access to a grocery store within 1 mile of residence, if in an urban area, or 10 miles if in a rural area. This is the original criteria.</li>
<li class="graf--li" id="9890" name="9890" style="margin-bottom: 12px; margin-left: 30px; padding-top: 2px;">No access to a grocery store within 0.5 miles of residence, if in an urban area, or 10 miles if in a rural area.</li>
<li class="graf--li" id="7c2b" name="7c2b" style="margin-bottom: 0px; margin-left: 30px; padding-top: 2px;">No access to a grocery store within 1 mile of residence, if in an urban area, or 20 miles if in a rural area</li>
</ol>
<div class="graf--p" id="81e7" name="81e7" style="background-color: white; color: rgba(0, 0, 0, 0.952941); font-family: freight-text-pro, Georgia, Cambria, 'Times New Roman', Times, serif; font-size: 22px; letter-spacing: 0.159999996423721px; line-height: 33px; margin-bottom: 30px;">
To help in addressing my original question on the relationship between food venue diversity I was given access to California’s business database for 2011. This data set contains information on the location and type of every registered business in the state at that time. Off all of the businesses listed I only selected those with <a class="markup--anchor markup--p-anchor" data-href="http://siccode.com/en/" href="http://siccode.com/en/" rel="nofollow" style="background-color: transparent; background-image: linear-gradient(rgba(0, 0, 0, 0) 50%, rgba(0, 0, 0, 0.6) 50%); background-position: 0px 23px; background-repeat: repeat-x; background-size: 2px 2px; text-decoration: none;">SICS</a> codes (Standard Industrial Classification System) which corresponded to food venues. This includes grocery stores, meat and fish markets, fruit and vegetable markets, candy and nut stores, dairy product stores, eating establishments, and eating establishments which serve alcohol. A <a class="markup--anchor markup--p-anchor" data-href="https://github.com/LAMakerspce/Economics/blob/master/FoodDiversity3.py" href="https://github.com/LAMakerspce/Economics/blob/master/FoodDiversity3.py" rel="nofollow" style="background-color: transparent; background-image: linear-gradient(rgba(0, 0, 0, 0) 50%, rgba(0, 0, 0, 0.6) 50%); background-position: 0px 23px; background-repeat: repeat-x; background-size: 2px 2px; text-decoration: none;">script</a> was then written to do the following analysis:</div>
<ol class="postList" style="background-color: white; color: rgba(0, 0, 0, 0.952941); counter-reset: post 0; font-family: freight-text-pro, Georgia, Cambria, 'Times New Roman', Times, serif; font-size: 22px; letter-spacing: 0.159999996423721px; line-height: 33px; list-style: none none; margin: 0px 0px 30px; padding: 0px;">
<li class="graf--li" id="ed24" name="ed24" style="margin-bottom: 12px; margin-left: 30px; padding-top: 2px;">Count all of the food venues of a specific type for a given area and calculate the Shannon index and the Shannon equitability index. The Shannon index is a raw measure of diversity, but it does not factor in differences in the number of businesses for a given area. The Shannon equitability index adjusts for the number of businesses in a given area by checking how diverse a population is against a theoretical maximum diversity. If this ratio is 0 then the population is a pure monoculture, if it is 1 then every member of the population is unique.</li>
<li class="graf--li" id="fe05" name="fe05" style="margin-bottom: 12px; margin-left: 30px; padding-top: 2px;">This information was then combined with the most recent food desert data from the USDA so that every census tract would have a food desert score, according to each of the three criteria, as well as the number of categorized food venues, their Shannon index, and Shannon equitability index. Maps of this diversity and equitability data can be found <a class="markup--anchor markup--li-anchor" data-href="http://scienceland.wikispaces.com/FoodDiversity" href="http://scienceland.wikispaces.com/FoodDiversity" rel="nofollow" style="background-color: transparent; background-image: linear-gradient(rgba(0, 0, 0, 0) 50%, rgba(0, 0, 0, 0.6) 50%); background-position: 0px 23px; background-repeat: repeat-x; background-size: 2px 2px; text-decoration: none;">here</a>.</li>
<li class="graf--li" id="98a0" name="98a0" style="margin-bottom: 0px; margin-left: 30px; padding-top: 2px;">These data sets were then combined to produce the following <a class="markup--anchor markup--li-anchor" data-href="https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/1tnq5GJOnJbzuJWUUMpVE8rJ8guvICnPBB8o1lAy8meA/edit?usp=sharing" href="https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/1tnq5GJOnJbzuJWUUMpVE8rJ8guvICnPBB8o1lAy8meA/edit?usp=sharing" rel="nofollow" style="background-color: transparent; background-image: linear-gradient(rgba(0, 0, 0, 0) 50%, rgba(0, 0, 0, 0.6) 50%); background-position: 0px 23px; background-repeat: repeat-x; background-size: 2px 2px; text-decoration: none;">table</a>. This table shows the average Shannon equitability index for census tract areas denoted, and not denoted, as food deserts according to all three criteria</li>
</ol>
<div class="graf--p" id="4d40" name="4d40" style="background-color: white; color: rgba(0, 0, 0, 0.952941); font-family: freight-text-pro, Georgia, Cambria, 'Times New Roman', Times, serif; font-size: 22px; letter-spacing: 0.159999996423721px; line-height: 33px; margin-bottom: 30px;">
After combing through thousands of entries what do <a class="markup--anchor markup--p-anchor" data-href="https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/1tnq5GJOnJbzuJWUUMpVE8rJ8guvICnPBB8o1lAy8meA/edit#gid=0" href="https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/1tnq5GJOnJbzuJWUUMpVE8rJ8guvICnPBB8o1lAy8meA/edit#gid=0" rel="nofollow" style="background-color: transparent; background-image: linear-gradient(rgba(0, 0, 0, 0) 50%, rgba(0, 0, 0, 0.6) 50%); background-position: 0px 23px; background-repeat: repeat-x; background-size: 2px 2px; text-decoration: none;">these results</a> mean? Using both the first and third criteria for food deserts shows very little difference in food venue equitability. This implies that census tracts where city dwellers are within a mile of a grocery store, and people living in rural areas are within twenty miles of a grocery store, live in areas with very similar levels of food venue diversity as to people in areas which fail these access thresholds.</div>
<div class="graf--p" id="57a9" name="57a9" style="background-color: white; color: rgba(0, 0, 0, 0.952941); font-family: freight-text-pro, Georgia, Cambria, 'Times New Roman', Times, serif; font-size: 22px; letter-spacing: 0.159999996423721px; line-height: 33px; margin-bottom: 30px;">
Where the difference is notable is when the second criteria for defining a food desert. These results indicate people living in urban areas without access to a grocery story within 0.5 miles of their home, or rural residents within 10 miles, have access to a significantly lower level of food venue diversity. The difference is notable in that food desert census tracts have a Shannon equitability index, on average, only about a quarter of the size for census tracts falling outside of this threshold. This holds true independent of food venue category.</div>
<div class="graf--p" id="955b" name="955b" style="background-color: white; color: rgba(0, 0, 0, 0.952941); font-family: freight-text-pro, Georgia, Cambria, 'Times New Roman', Times, serif; font-size: 22px; letter-spacing: 0.159999996423721px; line-height: 33px; margin-bottom: 30px;">
This of course leads to a whole host of other questions, such as what happens between 0.5 and 1 mile in food access which is associated with such a dramatic drop in food venue diversity. I believe much more work should be done on this topic, and I welcome feedback and ideas for collaboration. After this first significant pass the indication is that food deserts may indeed be food monocultures.</div>
<div class="graf--p graf--last" id="b118" name="b118" style="background-color: white; color: rgba(0, 0, 0, 0.952941); font-family: freight-text-pro, Georgia, Cambria, 'Times New Roman', Times, serif; font-size: 22px; letter-spacing: 0.159999996423721px; line-height: 33px; margin-bottom: 30px;">
Questions and comments: levisimons@gmail.com .</div>
<div class="graf--p graf--last" id="b118" name="b118" style="background-color: white; color: rgba(0, 0, 0, 0.952941); font-family: freight-text-pro, Georgia, Cambria, 'Times New Roman', Times, serif; font-size: 22px; letter-spacing: 0.159999996423721px; line-height: 33px; margin-bottom: 30px;">
(Originally published <a href="https://medium.com/@levisimons/are-food-deserts-also-food-monocultures-part-3-california-case-study-28d50eab2f7b">here</a> on May 17th 2015)</div>
Ariel Levi Simonshttp://www.blogger.com/profile/10736046165375267668noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-2831278573103662375.post-44433491242604227242015-05-23T10:08:00.001-07:002015-05-23T10:08:11.350-07:00Are food deserts also food monocultures? Part 2: New York City case study.<div class="graf--p" id="1942" name="1942" style="background-color: white; color: rgba(0, 0, 0, 0.952941); font-family: freight-text-pro, Georgia, Cambria, 'Times New Roman', Times, serif; font-size: 22px; letter-spacing: 0.159999996423721px; line-height: 33px; margin-bottom: 30px;">
