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Blood Will Tellreveals the underlying centrality of \"blood\" that shaped official ideas about who was eligible to be defined as Indian by the General Allotment Act in the United States. Katherine Ellinghaus traces the idea of blood quantum and how the concept came to dominate Native identity and national status between 1887 and 1934 and how related exclusionary policies functioned to dispossess Native people of their land. The U.S. government's unspoken assumption at the time was that Natives of mixed descent were undeserving of tribal status and benefits, notwithstanding that Native Americans of mixed descent played crucial roles in the national implementation of allotment policy.Ellinghaus explores on-the-ground case studies of Anishinaabeg, Arapahos, Cherokees, Eastern Cherokees, Cheyennes, Chickasaws, Choctaws, Creeks, Lakotas, Lumbees, Ojibwes, Seminoles, and Virginia tribes. Documented in these cases, the history of blood quantum as a policy reveals assimilation's implications and legacy. The role of blood quantum is integral to understanding how Native Americans came to be one of the most disadvantaged groups in the United States, and it remains a significant part of present-day debates about Indian identity and tribal membership.Blood Will Tellis an important and timely contribution to current political and scholarly debates.

The Allotment Plotreexamines the history of allotment on the Nez Perce Reservation from 1889 to 1892 to account for and emphasize the Nez Perce side of the story. By including Nez Perce responses to allotment, Nicole Tonkovich argues that the assimilationist aims of allotment ultimately failed due in large part to the agency of the Nez Perce people themselves throughout the allotment process. The Nez Perce were actively involved in negotiating the terms under which allotment would proceed and simultaneously engaged in ongoing efforts to protect their stories and other cultural properties from institutional appropriation by the allotment agent, Alice C. Fletcher, who was a respected anthropologist, and her photographer and assistant, E. Jane Gay. The Nez Perce engagement in this process laid a foundation for the long-term survival of the tribe and its culture. Making use of previously unknown archival sources, Fletcher's letters, Gay's photographs and journalistic accounts, oral tribal histories, and analyses of performances such as parades and verbal negotiations, Tonkovich assembles a masterful portrait of Nez Perce efforts to control their own future and provides a vital counternarrative of the allotment period, which is often portrayed as disastrous to Native polities.

Current research largely focuses on the role of allotment gardens, the challenges facing them, and the direction of their future development in urban environments. The main idea behind the introduction of allotment gardens was to improve the living conditions and food supply of workers and the underprivileged. The impact of allotment gardening does not only concern the allotment gardeners but also the general public and the environment. It is important to emphasise that allotments have impacts not only on food production and outdoor physical activity, but also on the reuse of idle or neglected land, community development, therapeutic and nutritional benefits, and psychological benefits for allotment holders and residents. For this reason, this study captures six broad themes related to allotments: (1) community participation and cohesion, (2) health and well-being, (3) economic opportunities, (4) pollution, (5) urban planning and development, and (6) sustainable environment. The research is a systematic review in which steps were taken to minimise bias in the identification, selection, and summarisation of studies. The initial literature selection was based on a keyword search (title, abstract, and keywords) of the comprehensive literature databases Web of Science (all years) and Scopus (all years). The total scientific literature on which this review is based includes 162 research articles published between 1978 and July 2022. This work aims to fill these gaps and analyse existing knowledge by providing a detailed review of the academic literature, focusing not only on the benefits of community gardens and allotments in urban areas, but also on the existing problems related to allotments and urban gardening. Possible directions of development are also analysed based on the legal regulations in each country.

Urban areas are often perceived to have lower biodiversity than the wider countryside, but a few small-scale studies suggest that some urban land uses can support substantial pollinator populations. We present a large-scale, well-replicated study of floral resources and pollinators in 360 sites incorporating all major land uses in four British cities. Using a systems approach, we developed Bayesian network models integrating pollinator dispersal and resource switching to estimate city-scale effects of management interventions on plant–pollinator community robustness to species loss. We show that residential gardens and allotments (community gardens) are pollinator ‘hotspots’: gardens due to their extensive area, and allotments due to their high pollinator diversity and leverage on city-scale plant–pollinator community robustness. Household income was positively associated with pollinator abundance in gardens, highlighting the influence of socioeconomic factors. Our results underpin urban planning recommendations to enhance pollinator conservation, using increasing city-scale community robustness as our measure of success. Analysing plant–pollinator interactions across all major land use classes in four cities, the authors show that residential gardens and community gardens are urban pollinator hotspots, with pollinator abundance positively associated with household income.

During the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, the federal government sought to forcibly assimilate Native Americans into American society through systematized land allotment. InSustaining the Cherokee Family, Rose Stremlau illuminates the impact of this policy on the Cherokee Nation, particularly within individual families and communities in modern-day northeastern Oklahoma.Emphasizing Cherokee agency, Stremlau reveals that Cherokee families' organization, cultural values, and social and economic practices allowed them to adapt to private land ownership by incorporating elements of the new system into existing domestic and community-based economies. Drawing on evidence from a range of sources, including Cherokee and United States censuses, federal and tribal records, local newspapers, maps, county probate records, family histories, and contemporary oral histories, Stremlau demonstrates that Cherokee management of land perpetuated the values and behaviors associated with their sense of kinship, therefore uniting extended families. And, although the loss of access to land and communal resources slowly impoverished the region, it reinforced the Cherokees' interdependence. Stremlau argues that the persistence of extended family bonds allowed indigenous communities to retain a collective focus and resist aspects of federal assimilation policy during a period of great social upheaval.

