UF Explore Magazine | Spring 2022

Age of D iscovery

DeLuca Preserve is a 27,000-acre Living Laboratory

The DeLuca Preserve in Osceola County became part of the University of Florida in 2020. The 27,000-acre parcel is home to endangered plant and animal species and represents a rare opportunity to study a nd protect

he biodiversity and ecosystem services offered by Florida’s undeveloped lands. Ducks Unlimited, the world's largest private nonprofit group devoted to wetlands, will collaborate with UF on conservation. Cover photo by Carlton Ward, Jr.

Scan this code with your camera to:

• Get more content for each story

• View back issues

Explore is published by UF Research. Opinions expressed do not reflect the official views of the university. Use of trade names implies no endorsement by the University of Florida. © 2022 University of Florida. explore.research.ufl.edu

Editor:

Art Director:

Design

Writers:

Printing:

DeLuca Preserve teems with biodiversity, including carnivorous plants like these sundews, drosera capillaris.

Photo

f there is one thing recent history has made clear, it is that you never know when the unexpected may usher in a new and very different reality. Who would have imagined the world would still be gripped by the pandemic two years after it emerged, or that geopolitical disputes on the other side of the world would have ripple effects here at home. Even our best efforts to forecast the future must be tempered by a realization that unexpected events may topple our assumptions. In order to move confidently ahead in times of uncertainty, we need reliable options when the rules of engagement shift. Fortunately, research is all about creating options.

Throughout the pandemic, we have leaned heavily on new and improved technologies to manage our lives. Unable to meet in person or travel, we adopted video conferencing technologies for gatherings, whether for an office staff meeting or a friend’s birthday party. Testing for COVID progressed from a procedure available only at a medical facility to a kit you buy from your local pharmacy. Less than a year after the pandemic emerged, research provided us with vaccines that greatly reduce the risk of serious illness or death from the disease. Years of research in biomedical sciences and other technologies provided the solutions we needed to move forward in the pandemic.

Although most of our attention was on the pandemic, other challenges didn’t go away, like global climate change, which is demanding new agricultural solutions to rising temperatures and changing weather patterns and threatening coastal dwellers with frequent flooding from rising seas. And cancer, diabetes, cardiovascular disease and other illnesses continue to disrupt lives.

Here at the University of Florida, our scientists and scholars are on the front lines of these and other challenges.

At the 27,000-acre DeLuca Preserve, we are working with our partners to preserve a priceless piece of natural Florida and use it as a living laboratory for understanding our state’s varied environment.

We are leveraging a 50-year-old collection of recorded interviews with Native Americans throughout the Southeast to protect a heritage that can provide insights into how to peacefully coexist with each other and the land.

The pandemic has had a huge impact on the retail industry, and our retail security experts are working with industry to develop technologies to keep customers, employees and transactions safe and secure.

But through all these challenges, exploration continues. That’s why we’re experimenting to see if plants will grow in lunar soil, because when we go back to the Moon for extended stays, we’ll need a way to grow the food that will sustain our astronauts.

New challenges bring new opportunities to learn. New obstacles bring new opportunities to invent. New surprises bring new opportunities to discover. Research yields options. When uncertainty is the norm, the value of research becomes even more evident.

P.

Vice President for Research

David

Norton

John Jernigan

Research Spending at Record $960 Million

Despite pandemic uncertainty, UF faculty conducted a record $960 million in research during fiscal year 2021, accounting for about 40% of the 12-institution State University System’s $2.3 billion in annual expenditures.

UF’s submission to the National Science Foundation’s annual Higher Education Research and Development survey reported a $17.8 million increase over UF’s previous record of $942.2 million set in 2020.

Of almost 7,800 active awards, the federal government accounted for $423.2 million of the total; state and local governments, $161.4 million; foundations, $46.6 million; and industry, $31.4 million. Other sources include institutional funds and gifts for research.

Life sciences research including health and agriculture totaled $707 million. The U.S. Department of Health and Human Services, including the National Institutes of Health, is UF’s largest funding source, followed by the U.S. Department of Agriculture. Engineering and computer sciences accounted for $137.9 million, while earth and physical sciences like geology, astronomy, chemistry and physics a nd mathematics accounted for $44 million. Many of these are funded by NSF. Psychology, the social sciences and humanities accounted for the balance of the funding.

Major projects currently underway include:

• A $15 million study through UF’s Institute of Food and Agricultural Sciences to determine if the biofuel carinata can be established in north Florida, giving farmers another

State & Local Federal

Major Funding Sources Foundations

Business

income source while providing sustainable energy. The project is funded by the USDA’s National Institute of Food and Agriculture.

• A collaboration with NVIDIA, a Silicon Valley-based technology company and key partner in UF's artificial intelligence (AI) initiative, to use AI to quickly draw insights about diseases and treatment effectiveness from tens of millions of electronic medical records.

• A $9 million effort led by cybersecurity researchers from UF’s Herbert

$423.2M $161.4M

$46.6M

$31.4M

Wertheim College of Engineering and The Ohio State University to make computer chips more secure and to provide a comprehensive workforce training and education program in areas related to microelectronics design and security.

“The University of Florida has built a research enterprise that is superbly equipped to tackle the problems of today and tomorrow,” Vice President for Research David Norton said.

Joseph Kays

Hirschfeld Wins John Bardeen Prize

Physicist Peter Hirschfeld, a UF professor since 1988, has won the 2022 John Bardeen Prize for his groundbreaking studies exploring superconductivity.

Hirschfeld has devoted most of his career to finding and designing materials that can conduct electricity without electrical resistance at room temperature, a discovery he deems the “holy grail” of his field. Currently, metallic conductors must be cooled to extremely low temperatures to become superconductors. The ability to superconduct at higher temperatures would save massive amounts of energy, revolutionizing transportation, power transmission and magnet technology.

Hirschfeld’s research focuses on understanding how superconductivity works in new classes of materials. By investigating

unconventional materials whose behaviors seem to defy scientific theory, Hirschfeld has expanded the field’s potential. Recently, he has embraced artificial intelligence techniques in the search for new materials.

The international prize, sponsored by the University of Illinois and named for the only person ever to have won two Nobel Prizes in physics, is awarded every three years. Hirschfeld will receive the award at the Materials and Mechanisms of Superconductivity conference in July alongside two other winners, Jörg Schmalian of the Karlsruhe Institute of Technology and Mohit Randeria of The Ohio State University.

Lauren Barnett

The Future of Blockchain

Anew lab in the UF College of the Arts’ Digital Worlds Institute will expand blockchain education with free, open-source classes and expanded course offerings, supported by a $270,000 grant from the Algorand Foundation.

Blockchain is a digital database that allows information to be used and shared simultaneously within a large, decentralized and publicly accessible network. For the arts, blockchain can be both a medium for artmaking and a tool for influencing and managing art markets.

“The creation of the Blockchain Lab at UF marks a significant moment in the history of the university, akin to the first labs dedicated to internet technology in the mid-90s,” said Associate Professor of Digital Arts and Sciences Marko Suvajdzic, the principal investigator on the project.

Suvajdzic will work with Tim Difato, acting director of Digital Worlds, to produce and design six online courses. The lab will also support startups by sponsoring a blockchain category at the Big Idea Gator Business Plan Competition, hosted annually by the Entrepreneurship and Innovation Center at the Warrington College of Business.

The lab and its partnerships will help forge the future of blockchain, said Sophia Acord, College of the Arts associate dean for research and strategic initiatives.

“Mastery of this technology and the tools that it creates will position students to be leading creators and collaborators in the 21st century,” she said.

Brandon J. McKinley

Peter Hirschfeld

Statue of UF Professor Comes to Smithsonian

When biomedical engineer Ana Maria Porras’ life-size, 3D-printed likeness arrived at the Smithsonian National Museum of Natural History in early March, it was the latest stop in a cross-country trek boosting representation of women in science.

The #IfThenSheCan exhibit highlights American Association for the Advancement of Science ambassadors like Porras, aiming to narrow the STEM gap by encouraging girls to consider science careers. The UF professor caught AAAS’ attention through her science communication projects on social media, where she posts photos of adorable crocheted microbes with lessons about their impact.

Each of the 120 bright orange statues bears a QR code to unlock information about the ambassador’s field and background. (A close look at Porras’ statue reveals three of her crocheted creations perched in her hand.) After debuting in Dallas, the exhibit which includes UF grads Jennifer Adler, a conservation photographer, and Allison Fundis, a marine geologist stopped at the Smithsonian for Women’s History Month.

“The group is so diverse in so many ways ethnicity, national origin, occupation,” Porras said. “If I were a little girl walking through, I would see there are so many different things you can do as a scientist and as an engineer. That's really powerful.”

Alisson Clark

Porras crafts colorful, crocheted versions of microbes, sharing facts about them on social media to spark interest in science.

Biomedical engineer Ana Maria Porras is part of an exhibition of more than 100 3D-printed statues of women in STEM.

Mellon Foundation Grant Supports Community-Engaged Artmaking Research to Advance Racial Equity

Anew grant unites Gainesville community members and UF College of the Arts faculty in a three-year project that explores artmaking as a platform for reconciliation.

The Andrew W. Mellon Foundation awarded UF a $750,000 Humanities in Place grant to collaborate with Gainesville’s historically Black neighborhoods in researching their questions and celebrating their stories through the arts.

Dionne Champion, research assistant professor at the UF Center for Arts in Medicine, will serve as the grant’s principal investigator. Champion, an engineer, dancer, arts educator and researcher, has led a number of community arts programs, especially for children who have experienced feelings of marginalization in STEM education settings.

Champion says the Racial Equity in Community-Engaged Research project

UF's Alana Jackson, left, and Dionne Champion, pictured at Gainesville's Depot Park, will lead the three-year research project.

is an opportunity to build a new equitable relationship and research exchange between the community and the university.

“Gainesville is bustling with innovative artists, creatives and culture bearers, many of whom come from multigenerational families in our historically Black communities,” Champion said. “As UF expands, it’s important to acknowledge and amplify the wisdom and aesthetics that are around us and precede us.”

Champion will coordinate the grant alongside Alana Jackson, a service learning lecturer at the Center for Arts in Medicine. Jackson is a songwriter, performer and spoken word artist dedicated to working in arts and health.

Sparked by the work of Gainesville native Terri Bailey and other local arts leaders, the project could serve as a model for arts partnerships between cities and universities. In its first effort, community residents will collect stories and photograph spaces to create “countermaps,” artistic renderings that combine what they capture. Participants will be selected through an application process and paid for their time and contributions.