Following up on my <a class="markup--anchor markup--p-anchor" data-href="https://medium.com/@levisimons/are-food-deserts-also-food-monocultures-31de780a6db4" href="https://medium.com/@levisimons/are-food-deserts-also-food-monocultures-31de780a6db4" style="background-color: transparent; background-image: linear-gradient(rgba(0, 0, 0, 0) 50%, rgba(0, 0, 0, 0.6) 50%); background-position: 0px 23px; background-repeat: repeat-x; background-size: 2px 2px; text-decoration: none;">earlier post</a> on comparing the diversity of venues selling food versus the presence of food deserts I would like to thank various readers for their feedback. Through these conversations I was referred to a data set, collected by the <a class="markup--anchor markup--p-anchor" data-href="http://www.foodcensus.org" href="http://www.foodcensus.org/" rel="nofollow" style="background-color: transparent; background-image: linear-gradient(rgba(0, 0, 0, 0) 50%, rgba(0, 0, 0, 0.6) 50%); background-position: 0px 23px; background-repeat: repeat-x; background-size: 2px 2px; text-decoration: none;">Food Census</a>, which had done a recent survey on all of the places selling food in a number of New York neighborhoods. Though, as a number of sociologists and demographers have told me, New York City is the exception to everything in the United States. Referring to the <a class="markup--anchor markup--p-anchor" data-href="http://www.ers.usda.gov/data-products/food-access-research-atlas/go-to-the-atlas.aspx" href="http://www.ers.usda.gov/data-products/food-access-research-atlas/go-to-the-atlas.aspx" rel="nofollow" style="background-color: transparent; background-image: linear-gradient(rgba(0, 0, 0, 0) 50%, rgba(0, 0, 0, 0.6) 50%); background-position: 0px 23px; background-repeat: repeat-x; background-size: 2px 2px; text-decoration: none;">USDA food desert map</a>turned up no such thing in the entire survey area.</div>
<div class="graf--p" id="5130" name="5130" style="background-color: white; color: rgba(0, 0, 0, 0.952941); font-family: freight-text-pro, Georgia, Cambria, 'Times New Roman', Times, serif; font-size: 22px; letter-spacing: 0.159999996423721px; line-height: 33px; margin-bottom: 30px;">
On first glance this isn’t too surprising. New York is a dense city with an extensive transit network. Plus, at least from where I’ve been in Brooklyn and Manhattan, the neighborhoods have a high degree of diversity in shops and restaurants. An analysis of the diversity of food venues found in the Food Census survey does appear to back up this assertion. At least at the level of <a class="markup--anchor markup--p-anchor" data-href="http://www.nyc.gov/html/dcp/html/neigh_info/nhmap.shtml" href="http://www.nyc.gov/html/dcp/html/neigh_info/nhmap.shtml" rel="nofollow" style="background-color: transparent; background-image: linear-gradient(rgba(0, 0, 0, 0) 50%, rgba(0, 0, 0, 0.6) 50%); background-position: 0px 23px; background-repeat: repeat-x; background-size: 2px 2px; text-decoration: none;">community districts</a> there is very little commercial repetition.</div>
<div class="graf--p" id="5934" name="5934" style="background-color: white; color: rgba(0, 0, 0, 0.952941); font-family: freight-text-pro, Georgia, Cambria, 'Times New Roman', Times, serif; font-size: 22px; letter-spacing: 0.159999996423721px; line-height: 33px; margin-bottom: 30px;">
Of course, without data collected within a known food desert we just have diversity levels for an exceptionally dense and connected part of the country. Though, for the fifteen community districts surveyed, what role does population density and poverty play in the diversity of food venues?</div>
<div class="graf--p" id="07f6" name="07f6" style="background-color: white; color: rgba(0, 0, 0, 0.952941); font-family: freight-text-pro, Georgia, Cambria, 'Times New Roman', Times, serif; font-size: 22px; letter-spacing: 0.159999996423721px; line-height: 33px; margin-bottom: 30px;">
To run this analysis the relative frequency for each food venue in a community district was calculated. If, for example, a district had 70 food venues and three were from the same franchise then that venue’s relative frequency (p) would be 3/70. The overall diversity for that district was then calculated using a <a class="markup--anchor markup--p-anchor" data-href="http://www.tiem.utk.edu/~gross/bioed/bealsmodules/shannonDI.html" href="http://www.tiem.utk.edu/~gross/bioed/bealsmodules/shannonDI.html" rel="nofollow" style="background-color: transparent; background-image: linear-gradient(rgba(0, 0, 0, 0) 50%, rgba(0, 0, 0, 0.6) 50%); background-position: 0px 23px; background-repeat: repeat-x; background-size: 2px 2px; text-decoration: none;">Shannon diversity index</a>, where the diversity was the negative sum of all of the p*ln(p) terms. This data was then compared to the population density for each district, as well as the percentage of the population on income assistance (All of this data is posted <a class="markup--anchor markup--p-anchor" data-href="https://plot.ly/~levisimons/142" href="https://plot.ly/~levisimons/142" rel="nofollow" style="background-color: transparent; background-image: linear-gradient(rgba(0, 0, 0, 0) 50%, rgba(0, 0, 0, 0.6) 50%); background-position: 0px 23px; background-repeat: repeat-x; background-size: 2px 2px; text-decoration: none;">here</a>). The results, at least for this small data set, are as follows:</div>
<ol class="postList" style="background-color: white; color: rgba(0, 0, 0, 0.952941); counter-reset: post 0; font-family: freight-text-pro, Georgia, Cambria, 'Times New Roman', Times, serif; font-size: 22px; letter-spacing: 0.159999996423721px; line-height: 33px; list-style: none none; margin: 0px 0px 30px; padding: 0px;">
<li class="graf--li" id="5715" name="5715" style="margin-bottom: 12px; margin-left: 30px; padding-top: 2px;">Assuming a simple linear model approximately ten percent of the variation in the diversity of the available food venues is related to the population density of the district (<a class="markup--anchor markup--li-anchor" data-href="https://plot.ly/~levisimons/143/food-venue-diversity-vs-population-density/" href="https://plot.ly/~levisimons/143/food-venue-diversity-vs-population-density/" rel="nofollow" style="background-color: transparent; background-image: linear-gradient(rgba(0, 0, 0, 0) 50%, rgba(0, 0, 0, 0.6) 50%); background-position: 0px 23px; background-repeat: repeat-x; background-size: 2px 2px; text-decoration: none;">link</a>). As the population density tends to go up so does the diversity of venues selling food. This isn’t too surprising, although it is not a large effect.</li>
<li class="graf--li" id="d42c" name="d42c" style="margin-bottom: 0px; margin-left: 30px; padding-top: 2px;">Assuming a simple linear model approximately five percent of the variation in the diversity of available food venues is related to the percentage of people in a district on income assistance, a proxy measure for poverty (<a class="markup--anchor markup--li-anchor" data-href="https://plot.ly/~levisimons/144/food-venue-diversity-vs-percent-population-on-income-support/" href="https://plot.ly/~levisimons/144/food-venue-diversity-vs-percent-population-on-income-support/" rel="nofollow" style="background-color: transparent; background-image: linear-gradient(rgba(0, 0, 0, 0) 50%, rgba(0, 0, 0, 0.6) 50%); background-position: 0px 23px; background-repeat: repeat-x; background-size: 2px 2px; text-decoration: none;">link</a>). If we assume that the presence of food deserts are correlated with poverty, and that this is in turn is correlated with a lack of food venue diversity, then this result too isn’t surprising. However, none of these neighborhoods fall within a USDA food desert, and the correlation coefficient on this fit is not large. Again, New York is not a typical slice of America.</li>
</ol>
<div class="graf--p" id="f854" name="f854" style="background-color: white; color: rgba(0, 0, 0, 0.952941); font-family: freight-text-pro, Georgia, Cambria, 'Times New Roman', Times, serif; font-size: 22px; letter-spacing: 0.159999996423721px; line-height: 33px; margin-bottom: 30px;">
Where to go from here? The type of data collected by the Food Census people is perfect for this type of analysis, plus it contains even more details on the types of foods sold at each place. For further analysis their collection methodology seems like a way to go if we want to apply this type of study to other parts of the United States.</div>
<div class="graf--p graf--last" id="9efc" name="9efc" style="background-color: white; color: rgba(0, 0, 0, 0.952941); font-family: freight-text-pro, Georgia, Cambria, 'Times New Roman', Times, serif; font-size: 22px; letter-spacing: 0.159999996423721px; line-height: 33px; margin-bottom: 30px;">
If you know of already existing data sets such as those collected by Food Census, or are interested in collecting such data in your neighborhood, please contact me at levisimons@gmail.com .</div>
<div class="graf--p graf--last" id="9efc" name="9efc" style="background-color: white; color: rgba(0, 0, 0, 0.952941); font-family: freight-text-pro, Georgia, Cambria, 'Times New Roman', Times, serif; font-size: 22px; letter-spacing: 0.159999996423721px; line-height: 33px; margin-bottom: 30px;">
(Originally published here<a href="https://medium.com/@levisimons/are-food-deserts-also-food-monocultures-part-2-new-york-city-case-study-a859db17c18c">https://medium.com/@levisimons/are-food-deserts-also-food-monocultures-part-2-new-york-city-case-study-a859db17c18c</a> on December 16th 2014)</div>
Ariel Levi Simonshttp://www.blogger.com/profile/10736046165375267668noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-2831278573103662375.post-89273670083730922932015-05-23T10:06:00.000-07:002015-05-23T10:06:01.122-07:00Are food deserts also food monocultures?<div class="graf--p" id="baab" name="baab" style="background-color: white; color: rgba(0, 0, 0, 0.952941); font-family: freight-text-pro, Georgia, Cambria, 'Times New Roman', Times, serif; font-size: 22px; letter-spacing: 0.159999996423721px; line-height: 33px; margin-bottom: 30px;">
Drive through a wealthy country, such as the United States, and one thing you will notice is a high degree of repetition in the scenery. Highways cross through large fields of near-identical corn and soy crops, punctuated by towns containing a similarly small set of franchises. This is not an easy knock on the cultural blandness of contented societies but rather, I suspect, two factors deeply connected with our path to near-limitless calories.</div>
<div class="graf--p" id="43df" name="43df" style="background-color: white; color: rgba(0, 0, 0, 0.952941); font-family: freight-text-pro, Georgia, Cambria, 'Times New Roman', Times, serif; font-size: 22px; letter-spacing: 0.159999996423721px; line-height: 33px; margin-bottom: 30px;">
