How Local Participation in National Planning Creates New Development Opportunities

This study looks into the role of participation in influencing the adaptation of national policies to generate local economic development opportunities. The main question put forward is: What are the preconditions for creating new local development opportunities in a national state’s government planning process? The subject of the study is a planning process for the designation of a national park in the southwestern part of Norway. The analysis looks into three factors from the perspective of power: the mobilization and power base development of local stakeholders, the planning authority’s intention and structure for participation and change, and how conflicts are handled in the dialogue arenas. The conclusion with respect to regional innovation literature is that local stakeholders could make a difference by articulating both power over and power with and that conflicts may be useful if the planning authority takes the participants’ claims seriously by showing compromise or allowing integration of interests. From such preconditions new local economic opportunities could be created by collaboration.     

Linking climate change to lemming cycles

The population cycles of rodents at northern latitudes have puzzled people for centuries, and their impact is manifest throughout the alpine ecosystem. Climate change is known to be able to drive animal population dynamics between stable and cyclic phases, and has been suggested to cause the recent changes in cyclic dynamics of rodents and their predators. But although predator-rodent interactions are commonly argued to be the cause of the Fennoscandian rodent cycles, the role of the environment in the modulation of such dynamics is often poorly understood in natural systems. Hence, quantitative links between climate-driven processes and rodent dynamics have so far been lacking. Here we show that winter weather and snow conditions, together with density dependence in the net population growth rate, account for the observed population dynamics of the rodent community dominated by lemmings (Lemmus lemmus) in an alpine Norwegian core habitat between 1970 and 1997, and predict the observed absence of rodent peak years after 1994. These local rodent dynamics are coherent with alpine bird dynamics both locally and over all of southern Norway, consistent with the influence of large-scale fluctuations in winter conditions. The relationship between commonly available meteorological data and snow conditions indicates that changes in temperature and humidity, and thus conditions in the subnivean space, seem to markedly affect the dynamics of alpine rodents and their linked groups. The pattern of less regular rodent peaks, and corresponding changes in the overall dynamics of the alpine ecosystem, thus seems likely to prevail over a growing area under projected climate change.     

Forecasting non-seasonal time series with missing observations

Most forecasting methods are based on equally spaced data. In the case of missing observations the methods have to be modified. We have considered three smoothing methods: namely, simple exponential smoothing; double exponential smoothing; and Holt's method. We present a new, unified approach to handle missing data within the smoothing methods. This approach is compared with previously suggested modifications. The comparison is done on 12 real, non-seasonal time series, and shows that the smoothing methods, properly modified, usually perform well if the time series have a moderate number of missing observations.     

PHAB toxins: a unique family of predatory sea anemone toxins evolving via intra-gene concerted evolution defines a new peptide fold

Sea anemone venoms have long been recognized as a rich source of peptides with interesting pharmacological and structural properties, but they still contain many uncharacterized bioactive compounds. Here we report the discovery, three-dimensional structure, activity, tissue localization, and putative function of a novel sea anemone peptide toxin that constitutes a new, sixth type of voltage-gated potassium channel (K_V) toxin from sea anemones. Comprised of just 17 residues, κ-actitoxin-Ate1a (Ate1a) is the shortest sea anemone toxin reported to date, and it adopts a novel three-dimensional structure that we have named the Proline-Hinged Asymmetric β-hairpin (PHAB) fold. Mass spectrometry imaging and bioassays suggest that Ate1a serves a primarily predatory function by immobilising prey, and we show this is achieved through inhibition of Shaker-type K_V channels. Ate1a is encoded as a multi-domain precursor protein that yields multiple identical mature peptides, which likely evolved by multiple domain duplication events in an actinioidean ancestor. Despite this ancient evolutionary history, the PHAB-encoding gene family exhibits remarkable sequence conservation in the mature peptide domains. We demonstrate that this conservation is likely due to intra-gene concerted evolution, which has to our knowledge not previously been reported for toxin genes. We propose that the concerted evolution of toxin domains provides a hitherto unrecognised way to circumvent the effects of the costly evolutionary arms race considered to drive toxin gene evolution by ensuring efficient secretion of ecologically important predatory toxins.