Article
Biochemical Research Methods
Ronald E. Crump, Ching- Huang, Edward S. Knock, Simon E. F. Spencer, Paul E. Brown, Erick Mwamba Miaka, Chansy Shampa, Matt J. Keeling, Kat S. Rock
Summary: The study focused on the transmission dynamics of gambiense human African trypanosomiasis (gHAT) in the Democratic Republic of Congo, exploring changes in transmission and factors contributing to disease persistence or intervention success. The findings showed significant improvements in passive detection in former Bandundu and Bas Congo provinces, with reduced time to detection. The study also established a framework for future predictions on disease transmission in the country.
PLOS COMPUTATIONAL BIOLOGY
(2021)
Article
Microbiology
Caroline E. Dewar, Aitor Casas-Sanchez, Constentin Dieme, Aline Crouzols, Lee R. Haines, Alvaro Acosta-Serrano, Brice Rotureau, Achim Schnaufer
Summary: This study demonstrates that efficient energy production through mitochondria is critical for the trypanosome's swimming ability and migration within the tsetse fly. Surprisingly, trypanosomes with impaired mitochondrial energy production are only mildly compromised in their ability to colonize the tsetse fly midgut. This study provides new insights into the complex mechanisms of trypanosome infection in tsetse flies.
Article
Microbiology
Caroline E. Dewar, Aitor Casas-Sanchez, Constentin Dieme, Aline Crouzols, Lee R. Haines, Alvaro Acosta-Serrano, Brice Rotureau, Achim Schnaufer
Summary: The single-celled parasite Trypanosoma brucei is transmitted by tsetse flies and its development in the fly's gut depends on efficient energy production by mitochondria.
Article
Physics, Multidisciplinary
Matheus M. G. Correia, Joao V. M. Barboza, Aquino L. Espindola
Summary: This study investigates the transmission of Trypanosoma brucei gambiense, the causative agent of Human African Trypanosomiasis, in African rural areas. By using agent-based modeling, it was found that humans and animals act as reservoirs for the pathogen, with transmission depending on the tsetse fly vector. Implementing treatment with Fexinidazole at different percentages in rural zones of the Democratic Republic of the Congo can optimize resources and potentially lead to disease eradication.
PHYSICA A-STATISTICAL MECHANICS AND ITS APPLICATIONS
(2021)
Article
Infectious Diseases
Fabrice Courtin, Dramane Kaba, Jean-Baptiste Rayaisse, Philippe Solano, Steve J. Torr, Alexandra P. M. Shaw
Summary: This study investigates the cost of controlling human African trypanosomiasis in the Bonon area of Cote d'Ivoire. The results show that the cost per square kilometer is higher compared to Chad and Uganda, but the cost per person protected is lower compared to Chad. This highlights the impact of differences in gHAT foci on the cost-effectiveness of tsetse control.
PLOS NEGLECTED TROPICAL DISEASES
(2022)
Article
Microbiology
Calmes Ursain Bouaka Tsakeng, Tito Tresor Melachio Tanekou, Steve Feudjio Soffack, Inaki Tirados, Cedrique Noutchih, Flobert Njiokou, Jude Daiga Bigoga, Charles Sinclair Wondji
Summary: This study provides an inventory of tsetse bacterial communities in Cameroon and explores their possible associations with trypanosome establishment in Glossina palpalis palpalis. The results show significant differences in microbiome diversity and composition among tsetse species and between teneral and non-teneral flies, or between flies displaying or not displaying mature trypanosome infections. Some bacteria are associated with trypanosome maturation in tsetse flies and could be further investigated for potential vector control tools.
Article
Geology
Cecilia Lopez-Gamundi, Brian B. Barnes, Anna C. Bakker, Paul (Mitch) Harris, Gregor P. Eberli, Sam J. Purkis
Summary: This study focuses on exploring the drivers of suspended sediment, including wind, waves, and tides, to understand the transport processes of fine-grained sediments. By analyzing satellite data, the study demonstrates how these drivers vary over time and space in the Great Bahama Bank carbonate platform. The results show the importance of tidal currents and wind-induced currents and waves in sediment suspension. This work contributes to a better understanding of sediment suspension on carbonate platforms using Earth observation data.