“The countermapping project will be an opportunity for community residents to represent themselves and tell their own stories, and to identify critical areas of focus for their communities,” Jackson said.

This summer, the community and UF team will host a paid apprenticeship for 20 young adults ages 18 to 25 to work with professional artists, scholars and creatives, developing the next generation of artists and social entrepreneurs.

Throughout 2022, the team will host four “Critical Community Conversations” with local residents, organizations, faculty and graduate students from diverse fields. Artist-researchers from the mapping projects will present their work to help guide the conversations, which are intended to inspire a series of art projects to be developed in 2023.

Next year, local artists and creatives will team up with community members and UF students and researchers to produce a physical or digital art installation that draws on and reflects the stories collected in the mapping projects and conversations. Six project teams will receive funding.

In the final year of the grant, these projects will be installed in a community cultural space.

The activities mark the first set of programming for the SPARC352 initiative a Space for People, Arts, Research, and Creative Collaboration and Community w ith 352 signifying Gainesville’s area code. The effort builds relationships between the city government and UF administration with the help of UF Office of Collaborative Initiatives Director Andrew Telles and UF Center for Arts, Migration, and Entrepreneurship Director

O şubi Craig.

“We can take some of these best practices we plan to build in Gainesville and connect not only the ideas, but the people, with others who are working on similar issues around the world,” Craig said. “Where better for us to start that work than in our backyard?”

Brandon J. McKinley

SPARC352 is a partnership between community members, local artists and entrepreneurs, the UF College of the Arts, UF Center for Arts, Migration, and Entrepreneurship, UF Center for Arts in Medicine, UF Health Shands Arts in Medicine, UF Office of Collaborative Initiatives and the city of Gainesville.

SPARC352 partners gather at a Partnership for Reimagining Gainesville event. From left to right: Terri Bailey, Turbado Marabou, Andrew Telles, Dionne Champion, Alana Jackson and Oşubi Craig.

NSF Grant Supports Low-income Students in Geomatics

Fields from environmental protection to emergency management and construction rely on geomatics professionals, who gather and analyze data from tools like satellite systems, laser scanning and piloted and unpiloted aircraft. With a $973,925 grant from the National Science Foundation, the University of Florida Institute of Food and Agricultural Sciences (UF/IFAS) is launching an effort to help talented low-income students enroll and succeed in geomatics.

In a six-year project, 38 students will receive scholarships and support services as part of a study to identify factors leading to academic success and retention. The proposal stemmed from a desire to increase the number of professional surveyors and mappers, who enable economic growth, said Amr Abd-Elrahman, an associate professor of geomatics and principal investigator of the project.

“Financially stressed students often face academic, structural, economic and social barriers affecting their pursuit of STEM education such as geomatics,” he said.

Pre-admission advising, recruitment activities, mentoring and professional development form a core part of the effort. A social science component will examine the effects of extracurricular

support and the structure of the geomatics degree program as a blended and geographically distributed program, said Alison Adams, an assistant professor at the UF/IFAS School of Forest, Fisheries and Geomatics Sciences.

Researchers will identify the barriers affecting the enrollment of low-income students and the factors contributing to student advancement.

The UF/IFAS statewide model, adopted in 2007, is recognized as a

pioneer in distance education of geomatics a f ield that requires practical and field training, providing hands-on and lab instruction from UF’s main campus, the Gulf Coast Research and Education Center (GCREC) in Plant City and the Fort Lauderdale Research and Education Center (FLREC) in Davie.

Abd-Elrahman hopes to welcome the first cohort in Fall 2022.

Lourdes Mederos

Amr Abd-Elrahman (right) teaches students in the field.

Alison Adams

Endemic COVID-19 Could Be 1 to 10 Years Away

f you donned your mask today and felt a primal urge to yell “When will this pandemic END-emic already?!” take heart. You are not alone. We want to shed our masks and gather close 2019 style, without fear.

But COVID hasn’t gone away entirely. In fact, experts say it’s here to stay. Which is why it’s still important to mask up, keep your distance, get vaccinated and stay boosted.

“We may feel over COVID, but COVID isn’t quite over us,” said UF biostatistician Ira Longini. “We are coming out of the omicron peak a little more slowly than we projected, pretty much everywhere on the planet.”

Longini is an expert in modeling infectious diseases, vaccine efficacy and clinical trials. He has been involved in projects with collaborators such as UF research assistant scientist Thomas Hladish in the UF College of Liberal Arts and Sciences to estimate how different COVID viral variant surges will play out in Florida. Their models have tracked closely to real-world events. But researchers are still trying to understand what may happen next with omicron.

Longini said many factors could be at play in the prolonged omicron denouement, including changes in people’s behaviors, public health mitigation interventions easing, and schools opening in person. The subvariants of viral variants could also play a role. The advent of subvariant BA.2, which emerged from omicron BA.1, could be changing infection rates in Europe, Longini said. The new subvariant has been found in a small number of cases in Florida, although its ability to reinfect those who have had COVID-19 are unknown, as is its role in current transmission rates.

“The main thing people can do right now is get vaccinated and get boosted a ll the way down to 5-yearolds,” said Longini, a faculty member of the UF Emerging Pathogens Institute. “And pay attention to your local

conditions, to know when transmission rates are surging or declining.”

So, how do pandemics end? History shows us two paths. In one path, the infectious agent fades from humanity.

“We saw this with the 1957-58 Asian flu, the A/H2N2 strain, which disappeared from the face of the Earth and has not been seen since 1968,” said Longini. “SARS-CoV-1 has also disappeared from human populations since 2004.”

The second path is when pandemics burn through a population and then stay by continually reinventing themselves with minor variations. This is the path of endemism: They integrate into the suite of infectious diseases that coexist with us.

“COVID is trying to find its way into the pantheon of respiratory viruses, but where does it fit?” Longini said. “Does it look like seasonal coronavirus, or does it look like influenza or respiratory syncytial virus, which is also known as RSV? It’s not done with us, but it’s trying to figure out its place, and it’s not going away.”

Longini estimates that it could take between one and 10 years for COVID to become endemic. Global disparities in vaccine distribution and acceptance could also further drive the emergence of new variants, he added.

“Some future variants may be mild, others more lethal,” Longini said. “There is really no telling.”

For now, COVID-19 is a yearround virus. But it may eventually become a seasonal threat, Longini said, similar to the mild coronavirus strains OC43, NL63, HKU1 and 229E, which we deal with most winters.

“It looks there will be a whole host of these coronaviruses that are all somewhat different from each other, and that will persist and co-circulate,” said Longini. “Right now, COVID is trying to find its niche. How can it coexist with its respiratory viral siblings? Eventually it must evolve in a way it can fit in and persist. Though it may take several years to reach the endemic state.”

In the meantime, as population-level immunity develops, Longini said COVID could eventually become a disease of children and the elderly.

“As people age and accumulate more and more immunity, they will be less likely to have severe disease from this,” Longini said. “Until they get very old and vulnerable through declining immune systems.”

So where does this leave us today? Unfortunately, no matter how many times you feel you have hit your COVID wall, it’s not yet endemic and there is still a place for mitigation, depending upon local conditions and your personal risk factors, such as obesity and diabetes.

“We can’t expect a good outcome without controls,” Longini said. When we allow the spread to get out of hand, he said, “the transmission becomes unstoppable, like a freight train.”

DeLene Beeland

In Comb Jellies, Clues to Early Brains

Anew $1.5 million grant will allow researchers to better understand the brains and nervous systems of animals and humans by studying gelatinous ocean comb jellies, sea creatures that can lead to insights about how brains began.

Using a $1.5 million exploratory grant from The Paul G. Allen Frontiers Group, a team at UF’s Whitney Laboratory for Marine Bioscience will study the nervous system of the ctenophore to reconstruct the nervous system of the first animal, which lived close to a billion years ago, shedding light on how certain evolutionary changes led to the nervous systems of modern animals.

Joseph Ryan, Mark Martindale and James Strother, based at the Whitney Laboratory in St. Augustine, will use an evolutionary framework to combine genomics, developmental biology and neuroscience approaches.

“We published the first ctenophore genome in 2013, and one of the big questions that emerged from that study was how are the nervous systems of ctenophores and other animals related,” Ryan said. “This question is fundamental to understanding how our earliest ancestors sensed their environment and what evolutionary events gave rise to the brains and nervous systems of today's animals.”

Jessica Long

Michele Manuel has been elected to the National Academy of Engineering, one of the field’s highest professional honors.

The NAE recognized Manuel for research, implementation and teaching involving self-healing metals, dissolving medical implants for surgery and lightweight, high-performance alloys.

Manuel helped develop self-repairing metals for the airline and aerospace industry that mend cracks without the need for skilled technicians or direct contact. Selfrepairing alloys are also more robust than traditional repair methods.

“Dr. Manuel is emblematic of the New Engineer who emerges from our college. Her research has given NASA

and other industries game-changing technology and her leadership as chair of our Department of Materials Science and Engineering lends immeasurable inspiration to our Gator Engineering students and graduates,” said Cammy Abernathy, dean of the Herbert Wertheim College of Engineering.

Manuel, who received her bachelor’s degree from UF, worked for NASA and General Motors before returning as a faculty member in 2008. In 2017, she became the first woman and person of color to lead the Department of Materials Science and Engineering as chair. She will be formally inducted during the NAE’s annual meeting in Washington, D.C., in October.

Michele Manuel

Biophysicist Develops AI Methods to Understand How Cells ‘Talk’

Cells may be the simplest units of life, but that doesn’t stop them from communicating in complex ways. UF biological physicist Purushottam Dixit believes that artificial intelligence can let us in on cells’ conversations a nd possibly help scientists introduce more targeted, effective therapies in medicine.

Awarded a $1.82 million grant from the National Institutes of Health, Dixit and his research team will use UF’s supercomputer, HiPerGator AI, to explore cellular communication. Through a process called cellular signaling, cells take in and respond to cues from their neighbors and environments deciding, amongst other things, whether to move, grow, or respond to threats.

“Signaling networks are the ‘eyes and ears’ of the cells that allow them to interpret what’s happening in their environment so that they can make decisions,” Dixit explained.

There can be vast differences, however, between individual cellular responses to the same cue. That’s where AI comes in handy. Technological advances in the last five years now allow researchers to analyze massive volumes of data to better understand deviations in behavior by genetically identical cells.

Differing cell responses to external stimuli can have dire consequences. For instance, certain cancer drugs use signaling networks to instruct tumors to die.

“Because there is heterogeny in the response of individual cells to this external input, some cells may not die,” Dixit said. “And that’s not good for us it’s good for the tumor, but not for us.”