For the first time in history our species has achieved the feat of having <a class="markup--anchor markup--p-anchor" data-href="http://www.who.int/mediacentre/factsheets/fs311/en/" href="http://www.who.int/mediacentre/factsheets/fs311/en/" rel="nofollow" style="background-color: transparent; background-image: linear-gradient(rgba(0, 0, 0, 0) 50%, rgba(0, 0, 0, 0.6) 50%); background-position: 0px 23px; background-repeat: repeat-x; background-size: 2px 2px; text-decoration: none;">more overweight people than those who go hungry</a>. How we got here is an interesting story combining the rise of the technology needed to run large-scale farms with agricultural policies geared towards the production of cheap staple crops (For a good introduction to the topic my favorite is the documentary <a class="markup--anchor markup--p-anchor" data-href="http://www.kingcorn.net/" href="http://www.kingcorn.net/" rel="nofollow" style="background-color: transparent; background-image: linear-gradient(rgba(0, 0, 0, 0) 50%, rgba(0, 0, 0, 0.6) 50%); background-position: 0px 23px; background-repeat: repeat-x; background-size: 2px 2px; text-decoration: none;">King Corn</a>.). What sounds strange, at least at first, is that the issue of malnourishment has not declined in a similar fashion. This is an immediate result of improvements made in the availability of cheap, though not necessarily nutritious, calories. The areas where this discrepancy lives has a name: food deserts. An area qualifies as a food desert, according to the US Department of Agriculture (USDA) if it meets the following two criteria:</div>
<blockquote class="graf--blockquote" id="1b51" name="1b51" style="background-color: white; border-left-color: rgba(0, 0, 0, 0.8); border-left-style: solid; border-left-width: 3px; color: rgba(0, 0, 0, 0.952941); font-family: freight-text-pro, Georgia, Cambria, 'Times New Roman', Times, serif; font-size: 22px; font-style: italic; letter-spacing: 0.159999996423721px; line-height: 33px; margin: 0px 0px 30px -23px; padding-bottom: 3px; padding-left: 20px;">
<strong class="markup--strong markup--blockquote-strong">1. </strong>They qualify as “<strong class="markup--strong markup--blockquote-strong"><span class="markup--em markup--blockquote-em" style="font-style: normal;">low-income communities”</span></strong>, based on having: a) a poverty rate of 20 percent or greater, OR b) a median family income at or below 80 percent of the area median family income; AND</blockquote>
<blockquote class="graf--blockquote" id="a8b8" name="a8b8" style="background-color: white; border-left-color: rgba(0, 0, 0, 0.8); border-left-style: solid; border-left-width: 3px; color: rgba(0, 0, 0, 0.952941); font-family: freight-text-pro, Georgia, Cambria, 'Times New Roman', Times, serif; font-size: 22px; font-style: italic; letter-spacing: 0.159999996423721px; line-height: 33px; margin: -30px 0px 30px -23px; padding-bottom: 3px; padding-left: 20px; padding-top: 30px;">
<strong class="markup--strong markup--blockquote-strong">2. </strong>They qualify as “<strong class="markup--strong markup--blockquote-strong"><span class="markup--em markup--blockquote-em" style="font-style: normal;">low-access communities”</span></strong>, based on the determination that at least 500 persons and/or at least 33% of the census tract’s population live more than one mile from a supermarket or large grocery store (10 miles, in the case of non-metropolitan census tracts).</blockquote>
<div class="graf--p" id="d996" name="d996" style="background-color: white; color: rgba(0, 0, 0, 0.952941); font-family: freight-text-pro, Georgia, Cambria, 'Times New Roman', Times, serif; font-size: 22px; letter-spacing: 0.159999996423721px; line-height: 33px; margin-bottom: 30px;">
If you’re interested in seeing if you live in a food desert check the USDA’s map <a class="markup--anchor markup--p-anchor" data-href="http://www.ers.usda.gov/data-products/food-access-research-atlas/go-to-the-atlas.aspx" href="http://www.ers.usda.gov/data-products/food-access-research-atlas/go-to-the-atlas.aspx" rel="nofollow" style="background-color: transparent; background-image: linear-gradient(rgba(0, 0, 0, 0) 50%, rgba(0, 0, 0, 0.6) 50%); background-position: 0px 23px; background-repeat: repeat-x; background-size: 2px 2px; text-decoration: none;">here</a>.</div>
<div class="graf--p" id="a6c1" name="a6c1" style="background-color: white; color: rgba(0, 0, 0, 0.952941); font-family: freight-text-pro, Georgia, Cambria, 'Times New Roman', Times, serif; font-size: 22px; letter-spacing: 0.159999996423721px; line-height: 33px; margin-bottom: 30px;">
Think of the word ‘desert’. In a standard ecological sense it is a place which lacks access to significant water. With food deserts the name is somewhat of a misnomer as there is still plenty of food available from fast food restaurants and convenience stores, what these places could better be described as would be ‘nutrient deserts’.</div>
<div class="graf--p" id="6d35" name="6d35" style="background-color: white; color: rgba(0, 0, 0, 0.952941); font-family: freight-text-pro, Georgia, Cambria, 'Times New Roman', Times, serif; font-size: 22px; letter-spacing: 0.159999996423721px; line-height: 33px; margin-bottom: 30px;">
Now with a lack of nutrients is there a corresponding lack of choice? Do the same monocultures which show up in our production of cheap food also show up in the venues available for its consumption?</div>
<div class="graf--p" id="3e20" name="3e20" style="background-color: white; color: rgba(0, 0, 0, 0.952941); font-family: freight-text-pro, Georgia, Cambria, 'Times New Roman', Times, serif; font-size: 22px; letter-spacing: 0.159999996423721px; line-height: 33px; margin-bottom: 30px;">
How to go about testing this question? First, define a metric which could quantify the diversity of food sources in a community. Second, compare this diversity metric to the median income of the community and to its access nutritious food. Without positing any cause and effect at this point it would be possible to test if communities which could be called food (nutrient) deserts would also tend to have a low diversity in the sources for nutritious food.</div>
<div class="graf--p" id="8893" name="8893" style="background-color: white; color: rgba(0, 0, 0, 0.952941); font-family: freight-text-pro, Georgia, Cambria, 'Times New Roman', Times, serif; font-size: 22px; letter-spacing: 0.159999996423721px; line-height: 33px; margin-bottom: 30px;">
The second metric can be taken from already existing data sets, such as those generated by the USDA. For the first metric we have a concept which we can borrow from ecology: the <a class="markup--anchor markup--p-anchor" data-href="http://www.tiem.utk.edu/~gross/bioed/bealsmodules/shannonDI.html" href="http://www.tiem.utk.edu/~gross/bioed/bealsmodules/shannonDI.html" rel="nofollow" style="background-color: transparent; background-image: linear-gradient(rgba(0, 0, 0, 0) 50%, rgba(0, 0, 0, 0.6) 50%); background-position: 0px 23px; background-repeat: repeat-x; background-size: 2px 2px; text-decoration: none;">Shannon index</a>.</div>
<figure class="graf--figure" id="f38c" name="f38c" style="background-color: white; box-sizing: border-box; clear: both; color: rgba(0, 0, 0, 0.952941); font-family: freight-text-pro, Georgia, Cambria, 'Times New Roman', Times, serif; font-size: 22px; letter-spacing: 0.159999996423721px; line-height: 33px; margin: 0px 0px 30px; outline: none; position: relative;"><div class="aspectRatioPlaceholder is-locked" style="margin: 0px auto; max-height: 51px; max-width: 261px; position: relative; width: 261px;">
<div class="aspect-ratio-fill" style="padding-bottom: 50.890625px;">
</div>
<img class="graf-image" data-height="51" data-image-id="1*9CGdKfABiw-i_Ak16VTUwA.png" data-width="261" src="https://d262ilb51hltx0.cloudfront.net/max/800/1*9CGdKfABiw-i_Ak16VTUwA.png" style="border: 0px; box-sizing: border-box; display: block; height: 50.890625px; left: 0px; margin: auto; max-width: 100%; position: absolute; top: 0px; width: 261px;" /></div>
<figcaption class="imageCaption" style="color: rgba(0, 0, 0, 0.6); font-size: 14px; font-style: italic; left: -172px; letter-spacing: 0.01rem; line-height: 1.4; margin-top: 0px; outline: 0px; position: absolute; text-align: right; top: 0px; width: 150px; z-index: 300;">The formula for calculating the Shannon index.</figcaption></figure><div class="graf--p" id="aac3" name="aac3" style="background-color: white; color: rgba(0, 0, 0, 0.952941); font-family: freight-text-pro, Georgia, Cambria, 'Times New Roman', Times, serif; font-size: 22px; letter-spacing: 0.159999996423721px; line-height: 33px; margin-bottom: 30px;">
Unpacking this equation the variables are as follows:</div>
<div class="graf--p" id="0ccb" name="0ccb" style="background-color: white; color: rgba(0, 0, 0, 0.952941); font-family: freight-text-pro, Georgia, Cambria, 'Times New Roman', Times, serif; font-size: 22px; letter-spacing: 0.159999996423721px; line-height: 33px; margin-bottom: 30px;">
H is the Shannon index, also known as the Claude-Shannon entropy of a system. Entropy, in general, is a measure of how much information it takes to describe a system. It is also a good way to describe the complexity of a system. For example, if one has an image file which is 480 pixels on a side and completely filled with the same shade of red it would be easy to compress the file with a brief description of the image dimensions and the fill color, thus giving the image a low measure of entropy. A similarly sized section of the Mona Lisa has a far higher measure of entropy as it would take far more information to describe the image in a more compressed state. The more complex a system the larger the Shannon index. In applying this formula to describing the diversity of ecosystems one will find that diverse ecosystems, such as a coral reef, will tend to have high entropies and that ecosystems dominated by large numbers of a few species, such as polar oceans, tend to have low entropies.</div>
