Tropical countries may be willing to pay more to protect their forests

Inadequate funding from developed countries has hampered international efforts to conserve biodiversity in tropical forests. We present two complementary research approaches that reveal a significant increase in public demand for conservation within tropical developing countries as those countries reach upper-middle-income (UMI) status. We highlight UMI tropical countries because they contain nearly four-fifths of tropical primary forests, which are rich in biodiversity and stored carbon. The first approach is a set of statistical analyses of various cross-country conservation indicators, which suggests that protective government policies have lagged behind the increase in public demand in these countries. The second approach is a case study from Malaysia, which reveals in a more integrated fashion the linkages from rising household income to increased household willingness to pay for conservation, nongovernmental organization activity, and delayed government action. Our findings suggest that domestic funding in UMI tropical countries can play a larger role in (i) closing the funding gap for tropical forest conservation, and (ii) paying for supplementary conservation actions linked to international payments for reduced greenhouse gas emissions from deforestation and forest degradation in tropical countries.Primary forests—“forests of native species in which there are no clearly visible signs of past or present human activity” (ref. 1, p. 11)—are globally significant repositories of biodiversity (2) and carbon (3). The global area of these forests is declining at an annual percentage rate that is nearly triple the rate for total global forest area (ref. 1, tables 2.4 and 3.3). Virtually all of the loss is occurring in tropical countries (SI Text, section 1). Logging is the main cause of the loss (ref. 1, p. 27), but hunting threatens biodiversity even in primary forests with intact tree cover (4, 5).Protecting primary tropical forests is a core mission of several international institutions created since the early 1990s, including the Convention on Biological Diversity (CBD), the Global Environment Facility (GEF), and the UN Collaborative Program on Reducing Emissions from Deforestation and Forest Degradation in Developing Countries (REDD). However, the CBD failed to achieve its goal of significantly reducing biodiversity loss by 2010 (6); international funding for biodiversity protection through the GEF and other mechanisms is below commitments made at the 1992 Earth Summit (7) and the amounts required to achieve the CBD’s 2020 protection targets (8); and REDD has not advanced beyond a readiness phase (www.un-redd.org). Relying on international mechanisms to fund protection of primary tropical forests does not look like a winning strategy.Here, we argue that economic development during the past 20–25 y has raised public demand for forest protection within tropical countries, but the level of protection supplied by tropical country governments has not kept pace. We focus on the dynamics of conservation and development within relatively wealthier developing countries: The group that is classified by the World Bank as upper-middle income (UMI). As we will show, the majority of primary forest area in tropical countries is found in these countries. We hypothesize that public willingness to pay (WTP) to protect forests has reached a relatively high level in UMI countries, leading to greater support for local conservation nongovernmental organizations (NGOs) and prompting governments to boost forest protection efforts—but not as much as the public would like. This gap between domestic demand and domestic supply of forest protection has two important implications: Domestic funding might be sufficient to cover the costs of additional protection in some, and perhaps many, tropical countries; and international funding might be able to leverage more domestic funding than it currently does.Although many cross-country studies in the environmental Kuznets curve (EKC) literature have investigated the effect of rising national income on deforestation (9), none has considered the effect on primary forests. This gap matters because deforestation, unlike primary forest loss, results mainly from agricultural conversion, not logging (1, 10). A few cross-country studies have considered the effect of national income on creation of protected areas (11–16), but with mixed findings on the significance of the effect. A second and larger group of studies has used surveys to measure WTP for biodiversity conservation by domestic populations within particular countries. Most of these studies have failed to detect a significant income effect (P < 0.05) (17, 18). Metaanalyses of these studies estimate income effects that are generally positive (protection increases with income) but not necessarily statistically significant (17, 18).We extended this prior work by coupling two research approaches: a broad-brush statistical analysis of the association between a standard measure of economic development, i.e., per capita gross national income (GNI), and a large set of cross-country conservation indicators (CIs); and a focused investigation of forest protection in a particular UMI country, Malaysia. The statistical analysis spanned 12 indicators from 10 diverse sources (Materials and Methods and SI Text, section 1). The indicators pertained to public environmental preferences, conservation NGOs, and government action (conservation spending, protected area establishment). These indicators relate more directly to our hypothesis about domestic demand and domestic supply of forest protection than do the deforestation rates analyzed by EKC studies. We limited the samples to countries classified as tropical by the UN Food and Agriculture Organization Forestry Department (ref. 19, data table 2) and paid special attention to differences between tropical countries in the UMI group and ones in lower income groups.The Malaysian case study allowed us to examine more closely the linkages from rising household income to increased household WTP, NGO engagement, and government protective action, and thereby uncover reasons for the underprovision of forest protection relative to household preferences. The case concerned Belum–Temengor, a 300,000-ha forested region in the state of Perak (Fig. 1). This region contains the largest area of primary forest in Peninsular Malaysia outside a national park. Our research included a population-representative survey of 1,261 rural and urban households in the Malaysian state of Selangor and the federal territory of Kuala Lumpur during 2010 (Materials and Methods). We used choice experiments (20, 21) to estimate household WTP to protect Belum–Temengor against logging and poaching (SI Text, section 2). Information from the case study enabled us to compare the public’s aggregate WTP for protection to current protection expenditures and to discuss why there is a gap between the two.Open in a separate windowFig. 1.Locations of Belum–Temengor (site of forest protection plans in choice experiments) and Selangor and Kuala Lumpur (site of household survey; the black dot is Kuala Lumpur) within Peninsular Malaysia (light gray). Lines show Malaysian state boundaries. Sources: base map, GADM database (www.gadm.org); Belum–Temengor boundaries, Forest Research Institute Malaysia.     