Scientists have a general idea about why some cells thwart the messages sent to them. Some fluctuations boil down to a concept of randomness known as “stochasticity.” Additionally, the number of molecules in each cell can vary, even between genetically identical cells. If you

think of these networks of cellular interactions as complex circuits, this variation impacts the “wiring” of these cells’ signaling responses. Although researchers have grasped a basic understanding of cellular signaling, the biochemistry driving the diversity in these processes remains poorly understood.

“We want to figure out the differences in this ‘machinery’ between different cells that allows some of them to behave in a certain way, some of them to behave in another,” Dixit said. “If we know that, we’ll be able to, let’s say, rationally design combination drug treatments.”

These multi-faceted drug ‘cocktails’, both antibiotic and anti-cancer, can more effectively combat disease and reduce the risk of drug resistance.

Dixit hopes that once armed with this insight, scientists can develop antibiotics that kill bacteria a nd chemotherapy drugs that kill tumors with heightened precision. Conversely, tissue engineers will be able to encourage cells to grow with greater accuracy, improving the success of therapeutic reconstructions like skin grafts.

This study is Dixit’s first time bridging his work with AI methods. He’s excited about the ability to analyze an abundant amount of data quickly and efficiently. While he’s using brand new AI technologies to advance his research, Dixit stresses that he will not lose sight of the past.

“Our goal is to integrate some of the biochemical knowledge gained over the past 50 to 100 years to build more specific machine learning methods tailored for this type of biological data,” he said.

Lauren Barnett

Dixit with research assistants Hoda Akl and Andrew Goetz.

Purushottam Dixit

Age of Discovery Age of Discovery

DeLuca Preserve offers unprecedented scientific opportunity

By Cindy Spence

Brent Sellers never tires of visitors’ reaction when he gives them a tour of the DeLuca Preserve, a 27,000-acre gem donated to the University of Florida in 2020.

His four-wheel drive Silverado 2500 is like a time machine as he opens a gate and steers it straight into the past, into a Florida known today mostly in history book pictures. It’s wild and unpopulated, not the Florida most people see every day, and he is used to open-mouthed stares and oohs and aahs.

As overseer of the preserve, Sellers is keenly aware of how easily his truck could have been a golf cart and the dirt road a four-lane highway. The gift from Elisabeth DeLuca, however, changed that fate, and Sellers and a growing cadre of scientists are grateful.

“The opportunities for research here are just about endless,” says Sellers, who added oversight of the preserve to his already big job as the director of the Range Cattle Research and Education Center, a 2,840-acre research ranch in Ona.

Sellers stops the truck for a moment at his favorite spot, where palmettos stretch across a landscape with soldier-straight pines lined up on a horizon of bright blue sky. Traffic on this day is a flock of dozens of wild turkeys with somewhere else to be and a cow and calf that refuse to budge from a patch of grass between the ruts of the road.

The road, however, is about to get busy.

To get science off the ground at the DeLuca Preserve, UF’s Institute of Food and Agricultural Sciences earmarked $600,000 for Jumpstart Awards that funded eight projects involving 23 scientists. And although the preserve looks like a 1950s postcard, there is nothing dated about the science about to be unleashed on the sprawling ecosystem.

The first question for the science pioneers is a basic one: What’s there?

“We don’t have much information about the preserve from a foundational point of view,” says forest resource economist Andres Susaeta. “What we’re doing, what all the jumpstart awards are doing, is the first research to determine what’s in there.”

“The opportunities for research here are just about endless.”

Brent Sellers

Assessing Biodiversity

Considering the rate at which the world is losing species, entomologist Lawrence Reeves wanted to try a faster way to measure biodiversity.

Traditional field work can take a long time, says Reeves, noting a project at the Savannah River Site in South Carolina where it took 45 years to accumulate enough records to identify hotspots of herpetological diversity. Science, he says, needs to move faster.

One novel way to speed things up is to use mosquitoes, a plentiful and untapped resource in Florida’s wildlands.

Reeves and his team will test whether analyzing DNA from mosquito blood meals is an effective way to determine the diversity of mammals, birds, reptiles and amphibians, including threatened or endangered species.

“For a century, we’ve been interested in identifying the blood meals of mosquitoes in order to learn which animals they feed on from an epidemiological context, how mosquitoes act as vectors for viruses,” says Reeves, whose lab is at the Florida Medical Entomology Laboratory in Vero Beach.

“So, we’ve done a lot with mosquito blood meal analysis, but this will be among the first times it’s been applied to these kinds of questions about what vertebrate species occur in a particular area,” Reeves says. “It’s the first real in-depth test.”

Traditional methods of biodiversity surveys, like camera traps and acoustic monitoring, will also be deployed, and over time the approaches will be compared to see which is more accurate.

Mosquitoes can go places camera traps can’t reach and detect animals camera traps can’t, so analyzing blood meals could detect the presence of creatures from the smallest lizards to the largest mammals, potentially even Florida panthers if they’re out there.

To collect the mosquitoes, Reeves will use two methods. For one, he will wear a Ghostbusters-style aspirator attached to a backpack and move through the habitat, vacuuming mosquitoes out of their resting sites as he goes. For the other, he will set out resting shelters, which look like a trash can on its side, to attract mosquitoes looking for a dark, cool place to relax and digest after a blood meal.

“Mosquitoes go in thinking it’s a nice place to rest, and then we come along and vacuum them out.”

DNA is extracted from the blood, then PCR tests are performed, and DNA is sequenced. Those sequences are then matched to a database of sequences from different animal species.

Reeves said he realized the preserve’s potential for biodiversity work right away.

“On our first scouting trip to the DeLuca Preserve, we got out of the car and almost stepped on carnivorous hooded pitcher plants and sundews,” Reeves says. “We looked up, and there were crested caracaras flying overhead it was like a scene straight out of the Pleistocene.”

Tyler Jones

Carlton Ward, Jr.

Bottom Up

In conducting a ground-to-treetop assessment, Jango Bhadha, like the seasoned soil scientist he is, figured it made sense to start on the ground, characterizing the soil-water-microbiome domains at DeLuca.

To sense the magnitude of the job ahead, the team met at the preserve, with Bhadha driving up from the Everglades Research and Education Center and others coming from the Fort Lauderdale Research and Education Center and from Gainesville.

“All of us have done ecosystems work, and scaling up is something we do on a regular basis,” Bhadha says. “But sometimes even though you might deal with hundreds and thousands of acres, the diversity could be monotonous, just one soil type or a single vegetation.

“The preserve has shrubs, flatwoods, wetlands, pines, palmettos. And then there is cattle and some old citrus groves,” Bhadha says. “It was 27,000 acres with all this diversity.

“So, it’s like a little kid in a candy store with all these different candies, and now I get to taste a lot of them all in one go.”

Bhadha will set up sentinel plots and analyze them for pH, organic matter, active carbon and other soil health indicators, as well as document land uses and the plant communities in various soils. Microbial diversity will be monitored along with seasonal wet and dry trends. Data will reside in a digital repository, open not only to researchers but to extension and K-12 classes.

“Open access data is key to leveraging the opportunities of the DeLuca Preserve for the benefit of all,” Bhadha says. “It is very important to get baseline data when the page is clear, to reflect the beginning. What we learn can then be used by others.”

Bhadha says he looked over the projects by fellow jumpstart awardees and noticed some synergies. He reached out to Aditya Singh in agricultural and biological engineering, who is assessing the tree canopies.

“We are doing everything below ground, they are doing the canopy,”

Bhadha says. “Maybe we can find correlations.”

Singh’s team will use a small plane to deploy hyperspectral imaging equipment and LiDAR laser rangefinding to sample the entire preserve at high resolution, filling a vital early need to map and inventory the diversity across scales: biological, structural, functional.

Hyperspectral data will be collected on the ground as well. The data from the ground and airborne equipment will be curated, and then the team will deploy AI models to generate comprehensive maps of the plants’ biochemistry.

Singh says the curated dataset will be the first of its kind anywhere. The DeLuca Preserve, he says, is an ideal place to gather information to develop novel AI-based data integration algorithms.

Singh says the map and inventory will show the distribution and structure of plant communities, including rare and endangered species as well as invasive species. The team also will produce a photographic field guide handbook.

Future teams can use the data as a springboard. Want to look at mature stands of pine? Here they are. Need to study invasives? They’re over there.

Forests and Trees

Working forests t hose managed for timber as well as for carbon sequestration, water production and aesthetics dominate the southern landscape. Working forests:

• Have the potential to sequester nearly ¼ of the region’s greenhouse g as emissions

• Produce 34 percent of the water yield in the southern United States

• Host more than 1,000 native terrest rial vertebrate species

• Generate about $14 (water, carbon, habitat services) for every $1 in t imber value

Andres Susaeta's team wants to develop a bioeconomic model southern forest managers can use to assess wildfire risks and determine the tradeoffs of managing forests for timber production vs. ecosystem services.

Susaeta will establish 34 plots in the preserve, which will be examined top to bottom as data is collected. With 5,339 acres of longleaf, slash pine, sand pine, live oaks and understory species, the preserve is ideal for this work, he says.

To assess the canopy size and density, a Jetsons-style machine, a terrestrial laser scanner, will produce a 3D point cloud

“Mosquitoes go in thinking it’s a nice place to rest, and then we come along and vacuum them out.”

— Lawrence Reeves

that can measure the volume of each and every tree, an important statistic considering that 50 percent of the volume of a tree is carbon.

The model could also help forest managers assess vulnerability to wildfire.

“Wildfire is a negative, but a prescribed fire is a tool,” Susaeta says. “Wildfire is something that we need to learn to live with, especially since the risk has increased because of climate change.”

Forest management practices can help or harm ecological functions, and variations in management from plot to plot matter. Stand A will be affected by how Stand B is managed, so the goal is to model those effects and share the information on an open database.

Susaeta says the plots can be permanent, so future researchers and grad students can use the coordinates to return for new experiments.

“This lab belongs to UF; it’s a fantastic natural laboratory for everything. After 20

“The preserve has shrubs, flatwoods, wetlands, pines, palmettos. And then there is cattle and some old citrus groves … It was 27,000 acres with all this diversity.

years of measuring, we can see the evolution of the forest over time,” Susaeta says. “Think of the dissertations that will come out of there.”

Hidden Diversity

One of the most understudied aspects of biodiversity worldwide is fungi, yet no ecosystem could function without them, say plant pathologists Matthew Smith and Laurel Kaminsky.

