A Pattern Of Islands Download 16
Zee Badoni
By their very nature oceanic island ecosystems offer great opportunities for the study of evolution and have for a long time been recognized as natural laboratories for studying evolution owing to their discrete geographical nature and diversity of species and habitats. The development of molecular genetic methods for phylogenetic reconstruction has been a significant advance for evolutionary biologists, providing a tool for answering questions about the diversity among the flora and fauna on such islands. These questions relate to both the origin and causes of species diversity both within an archipelago and on individual islands. Within a phylogenetic framework one can answer fundamental questions such as whether ecologically and/or morphologically similar species on different islands are the result of island colonization or convergent evolution. Testing hypotheses about ages of the individual species groups or entire community assemblages is also possible within a phylogenetic framework. Evolutionary biologists and ecologists are increasingly turning to molecular phylogenetics for studying oceanic island plant and animal communities and it is important to review what has been attempted and achieved so far, with some cautionary notes about interpreting phylogeographical pattern on oceanic islands.
Arthur Grimble was sent to the South Seas as a young man at the twilight of the Edwardian era. For the next twenty years he lived in the Gilbert and Ellice islands as a colonial administrator and developed a rare passion for the language, life and landscape of his parish. Fortunately his island neighbours, a fascinating cast of fishermen, sorcerers, poets and fighters, began to trust this charming, happy and energetic young man, and the old men shared with him their treasury of stories from the pagan days when warfare was endemic and magic was an essential part of everyday life.
Arthur Benson was pained at the rhyme-pattern of the octave, but said the thing sounded sincere and showed promise. I was unwise enough to bring his kindly letter to the notice of some of my uncles. They only said he ought to have known better; after all, he had had every chance, dammit, as the son of an archbishop! So, Benson, as a moral prop, was out. But I had acquired at school and Cambridge some kind of competence at cricket and other sports, which kept them always hoping for the best. When I became, first secretary, and then, in the normal course, captain of my college cricket XI, they began to believe I really might be on my way to vertebrate life. But they could not have been more deeply mistaken. As secretary, I invariably took orders from the captain; as captain, I invariably took orders from the secretary, while the team invariably played the game as if neither of us were there. The worst of it was, I loved it. If ever I had previously entertained a notion that I might enjoy ordering people around, that experience certainly disabused me of it.
A closer analog to the "islands" approach would be progressive enhancement, to which we're essentially adding SSR hydration and a consistent metaphor for adding interactivity to a region of the page. In traditional progressive enhancement, we might have a that looks for an image carousel in the page and instantiates a jQuery plugin on it. Instead, that image carousel would be rendered on the server and a dedicated emitted for it that loads the image carousel implementation and in-place upgrades it to be interactive.
Similar to Progressive Hydration, rendering pages using an islands architecture results in the heavier dynamic portions of the page being initialized not just progressively, but separately. This means individual regions of the page become interactive without anything else on the page needing to be loaded first.
In an "islands" model, server rendering is not a bolt-on optimization aimed at improving SEO or UX. Instead, it is a fundamental part of how pages are delivered to the browser. The HTML returned in response to navigation contains a meaningful and immediately renderable representation of the content the user requested.
Island Wood is a gorgeous retreat center on Bainbridge Island in Washington. It has such a special place in my heart that I had to create a simple, relaxing pattern to reflect the joy of my time at the retreat, mixed with beautiful yarns!
While I know we can't go on retreats every weekend, we CAN knit ourselves happy thinking about the possibility of retreats and what it means for our mental and emotional health. I humbly recommend getting lost in the stitches of the Island Wood socks this weekend. You can download a copy of the pattern here or on Ravelry.
Understanding of human migration patterns and population relocation through the Pacific, since earliest settlement, has been informed by insights into the geologic template of atoll island formation and the influence of environmental change (including sea level) in modulating the habitability of islands1,2. Consequently, islands have been conceptualised as pedestals for human occupation, presenting opportunities for resource development and settlement, with their formation critical in the migration of peoples through the Pacific1. Questions of contemporary, and near future, atoll island habitability and persistence are equally framed against a backdrop of environmental change, and in particular, climate-driven increases in sea level3,4.
Climate change remains one of the single greatest environmental threats to the livelihood and well-being of the peoples of the Pacific5. The fate of small island states confronted with the spectre of sea-level rise has raised global concern, and prompted a labyrinth of international programmes to consider how Pacific nations can and should adapt to the threats of climatic change6. Islands considered most at risk of physical destabilisation are low-lying atoll nations7,8. Erosion, combined with increased frequency of overwash flooding of island margins4 is expected to render islands uninhabitable9,10. Incremental and event-driven climatic changes to ecological systems also present additional future stresses for island habitability, including the tolerance of agriculture crops to increased soil salinity, as well as concerns about water security, both in the context of drought and salt water intrusion of groundwater11,12,13.
Under these environmental scenarios, conjectures of habitability and mobility become entwined and have driven an urgency in socio-political discourse about atoll nation futures and human security14,15. Strategies for adaptation to changing biophysical conditions are coupled with narratives of environmentally determined exodus16. Such persistent messages have normalised island loss and undermined robust and sustainable adaptive planning in small island nations17. In their place are adaptive responses characterised by in-place solutions, seeking to defend the line and include solutions such as reclamation and seawalls18,19, potentially reinforcing maladaptive practices. Notwithstanding the maladaptive outcomes of such approaches15,20 such dialogues present a binary of stay and defend the line or eventual displacement. There is limited space within these constructs to reflect on possibilities that a heterogeneous archipelago (size, number and dynamics of islands) may offer in terms of sustained habitability, beyond the historic imprint of colonial agendas and entrenched land tenure systems that may constrain novel adaptation responses at the national scale7,21,22.
Amid this dispiriting and forlorn consensus, recent commentators have queried whether the loss of islands can be avoided and ask whether a more optimistic prognosis exists for atoll nations17. We argue that indeed there are a more nuanced set of options to be explored to support adaptation in atoll states. Existing paradigms are based on flawed assumptions that islands are static landforms, which will simply drown as the sea level rises4,23. There is growing evidence that islands are geologically dynamic features that will adjust to changing sea level and climatic conditions24,25,26,27. However, such studies have typically examined a limited number of islands within atoll nations, and not provided forward trajectories of land availability, thereby limiting the findings for broader adaptation considerations17. Furthermore, the existing range of adaptive solutions are narrowly constrained and do not reflect the inherent physical heterogeneity and dynamics of archipelagic systems.
Summary data of physical island change of islands in Tuvalu between 1971 and 2014. a Absolute changes in island area in hectares with respect to island size. b Percentage change in islands per decade with respect to island size. Raw data contained in Supplementary Data 1. Note: square symbols denote reef platform islands; solid circles denote atoll rim islands; and light blue circles enclosing symbols denote populated islands
While wave processes can account for locational shifts in shorelines, they cannot solely account for the expansion of the majority of islands. Expansion of islands on reef surfaces indicates a net addition of sediment. Implications of increased sediment volumes are profound as they suggest positive sediment generation balances for these islands and maintenance of an active linkage between the reef sediment production regime and transfer to islands, which is critical for ongoing physical resilience of islands43. Such island reef budgets and their connectivity are likely to be spatially variable as a consequence of the localised reefal provenance of island sediments and the temporal dynamics of reef ecology and sediment generation and transfer mechanisms37,43,44. On most windward reef sites such linkages are modulated by storm-driven wave deposition of new materials and subsequent reef recovery, whereas at leeward locations, where sand islands may prevail, supply is likely to be characterised by a more consistent incremental addition of sediments from reef flat surfaces.
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