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GlideinWMS is a workload manager provisioning resources for many experiments, including CMS and DUNE. The software is distributed both as native packages and specialized production containers. Following an approach used in other communities like web development, we built our workspaces, system-like containers to ease development and testing. Developers can change the source tree or check out a different branch and quickly reconfigure the services to see the effect of their changes. In this paper, we will talk about what differentiates workspaces from other containers. We will describe our base system, composed of three containers: a one-node cluster including a compute element and a batch system, a GlideinWMS Factory controlling pilot jobs, and a scheduler and Frontend to submit jobs and provision resources. Additional containers can be used for optional components. This system can easily run on a laptop, and we will share our evaluation of different container runtimes, with an eye for ease of use and performance. Finally, we will talk about our experience as developers and with students. The GlideinWMS workspaces are easily integrated with IDEs like VS Code, simplifying debugging and allowing development and testing of the system even when offline. They simplified the training and onboarding of new team members and summer interns. And they were useful in workshops where students could have first-hand experience with the mechanisms and components that, in production, run millions of jobs.

New strategies for the provisioning of compute resources, e.g. in the form of dynamically integrated resources enabled by the COBalD/TARDIS software toolkit, require a new approach of collecting accounting data. AUDITOR, a flexible and expandable accounting ecosystem that can cover a wide range of use cases and infrastructures, has been developed specifically for this purpose. Accounting data are collected via so-called collectors and stored in a database. So-called plugins can access the data and act based on the accounting information. Access to the data is handled by the core component of AUDITOR, which provides a REST API together with a Rust and a Python client library. An HTCondor collector, a Slurm collector and a TARDIS collector are currently available, and a Kubernetes collector is already in the works. The APEL plugin enables, for example, the creation of APEL accounting summaries and their transmission to the APEL accounting server. Although the original aim for the development of AUDITOR was to enable the accounting of opportunistic resources managed by COBalD/TARDIS, it can also be used for standard accounting of a WLCG computing resource. As AUDITOR uses a highly flexible data structure to store accounting data, extensions such as GPU resource accounting can be added with minimal effort. This contribution provides insights into the design of AUDITOR and shows how it can be used to enable a number of different use cases.

Many human populations are undergoing an extinction of experience, with a progressive decline in interactions with nature. This is a consequence both of a loss of opportunity for, and orientation towards, such experiences. The trend is of concern in part because interactions with nature can be good for human health and wellbeing. One potential means of redressing these losses is through the intentional provision of resources to increase wildlife populations in close proximity to people, thereby increasing the potential for positive human–nature experiences, and thence the array of benefits that can result. In this paper, we review the evidence that these resource subsidies have such a cascade of effects. In some Westernized countries, the scale of provision is extraordinarily high, and doubtless leads to both positive and negative impacts for wildlife. In turn, these impacts often lead to more frequent, reliable and closer human–nature interactions, with a greater variety of species. The consequences for human wellbeing remain poorly understood, although benefits documented in the context of human–nature interactions more broadly seem likely to apply. There are also some important feedback loops that need to be better characterized if resource provisioning is to contribute effectively towards averting the extinction of experience. This article is part of the theme issue ‘Anthropogenic resource subsidies and host–parasite dynamics in wildlife’.

In recent years, the Internet of Things (IoT) has been one of the most popular technologies that facilitate new interactions among things and humans to enhance the quality of life. With the rapid development of IoT, the fog computing paradigm is emerging as an attractive solution for processing the data of IoT applications. In the fog environment, IoT applications are executed by the intermediate computing nodes in the fog, as well as the physical servers in cloud data centers. On the other hand, due to the resource limitations, resource heterogeneity, dynamic nature, and unpredictability of fog environment, it necessitates the resource management issues as one of the challenging problems to be considered in the fog landscape. Despite the importance of resource management issues, to the best of our knowledge, there is not any systematic, comprehensive and detailed survey on the field of resource management approaches in the fog computing context. In this paper, we provide a systematic literature review (SLR) on the resource management approaches in fog environment in the form of a classical taxonomy to recognize the state-of-the-art mechanisms on this important topic and providing open issues as well. The presented taxonomy are classified into six main fields: application placement, resource scheduling, task offloading, load balancing, resource allocation, and resource provisioning. The resource management approaches are compared with each other according to the important factors such as the performance metrics, case studies, utilized techniques, and evaluation tools as well as their advantages and disadvantages are discussed.

The world is going through one of the worst pandemics ever seen. After concurrent lockdowns, as the government is easing out, more people are on the verge of risking their lives. This leads to a need for a system that not only provides a user with relevant updates regarding this disease but is essentially a useful tool that can be used to provide a safest path between a source and a destination. Most of the people now are equipped with smart devices. Since the spread is nowhere near its termination and the world is having a lot of breakdowns be it in the form of economic disruption or sociological imbalance due to this, though the government is already working hard on detecting and declaring hotspot zones, there is no real-time evaluation of potentially crowded zones that can be a source of disease synthesis too. There is a need for a system that can notify its users regarding any kind of potentially harmful zones, and since getting on the road is more than a necessity now, a safe route provisioning system is also a dire need of the situation in order to stop the spread.