Article
Public, Environmental & Occupational Health
Abraham Mayoke, Johnson O. Ouma, Paul O. Mireji, Stephen F. Omondi, Shadrack M. Muya, Andre Itoua, Sylvance O. Okoth, Rosemary Bateta
Summary: The study of genetic diversity of Glossina fuscipes in the Congo revealed high genetic diversity, genetic differentiation, genetic information exchange, and the impact of human intervention.
AMERICAN JOURNAL OF TROPICAL MEDICINE AND HYGIENE
(2021)
Article
Entomology
Tito Tresor Melachio Tanekou, Calmes Ursain Bouaka Tsakeng, Inaki Tirados, Steve J. Torr, Flobert Njiokou, Alphonse Acho, Charles Sinclair Wondji
Summary: Despite efforts by the World Health Organization and the National Control Programme, sleeping sickness remains prevalent in Campo, southern Cameroon. This study provides updated entomological and parasitological parameters to guide the control of tsetse vectors in the area. The dominant vector species, Glossina palpalis palpalis, showed high densities and trypanosome infection rates. The mapping of tsetse densities will help inform vector control strategies.
MEDICAL AND VETERINARY ENTOMOLOGY
(2022)
Article
Biodiversity Conservation
James M. Muthoka, Alexander S. Antonarakis, Anton Vrieling, Francesco Fava, Edward E. Salakpi, Pedram Rowhani
Summary: Understanding the dynamics of grasslands and their relationship with weather and grazing is crucial for the livelihoods of pastoralists. This study uses digital repeat photography to examine how intra-seasonal grassland dynamics of different grassland communities are affected by precipitation, temperature, and grazing in a semi-arid savannah in Kenya. The results show that precipitation mainly affects early and mid-season flushing, temperature drives end-of-season senescence, and grazing influences mid-season declines. Different grassland species communities are impacted differently by these drivers.
ECOLOGICAL INDICATORS
(2022)
Article
Biodiversity Conservation
James M. Muthoka, Alexander S. Antonarakis, Anton Vrieling, Francesco Fava, Edward E. Salakpi, Pedram Rowhani
Summary: This study explores how different grassland communities in a heterogeneous semi-arid savannah in Kenya respond to precipitation, temperature, and grazing during intra-seasonal dynamics using digital repeat photography. The results show that the impact of these factors on grassland species communities is not uniform, with some communities being more strongly influenced by precipitation, temperature, or grazing than others.
ECOLOGICAL INDICATORS
(2022)
Article
Environmental Sciences
Yonas B. Dibike, Rajesh R. Shrestha, Colin Johnson, Barrie Bonsal, Paulin Coulibaly
Summary: The study found that snow water equivalent, April 1st snow water equivalent, and spring precipitation are the most important predictors of annual maximum flows and mean spring flows in western Canadian river basins. The MLR framework is useful for assessing the spatial variation in hydroclimatic controls. Future projections show significant spatial variations in annual maximum and mean spring flows.
Article
Agronomy
Lucy Reading, Nelson Corbett, Jacinta Holloway-Brown, Laura Bellis
Summary: Evapotranspiration by phreatophytes in riparian zones is an important component of the water balance. The factors influencing evapotranspiration, such as climatic conditions, species type, depth to groundwater, and distance to surface water, are not well understood. A field experiment in North Queensland, Australia, investigated these factors using non-parametric methods, revealing the relative importance of distance from surface water, depth to groundwater, and species in determining sap flow rates.
Article
Public, Environmental & Occupational Health
Sadiya Maxamhud, Johanna F. Lindahl, Albert Mugenyi, Richard Echodu, Charles Waiswa, Kristina Roesel
Summary: This study investigated the potential impact of a government tsetse fly control program and the role of pigs in Trypanosoma epidemiology in the West Nile region of Uganda. The findings showed a significant difference in captured tsetse flies between government intervention sites and control sites, as well as a high prevalence of Trypanosoma vivax in pig blood samples.
VECTOR-BORNE AND ZOONOTIC DISEASES
(2022)
Article
Ecology
Regina Therese M. Bacalso, Giovanni Romagnoni, Sheryll Mesa, Matthias Wolff
Summary: Fisheries management requires understanding of the factors influencing stocks and their variability. This study explored the effects of seasonal environmental parameters on catch per unit of effort (CPUE) in the Visayan Sea. The results showed that increasing sea surface temperatures had negative effects on CPUE for most species, while wind and optimal rainfall levels had positive effects attributed to their influence on net primary productivity and food availability.