Building on lessons from prior recessions, during COVID-19, Congress authorized several temporary emergency provisions that made SNAP more responsive to the economic downturn, including the suspension of work requirements, administrative flexibilities that reduced the need for in-person contact with state caseworkers, an across-the-board benefit increase, and substantially increased benefit levels through a provision called Emergency Allotments (EAs). Families with no income (such as after allowable deductions under the program for housing, medical care, and child care) receive the maximum SNAP benefit for their family size. Measures of food insufficiency over the same period were drawn from the Census Household Pulse Survey, a quick response data set collected by the Census Bureau to track the effects of COVID-19 on family well-being and economic resources over time. [...]SNAP benefits were increased by an average of 21%.

Spike sorting is the process of grouping spikes of distinct neurons into their respective clusters. Most frequently, this grouping is performed by relying on the similarity of features extracted from spike shapes. In spite of recent developments, current methods have yet to achieve satisfactory performance and many investigators favour sorting manually, even though it is an intensive undertaking that requires prolonged allotments of time. To automate the process, a diverse array of machine learning techniques has been applied. The performance of these techniques depends however critically on the feature extraction step. Here, we propose deep learning using autoencoders as a feature extraction method and evaluate extensively the performance of multiple designs. The models presented are evaluated on publicly available synthetic and real “in vivo” datasets, with various numbers of clusters. The proposed methods indicate a higher performance for the process of spike sorting when compared to other state-of-the-art techniques.

The Covid-19 pandemic exposed the fragility of the UK food system(1). Currently, 46% of fruit and vegetables are imported(1), making the UK vulnerable. Recent events such as war in Ukraine, volatile fuel prices and crop failures attributed to climate change have exacerbated this(1), with global food prices reflected in the cost-of-living crisis(2). Food is not just a source of nutrition, but of personal and cultural identity(3), with potential to impact on the extent to which people feel that they belong to a place or community. Community food growing schemes such as allotments remain popular in the UK(4). They could increase food resilience and security through growing produce, otherwise imported. The impact of a community growing scheme based in south London was explored. The scheme, a small farm allotment, was established by a Hong Kong farmer to grow produce including traditional Asian vegetables. It also aims to encourage collective efforts e.g. co-farming, through use of shared and private spaces. Focusing on traditional Asian vegetables, it offers bespoke advice, support and education via workshops, online mentoring and traineeships. Evaluation of this scheme was undertaken with ethics approval from Kingston University London. Using participatory non-extractive methods, qualitative and quantitative data were obtained using questionnaires and optional interviews with attendees of workshops (n = 52), online mentees (n = 2), and trainees (n = 3). All participants described themselves as Asian, Chinese or Hongkongers. More than two thirds (69.1%) had been in the UK for a relatively short time (up to 24 months). Both experience of, and knowledge about, growing food were low amongst participants, although this varied by group. While none of the trainees had previous food growing experience, half of online mentees and more than quarter (26.9%) of workshop attendees had some. All of the online mentees and over half (53.8%) of workshop attendees described themselves as having some knowledge about growing food. The most common reasons given for their involvement were an interest in urban growing/agriculture and practical (rather than theoretical) skills acquisition. Asian vegetables had multiple meanings for participants. Most commonly, they related to aspects of home, demonstrating the importance of culturally specific foods in evoking memories of people, place and time. Asked whether taking part in growing could help them build a sense of belonging within the UK Hong Kong community, responses were almost entirely affirmative for a variety of reasons. This highlights the multiple roles of food in people’s lives, and the potential for food to be used as a bridge between different groups, and as a bridge between their original and current homes. It also emphasises the role that growing food could play in cultural identity and pride, potentially building belonging as well as food resilience.

Food production depends upon the adequate provision of underpinning ecosystem services, such as pollination. Paradoxically, conventional farming practices are undermining these services and resulting in degraded soils, polluted waters, greenhouse gas emissions and massive loss of biodiversity including declines in pollinators. In essence, farming is undermining the ecosystem services it relies upon. Finding alternative more sustainable ways to meet growing food demands which simultaneously support biodiversity is one of the biggest challenges facing humanity. Here, we review the potential of urban and peri-urban agriculture to contribute to sustainable food production, using the 17 sustainable development goals set by the United Nations General Assembly as a framework. We present new data from a case study of urban gardens and allotments in the city of Brighton and Hove, UK. Such urban and peri-urban landholdings tend to be small and labour-intensive, characterised by a high diversity of crops including perennials and annuals. Our data demonstrate that this type of agricultural system can be highly productive and that it has environmental and social advantages over industrial agriculture in that crops are usually produced using few synthetic inputs and are destined for local consumption. Overall, we conclude that food grown on small-scale areas in and near cities is making a significant contribution to feeding the world and that this type of agriculture is likely to be relatively favourable for some ecosystem services, such as supporting healthy soils. However, major knowledge gaps remain, for example with regard to productivity, economic and employment impacts, pesticide use and the implications for biodiversity.