<div class="graf--p" id="2419" name="2419" style="background-color: white; color: rgba(0, 0, 0, 0.952941); font-family: freight-text-pro, Georgia, Cambria, 'Times New Roman', Times, serif; font-size: 22px; letter-spacing: 0.159999996423721px; line-height: 33px; margin-bottom: 30px;">
i is an index running from 1 to R. In an ecosystem the number R describes how many species there are.</div>
<div class="graf--p" id="5588" name="5588" style="background-color: white; color: rgba(0, 0, 0, 0.952941); font-family: freight-text-pro, Georgia, Cambria, 'Times New Roman', Times, serif; font-size: 22px; letter-spacing: 0.159999996423721px; line-height: 33px; margin-bottom: 30px;">
p_i is the population of species i. This is determined by counting, or more often estimating, the population of the species in an ecosystem.</div>
<div class="graf--p" id="fa0b" name="fa0b" style="background-color: white; color: rgba(0, 0, 0, 0.952941); font-family: freight-text-pro, Georgia, Cambria, 'Times New Roman', Times, serif; font-size: 22px; letter-spacing: 0.159999996423721px; line-height: 33px; margin-bottom: 30px;">
To give a few examples of how to use this formula consider a simple ecosystem with 100 brine shrimp, 900 bacteria, and 9,000 pieces of algae. The total number of organisms is 100+900+9,000 = 10,000. The fraction of the overall population covered by brine shrimp is therefor 100/10,000=0.01, the bacteria cover a fraction of 900/10,000=0.09, and the algae cover the remaining 0.90. Running the sum then looks like the following:</div>
<div class="graf--p" id="079e" name="079e" style="background-color: white; color: rgba(0, 0, 0, 0.952941); font-family: freight-text-pro, Georgia, Cambria, 'Times New Roman', Times, serif; font-size: 22px; letter-spacing: 0.159999996423721px; line-height: 33px; margin-bottom: 30px;">
H = -0.01*ln(0.01) + -0.09*ln(0.09) + -0.90*ln(0.90) = 0.358</div>
<div class="graf--p" id="b335" name="b335" style="background-color: white; color: rgba(0, 0, 0, 0.952941); font-family: freight-text-pro, Georgia, Cambria, 'Times New Roman', Times, serif; font-size: 22px; letter-spacing: 0.159999996423721px; line-height: 33px; margin-bottom: 30px;">
How would this then compare to a hypothetical ecosystem where we had 100 species, each of which took up an equal share (0.01) of the population? In that case our entropy for the ecosystem would be:</div>
<div class="graf--p" id="cdaa" name="cdaa" style="background-color: white; color: rgba(0, 0, 0, 0.952941); font-family: freight-text-pro, Georgia, Cambria, 'Times New Roman', Times, serif; font-size: 22px; letter-spacing: 0.159999996423721px; line-height: 33px; margin-bottom: 30px;">
H = -0.01*ln(0.01) + -0.01*ln(0.01) + …. + -0.01*ln(0.01) = 4.61</div>
<div class="graf--p" id="8658" name="8658" style="background-color: white; color: rgba(0, 0, 0, 0.952941); font-family: freight-text-pro, Georgia, Cambria, 'Times New Roman', Times, serif; font-size: 22px; letter-spacing: 0.159999996423721px; line-height: 33px; margin-bottom: 30px;">
These are far simpler cases than would typically be encountered in nature, but they demonstrate how we can succinctly differentiate diverse and homogenous ecosystems.</div>
<div class="graf--p" id="b452" name="b452" style="background-color: white; color: rgba(0, 0, 0, 0.952941); font-family: freight-text-pro, Georgia, Cambria, 'Times New Roman', Times, serif; font-size: 22px; letter-spacing: 0.159999996423721px; line-height: 33px; margin-bottom: 30px;">
Now how would this play out in our urban food distribution ecosystem? In this scenario the number of unique venues selling food in a given area, whether it is a convenience store or high-end restaurant, is our value R. In a neighborhood with 100 boutiques and 3 franchises R would be 103. The population then of each venue could be done by simply counting up each venue type. Once the tally is collected a few quick calculations would determine the population fraction each venue covers as well as the overall diversity of the urban food venue ecosystem. The data collection itself could be done on foot with a notebook, or a laptop with detailed enough access to local business data.</div>
<div class="graf--p" id="88b0" name="88b0" style="background-color: white; color: rgba(0, 0, 0, 0.952941); font-family: freight-text-pro, Georgia, Cambria, 'Times New Roman', Times, serif; font-size: 22px; letter-spacing: 0.159999996423721px; line-height: 33px; margin-bottom: 30px;">
In places dominated by a few franchises one would then expect to see a low level of food distribution diversity, but would this then be tied to its quality and availability? Would this diversity in turn have anything to do with the income of the area? It could be reasonably argued that diverse ecosystems are more resilient to external shocks as niches vacated by one extinction could be filed by similar species. However, polar ecosystems often have large biomasses even without a myriad of species.</div>
<div class="graf--p" id="1b23" name="1b23" style="background-color: white; color: rgba(0, 0, 0, 0.952941); font-family: freight-text-pro, Georgia, Cambria, 'Times New Roman', Times, serif; font-size: 22px; letter-spacing: 0.159999996423721px; line-height: 33px; margin-bottom: 30px;">
In either case this appears to be a hypothesis which could be tackled by a team of citizen scientists in the nascent field <a class="markup--anchor markup--p-anchor" data-href="http://www.peterlang.com/download/extract/40473/extract_56610.pdf" href="http://www.peterlang.com/download/extract/40473/extract_56610.pdf" rel="nofollow" style="background-color: transparent; background-image: linear-gradient(rgba(0, 0, 0, 0) 50%, rgba(0, 0, 0, 0.6) 50%); background-position: 0px 23px; background-repeat: repeat-x; background-size: 2px 2px; text-decoration: none;">urban ecology</a>.</div>
<div class="graf--p graf--last" id="d734" name="d734" style="background-color: white; color: rgba(0, 0, 0, 0.952941); font-family: freight-text-pro, Georgia, Cambria, 'Times New Roman', Times, serif; font-size: 22px; letter-spacing: 0.159999996423721px; line-height: 33px; margin-bottom: 30px;">
Interested in starting such a study? Feedback is appreciated at levisimons@gmail.com .</div>
<div class="graf--p graf--last" id="d734" name="d734" style="background-color: white; color: rgba(0, 0, 0, 0.952941); font-family: freight-text-pro, Georgia, Cambria, 'Times New Roman', Times, serif; font-size: 22px; letter-spacing: 0.159999996423721px; line-height: 33px; margin-bottom: 30px;">
(Originally published <a href="https://medium.com/@levisimons/are-food-deserts-also-food-monocultures-31de780a6db4">here</a> on December 8th 2014)</div>
Ariel Levi Simonshttp://www.blogger.com/profile/10736046165375267668noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-2831278573103662375.post-80452053588466219222015-05-23T10:00:00.003-07:002015-05-23T10:00:26.318-07:00What is killing California’s trees, and what can you do about it?<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;">
<a href="https://d262ilb51hltx0.cloudfront.net/max/596/1*92XLPqpNM2Fi5-bpgcOJnQ.jpeg" imageanchor="1" style="clear: left; float: left; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" height="237" src="https://d262ilb51hltx0.cloudfront.net/max/596/1*92XLPqpNM2Fi5-bpgcOJnQ.jpeg" width="320" /></a></div>
<div class="graf--p" id="6441" name="6441" style="background-color: white; color: rgba(0, 0, 0, 0.952941); font-family: freight-text-pro, Georgia, Cambria, 'Times New Roman', Times, serif; font-size: 22px; letter-spacing: 0.159999996423721px; line-height: 33px; margin-bottom: 30px;">
The great thing about living in a major port city such as Los Angeles is having access to ideas and goods from the around the world. Though the port of LA, and by extension every trade conduit branching off from there, takes the chance on cargo containers carrying an invasive species. In 2003 on such species, the <a class="markup--anchor markup--p-anchor" data-href="http://ucanr.edu/sites/socaloakpests/Polyphagous_Shot_Hole_Borer/" href="http://ucanr.edu/sites/socaloakpests/Polyphagous_Shot_Hole_Borer/" rel="nofollow" style="background-color: transparent; background-image: linear-gradient(rgba(0, 0, 0, 0) 50%, rgba(0, 0, 0, 0.6) 50%); background-position: 0px 23px; background-repeat: repeat-x; background-size: 2px 2px; text-decoration: none;">polyphagus shothole borer</a>(PSHB), was spotted in Whittier, a suburb of Los Angeles. In the intervening decade it has quickly spread to many of the trees in southern California.</div>
<figure class="graf--figure postField--insetLeftImage" id="88d0" name="88d0" style="background-color: white; box-sizing: border-box; clear: both; color: rgba(0, 0, 0, 0.952941); float: left; font-family: freight-text-pro, Georgia, Cambria, 'Times New Roman', Times, serif; font-size: 22px; letter-spacing: 0.159999996423721px; line-height: 33px; margin: 10px 30px 10px 0px; outline: none; position: relative; width: 350px;"><div class="aspectRatioPlaceholder is-locked" style="margin: 0px auto; max-height: 188px; max-width: 250px; position: relative; width: 250px;">
<div class="aspect-ratio-fill" style="padding-bottom: 188px;">
</div>
<img class="graf-image" data-height="188" data-image-id="1*cBSTVk5B9pUrjiAUoAspMQ.jpeg" data-width="250" src="https://d262ilb51hltx0.cloudfront.net/max/600/1*cBSTVk5B9pUrjiAUoAspMQ.jpeg" style="border: 0px; box-sizing: border-box; display: block; height: 188px; left: 0px; margin: auto; max-width: 100%; position: absolute; top: 0px; width: 250px;" /></div>
<figcaption class="imageCaption" style="color: rgba(0, 0, 0, 0.6); font-size: 14px; font-style: italic; left: -172px; letter-spacing: 0.01rem; line-height: 1.4; margin-top: 0px; outline: 0px; position: absolute; text-align: right; top: 0px; width: 150px; z-index: 300;">Beetle entrance with fungal damage (UC-Riverside)</figcaption></figure><div class="graf--p" id="190f" name="190f" style="background-color: white; color: rgba(0, 0, 0, 0.952941); font-family: freight-text-pro, Georgia, Cambria, 'Times New Roman', Times, serif; font-size: 22px; letter-spacing: 0.159999996423721px; line-height: 33px; margin-bottom: 30px;">