REGIONAL STUDIES IN MARINE SCIENCE
(2023)
Article
Geochemistry & Geophysics
Rui Li, Chenxi Duan, Shunyi Zheng, Ce Zhang, Peter M. Atkinson
Summary: This paper proposes a multiscale skip connected and asymmetric-convolution-based U-Net (MACU-Net) architecture for semantic segmentation of remote sensed images, with the goal of enhancing feature representation and extraction. Experimental results demonstrate that MACU-Net outperforms other benchmark approaches.
IEEE GEOSCIENCE AND REMOTE SENSING LETTERS
(2022)
Article
Geochemistry & Geophysics
Qunming Wang, Xinyu Ding, Xiaohua Tong, Peter M. Atkinson
Summary: The article proposes a real-time STSU method (RSTSU) for monitoring land cover changes in real-time, which only requires a single coarse-to-fine spatial resolution image pair for training the learning model, suitable for real-time analysis, and its effectiveness is validated through experiments.
IEEE TRANSACTIONS ON GEOSCIENCE AND REMOTE SENSING
(2022)
Article
Geochemistry & Geophysics
Kaidi Peng, Qunming Wang, Yijie Tang, Xiaohua Tong, Peter M. Atkinson
Summary: The article introduces a geographically weighted spatiotemporal fusion method (SU-GW) to address spatial variation in land cover and increase the accuracy of spatiotemporal fusion. Experimental results comparing 24 versions indicated that SU-GW was effective in increasing prediction accuracy, providing a general solution for enhancing spatiotemporal fusion and potentially updating existing methods.
IEEE TRANSACTIONS ON GEOSCIENCE AND REMOTE SENSING
(2022)
Article
Geochemistry & Geophysics
Lifeng Wang, Liguo Wang, Qunming Wang, Peter M. Atkinson
Summary: This study proposes an end-to-end Siamese CNN with a spectral-spatial-wise attention mechanism for change detection in hyperspectral images. The method can adaptively emphasize informative spectral channels and spatial locations to improve the accuracy of change detection.
IEEE TRANSACTIONS ON GEOSCIENCE AND REMOTE SENSING
(2022)
Article
Geochemistry & Geophysics
Rui Li, Shunyi Zheng, Ce Zhang, Chenxi Duan, Jianlin Su, Libo Wang, Peter M. Atkinson
Summary: Semantic segmentation of remote sensing images is vital for various applications such as land resource management and urban planning. Despite the improvement in accuracy with deep convolutional neural networks, standard models have limitations like underuse of information and insufficient exploration of long-range dependencies. This article introduces a multiattention network (MANet) with efficient attention modules to address these issues and demonstrates superior performance on large-scale remote sensing datasets.
IEEE TRANSACTIONS ON GEOSCIENCE AND REMOTE SENSING
(2022)
Article
Computer Science, Artificial Intelligence
Xiaowei Gu, Ce Zhang, Qiang Shen, Jungong Han, Plamen P. Angelov, Peter M. Atkinson
Summary: A novel semi-supervised ensemble framework was proposed for remote sensing scene classification, utilizing a self-training hierarchical prototype-based classifier to address the challenges of labelled data scarcity and scene complexity. Experimental results demonstrated significant improvements in classification accuracy on popular benchmark datasets with limited labelled images available.
INFORMATION FUSION
(2022)
Article
Ecology
Juan M. Escamilla Molgora, Luigi Sedda, Peter Diggle, Peter M. Atkinson
Summary: This study proposes a Bayesian framework for presence-only (PO) species distribution models (SDM) that explicitly models the sampling effect. It provides three modeling alternatives to account for a spatial autocorrelation structure and achieves higher predictive accuracy than MaxEnt in two case studies. The framework is aided by a sampling effort process informed by accumulated observations of independent and heterogeneous surveys.
JOURNAL OF BIOGEOGRAPHY
(2022)
Article
Environmental Sciences
Shawky Mansour, Mohammed Alahmadi, Peter M. Atkinson, Ashraf Dewan
Summary: In recent years, socioeconomic transformation and social modernisation have led to the expansion of urban settlements in the Gulf Cooperation Council states, including desert cities. However, the prediction and research of desert urban patterns have been lacking, and this study focuses on the land use-land cover changes in the desert city of Ibri in Oman. The results show that the observed changes were rapid, with desert, bare land, and vegetation transforming into built-up areas. The forecast predicts a significant increase in land conversion from desert to urban in the next two decades.