Fungi help turn dead branches and tree trunks into soil and play key roles in carbon and nutrient cycling. Without fungi, dead wood would pile up and become tinder for catastrophic fires. There are an estimated 2.2 million to 3.8 million species of fungi on Earth but only 120,000 have been described. By comparison, of 300,000 plant species, nearly all are described.

In the past 10 years, Smith’s lab has found a handful of Florida fungi that had

rarely been seen since they were originally described in the 1940s, along with a handful totally new to science. He and Kaminsky see DeLuca as fertile ground for new species since only 138 fungi collection records exist for Osceola County, most collected before 1980.

But that doesn’t mean fungi aren’t there. On their scouting trip, Kaminsky says, they were glad they brought their collecting gear because they found a bounty of fungi in minutes just a short distance from the entrance.

Smith and Kaminsky will collect, identify, document, preserve and DNA barcode the macrofungi at the preserve, and they hypothesize that DeLuca will yield rare fungi that are new to science or restricted to the region. The monthly collecting trips will be augmented by two mycoblitzes in which teams including students will collect as many fungi as possible. The specimens will be housed at the UF Fungarium, which Smith curates.

Jango Bhadha

To assess the canopy size and density, Andres Susaeta and his team will use a terrestrial laser scanner to produce a 3D point cloud that can measure the volume of each and every tree.

Tyler Jones

Jango Bhadha

Basic questions scientists are starting to answer about other organisms how climate change might affect distribution, for instance c an’t be easily answered for fungi yet, Smith says.

“We have all sorts of questions we would like to answer, but we don’t even know what fungi exist to begin with,” Smith says.

“In the DeLuca Preserve, there could be hundreds and hundreds unknown before now.”

DNA sequencing has also disrupted previous ideas about fungi. Smith and Kaminsky have uploaded DNA data from specimens they collected that should be one thing based on appearance but that turn out to be something else when DNA is sequenced.

“Once you start generating data, you find all kinds of hidden diversity,” Smith says. “Even under the microscope, we often can’t see differences.”

Smith says the preserve can escape the fate of Miami, where there were many early records of fungi from live oak hammocks lost to development.

The DeLuca Preserve, he says, represents an opportunity to collect in a habitat that has some features in common with the lost South Florida landscape.

“We can go in and see if some of those fungi might be there,” Smith says. “To get answers, we need to do this basic, age of discovery work.”

Sight and Sound

Wildlife ecologists Hance Ellington and Marcus Lashley are collaborating on two jumpstart projects.

Ellington, the wildlife specialist at Ona, is examining the influence of grazing on bird biodiversity, an important issue in Central and South Florida, where sprawling ranches contribute to open spaces used by wildlife.

Ellington will deploy 48 acoustic recording units to remotely monitor avian biodiversity across different pasture types grazed at different intensities. Grassland bird populations have been declining globally, and while pastureland may be

more bird friendly than urbanization, there hasn’t been a lot of research to determine how grazing management impacts avian biodiversity.

Some avian species do well on pastures, others not so well, Ellington says. An improved pasture, for instance, generally is not burned, and the grasses are usually monoculture with uniform vegetation height. In contrast, DeLuca is a mosaic with both improved pasture and seminative rangeland.

Ellington is also collaborating in work on the endangered grasshopper sparrow, a project started at DeLuca by research biologist Reed Bowman from the Archbold Biological Station.

Lashley will be adding the DeLuca Preserve to SNAPSHOT USA, a standardized yearly camera trap survey of

wildlife populations in all 50 states. SNAPSHOT USA has collected data three years in a row, so it’s the beginning of a long-term, open-access database. Some species, Lashley says, are monitored across their entire range.

“It’s unprecedented to be monitoring wildlife at that scale,” Lashley says.

At DeLuca, the work will create a record of diversity for the southeastern fox squirrel, the wild turkey, and non-native species like wild pigs. Ellington says he hopes to pair some of his 48 acoustic monitors with 60 camera traps where possible.

The preserve also puts time on a scientist’s side. As a dedicated research space, it allows scientists to start a 10- or 20-year project and be assured they can see it through.

“Frankly, in ecology,” Lashley says,

Research on the critically endangered Florida grasshopper sparrow is being done by Archbold Biological Station scientists at DeLuca Preserve.

Cantharellus mushroom

Carlton Ward, Jr.

Reviving Citrus

Citrus researcher Jude Grosser remembers being a graduate student in Kentucky and driving to a biotechnology meeting in Miami in 1983.

“We came down US 27, and it was just wall to wall beautiful, dark green, big, lush citrus trees as far as the eye could see,” says Grosser, who returned in 1984 to take a job at the Citrus Research and Education Center in Lake Alfred.

“When I drove back for my job, it looked like a nuclear bomb had gone off. All these skeletons of trees.”

That was the aftermath of the freeze of 1983. Today, the enemy is citrus greening, also known as Huanglongbing, or HLB, and it’s taking land out of citrus fast. Estimates are that Florida will produce only 50 million boxes of citrus this year. At the peak of production, Florida produced 240 million, and an average year was 150 million boxes.

“We’re down to about a quarter or a third of the citrus production we had when this scourge arrived,” Grosser says. “A lot of people are going out of business. The whole industry is collapsing.”

Why do citrus research anymore?

“Because I think we can solve this problem,” Grosser says.

Grosser and his research team want to try 10 scion/rootstock combinations on five elite new UF citrus varieties and plant them on 10 acres at the DeLuca Preserve. Recent work has revealed that micronutrients boost resistance to greening, so combining scions with new rootstock genetics and new knowledge about nutrients could make a difference, Grosser says.

The scions selected for the project are two sweet orange varieties, two red grapefruit varieties (including one that doesn’t interact with prescription drugs) and an easy-to-peel seedless tangerine, aimed at edging into the market for Halos and Cuties, which don’t grow in Florida. The rootstocks selected are “gauntlet”

“many things need to be studied for decades before you really start to get a good handle on how they work.”

“This is an opportunity to put everything together in one basket: the new rootstocks, the scions and the new science on nutrition.”

Jude Grosser

Citrus at DeLuca Preserve

Tyler Jones

Tyler Jones

rootstocks, tolerant or resistant to HLB.

“There’s a jigsaw to making rootstocks work against this disease,” Grosser says. “We’re going to stack the deck for gene combinations we think work best.”

The existing trees at DeLuca look puny, and the grove is infected with HLB, but that doesn’t worry Grosser.

“You can’t hide from greening, no matter where you go in Florida. That’s the reality. We can count on there being a strong HLB presence at DeLuca, but I think the project we’re designing can handle it,” Grosser says.

“This is an opportunity to put everything together in one basket: the new rootstocks, the scions and the new science on nutrition.”

Connected Habitats

Before development plans collapsed, the DeLuca Preserve was slated for an urban future. On land use maps, it appeared as Destiny, a town of up to 250,000 people.

Maps now will show it as part of the Florida Wildlife Corridor, and people will be outnumbered by crested caracaras and grasshopper sparrows, free-roaming cows and wild turkeys. In place of golf courses, there will be hooded pitcher plants and sundews and more pines and palmettos than perhaps even the most sophisticated equipment can count.

Ducks Unlimited, the world’s largest private nonprofit group devoted to wetlands, holds a conservation easement for DeLuca Preserve and will collaborate with UF on protecting it. Tom Hoctor, the architect of the Florida Ecological Greenways Network, a science-based map that identified the corridor, says the DeLuca tract is a keystone in the region.

“The DeLuca property is an essential piece of the Florida Wildlife Corridor,” says Hoctor, director of the Center for Landscape Conservation Planning in the UF College of Design, Construction and Planning. “It’s a strategic location.”

Hoctor’s work since 1995 on the greenways network identified “critical linkages” that would chart a continuous network of

“Grasshopper sparrows are an indicator of healthy dry prairie … If they’re doing well on DeLuca, that means a lot of other species that depend on a large functioning, connected landscape are going to be doing well, too.”

Tom Hoctor

John Jernigan

Tyler Jones

protected land, making the corridor possible. In his work on habitat connectivity, he has learned how animals move across landscapes and anticipates the DeLuca Preserve will be traveled and well-used.

“Grasshopper sparrows are an indicator of healthy dry prairie,” Hoctor says. “If they’re doing well on DeLuca, that means a lot of other species that depend on a large functioning, connected landscape are going to be doing well, too.”

The dry prairie landscape itself is rare and threatened. Historically it has been dominated by both open uplands and open wetlands, but much has been converted to other uses over the past century.

Beyond the landscape and the wildlife, Hoctor says, the property is a critical linkage between two watersheds: the Kissimmee River watershed to the south and the Upper St. Johns River watershed to the north. The preserve is also part of a swath of land that contains the headwaters of the Everglades, the United States’ most endangered ecosystem.

“Having the DeLuca Preserve turned into both a conservation property in the middle of an extremely important conservation landscape and being open for this kind of research is a really unique opportunity,” Hoctor says.

With approximately 8 million acres remaining to be protected for the wildlife corridor, the DeLuca Preserve gift provides hope.

“Some people say Florida’s way too developed to protect these lands,” Hoctor says. “Well, actually, no, it’s not. Here’s the science, and here’s the map.”

Brent Sellers Professor and Director, Range Cattle Research and Education Center, Ona sellersb@ufl.edu

Related website: Florida Ecological Greenways Network http://conservation.dcp.ufl.edu/fegnproject/

Reimagining the Ocklawaha River

What if the Rodman Dam created in the 1960s as part of the ill-fated Cross-Florida Barge Canal was breached and the Ocklawaha River was allowed to return to its natural course?

This was the challenge UF landscape architecture Associate Professor Tom Hoctor posed to his senior design class in 2020 after being approached by Free the Ocklawaha River Coalition, an advocacy group promoting breaching a portion of the dam and reconnecting the Ocklawaha and St. Johns rivers. The group maintains that a free-flowing Ocklawaha which represents another segment of the Florida Wildlife Corridor would have environmental benefits and would bring significant outdoor tourism dollars to the local economy in Putnam and Marion counties.

In response, 14 undergraduates developed nine recreation and restoration designs which have been featured in focus groups, community events, a viewbook for leaders, a newspaper supplement and more. This fall, senior Kathryn Stenberg took one critical project, the current Rodman Recreation Area, to the next level. In addition to a map series visually explaining partial restoration, she developed three detailed concepts for repurposing the recreation area, post restoration. These concepts helped solicit citizen feedback for her final project design.

“The student designs, particularly Kathryn’s designs, have helped us show leaders and residents of all backgrounds what they could gain in the river restoration process, not just what they will lose,” says Margaret Spontak, chair of the coalition. “The work has been the door opener to healthy conversations, opening people to change, and moving this project forward in ways that have not occurred in 50 years.”