BRAF Mutation in Papillary Thyroid Cancer and Its Value in Tailoring Initial Treatment: A Systematic Review and Meta-Analysis

ABSTRACT: Clinicians have long sought to characterize biological markers of neoplasia as objective indicators of tumor presence, pathogenicity, and prognosis. Armed with data that correlate biomarker activity with disease presence and progression, clinicians can develop treatment strategies that address risks of disease recurrence or persistence and progression. The B-type Raf kinase (BRAF V600E) mutation in exon 15 of the BRAF gene has been noted to be a putative prognostic marker of the most prevalent form of thyroid cancer, papillary thyroid cancer (PTC)-a tumor type with high proclivity for recurrence or persistence. There has been a remarkable interest in determining the association of BRAF mutation with PTC recurrence or persistence. Using many new studies that have been published recently, we performed a meta-analysis to investigate correlations of BRAF mutation status with PTC prognosis, focusing on the recurrence or persistence of the disease after initial treatment.The study was based on published studies included in the PubMed and Embase databases addressing the BRAF mutation and the frequency of recurrence of PTC. We selected studies with data that enabled measurement of the risk ratio for recurrent disease. We also analyzed the factors that are classically known to be associated with recurrence. These factors included lymph node metastasis, extrathyroidal extension, distant metastasis, and American Joint Committee on Cancer (AJCC) stages III/IV.We used 14 articles that included an analysis of these factors as well as PTC recurrence data, with a total of 2470 patients from 9 different countries. The overall prevalence of the BRAF mutation was 45%. The risk ratios in BRAF mutation-positive patients were 1.93 (95% confidence interval [CI], 1.61-2.32; Z = 7.01; p < 0.00001) for PTC recurrence, 1.32 (95% CI, 1.20-1.45; Z = 5.73; p < 0.00001) for lymph node metastasis, 1.71 (95% CI, 1.50-1.94; Z = 8.09; p < 0.00001) for extrathyroidal extension, 0.95 (95% CI, 0.63-1.44; Z = 0.23; p = 0.82) for distant metastasis, and 1.70 (95% CI, 1.45-1.99; Z = 6.46; p < 0.00001) for advanced stage AJCC III/IV.Thus, in this meta-analysis, the BRAF mutation in PTC was significantly associated with PTC recurrence, lymph node metastasis, extrathyroidal extension, and advanced stage AJCC III/IV. Patients with PTC harboring mutated BRAF are likely to demonstrate factors that are associated with an increased risk for recurrence of the disease, offering new prospects for optimizing and tailoring initial treatment strategies to prevent recurrence.     