The beetles themselves are small, only a few millimeters long, but they carry fungal spores with them which quickly magnifies the impact of their burrowing. Some trees, for reasons not yet known, are more susceptible to the effects of the burrowing and associated fungal infections. These trees, such as coast live oak and avocado, will play host to a beetle infestations and eventually die before as the beetles go on to infect the surrounding trees.</div>
<div class="graf--p" id="f7b0" name="f7b0" style="background-color: white; color: rgba(0, 0, 0, 0.952941); font-family: freight-text-pro, Georgia, Cambria, 'Times New Roman', Times, serif; font-size: 22px; letter-spacing: 0.159999996423721px; line-height: 33px; margin-bottom: 30px;">
Our best guess is that these beetles originated in southeast Asia, and then arrived on lumbers shipments through the port of Los Angeles. Beyond that there are a number of outstanding questions: What kept them in check in their native environment? What environmental triggers are behind their spread? Why are some tree species immune to their spread? In the meantime their spread is beginning to threaten both the economy, through the infection of avocado trees, as well as the ecology, through the devastation to native box elder populations.</div>
<div class="graf--p" id="b549" name="b549" style="background-color: white; color: rgba(0, 0, 0, 0.952941); font-family: freight-text-pro, Georgia, Cambria, 'Times New Roman', Times, serif; font-size: 22px; letter-spacing: 0.159999996423721px; line-height: 33px; margin-bottom: 30px;">
What can be done? Given the scope and speed of the problem a lot of basic data is needed relatively quickly. Even photographing infected trees, then tagging the images with the time and location of the siting, can build a picture of what factors may be involved the spread of PSHB. When this basic information is merged with data on trees types and local weather records then deeper scientific questions can be addressed: What temperature and humidity range do the beetles prefer? Are they more likely to spread along local wind currents or road networks? Are some trees better hosts to their spread than others?</div>
<div class="graf--p" id="7d8a" name="7d8a" style="background-color: white; color: rgba(0, 0, 0, 0.952941); font-family: freight-text-pro, Georgia, Cambria, 'Times New Roman', Times, serif; font-size: 22px; letter-spacing: 0.159999996423721px; line-height: 33px; margin-bottom: 30px;">
To collect this data we have started the <a class="markup--anchor markup--p-anchor" data-href="http://www.inaturalist.org/projects/scarab" href="http://www.inaturalist.org/projects/scarab" rel="nofollow" style="background-color: transparent; background-image: linear-gradient(rgba(0, 0, 0, 0) 50%, rgba(0, 0, 0, 0.6) 50%); background-position: 0px 23px; background-repeat: repeat-x; background-size: 2px 2px; text-decoration: none;">SCARAB</a> (Scientific Collaboration for Accessible Research About Borers) project. Using the <a class="markup--anchor markup--p-anchor" data-href="http://www.inaturalist.org" href="http://www.inaturalist.org/" rel="nofollow" style="background-color: transparent; background-image: linear-gradient(rgba(0, 0, 0, 0) 50%, rgba(0, 0, 0, 0.6) 50%); background-position: 0px 23px; background-repeat: repeat-x; background-size: 2px 2px; text-decoration: none;">iNaturalist</a> mobile app anyone can help map the spread of these infestations so that we can better understand how to manage them.</div>
<div class="graf--p" id="09d7" name="09d7" style="background-color: white; color: rgba(0, 0, 0, 0.952941); font-family: freight-text-pro, Georgia, Cambria, 'Times New Roman', Times, serif; font-size: 22px; letter-spacing: 0.159999996423721px; line-height: 33px; margin-bottom: 30px;">
To help with this project please take the following steps:</div>
<ol class="postList" style="background-color: white; color: rgba(0, 0, 0, 0.952941); counter-reset: post 0; font-family: freight-text-pro, Georgia, Cambria, 'Times New Roman', Times, serif; font-size: 22px; letter-spacing: 0.159999996423721px; line-height: 33px; list-style: none none; margin: 0px 0px 30px; padding: 0px;">
<li class="graf--li" id="3717" name="3717" style="margin-bottom: 12px; margin-left: 30px; padding-top: 2px;">Set up an account with <a class="markup--anchor markup--li-anchor" data-href="http://www.inaturalist.org" href="http://www.inaturalist.org/" rel="nofollow" style="background-color: transparent; background-image: linear-gradient(rgba(0, 0, 0, 0) 50%, rgba(0, 0, 0, 0.6) 50%); background-position: 0px 23px; background-repeat: repeat-x; background-size: 2px 2px; text-decoration: none;">iNaturalist</a> online, then join the <a class="markup--anchor markup--li-anchor" data-href="http://www.inaturalist.org/projects/scarab" href="http://www.inaturalist.org/projects/scarab" rel="nofollow" style="background-color: transparent; background-image: linear-gradient(rgba(0, 0, 0, 0) 50%, rgba(0, 0, 0, 0.6) 50%); background-position: 0px 23px; background-repeat: repeat-x; background-size: 2px 2px; text-decoration: none;">SCARAB</a> project.</li>
<li class="graf--li" id="4375" name="4375" style="margin-bottom: 12px; margin-left: 30px; padding-top: 2px;">Download the iNaturalist app onto your phone. It currently works for Android and iOS.</li>
<li class="graf--li" id="11b1" name="11b1" style="margin-bottom: 12px; margin-left: 30px; padding-top: 2px;">Look for infected trees. Spotting their presence is relatively straightforward as the fungal infections they carry form dark stains across the tree bark near boreholes of about a millimeter in diameter (The above photo, with a ballpoint pen near the borehole, gives some scale to this.).</li>
<li class="graf--li" id="dde0" name="dde0" style="margin-bottom: 12px; margin-left: 30px; padding-top: 2px;">Take a photo of the infected tree, as well as a closeup shot of a borehole near a fungal stain. For the closeup shot please include a ruler or pen near the borehole to give a sense of scale.</li>
<li class="graf--li" id="36ce" name="36ce" style="margin-bottom: 12px; margin-left: 30px; padding-top: 2px;">Tag the image with the collection data and GPS location.</li>
<li class="graf--li" id="23eb" name="23eb" style="margin-bottom: 0px; margin-left: 30px; padding-top: 2px;">If possible, please record the type of tree infected.</li>
</ol>
<div class="graf--p" id="d852" name="d852" style="background-color: white; color: rgba(0, 0, 0, 0.952941); font-family: freight-text-pro, Georgia, Cambria, 'Times New Roman', Times, serif; font-size: 22px; letter-spacing: 0.159999996423721px; line-height: 33px; margin-bottom: 30px;">
Each individual may not need to take that many photos, but taken together this data may be able to help save a number of our local trees.</div>
<div class="graf--p graf--last" id="0676" name="0676" style="background-color: white; color: rgba(0, 0, 0, 0.952941); font-family: freight-text-pro, Georgia, Cambria, 'Times New Roman', Times, serif; font-size: 22px; letter-spacing: 0.159999996423721px; line-height: 33px; margin-bottom: 30px;">
Questions or comments? Please contact me at levisimons@gmail.com .</div>
<div class="graf--p graf--last" id="0676" name="0676" style="background-color: white; color: rgba(0, 0, 0, 0.952941); font-family: freight-text-pro, Georgia, Cambria, 'Times New Roman', Times, serif; font-size: 22px; letter-spacing: 0.159999996423721px; line-height: 33px; margin-bottom: 30px;">
(Originally published <a href="https://medium.com/@levisimons/what-is-killing-californias-trees-and-what-can-you-do-about-it-13223e4a0fec">here</a> on December 17th 2014)</div>
Ariel Levi Simonshttp://www.blogger.com/profile/10736046165375267668noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-2831278573103662375.post-4381096450086678502015-05-23T09:49:00.001-07:002015-05-23T09:49:06.529-07:00The ecology of the connected world<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;">
<a href="https://d262ilb51hltx0.cloudfront.net/fit/c/464/464/1*P9paBwhQZLgctZbg7kjtFQ.jpeg" imageanchor="1" style="clear: left; float: left; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" height="320" src="https://d262ilb51hltx0.cloudfront.net/fit/c/464/464/1*P9paBwhQZLgctZbg7kjtFQ.jpeg" width="320" /></a></div>
<div class="graf--p" id="88f1" name="88f1" style="background-color: white; color: rgba(0, 0, 0, 0.952941); font-family: freight-text-pro, Georgia, Cambria, 'Times New Roman', Times, serif; font-size: 22px; letter-spacing: 0.159999996423721px; line-height: 33px; margin-bottom: 30px;">
For the entirety of human history, through curiosity, commerce, and conquest, the world has become an ever more connected place. This trendline, plus the end of the Cold War triumphalism embodied in Francis Fukuyama’s <a class="markup--anchor markup--p-anchor" data-href="http://www.amazon.com/The-End-History-Last-Man/dp/0743284550" href="http://www.amazon.com/The-End-History-Last-Man/dp/0743284550" rel="nofollow" style="background-color: transparent; background-image: linear-gradient(rgba(0, 0, 0, 0) 50%, rgba(0, 0, 0, 0.6) 50%); background-position: 0px 23px; background-repeat: repeat-x; background-size: 2px 2px; text-decoration: none;">The End of History</a>, reached a pop-culture apogee with Jules and Vincent’s iconic conversation about the <a class="markup--anchor markup--p-anchor" data-href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6Pkq_eBHXJ4" href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6Pkq_eBHXJ4" rel="nofollow" style="background-color: transparent; background-image: linear-gradient(rgba(0, 0, 0, 0) 50%, rgba(0, 0, 0, 0.6) 50%); background-position: 0px 23px; background-repeat: repeat-x; background-size: 2px 2px; text-decoration: none;">Royale with Cheese</a>. Although the peaceful global strip mall of a new world order never quite came to pass neither has the degree of globalization diminished since the fall of the Berlin wall.</div>
<div class="graf--p" id="611e" name="611e" style="background-color: white; color: rgba(0, 0, 0, 0.952941); font-family: freight-text-pro, Georgia, Cambria, 'Times New Roman', Times, serif; font-size: 22px; letter-spacing: 0.159999996423721px; line-height: 33px; margin-bottom: 30px;">