Sprout One small One small Sprout Sprout

Growing plants in Apollo moon dust is

a giant leap forward

By Samantha Murray

Photography by Tyler Jones NASA

AAsafe seems an unlikely place for a box of soil. Unless it’s the rarest, most valuable soil on Earth.

So when 12 vials e ach with a gram of lunar soil collected during the Apollo 11, 12 and 17 missions to the Moon a rrived at the UF Space Plants Lab early last year, researchers Rob Ferl and Anna-Lisa Paul wasted no time getting them secured.

“Every discussion we had with NASA was about safety and security for these samples,” says Ferl, a distinguished professor of horticultural sciences in UF’s Institute of Food and Agricultural Sciences. “So when they finally arrived, we were very nervous. When we opened the box, we just sat there for long minutes realizing we had some of the Moon in our hands. Then we got them in the safe.”

Ferl and Paul applied three times over 11 years for the chance to work with this moon dust. Finally, NASA said yes.

“We were stunned, elated, excited,” says Paul, also a horticultural sciences professor in UF/IFAS. “You might say we were over the Moon.”

Ferl attributes the long-awaited green light partly to the Artemis Program, which plans to return astronauts to the moon. Artemis will require a better understanding of how to grow plants in space, Ferl says, “because it’s pretty clear that somebody is going to be growing plants on the Moon in the next decade.”

Ferl and Paul are trailblazers in the study of plants in space. Through the Space Plants Lab, they have sent experiments on space shuttles, on rockets to the International Space Station and on suborbital flights with Blue Origin and Virgin Galactic, all with the goal of understanding how plants respond to these extreme environments. Their findings may one day help astronauts grow plants as a source of food and oxygen on deep space missions.

But ever since their first spaceflight experiment, the researchers had dreamed about the chance to grow plants in soil that was not of this world.

“What happens when you grow plants in lunar soil, something that is totally outside of a plant’s evolutionary experience? What would plants do in a lunar greenhouse? Could we have lunar farmers? These are all things we want to know.”

—Rob Ferl

“For longer missions, we may use the Moon as a hub or launching pad. It makes sense that we would want to use the soil that’s already there to grow plants,” Ferl says. “So, what happens when you grow plants in lunar soil, something that is totally outside of a plant’s evolutionary experience? What would plants do in a lunar greenhouse? Could we have lunar farmers? These are all things we want to know.”

To begin to answer these questions, Ferl and Paul proposed a deceptively simple experiment: plant seeds in lunar soil and see what happens.

Flight Tests

For plant scientists, germinating seeds in terrestrial soil is just another day in the lab. But for Ferl and Paul, lunar soil which geologists call lunar regolith presented new challenges and plenty of unknowns.

For one, they had just a few teaspoons of the stuff. Each particle is of incalculable scientific and historical significance. Lunar regolith is the powdery substance that covers most of the moon’s surface— Buzz Aldrin's boot print, as seen in the now iconic photo, was made in lunar regolith.

“When the lunar samples came back

to the Johnson Space Center in Houston, they were handled in a total vacuum. Initially, that’s because NASA didn’t know if lunar soil would be harmful to people; for example, if it had a new pathogen that had never been on Earth,” Ferl says.

“To test if there were pathogenic organisms on the moon, NASA sprinkled it on plants, though they weren’t growing them in the regolith. After a few weeks, scientists determined there was nothing dangerous about the lunar regolith and it was sealed up in vials.”

And now the Space Plants team was preparing to unseal those vials.

“The samples we were working with were collected by Neil Armstrong, Pete Conrad, Harrison Schmitt, and other astronauts from the surface of the Moon and brought back to Earth in the 1960s and ‘70s, and now we were opening the vials, exposing the samples to oxygen for the very first time,” says Paul, who is also director of UF’s Interdisciplinary Center for Biotechnology Research. “It was a daunting responsibility.”

The small amount of lunar soil meant the scale of the experiment had to be equally small. To grow their tiny lunar garden, the researchers used thimble-sized wells in plastic plates normally used to culture cells.

To further complicate matters, Ferl and

Paul had to retain as much of the original samples as possible.

“These samples were on loan to us. We needed to send NASA back as much as we possibly could,” Ferl says.

Given all these constraints, the Space Plants team choreographed and practiced every motion of transferring the lunar samples into the plates and planting the seeds. In their practice runs, they used JSC-1A lunar simulant, a terrestrial substance that mimics the real thing.

Still, there was only so much practicing they could do.

“The simulant is just an approximation,” Paul says. “True lunar regolith is nothing like what we have on Earth. Under a microscope, terrestrial soil particles are rounded. Lunar regolith is sharp and jagged. It’s made up of ions and elements different from what you tend to find in soils on Earth. But, aside from these few knowns, there was a lot more we couldn’t predict about how the lunar soil would behave.”

On the other hand, a lot is known about the plant they would be growing, Arabidopsis thaliana. Arabidopsis is used widely in the plant sciences, so much that it’s sometimes called the “white mouse” of plants. And like that classic lab mouse, Arabidopsis is so ubiquitous because its genetic code has been completely mapped.

Anna-Lisa Paul, left, and Rob Ferl, working with the lunar soils in their lab.

Ferl and Paul have used Arabidopsis for years on their space plant projects.

Using such a well-studied plant allowed the researchers to get a clear picture of how the lunar regolith affected the plants growing in it, down to their patterns of gene expression. To provide points of comparison, the researchers also grew Arabidopsis plants in the JSC-1A lunar simulant and simulated Martian soils, as well as terrestrial regolith from extreme environments.

“We wanted not only to observe how well the plants grew in the lunar samples, but how that environment changed them at the cellular and genetic level,” Paul says.

much they weighed and other data.

In the corner of the room sat the dozen sealed vials, each holding precious Moon dust.

As Ferl and Paul got ready to open the vials under the lab hood, the room got quiet. The two scientists spoke to each other in low voices, requesting tools and asking questions as if they were surgeons. Some of the vials weren’t easy to open— think stuck pickle jar, but with an irreplaceable substance on the line.

“When I opened that first vial, my hands were visibly shaking,” Ferl says. “No way you can have the Moon in your hands for the first time and act anywhere like a normal human being, especially if

It took about an hour to fill all the wells. Before the seeds could be planted, the soil needed to be moistened with distilled water. Each well had a circle of rockwool at the base to wick up moisture when the plate was placed in water.

Paul and Ferl placed the plates in water and waited. And waited. The nonlunar material was hydrating, but the lunar soil remained as dry as the surface of the Moon.

“Well, to be fair, they’ve haven’t seen water in a billion years,” Paul said with a nervous laugh.

But growing plants requires water. The scientists had to find another way to get the lunar soil to absorb it.

Countdown

After several practice runs with the lunar simulant, Ferl and Paul were finally ready to plant seeds in the real lunar regolith or as ready as they were ever going to be.

“I’d sum up my feelings as ‘trembling excitement and awe,’ mixed with a bit of deep pride that we were now a part of the story and lineage of humans and Moon exploration,” Paul says.

With a few graduate students looking on, Ferl and Paul went over the procedure one final time with Space Plants lab manager Jordan Callaham. During the procedure, Callaham would take detailed notes on a printed diagram showing which samples were going in which well, how

you’re a geek like me. All you have to do is sneeze and you blow away the experiment.”

At last, the vial was open. Ferl scooped some of the soil onto a small metal spatula and invited the lab’s few onlookers to lean in.

“That right there is lunar soil,” he said. Some of the lunar samples proved easier to work with than others. Because lunar soil is so jagged, static can build up, causing the substance to clump together uncooperatively.

“Apollo 17 samples were by far our favorite to work with. Those were collected off the lunar rover after its bumper broke so they were almost accidental, in a way,” Ferl says.

They turned to plan B: Fill a pipette  with water and add the water drop by drop.

But instead of soaking in, the water formed perfect beads on the soil’s surface. In some instances, it even climbed back up onto the tip of the pipette.

“Look at that it’s hydrophobic! It does not like water,” Paul said.

On to plan C: Mix the water into the soil with one of the small spatulas. It wouldn’t be ideal, though m ixing would mean precious grains of lunar soil could be lost.

But to everyone’s relief, mixing worked.

Ferl says that for biologists, regolith is considered soil “when there is biology in it,” so the Moon dust was about to become Moon soil.

Rob Ferl weighs lunar soil. The soil samples had been sealed in vials since the time of the Apollo 11, 12 and 17 missions to the Moon.

Transferring lunar soil to plates containing thimble-sized wells that would function as tiny pots.

Two to three Arabidopsis seeds were added to each well, and then the plates were moved to a nearby Growth Chamber Facility. There, in a small, climate-controlled room, the plates sat under timed LED lights, waiting to sprout the first plants of their kind.

Liftoff

And sprout they did. Tiny Arabidopsis plants emerged from lunar and non-lunar soils alike. Nearly every seed germinated.

“We were amazed. We did not predict that,” Paul says.

As Ferl and Paul explain in a study published in the journal Communications Biology, the results indicate that lunar soils don’t interrupt the hormones and signals involved in plant germination.

Daily care for the plants involved “fairly routine science protocols,” Paul says. Entering the space, the scientists cleaned their shoes on a sticky mat at the threshold and donned lab coats and gloves. Then they got to work taking pictures, measurements and notes,

and giving the plants fresh water and nutrients.

“It was still an awe-filled operation, every day, realizing what we were doing, what we were touching,” Paul says. “But, as a scientist, you kind of step away from the overwhelming magnitude of the experiment because you need to treat all aspects of the experiment exactly the same from the astoundingly precious lunar samples to the JSC-1A terrestrial controls.”

Between days six and eight, the plants were thinned so that only one plant would be left to grow in each well. To do this, Paul and Ferl went in with a magnifying lens and tweezers, plucking out the extra sprouts a procedure no different than that undertaken by a farmer or home gardener growing plants from seed, but at a very small scale.

“It’s like tiny plant surgery,” Paul says.

It was during this delicate process that the scientists first noticed that the plants growing in the lunar soil had smaller roots than those grown in the other media. As the remaining plants grew, the ones in lunar soil grew more slowly and had

greater variability in size compared with the others. Some were visibly stunted.

These were all physical signs that the plants were working to cope with the chemical and structural make-up of the Moon’s soil, Paul says. This was further confirmed when the researchers performed gene expression analyses of the plants.

“At the genetic level, the plants were pulling out tools traditionally used to cope with stressors such as salt, metals and oxidative stress. Based on this, we can infer that the plants perceive the lunar regolith environment as stressful,” she explains.