Article
Engineering, Electrical & Electronic
Yijie Tang, Qunming Wang, Peter M. M. Atkinson
Summary: This article proposes a filling then spatio-temporal fusion (FSTF) method to address the challenge of large gaps in MODIS LST data. By utilizing the CLDAS LST product, the FSTF method can more accurately reconstruct the MODIS LST images. The results of the study demonstrate the potential of FSTF for updating the current MODIS LST product globally.
IEEE JOURNAL OF SELECTED TOPICS IN APPLIED EARTH OBSERVATIONS AND REMOTE SENSING
(2023)
Article
Remote Sensing
Idham Khalil, Aidy M. Muslim, Mohammad Shawkat Hossain, Peter M. Atkinson
Summary: This research explores the potential consequences of Sea Surface Temperature (SST) warming on the ecosystems of the Indo-Pacific (IP) region, specifically on coral bleaching. The findings predict widespread coral bleaching in many places in the IP region over the next 30 years, posing a significant threat to the marine environment.
INTERNATIONAL JOURNAL OF REMOTE SENSING
(2023)
Article
Multidisciplinary Sciences
Javier Houspanossian, Raul Gimenez, Juan I. Whitworth-Hulse, Marcelo D. Nosetto, Wlodek Tych, Peter M. Atkinson, Mariana C. Rufino, Esteban G. Jobbagy
Summary: This study demonstrates the impacts of rainfed agriculture on hydrology through remote sensing analysis, field studies, and simulation experiments. The findings reveal that the expansion of farming in the South American plains has led to increased flood coverage and shallower groundwater levels, which are attributed to the reduced rooting depths and evapotranspiration in croplands. These results highlight the escalating flood risks associated with rainfed agriculture expansion.
Article
Geochemistry & Geophysics
Yonghao Xu, Tao Bai, Weikang Yu, Shizhen Chang, Peter M. Atkinson, Pedram Ghamisi
Summary: Recent advances in AI have led to extensive application of AI algorithms, especially deep learning, in geoscience and remote sensing. Although AI enables more accurate observation and understanding of the earth, the vulnerability and uncertainty of AI models deserve further attention, especially for safety critical tasks. This article reviews the development of AI security in the geoscience and RS field, covering adversarial attack, backdoor attack, federated learning, uncertainty, and explainability. It also discusses potential opportunities and trends for future research.
IEEE GEOSCIENCE AND REMOTE SENSING MAGAZINE
(2023)
Article
Engineering, Electrical & Electronic
Nathan Price, Peter M. Atkinson
Summary: This study presents a data-driven regionalization approach using transfer learning and high-resolution imagery to disaggregate nighttime lights data for predicting GDP. The method outperforms comparable methods in both national and subnational studies. The study also challenges the utility of the urban-rural dichotomy and argues for the use of nightlights as a better representation of the overall economy.
IEEE JOURNAL OF SELECTED TOPICS IN APPLIED EARTH OBSERVATIONS AND REMOTE SENSING
(2022)
Article
Geochemistry & Geophysics
Yuanzhi Cai, Lei Fan, Peter M. Atkinson, Cheng Zhang
Summary: This research proposes a novel image enhancement method to reveal the local geometric characteristics of point cloud data in images. The method explores various feature channel combinations and achieves improved semantic segmentation accuracy. Experimental results on the Semantic3D benchmark demonstrate the superiority of this image-based approach.
IEEE TRANSACTIONS ON GEOSCIENCE AND REMOTE SENSING
(2022)
Article
Multidisciplinary Sciences
Juan M. Escamilla Molgora, Luigi Sedda, Peter J. Diggle, Peter M. Atkinson
Summary: Species distribution models are widely used for mapping taxa spatially. However, current models typically rely on presence-absence data, while the available data are mainly presence-only. This study presents a Bayesian-based SDM that operates directly on presence-only data and infers absences, improving the utility of global biodiversity databases.
JOURNAL OF THE ROYAL SOCIETY INTERFACE
(2022)