Direction of hair whorl and handedness

Although facial symmetry correlates with facial attractiveness, human faces are often far from symmetrical with one side frequently being larger than the other (Kowner, 1998). Smith (2000) reported that male and female faces were asymmetrical in opposite directions, with males having a larger area on the left side compared to the right side, and females having a larger right side compared to the left side. The present study attempted to replicate and extend this finding. Two databases of facial images from Stirling and St Andrews Universities, consisting of 180 and 122 faces respectively, and a third set of 62 faces collected at Abertay University, were used to examine Smith's findings. Smith's unique method of calculating the size of each hemiface was applied to each set. For the Stirling and St Andrews sets a computer program did this automatically and for the Abertay set it was done manually. No significant overall effect of gender on facial area asymmetry was found. However, the St Andrews sample demonstrated a similar effect to that found by Smith, with females having a significantly larger mean area of right hemiface and males having a larger left hemiface. In addition, for the Abertay faces handedness had a significant effect on facial asymmetry with right-handers having a larger left side of the face. These findings give limited support for Smith's results but also suggest that finding such an asymmetry may depend on some as yet unidentified factors inherent in some methods of image collection.     

Characterizing Changes in the Excitability of Corticospinal Projections to Proximal Muscles of the Upper Limb

BackgroundThere has been an explosion of interest in methods of exogenous brain stimulation that induce changes in the excitability of human cerebral cortex. The expectation is that these methods may promote recovery of function following brain injury. To assess their effects on motor output, it is typical to assess the state of corticospinal projections from primary motor cortex to muscles of the hand, via electromyographic responses to transcranial magnetic stimulation. If a range of stimulation intensities is employed, the recruitment curves (RCs) obtained can, at least for intrinsic hand muscles, be fitted by a sigmoid function.Objective/hypothesisTo establish whether sigmoid fits provide a reliable basis upon which to characterize the input–output properties of the corticospinal pathway for muscles proximal to the hand, and to assess as an alternative the area under the (recruitment) curve (AURC).MethodsA comparison of the reliability of these measures, using RCs obtained for muscles that are frequently the targets of rehabilitation.ResultsThe AURC is an extremely reliable measure of the state of corticospinal projections to hand and forearm muscles, which has both face and concurrent validity. Construct validity is demonstrated by detection of widely distributed (across muscles) changes in corticospinal excitability induced by paired associative stimulation (PAS).Conclusion(s)The parameters derived from sigmoid fits are unlikely to provide an adequate means to assess the effectiveness of therapeutic regimes. The AURC can be employed to characterize corticospinal projections to a range of muscles, and gauge the efficacy of longitudinal interventions in clinical rehabilitation.     

Development of polymorphic microsatellite markers for the microendemic pupfishes Cyprinodon julimes and C. pachycephalus

We developed microsatellite loci for the Julimes pupfish, Cyprinodon julimes. Twenty-five loci were screened across 19 individuals from Julimes Spring, Chihuahua, Mexico. The number of alleles per locus ranged from 2 to 14, observed heterozygosity ranged from 0.105 to 0.947, and the probability of identity values ranged from 0.022 to 0.588. We then tested for cross-amplification in the bighead pupfish, C. pachycephalus; twenty-three individuals from San Diego de Alcalá, Chihuahua, Mexico, were screened across the 20 loci that amplified cleanly. These new loci will be used for long-term genetic monitoring of these critically endangered species.     

Comparison of periodontal open flap debridement versus closed debridement with Er,Cr:YSGG laser

Background

Traditional periodontal open flap debridement (OFD) results in reduced pocket depth (PD), clinical attachment loss (CAL), gingival recession (GR) and postoperative pain and discomfort. The quest to overcome these shortcomings has led to research into Er,Cr:YSGG laser assisted pocket therapy (ELAPT). This study was designed to compare the clinical outcomes of ELAPT versus OFD.

Methods

Fifteen patients with a PD of ≥5 mm and ≤8 mm at two sites were selected. Test sites (Group 1) were treated by ELAPT and the control (Group 2) by OFD. Clinical parameters were recorded at baseline, 3 and 6 months and included Plaque Index (PI), Gingival Index (GI), modified Sulcular Bleeding Index (mSBI), PD, CAL and GR.

Results

Both treatments produced a reduction in PI, GI, mSBI and PD, an increase in GR, and a gain in CAL at 3 and 6 months. The mean gain of CAL in Group 1 at 3 and 6 months (1.60 ± 0.78 and 1.80 ± 0.63) was similar (p > 0.05) to the value of Group 2 (1.93 ± 0.88 and 2.00 ± 0.54). GR increased significantly (p < 0.05) only in Group 2 at 3 and 6 months (1.80 ± 0.56 and 1.87 ± 0.64) compared to Group 1 (0.50 ± 0.68 and 0.60 ± 0.74).

Conclusions

ELAPT compared with OFD results in similar CAL gains with less GR and significant reductions in PD, GI and mSBI, and may be considered as an alternative to surgical therapy.