Overall, the scientists say, the study reveals two things: Yes, plants can grow in lunar soil, but doing so successfully will require some tinkering.

The properties of the soils may play a role in how well the plants can grow, say Ferl and Paul, who collaborated on the study with Stephen Elardo, an assistant professor of geology in the UF College of Liberal Arts and Sciences.

For instance, plants grown in soils

Rob Ferl and Anna-Lisa Paul looking at the plates filled part with lunar soil and part with control soils, now under LED growing lights. At the time, the scientists did not know if the seeds would even germinate in lunar soil.

Plants grown in simulated lunar soil.

“As a scientist, you kind of step away from the overwhelming magnitude of the experiment because you need to treat all aspects of the experiment exactly the same f rom the astoundingly precious lunar samples to the JSC-1A terrestrial controls.”

Anna-Lisa Paul

collected during the Apollo 11 mission fared worst. These samples were taken from mature regolith, the outer layer of the Moon’s surface, which is exposed to more cosmic wind than the layers beneath. On the other hand, plants grown in soil from Apollo 17, a less exposed regolith, fared better.

Growing plants in lunar soils may also change the soils themselves, Elardo says.

“Besides the success of plant growth, I’m interested in how the soil mineralogy changes in response to the plant being grown in it. The Moon is a really, really dry place, and the first time we were actually able to measure water in a lunar mineral was in 2010,” Elardo says. “So how will the minerals in lunar soil respond to having a plant grown in them, with the added water and plant nutrients? Will the mineralogy change? How much? Will adding water make the mineralogy more hospitable to plants?”

Follow-up studies will build on these questions and more.

“Ultimately we would like to use the gene expression data to help address how

we can ameliorate the stress responses to the level where plants particularly crops are able to grow in a lunar regolith with very little impact to their health,” Paul says.

But for now, the scientists are celebrating having taken the first steps toward growing plants on the Moon.

“We wanted to do this experiment because, for years, we were asking this question: Would plants grow in lunar soil?” says Ferl. “The answer, it turns out, is yes.

Rob Ferl Distinguished Professor of Horticultural Sciences Assistant Vice President for Research robferl@ufl.edu

Anna-Lisa

Paul Research Professor of Horticultural Sciences Director of the Interdisciplinary Center for Biotechnology Research alp@ufl.edu

Stephen

M. Elardo Assistant Professor of Geology selardo@ufl.edu

Related website: https://hos.ifas.ufl.edu/spaceplantslab/

Anna-Lisa Paul does the delicate work of harvesting plants for genetic analysis.

Harvesting an Arabidopsis plant growing in lunar soil.

Plants grown in real lunar soil.

NativeVoices

Oral histories help preserve Indigenous heritage

By Joseph Kays

When University of Florida historian Samuel Proctor and his team of volunteers fanned out across the southeastern United States in the late 1960s to record oral histories of Native Americans, they were equipped only with their questions and portable tape recorders.

Proctor was already a leading Florida historian and oral history pioneer when tobacco heiress and philanthropist Doris Duke tapped UF and six other universities around the country to help preserve the cultures and histories of Native Americans. With a $170,000 grant from Duke, representatives of the UF Oral History Program interviewed about 1,000 Native Americans from the Seminole, Cherokee, Choctaw, Catawba, Poarch Creek and Lumbee tribes between 1966 and 1975.

“Her argument was that the library was filled with books about Indians, all written by non-Indians,” Proctor recalled in his own oral history several years before he died in 2005. “She believed that the tape recorder would give these otherwise voiceless people an opportunity to talk.”

And talk they did. Proctor and the other interviewers including members of the tribes and faculty and graduate students from UF and other institutions around the Southeast recorded some 800 hours of oral history.

“We really reclaimed or recovered a lot of history that otherwise would have been lost,” Proctor said.

The tapes came back to UF for transcription, on manual typewriters followed by some heavy editing with pencil, then were filed away. Although they were publicly accessible, in reality only committed scholars willing and able to come to Gainesville could access them. The same was true at the other institutions in

Oklahoma, Arizona, Utah, South Dakota, New Mexico and Illinois where another 5,600 recordings were collected and archived.

In 2019, a casual conversation between the former president of the Doris Duke Charitable Foundation and the former director of the Smithsonian National Museum of the American Indian “provided a much more substantial understanding of the breadth and rareness of the oral history collections that Doris Duke funded during her life,” according to Rumeli Banik, a senior program officer at the foundation.

The foundation hired Laura Marshall Clark, a member of the Muscogee (Creek) Nation of Oklahoma, to evaluate the collections at all seven universities. Clark says the state of the collections differed widely at each institution, but that UF had some of the most complete transcripts.

Based on Clark’s analysis of the project nationwide, the foundation awarded $300,000 to the Association of Tribal Archives, Libraries, and Museums (ATALM) to “work with the seven universities and Native communities to improve culturally appropriate access to the collections; provide the originating communities with copies of all materials collected; ensure proper care of the original materials; and promote and encourage use of the collections.”

In early 2021 the foundation also awarded $1.35 million in grants to the original seven institutions including $200,000 to UF to “digitize, translate and index recordings and materials spanning 150 Indigenous cultures; improve their accessibility and utility to Native communities, tribal colleges, and the wider public; expand the collections to include contemporary voices; and develop related curriculums and educational resources for students and visitors.”

“The oral history project was under development before the pandemic; however, the pandemic has reinforced the importance of this effort. We recognize that the pandemic has had disproportionate impacts on the health, social and economic well-being of Indigenous communities and that Covid-19 has resulted in a high death rate in Indigenous communities and loss of the elder population, who are important culture bearers,” Banik says. “This project aligns with the foundation’s broader efforts to raise the visibility of Native experiences and increase authentic representation of Native communities and their experiences through their own stories and voices.”

Ginessa Mahar, principal investigator on the grant and anthropology librarian for UF’s George A. Smathers Libraries, says “this grant funding provides an opportunity for us as a repository to reconnect with the communities from which these materials were gathered. We’re very excited for this project, as it ensures not only the preservation of this rich cultural heritage, but does so in a meaningful way that includes repatriation and culturally responsible accessibility.”

Preserving the Past

Mahar has three degrees in anthropology, including a doctorate from UF, and she worked as an archivist and lab supervisor at the American Museum of Natural History in New York before coming to UF, but nothing she has done prepared her for the challenge of managing the Doris Duke Native American Oral History Collection at UF.

“Most of my archival experience has been with bringing materials into the digital era, especially visuals like photos and maps,” Mahar says. “But this is the first time I've ever worked with audio, and this is certainly the first time I've partnered with an oral history program.”

What Mahar and colleague Deborah Hendrix from the Samuel Proctor Oral History Project (SPOHP) found as they dove back into UF’s Native American collection was a project framed by the technologies and methods of the 1960s and ‘70s. A thorough inventory of the project materials found that the tapes were generally in good condition, but fragile. The accompanying documentation consisted of Proctor’s field notebook of interview details, index cards with basic information typed or hand-written on them, some permission slips and many examples of correspondence. The original typed transcripts and some of the index cards had been scanned in the early 2000s, but they were not searchable.

Ginessa Mahar

“The inventory alone was enlightening, and that was the basis for the creation of our catalog and database,” Mahar says. “We ended up with over 35 linear feet of archival material.”

While the team initially considered trying to digitize the tapes in house, Mahar says it soon became clear they needed specialized expertise, so they made the “nerve-wracking” decision to pack up the tapes like they were favorite family photos and ship them off to be digitized by Preserve South, an Atlanta company that has “one of the most advanced, high-resolution, multi-track audio archiving studios in the world,” according to its website.

Before digitizing the tapes, Preserve South inspected and repaired any damage, including what is known as “sticky shed syndrome,” which Library of Congress archivists describe as a degradation of the binders that hold the magnetic particles to the tape, causing them to peel off as the tape runs through the playback equipment.

The solution is to “bake” the tapes at about 130 degrees to recure the binding material. After baking, Preserve South queued the tapes up and started digitizing. In the rare cases where the

“We’re very excited for this project, as it ensures not only the preservation of this rich cultural heritage, but does so in a meaningful way that includes repatriation and culturally responsible accessibility.”

Ginessa Mahar

sound was lost, the company was usually able to use a duplicate tape to fill in gaps.

While the high resolution files Preserve South returned to UF in the summer of 2021 were a vast improvement over the old analog tapes, Hendrix is working with several students to perform additional “audio optimization” on them using three different types of software to merge tracks, eliminate background noise and enhance voices.

“We’re really just trying to make a clearer audio recording, so it's easier for the transcription assistant to go through and get a more accurate rendition of the interview,” Mahar says. “It’s great that we can provide this kind of training for our students to enhance their future career opportunities.”

Although most of the interviews had been transcribed shortly after they were conducted, Mahar and Hendrix decided they needed to be transcribed anew. During that process Mahar says they are finding additional information, like secondary speakers on the tape or sections in Indigenous languages that were not transcribed.

The UF Oral History Program interviewed about 1,000 Native Americans from the Seminole, Cherokee, Choctaw, Catawba, Poarch Creek and Lumbee tribes between 1966 and 1975.

Arzanda Sanders of the Catawba Tribe of South Carolina, who was interviewed in 1972.

To speed up the process, Mahar said they used optical character recognition, or OCR, on the scans of the original transcripts to make them editable, “and that allowed us to get a lot of the typing out of the way.” The researchers are now listening to each interview again, using these rough transcripts as a starting point, but applying modern transcription protocols that recognize not just the words that are said, but more intent, like inflection and other non-verbal elements.

Digital Repatriation

Another major goal of the project is to reconnect the oral histories with the people and tribes from which they came.

“Community engagement is a core part of this,” Mahar says. “Not only are we trying to render more accurate representations of these interviews through transcripts, we're also working with the communities to ‘digitally repatriate’ the materials.”

“The ultimate goal really of working with these communities is not only to give them back digital copies of these interviews, but also to provide them with more autonomy over how those materials are accessed.”

The Association of Tribal Archives, Libraries, and Museums and the universities are employing a content management system called Mukurtu that describes itself as a “free, mobile and open source platform built with Indigenous communities to manage and share digital cultural heritage.”

Mukurtu allows tribes to “label third-party owned or public domain materials with added information about access, use, circulation and attribution,” according to its website.

“Cultural protocols are the core of the Mukurtu content management system,” the website continues. “Protocols make it possible to define a range of access levels for digital heritage objects and collections from completely open to strictly controlled.”