Thousands of years of the history of commerce, from the Phoenicians, through the Silk Road, can let us do some neat stuff like covering ourselves in Hello Kitty paraphernalia at a duty-free shop in Dubai. Although, if humans were to vanish tomorrow the enduring legacy of our centuries of activity would not show up in this cosmopolitan bric-a-brac, but rather in the fossil record and the geographic distribution of species. For every good intentionally traded there was at least one species along for the ride.</div>
<div class="graf--p" id="e418" name="e418" style="background-color: white; color: rgba(0, 0, 0, 0.952941); font-family: freight-text-pro, Georgia, Cambria, 'Times New Roman', Times, serif; font-size: 22px; letter-spacing: 0.159999996423721px; line-height: 33px; margin-bottom: 30px;">
The idea of invasive, or non-native species, is well established in both ecology and popular culture. Their introduction is sometimes deliberate, but is more often an inadvertent byproduct of shipping organisms in the hold or ballast water of the thousands of ocean going vessels involved in global commerce. Most people know of at least one example, such as <a class="markup--anchor markup--p-anchor" data-href="http://www.invasivespeciesinfo.gov/plants/kudzu.shtml" href="http://www.invasivespeciesinfo.gov/plants/kudzu.shtml" rel="nofollow" style="background-color: transparent; background-image: linear-gradient(rgba(0, 0, 0, 0) 50%, rgba(0, 0, 0, 0.6) 50%); background-position: 0px 23px; background-repeat: repeat-x; background-size: 2px 2px; text-decoration: none;">kudzu</a> in the American south or <a class="markup--anchor markup--p-anchor" data-href="http://australianmuseum.net.au/Cane-Toad" href="http://australianmuseum.net.au/Cane-Toad" rel="nofollow" style="background-color: transparent; background-image: linear-gradient(rgba(0, 0, 0, 0) 50%, rgba(0, 0, 0, 0.6) 50%); background-position: 0px 23px; background-repeat: repeat-x; background-size: 2px 2px; text-decoration: none;">cane toads</a> in Australia.</div>
<div class="graf--p" id="368d" name="368d" style="background-color: white; color: rgba(0, 0, 0, 0.952941); font-family: freight-text-pro, Georgia, Cambria, 'Times New Roman', Times, serif; font-size: 22px; letter-spacing: 0.159999996423721px; line-height: 33px; margin-bottom: 30px;">
These are, at least from the perspective of the introduced species, the success stories. Many organisms have hitched rides in cargo holds only to find an inhospitable climate, no food, or that they’re incredibly delicious to something just beyond the docks. Although predicting which introduced species will become invasive is not entirely possible, for a number of species, the odds are stacked in their favor.</div>
<div class="graf--p" id="9c2c" name="9c2c" style="background-color: white; color: rgba(0, 0, 0, 0.952941); font-family: freight-text-pro, Georgia, Cambria, 'Times New Roman', Times, serif; font-size: 22px; letter-spacing: 0.159999996423721px; line-height: 33px; margin-bottom: 30px;">
Witness the cockroach, pigeon, and rat. What these species have in common is their ability to fit into ecosystem of cities. For humans every city may be distinctive, but in aggregate they form a type of biome that is generally warmer, wetter, brighter, and with more food sources than the surrounding environment. Just as the world has temperate rainforests, chaparral, and taiga it now has an archipelago of urban biomes connected by the filaments of trade and travel.</div>
<figure class="graf--figure postField--insetLeftImage" id="b232" name="b232" style="background-color: white; box-sizing: border-box; clear: both; color: rgba(0, 0, 0, 0.952941); float: left; font-family: freight-text-pro, Georgia, Cambria, 'Times New Roman', Times, serif; font-size: 22px; letter-spacing: 0.159999996423721px; line-height: 33px; margin: 10px 30px 10px 0px; outline: none; position: relative; width: 350px;"><div class="aspectRatioPlaceholder is-locked" style="margin: 0px auto; max-height: 209px; max-width: 350px; position: relative; width: 350px;">
<div class="aspect-ratio-fill" style="padding-bottom: 208.59375px;">
</div>
<img class="graf-image" data-action-value="1*BzHM_DJItHeqDA6Wx76GZw.jpeg" data-action="zoom" data-height="378" data-image-id="1*BzHM_DJItHeqDA6Wx76GZw.jpeg" data-width="634" src="https://d262ilb51hltx0.cloudfront.net/max/634/1*BzHM_DJItHeqDA6Wx76GZw.jpeg" style="border: 0px; box-sizing: border-box; cursor: -webkit-zoom-in; display: block; height: 208.59375px; left: 0px; margin: auto; max-width: 100%; position: absolute; top: 0px; width: 350px;" /></div>
<figcaption class="imageCaption" style="color: rgba(0, 0, 0, 0.6); font-size: 14px; font-style: italic; left: -172px; letter-spacing: 0.01rem; line-height: 1.4; margin-top: 0px; outline: 0px; position: absolute; text-align: right; top: 0px; width: 150px; z-index: 300;">The Word in Dubai (AFP/Getty)</figcaption></figure><div class="graf--p" id="6fe1" name="6fe1" style="background-color: white; color: rgba(0, 0, 0, 0.952941); font-family: freight-text-pro, Georgia, Cambria, 'Times New Roman', Times, serif; font-size: 22px; letter-spacing: 0.159999996423721px; line-height: 33px; margin-bottom: 30px;">
The question then is what will happen to local and global levels of biodiversity as cities grow in scale and our species drifts towards near <a class="markup--anchor markup--p-anchor" data-href="http://www.who.int/gho/urban_health/situation_trends/urban_population_growth_text/en/" href="http://www.who.int/gho/urban_health/situation_trends/urban_population_growth_text/en/" rel="nofollow" style="background-color: transparent; background-image: linear-gradient(rgba(0, 0, 0, 0) 50%, rgba(0, 0, 0, 0.6) 50%); background-position: 0px 23px; background-repeat: repeat-x; background-size: 2px 2px; text-decoration: none;">100% levels of urbanization</a>. It is well established that local species will be displaced or killed off as a city expands and foreign species are introduced. Though will this biological era, dubbed by some ecologists as the <a class="markup--anchor markup--p-anchor" data-href="http://www.smithsonianmag.com/ist/?next=/science-nature/what-is-the-anthropocene-and-are-we-in-it-164801414/" href="http://www.smithsonianmag.com/ist/?next=/science-nature/what-is-the-anthropocene-and-are-we-in-it-164801414/" rel="nofollow" style="background-color: transparent; background-image: linear-gradient(rgba(0, 0, 0, 0) 50%, rgba(0, 0, 0, 0.6) 50%); background-position: 0px 23px; background-repeat: repeat-x; background-size: 2px 2px; text-decoration: none;">anthropocene</a>, lead to a Fukuyama-esque end of biological history: a repetitive global strip mall ecosystem? Or, as with international relations in the 1990s, witnessing an equivalent lull following the collapse of an earlier dynamic?</div>
<div class="graf--p" id="f6cb" name="f6cb" style="background-color: white; color: rgba(0, 0, 0, 0.952941); font-family: freight-text-pro, Georgia, Cambria, 'Times New Roman', Times, serif; font-size: 22px; letter-spacing: 0.159999996423721px; line-height: 33px; margin-bottom: 30px;">
What would be interesting to see is if each city acts like an island, leading to a burst of speciation in the local environment, or if urban areas cause a collapse in the general level of biodiversity. In testing this question we may be able to compare current and historical trends relating the <a class="markup--anchor markup--p-anchor" data-href="http://www.atkearney.com/research-studies/global-cities-index" href="http://www.atkearney.com/research-studies/global-cities-index" rel="nofollow" style="background-color: transparent; background-image: linear-gradient(rgba(0, 0, 0, 0) 50%, rgba(0, 0, 0, 0.6) 50%); background-position: 0px 23px; background-repeat: repeat-x; background-size: 2px 2px; text-decoration: none;">degree of globalization for a city</a>, how interconnected it is with other cities, as well as the density and diversity of species within the urban area as well as its vicinity. Testing long term causal relations may be far more difficult, but if cities have an impact on local and global biodiversity today then it stands to reason they have had it for centuries. In which case a study would benefit from looking at measures of biodiversity in and around urban environments as trade networks grew and collapsed over the years. Of course this would be an even more difficult undertaking than trying to study any current relationships.</div>
<div class="graf--p" id="952c" name="952c" style="background-color: white; color: rgba(0, 0, 0, 0.952941); font-family: freight-text-pro, Georgia, Cambria, 'Times New Roman', Times, serif; font-size: 22px; letter-spacing: 0.159999996423721px; line-height: 33px; margin-bottom: 30px;">
What data sets currently exist, or methodologies for measuring current and historical biodiversity, which could help address this question?</div>
<div class="graf--p graf--last" id="367d" name="367d" style="background-color: white; color: rgba(0, 0, 0, 0.952941); font-family: freight-text-pro, Georgia, Cambria, 'Times New Roman', Times, serif; font-size: 22px; letter-spacing: 0.159999996423721px; line-height: 33px; margin-bottom: 30px;">
Comments and questions welcome at levisimons@gmail.com .</div>
<div class="graf--p graf--last" id="367d" name="367d" style="background-color: white; color: rgba(0, 0, 0, 0.952941); font-family: freight-text-pro, Georgia, Cambria, 'Times New Roman', Times, serif; font-size: 22px; letter-spacing: 0.159999996423721px; line-height: 33px; margin-bottom: 30px;">
(Originally published <a href="https://medium.com/@levisimons/the-ecology-of-the-connected-world-78df755b0ebd">here</a> on December 14th 2015)</div>
Ariel Levi Simonshttp://www.blogger.com/profile/10736046165375267668noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-2831278573103662375.post-51857110288116508562015-05-23T09:37:00.003-07:002015-05-23T09:44:46.091-07:00How user friendly is your city?<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;">
