Volunteering

• From late April through June 2024, the largest brood of 13-year cicadas, known as Brood XIX, will co-emerge with a midwestern brood of 17-year cicadas, Brood XIII.
• A co-emergence like this of two specific broods with different life cycles happens only once every 221 years.
• For about four weeks, scattered wooded and suburban areas will ring with cicadas’ distinctive whistling, buzzing and chirping mating calls.
• Once the eggs hatch, new cicada nymphs will fall from the trees and burrow back underground, starting the cycle again.
• It’s no accident that the scientific name for periodical 13- and 17-year cicadas is Magicicada, shortened from “magic cicada.”

Ancient visitors

• Molecular analysis has shown that about 4 million years ago, the ancestor of the current Magicicada species split into two lineages.
• The resulting three lineages are the basis of the modern periodical cicada species groups, Decim, Cassini and Decula.
• The sudden appearance of so many insects reminded them of biblical plagues of locusts, which are a type of grasshopper.
• During the 19th century, notable entomologists such as Benjamin Walsh, C.V. Riley and Charles Marlatt worked out the astonishing biology of periodical cicadas.

Acting in unison

• This increases their chances of accomplishing their key mission aboveground: finding mates.
• While periodical cicadas largely come out on schedule every 17 or 13 years, often a small group emerges four years early or late.
• Early-emerging cicadas may be faster-growing individuals that had access to abundant food, and the laggards may be individuals that subsisted with less.

Will climate change shift Magicicada clocks?

• As glaciers retreated from what is now the U.S. some 10,000 to 20,000 years ago, periodical cicadas filled eastern forests.
• Today there are 12 broods of 17-year periodical cicadas in northeastern deciduous forests, where trees drop leaves in winter.
• Because periodical cicadas are sensitive to climate, the patterns of their broods and species reflect climatic shifts.
• Although periodical cicadas prefer forest edges and thrive in suburban areas, they cannot survive deforestation or reproduce successfully in areas without trees.

• In the late 19th century, one Brood (XXI) disappeared from north Florida and Georgia.
• Climate change could also have farther-reaching effects.
• As the U.S. climate warms, longer growing seasons may provide a larger food supply.
• This may eventually change more 17-year cicadas into 13-year cicadas, just as past warming altered Magicicada neotredecim.
• We hypothesize that this was due to climate warming.

John Cooley receives funding from the National Science Foundation and the National Geographic Society. Chris Simon has received funding from the National Science Foundation, the Fulbright Foundation, the National Geographic Society and the New Zealand Marsden Fund.

• In an article published today in Nature, my colleagues and I show that illicit, often out-of-control road building is imperilling forests in Indonesia, Malaysia and Papua New Guinea.
• Once roads are bulldozed into rainforests, illegal loggers, miners, poachers and landgrabbers arrive.
• Once they get access, they can destroy forests, harm native ecosystems and even drive out or kill indigenous peoples.
• All nations have some unmapped or unofficial roads, but the situation is especially bad in biodiversity-rich developing nations, where roads are proliferating at the fastest pace in human history.

Mapping ghost roads

• This workforce then spent some 7,000 hours hand-mapping roads, using fine-scale satellite images from Google Earth.
• For starters, unmapped ghost roads seemed to be nearly everywhere.
• In fact, when comparing our findings to two leading road databases, OpenStreetMap and the Global Roads Inventory Project, we found ghost roads in these regions to be 3 to 6.6 times longer than all mapped roads put together.

• When ghost roads appear, local deforestation soars – usually immediately after the roads are built.
• We found the density of roads was by far the most important predictor of forest loss, outstripping 38 other variables.

Roads and protected areas

• In protected areas, we found only one-third as many roads compared with nearby unprotected lands.
• The bad news is that when people do build roads inside protected areas, it leads to about the same level of forest destruction compared to roads outside them.
• Keeping existing protected areas intact is especially urgent, given more than 3,000 protected areas have already been downsized or degraded globally for new roads, mines and local land-use pressures.

Hidden roads and the human footprint

• To gauge how much impact we’re having, researchers use the human footprint index, which brings together data on human activities such as roads and other infrastructure, land-uses, illumination at night from electrified settlements and so on.
• When ghost roads are included in mapping the human impact on eastern Borneo, areas with “very high” human disturbance double in size, while the areas of “low” disturbance are halved.

Artificial intelligence

• Worse, these roads can be actively encouraged by aggressive infrastructure-expansion schemes — most notably China’s Belt and Road Initiative, now active in more than 150 nations.
• You might think AI could do this better, but that’s not yet true – human eyes can still outperform image-recognition AI software for mapping roads.
• Once we have this information, we can make it public that so authorities, NGOs and researchers involved in forest protection can see what’s happening.

Distinguished Professor Bill Laurance receives funding from the Australian Research Council and other scientific and philanthropic bodies. He is a former Australian Laureate and director of the Centre for Tropical Environmental and Sustainability Science at James Cook University.

• An expert in the clinical research of respiratory viruses, Dr. Turner will oversee the Company’s current clinical trial and drive further clinical development.
• This study aims to assess the effectiveness of 2-DG in preventing illness from rhinoviruses, reducing infection rates, and easing symptom severity.
• A total of 128 volunteers will participate, receiving up to four daily intranasal doses of either 2-DG or a placebo.
• 2-DG is a unique and intriguing therapeutic approach to treating viral infections by blocking the virus’ nutrient access,” commented Ronald Bruce Turner, MD, CMO of G.ST Antivirals.

• PDFNJ highlighted these initiatives, which are critical in providing New Jersey communities with vital information on preventing opioid misuse, as part of the Rx Summit’s poster sessions.
• Through this program, more than 10,000 volunteers throughout the state share opioid prevention and awareness messages and materials.
• “At the Rx Summit, we shared our strategies for reaching New Jersey communities with essential information on preventing opioid misuse,” said Angelo Valente, Executive Director of PDFNJ.
• Since its inception, the Partnership has garnered 226 advertising and public relations awards from national, regional and statewide media organizations.