“Perhaps an indigenous group doesn't want non-members of their communities to hear these oral histories, maybe there's knowledge within these oral histories that outsiders should just not be privy to.” Mahar says. “Or, there could be segments within their societies that don't have those privileges. Maybe this is knowledge that only elders should be privy to, or maybe it's women's knowledge that's not appropriate for men. Mukurtu allows them to have multiple levels of accessibility either within or outside of their community.”

“There are a lot of protocols in place for tribes,” Clark adds. “Some of the more obvious topics would be ceremonies and spiritual practices or songs and chants that they might not want publicly available.”

UF museum studies master’s student Evangeline Giaconia was already looking at how museums have historically misrepresented Indigenous peoples when her experience working with Mukurtu on the Native American Oral Histories project over the last year prompted her to shift her entire research focus.

“I was a little familiar with Mukurtu from my research on museums and I thought it was a really awesome system,” Giaconia says, “so when Ginessa gave me an opportunity to learn more about Mukurtu and actually upload digital heritage items to it I jumped at the opportunity.”

The more Giaconia worked with Mukurtu, the more she realized she wanted to learn about it, until it became the subject of her master’s research. Now, she is going to study how platforms like Mukurtu bridge the gap between providing open access to historical collections and ensuring that Indigenous communities can maintain control over their heritage.

“There’s a big move to make things open access across the board these days, but when you're working with native cultural heritage, open access is not always the preferred option,” she says. “Mukurtu is a really interesting platform that is, I think, a good mediator for those situations because of how it's structured to allow tribal control of access on every level.”

SPOHP continued to gather Native American oral histories after the Duke project ended, including one that revisited Seminole Tribe of Florida members 30 years after the original interviews. That work resulted in a book co-authored by former SPOHP Director Julian Pleasants titled Seminole Voices: Reflections on Their Changing Society, 1970-2000 that aimed to “shed light on how the Seminoles’ society, culture, religion, government, health care, and economy had changed during a tumultuous period in Florida’s history,” according to the book’s description.

Deborah Hendrix

John Jernigan

“In 1970 the Seminoles lived in relative poverty, dependent on the Bureau of Indian Affairs, tourist trade, cattle breeding, handicrafts, and truck farming. By 2006 they were operating six casinos, and in 2007 they purchased Hard Rock International for $965 million. Within one generation, the tribe moved from poverty and relative obscurity to entrepreneurial success and wealth,” according to the book description.

SPOHP is currently working with the Poarch Band of Creek Indians in Alabama. Since 2017, the program has conducted nearly 100 interviews with members of the tribe.

Beginning as part of the UF Doris Duke project in 1971, Florida State University anthropology Professor Anthony Paredes spent 13 years researching and interviewing Poarch Creek Indians. Parades provided much of the documentation the tribe used to gain federal recognition.

“Dr. Parades came into our community in the 1970s and became a well-loved person in our community,” says Dr. Deidre Dees, the tribal archivist for the Poarch Creek Indians. "We actually have the tape recorder he used to conduct his interviews in our collection.”

Dees first learned of the recordings when she was hired in 2009, and the tribe quickly moved to get them digitized.

“We began disseminating information to the tribal community as soon as we got our hands on the recordings and the transcriptions,” she says.

In 2013, her team established an “Evening with the Elders” program that regularly draws hundreds of tribal members. They play clips from the recordings and share the transcripts so people at the events can follow along. They also gather photos of the interviewees’ families to put the recordings in perspective and to bolster the tribal archives.

“We have had grandchildren, adult grandchildren, come up to us after an event with tears in their eyes because it was the first time they had heard the voice of their grandmother or grandfather,” she says.

Related websites: https://ufdc.ufl.edu/collections/oh4 https://oral.history.ufl.edu/projects/nahp/

Project manager Indica Mattson, left, and archival assistant Sofia Echeverry have developed a database of the Native American transcripts.

Ginessa Mahar Anthropology Librarian, George A. Smathers Libraries gjmahar@ufl.edu

Deborah Hendrix Program Coordinator, Samuel Proctor Oral History Program hendrixd@ufl.edu

John Jernigan

Safer StoreS, Safer StreetS

UF researchers are pioneering high-tech solutions to retail theft

By Alisson Clark

Head up to the second floor of the University of Florida’s Innovation Hub and you might find yourself in the checkout area of a big box store, the aisles of a Home Depot, or a shopping center parking lot.

In a 360-degree immersive simulation lab, floor-to-ceiling projections recreate retail environments that allow research scientist Read Hayes and his collaborators to test new security interventions before they appear at a store near you. While the lab gets enthusiastic reactions from visitors in retail and law enforcement, its most important audience is criminals.

The simulation area, one of five labs in the Hub dedicated to retail security, is part of Hayes’ decades-long journey to understand what drives retail crime. It’s one of many ways UF researchers blend technology with social science to improve retail security and deter theft, fraud and violence.

Research assistant Richelle Ross demonstrates gaze-tracking glasses used in the simulation lab. Photography by John Jernigan

Retail theft leads to losses of around $60 billion per year, according to the National Retail Federation: costs that are passed on to customers. The tactics keep evolving, with online resale proliferating, curbside pickup crime emerging and smash-and-grab attacks making headlines. For Hayes and his colleagues across campus and in industry, staying one step ahead of criminals means learning to think like them.

Growing up, car rides with his dad gave Hayes a crash course in the scientific method. The elder Hayes, a family doctor, used drive time to listen to tapes about the latest medical breakthroughs. (“Gross stuff, worms and sores,” Hayes recalls.) A reverence for research stuck with him as he earned criminology degrees from UF and the University of Leicester, and working undercover gave him an anecdotal understanding of the criminal mind. But as he climbed the ranks of the loss prevention industry, Hayes wanted data.

“Everyone would look at what the big guys did and benchmark on that, but even the big guys were making decisions based on hunches,” he says.

Input from offenders informed some decisions, but the easiest criminals to interview were “the dumb and unlucky,” i.e. those who got caught. If retailers really wanted to discourage criminals, they needed to hear from the good ones. Hayes turned to snowball sampling, asking the initial round of shoplifters he interviewed to refer him to others who could help inform his research. Through offender interviews, Hayes and his team glean insider knowledge about how shoplifters prefer to steal, from switching price tags to hacking gift cards and shopping at “soccer mom o’clock” t he time of day when stores may be too busy to effectively prevent theft. Over years, he developed a network that could power the randomized controlled trials needed to help retailers make evidence-based decisions.

Skepticism about the limitations of this kind of science pervaded the industry, however. That changed in 2000, when Target’s vice president of asset protection publicly backed Hayes and funded his

research. That work led to the creation of the Loss Prevention Research Council, an industry group Hayes directs consisting of over 160 members, including 70 retailers from Walmart to Louis Vuitton. Launched from a back room of the Gainesville Sears, it moved to a midtown space and then to the Innovation Hub.

Hayes and his team have completed more than 300 studies and organize an annual conference to share research results. In their published papers, they’ve tested the efficacy of alarm tags to prevent theft of cordless drills (effective), weightloss supplements and skin care products (not effective) and compared the utility of theft-proof shelves against monitors that broadcast thieves’ activity. (The display cut loss by 21%, while the monitor didn’t have much impact.)

In the simulation lab, researchers use gaze-tracking glasses to see where offenders are looking and galvanic skin response sensors to tell what they’re feeling. Thieves can point out what they perceive as a camera’s likely blind spots and which types of deterrents they’re most likely to notice and fear. The LPRC space also includes an ideation lab, a rapid prototyping space and a mock store for hands-on testing. After 30 randomized controlled

trials more, he says, than any other group Hayes has turned many initial skeptics into believers.

“People in the industry had to understand the role science plays,” he says. “Science is not a joke and it’s not a deity. It’s a process.”

Street Smart

When 80 people launched a coordinated attack on a Nordstrom department store near San Francisco in November, calls to police began before the smashand-grab did. Witnesses outside the store reported reckless driving as the offenders’ cars convened, blocking off access to the scene. In a parking lot in midtown Gainesville, high-tech towers are paving the way for artificial intelligence to flag those early indicators, which could notify nearby store managers to take steps to protect customers, staff and merchandise.

The towers t hree already in place and two more to come c ombine thermal sensors, gunshot detectors, 3-D laser scanning and cameras, driving the next generation of crime prevention. If the tower detects a gunshot, for example, an AI model could activate a camera to pan, tilt and zoom around the scene,

A mock store allows researchers to test new theft deterrents.

assessing the situation and alerting law enforcement. They’re part of UF’s SaferPlaces Lab, four contiguous mini-blocks surrounding the Innovation Hub, and a core component of Safecord, an interdisciplinary effort linking city officials and law enforcement with UF researchers.

Leveraging a National Science Foundation planning grant, the research aims to inform smart streetscapes that reduce crime in retail environments and beyond. The vision, says Safecord principal investigator and electrical and computer engineering Professor José Fortes of UF’s Herbert

Wertheim College of Engineering, is to develop technology for sensing and processing real-time information that identifies safety issues and how to address them.

For example, how do warm- or cooltoned lights affect perceptions of safety? What brightness makes the area feel well lit? The lab makes it possible for UF and the city to investigate these questions in a real-world environment, he explains.

“These are situations you can’t recreate in a controlled experiment. We’re trying to change perceptions for customers as well as for people who do bad things.

“People in the industry had to understand the role science plays. Science is not a joke and it’s not a deity. It’s a process.”

— Read Hayes

In the lab, criminologist Read Hayes and his team can simulate different retail environments, identifying deterrents that make would-be criminals think twice about stealing.

When we can do that through the built environment, quality of life is improved,” Fortes says. “The SaferPlaces Lab provides unparalleled capability for this research.”

Along with computer engineering Professor Renato Figueiredo and Hayes, who is also housed in engineering, Fortes’ collaborators include College of Design, Construction and Planning Professors Ryan Sharston and Yan Wang.

As an urban planning professor and civil engineer studying built-environment resilience, Wang looks at the human dimensions of smart cities. She wants to know how data from sensors like those in the SaferPlaces Lab can integrate with information gleaned from social media or reported by members of the community, and what types of monitoring make people feel safe without raising privacy concerns. Taken together, these advances have the potential to improve quality of life, inspire the infrastructure of future cities and guide real-time disaster response.

“Safety issues need to be addressed by so many disciplines,” she says. “It’s a great opportunity for interdisciplinary research.”

Part of the SaferPlaces Lab emulates one of the fastest-growing areas for retail theft: curbside pickup. The pandemic sparked an avalanche of what’s known in the industry as BOPIS buy online, pick-up in store which can require lone workers to venture out into a minimally secured parking lot, sometimes late at night, to deliver expensive merchandise. If workers and customers don’t feel safe, retailers risk losing both. Smart towers could protect curbside transactions as well as passersby, alerting them with a chirping noise or making the streetlights brighter if someone is hiding nearby.