<a href="https://d262ilb51hltx0.cloudfront.net/fit/c/600/600/1*VqPNu6pFNQhtWzxvevzstA.png" imageanchor="1" style="clear: left; float: left; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" height="320" src="https://d262ilb51hltx0.cloudfront.net/fit/c/600/600/1*VqPNu6pFNQhtWzxvevzstA.png" width="320" /></a></div>
<div class="graf--p" id="6f51" name="6f51" style="background-color: white; color: rgba(0, 0, 0, 0.952941); font-family: freight-text-pro, Georgia, Cambria, 'Times New Roman', Times, serif; font-size: 22px; letter-spacing: 0.159999996423721px; line-height: 33px; margin-bottom: 30px;">
When you think about user manuals what are your first thoughts? Odds are they’ll involve pamphlets in five languages about how to reset a garage door opener, or efficient <a class="markup--anchor markup--p-anchor" data-href="http://tedconfblog.files.wordpress.com/2013/10/ikea-instructions.jpg?w=900" href="http://tedconfblog.files.wordpress.com/2013/10/ikea-instructions.jpg?w=900" rel="nofollow" style="background-color: transparent; background-image: linear-gradient(rgba(0, 0, 0, 0) 50%, rgba(0, 0, 0, 0.6) 50%); background-position: 0px 23px; background-repeat: repeat-x; background-size: 2px 2px; text-decoration: none;">Scandanavian pictograms</a> describing how to put together your new couch.</div>
<div class="graf--p" id="fdb4" name="fdb4" style="background-color: white; color: rgba(0, 0, 0, 0.952941); font-family: freight-text-pro, Georgia, Cambria, 'Times New Roman', Times, serif; font-size: 22px; letter-spacing: 0.159999996423721px; line-height: 33px; margin-bottom: 30px;">
What about cities? <a class="markup--anchor markup--p-anchor" data-href="http://www.who.int/gho/urban_health/situation_trends/urban_population_growth_text/en/" href="http://www.who.int/gho/urban_health/situation_trends/urban_population_growth_text/en/" rel="nofollow" style="background-color: transparent; background-image: linear-gradient(rgba(0, 0, 0, 0) 50%, rgba(0, 0, 0, 0.6) 50%); background-position: 0px 23px; background-repeat: repeat-x; background-size: 2px 2px; text-decoration: none;">Odds are</a> you’re living in one right now, and you’ve probably lived in at least one for a significant portion of your life.</div>
<div class="graf--p" id="7e86" name="7e86" style="background-color: white; color: rgba(0, 0, 0, 0.952941); font-family: freight-text-pro, Georgia, Cambria, 'Times New Roman', Times, serif; font-size: 22px; letter-spacing: 0.159999996423721px; line-height: 33px; margin-bottom: 30px;">
If so many of us use cities, then where are the user manuals?</div>
<div class="graf--p" id="1bf8" name="1bf8" style="background-color: white; color: rgba(0, 0, 0, 0.952941); font-family: freight-text-pro, Georgia, Cambria, 'Times New Roman', Times, serif; font-size: 22px; letter-spacing: 0.159999996423721px; line-height: 33px; margin-bottom: 30px;">
It turns out that effectively there <em class="markup--em markup--p-em">are </em>user manuals for people living in cities, although these “manuals” are an amalgamation of customs, urban planning (or lack thereof), and local legal codes. We generally take these user manuals for granted when we grow up in a particular city, and typically navigate what we need to do, in order to do what we want, without even thinking about how complicated the process really is. And, at the very least, if our own navigation skills fail, we know someone who can help us out.</div>
<div class="graf--p" id="4d6a" name="4d6a" style="background-color: white; color: rgba(0, 0, 0, 0.952941); font-family: freight-text-pro, Georgia, Cambria, 'Times New Roman', Times, serif; font-size: 22px; letter-spacing: 0.159999996423721px; line-height: 33px; margin-bottom: 30px;">
But, imagine that you pick up and move out of your culture, language, and country. What happens now? About five years ago, I joined the ranks of the 200<a class="markup--anchor markup--p-anchor" data-href="http://www.theguardian.com/news/datablog/2013/sep/11/on-the-move-232-million-migrants-in-the-world" href="http://www.theguardian.com/news/datablog/2013/sep/11/on-the-move-232-million-migrants-in-the-world" rel="nofollow" style="background-color: transparent; background-image: linear-gradient(rgba(0, 0, 0, 0) 50%, rgba(0, 0, 0, 0.6) 50%); background-position: 0px 23px; background-repeat: repeat-x; background-size: 2px 2px; text-decoration: none;">+ million migrants</a> on planet Earth and moved to Seoul. This was a disorienting experience. I felt like I was four years old again because I had lost so many of these social landmarks. Imagine being illiterate and ordering food in a restaurant. You’ll grab onto whatever other information you can get, such as price. When my and my wife used this strategy, it usually worked, but occasionally we’d end up with a bottle of wine for dinner when the wine happened to be the price of a reasonable meal. I found that things I’d normally be able to resolve with five minutes on the internet, or with a phone call, such as finding a local gym, could turn into days of wandering the streets looking for vaguely gym-shaped buildings.</div>
<div class="graf--p" id="10e4" name="10e4" style="background-color: white; color: rgba(0, 0, 0, 0.952941); font-family: freight-text-pro, Georgia, Cambria, 'Times New Roman', Times, serif; font-size: 22px; letter-spacing: 0.159999996423721px; line-height: 33px; margin-bottom: 30px;">
Over time, with a lot of effort, I started to piece together my own user’s guide to Seoul. For instance, I learned to ask for opening or closing time by miming a clock. I asked co-workers what the deal was with <a class="markup--anchor markup--p-anchor" data-href="http://colinincheonan.wordpress.com/2011/01/21/sex-in-south-korea/" href="http://colinincheonan.wordpress.com/2011/01/21/sex-in-south-korea/" rel="nofollow" style="background-color: transparent; background-image: linear-gradient(rgba(0, 0, 0, 0) 50%, rgba(0, 0, 0, 0.6) 50%); background-position: 0px 23px; background-repeat: repeat-x; background-size: 2px 2px; text-decoration: none;">all the barber poles</a>, and used sites such as <a class="markup--anchor markup--p-anchor" data-href="http://www.meetup.com/" href="http://www.meetup.com/" rel="nofollow" style="background-color: transparent; background-image: linear-gradient(rgba(0, 0, 0, 0) 50%, rgba(0, 0, 0, 0.6) 50%); background-position: 0px 23px; background-repeat: repeat-x; background-size: 2px 2px; text-decoration: none;">Meetup</a> to hang out with people practicing their English in some of the most <a class="markup--anchor markup--p-anchor" data-href="http://karine.do/visits/korea/oi-club-bar/" href="http://karine.do/visits/korea/oi-club-bar/" rel="nofollow" style="background-color: transparent; background-image: linear-gradient(rgba(0, 0, 0, 0) 50%, rgba(0, 0, 0, 0.6) 50%); background-position: 0px 23px; background-repeat: repeat-x; background-size: 2px 2px; text-decoration: none;">post-ironic places on Earth</a>.</div>
<div class="graf--p" id="f220" name="f220" style="background-color: white; color: rgba(0, 0, 0, 0.952941); font-family: freight-text-pro, Georgia, Cambria, 'Times New Roman', Times, serif; font-size: 22px; letter-spacing: 0.159999996423721px; line-height: 33px; margin-bottom: 30px;">
I can describe the process of trying to get around Seoul in the language of graph theory. I was a node, trying to follow the links between other nodes (people or places or services) to achieve some outcome (find a gym, or a meal that wasn’t a bottle of wine). In order to survive, in one way or other, all of the hundreds of thousands of immigrants in Seoul were doing the same thing.yIn fact, everyone in Seoul were getting around, using their connections to the city and other people in exactly the same way. There is a big difference between the way an immigrant and a native can navigate their map of a city, though. Given barriers in language, culture, and general background knowledge, an average migrant is likely to need a much longer chain of links to get where they need to go than the average native of Seoul. For instance, instead of directly asking someone they know about the best kimchi soup restaurant, a migrant might need to ask a well connected friend, who then asks a kimchi soup expert. Social network scientists have a metric for this, called the <a class="markup--anchor markup--p-anchor" data-href="https://www.learner.org/courses/mathilluminated/interactives/network/" href="https://www.learner.org/courses/mathilluminated/interactives/network/" rel="nofollow" style="background-color: transparent; background-image: linear-gradient(rgba(0, 0, 0, 0) 50%, rgba(0, 0, 0, 0.6) 50%); background-position: 0px 23px; background-repeat: repeat-x; background-size: 2px 2px; text-decoration: none;">network diameter</a>. The network diameter is the average distance, measured in links, between any two random nodes in a network. In Seoul, other migrants and were all using our networks of social linkages as our discovery tool for discovering the rules and rewards of the city. Over time, people construct their networks to become more extensive and efficient. A direct prediction of this process is that the average number of links that a user of a city needs to conduct a given task should drop, the longer they have lived in that city.</div>
<div class="graf--p" id="b544" name="b544" style="background-color: white; color: rgba(0, 0, 0, 0.952941); font-family: freight-text-pro, Georgia, Cambria, 'Times New Roman', Times, serif; font-size: 22px; letter-spacing: 0.159999996423721px; line-height: 33px; margin-bottom: 30px;">