Hayes is quick to add that AI-powered surveillance methods like these shouldn’t be seen as evidence gathering devices, but as early-detection tools.

“With these models, you’re identifying the behavior, not the person,” he says. “All AI does is give you a heads up.”

“These are situations you can’t recreate in a controlled experiment. We’re trying to change perceptions for customers as well as for people who do bad things. When we can do that through the built environment, quality of life is improved. The SaferPlaces Lab provides unparalleled capability for this research.”

José Fortes

Safety starts outside the store. Using artificial intelligence, towers equipped with sound detectors, radar and cameras can aid in early detection and crime prevention, says engineer José Fortes.

Red & Green

You’re at the self-checkout, trying to scan an onion. Using behavioral cues, the checkout kiosk may soon be able to determine if you’re actually struggling with the technology or trying to confuse the scanner by bagging a pricey item after scanning something cheaper.

Retail security hinges on a balance between thwarting would-be criminals, referred to in the industry as red guests, and serving law-abiding green guests. Interventions need to keep green visitors safe while annoying them as little as possible.

Tried buying cartridges for refillable razors lately? If so, you’ve probably encountered a theft-deterring display that may have been field-tested by Hayes’ group. At the request of major retailers, they’ve hosted “bake-offs” where shoplifters come to the lab to test competing anti-theft technologies. The one rated most challenging when trying to steal the product gets installed in stores. (In addition to razor cartridges, laundry detergent, tooth whiteners, baby formula and heartburn medication are favorite targets.) Shoplifters gravitate toward items like these because they’re easy to carry and hide, available in a wide variety of stores, expensive to purchase and simple to sell, Hayes explains.

Online marketplaces make reselling stolen merchandise easier than ever, so much so that the CEOs of 20 retailers

wrote to Congress last year asking them to support a bill that would boost transparency in such purchases.

Deterring crime might require buyers and sellers to jump through extra hoops, which can be frustrating but likely not as frustrating as finding a shelf emptied by shoplifters. Some innovations, however, can help green guests. Cameras that deter thieves can be taught to detect spills a guest could slip on, or spot unhappy faces that signal a shopper needs help. And closer tracking of inventory through RFID tags not only thwarts stealing, but ensures customers can find an item the store says is in stock by pinpointing its location in the aisles.

For retailers and loss-prevention experts, the goal isn’t necessarily catching thieves, but making theft less appealing.

“It’s about getting people with bad intentions to do a U-turn,” Hayes says.

What works for a lone shoplifter, however, might not work for a coordinated group. The smash-and-grab attacks that proliferated at the end of 2021 represent a tiny portion of retail crime, but sparked concern for retailers, who know workers and customers don’t want to be where they don’t feel safe. In the National Retail Federation’s 2021 retail security survey, 69% of stores noted an increase in organized crime, and 65% reported an increase in violence.

Was this a pandemic aberration or a growing trend? Can social media chatter give an early indicator that the next attack is imminent? What will offenders try next? For Hayes a social scientist in an engineering school t he answers are inherently interdisciplinary.

“Retail crime can be very dangerous and violent,” Hayes says, “but even when it’s not, it affects everyone.”

José A.B. Fortes Professor and AT&T Eminent Scholar, Electrical and Computer Engineering Director, Advanced Computing and Information Systems Laboratory fortes@ufl.edu

Read Hayes Research Scientist, Florida Engineering Experiment Station Director, Loss Prevention Research Council rrhayes@ufl.edu

Yan Wang Assistant Professor, Urban and Regional Planning Florida Institute for Built Environment Resilience Director, Urban Agility and Resilience Laboratory yanw@ufl.edu

“Safety issues need to be addressed by so many disciplines. It’s a great opportunity for interdisciplinary research.”

— Yan Wang

Yan Wang

In the operations center at UF's Innovation Hub, criminologist Read Hayes and operations team leader Diego Rodriguez get a bird's-eye view of the SaferPlaces Lab.

Adele is Right Album Tracks Should Not Be Shuffled

By José Valentino Ruiz

For as long as albums have existed, they have offered listeners wonder, hope, truth and reality concerning the state of the human condition.

This is achieved through a group effort. Artists, producers, songwriters, engineers, artwork designers and liner note writers carefully curate and present a structured soundtrack, with tracks sequenced in such a way to take listeners on a journey. It can provide a brief bit of order to listeners’ often chaotic lives.

But what happens if we listen to songs from an artist’s album randomly rather than in their intended order?

This wasn’t much of an issue when the listener had to fastforward tape to just the right spot, or jump a needle to the appropriate groove. But the advent of streaming services meant that mixing up the order of album tracks was just a click away, or sometimes even it is the default setting.

On Nov. 19, 2021, Adele released her fourth album, “30,” and successfully convinced audio streaming service Spotify to change its default setting so it doesn’t randomize her new album’s tracks.

I have every sympathy with Adele’s position.

As a Latin Grammy Award-winning composer and Emmy Award-winning musician who has produced more than 90 albums, as well as someone who teaches music business and entrepreneurship, I know from experience the importance of album sequencing t hat is, the art of curating album tracks to convey its themes.

Creative Process

Producers such as myself take into consideration that, as I put it, art is humanity expressed. As such, we try to create albums that reflect personal life experiences.

And just as storylines make sense only when you have the context of the beginning and the end, listeners need to understand the impetus for why the album was even made.

Producers also take into consideration the various stages taken to create an album. Music education philosopher John Kratus set out the four stages involved in his study of the creative musical processes:

Stage one involves an exploration of an album’s concept. It is here that the themes of the album are discussed and established.

Stage two is the improvisational processes. This is when musicians work together to create song structures, grooves and lyrics to convey the themes.

Then comes stage three: the composition or documentation of the album. This is achieved in the recording studio with audio engineers and producers, who determine the final versions of the songs that will be put on the album.

Finally, stage four is the creative performance or delivery of an album. This takes place post-recording and involves the marketing and communications strategy to promote the album through concerts, music videos and interviews. The creative team decides which mediums and platforms the album will appear on.

The above process is almost perfectly demonstrated in Peter Jackson’s newly released Beatles’s documentary, “The Beatles: Get Back.”

The footage reveals the four members of arguably the most influential band going through the creative process.

First they discuss the rationale for a song t he exploration. Then they create the song’s structure of melody, harmony and rhythm through improvisation. They then record the album’s repertoire c omposition. Finally, they rehearse the songs to be performed within a specific order for future concerts delivery.

Rubric for Success

Another important variable is ordering of songs on an album in such a way as to cater to a number of different requirements.

For example, it is ordered to help balance palatability and appreciation. If the album has too many intense songs at the beginning for example, songs that are fast tempo, loud and busy in musical interaction t he listener might assume that the artist has no regard for pacing the “storyline” and energy levels of the album as a whole.

to give listeners the impression of a day passing from early morning to late at night. Meanwhile, multi-Grammy Award-winning saxophonist Michael Brecker ordered his last album, “Pilgrimage”, to mirror the final stages of his life as he battled cancer.

Different artists and genres approach albums in different ways. But there are certain rubrics by which albums can be ordered. One standard example I suggest of how a 12-track album may be ordered is as follows:

• Track 1: An anthem song with high energy, vibrancy and intensity, with rich instrumental textures.

• Track 2: A medium tempo track with fewer instrumental textures, lyrics. The idea is to express more vulnerability.

• Track 3: A high-energy number with completely different instrumental textures. For example, if track 1 uses lots of acoustic instruments, then track 3 will be more digital in attribute.

• Track 4: A strong ballad.

• Track 5: The second-most powerful song on the album, generally in a different tempo and time signature for example, it could be a waltz or a swing-style song.

• Tracks 6 to 11, which would traditionally have been on the “b” side of vinyl albums, tend to be more relaxed and less concerned about commercial appeal. They focus on conveying more philosophical and poetic nuances.

• The last track of the album, track 12 in this example, is generally either nostalgic or doesn’t entirely resolve itself either lyrically or musically. The aim is often to inspire the listener to purchase the next album.

This structure isn’t set in stone, but if readers pick up their favorite album, there is a chance that some of the above rules will apply.

Social Message

Album sequencing is typically one of the final stages and takes place during what is called a “spotting session.”

During this stage, the artists, producers, artists’ management and publicists engage in album sequencing to ensure the themes of the album are communicated fluidly and the artist’s vision can be understood when listening to the album from beginning and end.

A producer also wants to avoid sonic fatigue, which can happen when a listener gets exhausted by an album that has too much musical intensity at the beginning. To achieve this, producers make sure that the songs vary in instrumentation, harmonic progression and dynamic levels when placed next to one another.

The order of tracks can also influence listeners’ empathy and relatability with the artist’s vision for the album by mirroring the songs’ themes or the artist’s life stories to the order in which they manifested in real life. For example, a musician might be telling an autobiographical story through the songs that mirror their chronology in real life.

Bruce Springsteen discussed in his 2016 autobiography the very purposeful way he ordered the songs on his album “Born to Run,”

Reflecting on all that goes into sequencing an album’s tracks can give music lovers a better understanding for why Adele’s nonrandomization request was supported by so many musicians. By clicking on random, listeners might be missing the message as well as the audio journey that has been carefully created.

José Valentino Ruiz Assistant Professor of Music, University of Florida asamia@ufl.edu

To read more articles by UF faculty, visit https://theconversation.com/institutions/university-of-florida-1392

José Valentino Ruiz

Box 115500

Gainesville, FL 32611-5500

An extremely rare yellow male Northern Cardinal lit up the internet in March after it was spotted in the Natural Area Teaching Laboratory on the UF campus near the Florida Museum of Natural History’s Powell Hall.

Museum ornithology collections manager Andy Kratter said it’s likely this cardinal is yellow instead of red due to a mutation in how the red pigments are created. Kratter added, “All carotenoids come from the foods that the birds eat, but every once in a while, a rare onein-a-million mutation pops up in a male cardinal that creates a hiccup in the process that turns the carotenoids into yellow instead of red.”

In several other bird species with red or yellow plumage C edar Waxwings, House Finches, Flamingoes changes in diet lead to aberrant orange, yellow, or pale plumages. For instance, in Cedar Waxwings, the normally yellow tail tip is orange if they feed on certain exotic species of honeysuckle when they are molting.

Scan this code with your camera to join our mailing list or update your mailing address.

Kristen Grace/Florida Museum