Now, what if we all had access to the different maps that people use in a city? We can be pretty sure that large data consuming institutions, such as Facebook or the NSA, have already been doing this for years. You could personally try and collect the data of people’s personal networksby mapping user public queries and networks.. But, even without knowing individual identities, you would end up with a great deal of identifiable personal data. While we may get better at managing the tensions between the efficiency of searching and connecting with our networks; and lack of privacy, and the power of big institutions, my suspicion is that it will be like the <a class="markup--anchor markup--p-anchor" data-href="http://www.ch.ic.ac.uk/rzepa/mim/drugs/html/morphine_text.htm" href="http://www.ch.ic.ac.uk/rzepa/mim/drugs/html/morphine_text.htm" rel="nofollow" style="background-color: transparent; background-image: linear-gradient(rgba(0, 0, 0, 0) 50%, rgba(0, 0, 0, 0.6) 50%); background-position: 0px 23px; background-repeat: repeat-x; background-size: 2px 2px; text-decoration: none;">century-long search for non-addictive painkillers</a>. We certainly found more painkillers, but also discovered that painkillers are fundamentally addictive. In a highly connected world with rapidly growing bandwidth and computational power I believe we’re going to effectively return to village life: everyone will be able to know what everyone else is up to, whether they want it or not.</div>
<div class="graf--p" id="15cd" name="15cd" style="background-color: white; color: rgba(0, 0, 0, 0.952941); font-family: freight-text-pro, Georgia, Cambria, 'Times New Roman', Times, serif; font-size: 22px; letter-spacing: 0.159999996423721px; line-height: 33px; margin-bottom: 30px;">
Another consideration, when studying the maps that people make themselves, is being overloaded by the data. If you’ve ever seen <a class="markup--anchor markup--p-anchor" data-href="http://internet-map.net/" href="http://internet-map.net/" rel="nofollow" style="background-color: transparent; background-image: linear-gradient(rgba(0, 0, 0, 0) 50%, rgba(0, 0, 0, 0.6) 50%); background-position: 0px 23px; background-repeat: repeat-x; background-size: 2px 2px; text-decoration: none;">maps made of the internet’s various parts</a> you’ll find a lot of pretty pictures giving a rough idea of what is connected to what, but it can only be painted in broad strokes, at an abstract distance, for it to make any sense. Similarly, if we construct a composite map of everyone’s networks in a city, it will return a structure on the same order of complexity as the human brain. If we want to construct a useful map, we need to boil down the data to a handful of metrics.</div>
<div class="graf--p" id="1d3b" name="1d3b" style="background-color: white; color: rgba(0, 0, 0, 0.952941); font-family: freight-text-pro, Georgia, Cambria, 'Times New Roman', Times, serif; font-size: 22px; letter-spacing: 0.159999996423721px; line-height: 33px; margin-bottom: 30px;">
The most obvious metric is network diameter. This will tell you how far apart any person is with what they want to do with their city. We can consider this a good indicator of how easy a city is to navigate, for a given person. Holding all else constant, the smaller the network diameter is, the easier it will be for a person to do the things they want to do. Consider a transportation metaphor. If you could get from Pasadena to Venice Beach with only a single train transfer, it might be an easy Sunday afternoon trip. If you need to do two train transfers, and a bus, you probably won’t bother. And of course, if you have a car, it might be only a single, simple trip (and a stop for gas), which could make any distance simple. Do you really want to go through five people to figure out how to get a debit card? Or is it easier to pay in cash? An overall “network diameter” measure of a city is of course a level of abstraction too high. There will ultimately be a series of independent network diameters within this overall connectivity of a city. While it may take a population an average of three links to figure out financial services in a city it could take five links to figure out how to access health services. While it might take five public transportation links to get between any two points in the city, it might only take one link to reach fresh groceries. An average score of four links overall for a city may be useful, but to really understand the kinds of challenges people are navigating within the city, we’ll need to look at this closer level. Once this type of data could be aggregated anyone could be able to look up how usable a city would be, for various services, before pulling up stakes and moving elsewhere.</div>
<div class="graf--p" id="30ac" name="30ac" style="background-color: white; color: rgba(0, 0, 0, 0.952941); font-family: freight-text-pro, Georgia, Cambria, 'Times New Roman', Times, serif; font-size: 22px; letter-spacing: 0.159999996423721px; line-height: 33px; margin-bottom: 30px;">
As some of the above examples should make clear, there are likely to be different network diameters for the different people who live in a city. If you don’t have a car, moderate distances might quickly become insurmountable in a poorly connected city. What else would impact the network diameter for a given person? As my history in Seoul taught me, the amount of time someone has lived in a city will have an effect. The apparent “size” of a city will shrink, as new migrants become more familiar with their new surroundings. However, time alone won’t shrink network diameters in the same way for all people. Language will obviously shapre this process. It’s possible that the greater the differences between the native language of a person and the dominant language of their city the larger the network diameter and the more slowly it will shrink. We could test this, using one of the <a class="markup--anchor markup--p-anchor" data-href="http://ftp.iza.org/dp1246.pdf" href="http://ftp.iza.org/dp1246.pdf" rel="nofollow" style="background-color: transparent; background-image: linear-gradient(rgba(0, 0, 0, 0) 50%, rgba(0, 0, 0, 0.6) 50%); background-position: 0px 23px; background-repeat: repeat-x; background-size: 2px 2px; text-decoration: none;">various measurements</a> of the differences between languages. For, example the US Defense Language Institute has a <a class="markup--anchor markup--p-anchor" data-href="http://www.dliflc.edu/languagesatdli.html" href="http://www.dliflc.edu/languagesatdli.html" rel="nofollow" style="background-color: transparent; background-image: linear-gradient(rgba(0, 0, 0, 0) 50%, rgba(0, 0, 0, 0.6) 50%); background-position: 0px 23px; background-repeat: repeat-x; background-size: 2px 2px; text-decoration: none;">four-tiered scale</a> for its students, and for a native English speaker, Korean is considered one of the most difficult languages to learn. It’s possible that an American in Korea (or Korean in America) will find it harder to buid a network than someone speaking a more compatible native language.</div>
<div class="graf--p" id="f70e" name="f70e" style="background-color: white; color: rgba(0, 0, 0, 0.952941); font-family: freight-text-pro, Georgia, Cambria, 'Times New Roman', Times, serif; font-size: 22px; letter-spacing: 0.159999996423721px; line-height: 33px; margin-bottom: 30px;">
In developing this idea I put together a list of metrics about people and cities which I think would be useful to know in trying to measure. Below is a proposed list of variables regarding people and cities which should be useful in studying the usability of various cities for various populations:<br />
<br /></div>
<pre class="graf--pre" id="6b67" name="6b67" style="background: rgba(0, 0, 0, 0.0470588); color: rgba(0, 0, 0, 0.952941); font-family: Menlo, Monaco, 'Courier New', Courier, monospace; font-size: 16px; letter-spacing: 0.159999996423721px; margin-bottom: 20px; overflow: auto; padding: 20px; white-space: pre-wrap;">Primary language, Written fluency in primary language, Spoken fluency in primary language, Residency time in city, ProfessionSecondary language, Written fluency in secondary language(s), Spoken fluency in secondary language(s), Planned residency time in city, Home country, Ethnicity, Relationship status, Income (in local currency adjusted for PPP), Gender, Number of countries in residency history, Urban population, Prevalence of various written languages, Ethnic makeup, Median income, Urban population density, Prevalence of various spoken languages, Median education levels, <a class="markup--anchor markup--pre-anchor" data-href="http://web.worldbank.org/WBSITE/EXTERNAL/TOPICS/EXTPOVERTY/EXTPA/0,,contentMDK:20238991~menuPK:492138~pagePK:148956~piPK:216618~theSitePK:430367,00.html" href="http://web.worldbank.org/WBSITE/EXTERNAL/TOPICS/EXTPOVERTY/EXTPA/0,,contentMDK:20238991~menuPK:492138~pagePK:148956~piPK:216618~theSitePK:430367,00.html" rel="nofollow" style="background: none;">Gini coefficient</a></pre>
<pre class="graf--pre" id="6b67" name="6b67" style="background: rgba(0, 0, 0, 0.0470588); color: rgba(0, 0, 0, 0.952941); font-family: Menlo, Monaco, 'Courier New', Courier, monospace; font-size: 16px; letter-spacing: 0.159999996423721px; margin-bottom: 20px; overflow: auto; padding: 20px; white-space: pre-wrap;"></pre>
<div class="graf--p" id="d145" name="d145" style="background-color: white; color: rgba(0, 0, 0, 0.952941); font-family: freight-text-pro, Georgia, Cambria, 'Times New Roman', Times, serif; font-size: 22px; letter-spacing: 0.159999996423721px; line-height: 33px; margin-bottom: 30px;">
Of course these metrics would probably need to be updated before trying to do any study, but they appear to be a decent place to start. The real difficult part would be to set up a method for collecting all of the relevant data. My guess, given their global ubiquity, mobile phones would be the best data collection tool.</div>
<div class="graf--p graf--last" id="8792" name="8792" style="background-color: white; color: rgba(0, 0, 0, 0.952941); font-family: freight-text-pro, Georgia, Cambria, 'Times New Roman', Times, serif; font-size: 22px; letter-spacing: 0.159999996423721px; line-height: 33px; margin-bottom: 30px;">
This is my call to potential collaborators and feedback. If you’re interested in developing this idea please email me at levisimons@gmail.com .<br />
(Originally posted <a href="https://medium.com/@levisimons/how-user-friendly-is-your-city-4c04c1d2390e">here</a> on December 5th 2014)</div>
Ariel Levi Simonshttp://www.blogger.com/profile/10736046165375267668noreply@blogger.com0