Small streams constitute the majority of the water courses in a catchment and have specific characteristics that distinguish them from larger streams and rivers. Despite their small size and frequently remote locations, small streams contribute to ecosystem services that are important for humans. Here, we have identified 27 ecosystem services that small streams provide: seven supporting services, eight regulating services, five provisioning services and seven cultural services. Small streams are especially important for the maintenance of biodiversity, which is the basis of many ecosystem services. Small streams also support ecosystem services provided by larger streams and rivers due to longitudinal connectivity resulting in the downstream transference of energy, water, sediments, nutrients, organic matter and organisms. Small streams are, however, highly vulnerable to disturbances, which can compromise the ecosystem services they supply. We see a global need to effectively protect small streams to safeguard biodiversity and human wellbeing.

Cooperative behaviour is widespread in animals and is likely to be the result of multiple selective pressures. A contentious hypothesis is that helping enhances the probability of obtaining a sexual partner (i.e., confers direct benefits through sexual selection). Under this hypothesis, cooperative behaviours may have evolved into a signal. Consequently, we would expect individuals to enhance cooperation when a potential mate is present, to signal their status and quality. We evaluated this possibility in the cooperatively breeding sociable weaver ( Philetairus socius ). We simulated the presence of different types of individuals using a playback to test whether the simulated presence of an unknown individual, possibly a potential mate, increases provisioning rate in two classes of cooperating birds : breeders and helpers. If the signal is the provisioning rate in itself we expected increased feeding rates of male helpers during the simulated presence of an unknown female. Contrary to our predictions, the simulated presence in the audience of an unknown individual did not influence the nestling provisioning rate of birds of any sex and class. From these results, we conclude that in this species the variation in provisioning rate is unlikely to be used as a signal in a sexual selection context. However, we also highlight the limitations of our methods and suggest improvements that future studies should incorporate when testing audience effects on cooperation. Significance statement Animals may cooperate to gain direct benefits, like attracting mates. This happens for example in humans. In species where cooperation leads to direct sexual benefits, when the appropriate audience is present, (i.e., a potential mate), helpers should enhance their cooperation. To determine whether helping to raise others’ young varies according to who is watching, we used playbacks to simulate the presence of unknown individuals of opposite sex (potential mates) while helpers were feeding young. Helping, quantified here as number of times food was brought to the chicks over an hour, was not affected by the simulated audience. We concluded that in sociable weavers variation in provisioning rate is unlikely to be a signal to obtain direct sexual benefits.

Ecosystem services mapping and modeling has focused more on supply than demand, until recently. Whereas the potential provision of economic benefits from ecosystems to people is often quantified through ecological production functions, the use of and demand for ecosystem services has received less attention, as have the spatial flows of services from ecosystems to people. However, new modeling approaches that map and quantify service-specific sources (ecosystem capacity to provide a service), sinks (biophysical or anthropogenic features that deplete or alter service flows), users (user locations and level of demand), and spatial flows can provide a more complete understanding of ecosystem services. Through a case study in Puget Sound, Washington State, USA, we quantify and differentiate between the theoretical or in situ provision of services, i.e., ecosystems’ capacity to supply services, and their actual provision when accounting for the location of beneficiaries and the spatial connections that mediate service flows between people and ecosystems. Our analysis includes five ecosystem services: carbon sequestration and storage, riverine flood regulation, sediment regulation for reservoirs, open space proximity, and scenic viewsheds. Each ecosystem service is characterized by different beneficiary groups and means of service flow. Using the ARtificial Intelligence for Ecosystem Services (ARIES) methodology we map service supply, demand, and flow, extending on simpler approaches used by past studies to map service provision and use. With the exception of the carbon sequestration service, regions that actually provided services to people, i.e., connected to beneficiaries via flow paths, amounted to 16-66% of those theoretically capable of supplying services, i.e., all ecosystems across the landscape. These results offer a more complete understanding of the spatial dynamics of ecosystem services and their effects, and may provide a sounder basis for economic valuation and policy applications than studies that consider only theoretical service provision and/or use.

Provision of supplementary food for wild birds at garden feeding stations is a common, large-scale and year-round practice in multiple countries including Great Britain (GB). While these additional dietary resources can benefit wildlife, there is a concomitant risk of disease transmission, particularly when birds repeatedly congregate in the same place at high densities and through interactions of species that would not normally associate in close proximity. Citizen science schemes recording garden birds are popular and can integrate disease surveillance with population monitoring, offering a unique opportunity to explore inter-relationships between supplementary feeding, disease epidemiology and population dynamics. Here, we present findings from a national surveillance programme in GB and note the dynamism of endemic and emerging diseases over a 25-year period, focusing on protozoal (finch trichomonosis), viral (Paridae pox) and bacterial (passerine salmonellosis) diseases with contrasting modes of transmission. We also examine the occurrence of mycotoxin contamination of food residues in bird feeders, which present both a direct and indirect (though immunosuppression) risk to wild bird health. Our results inform evidence-based mitigation strategies to minimize anthropogenically mediated health hazards, while maintaining the benefits of providing supplementary food for wild birds. This article is part of the theme issue ‘Anthropogenic resource subsidies and host–parasite dynamics in wildlife’.

Although a number of comprehensive reviews have examined global ecosystem services (ES), few have focused on studies that assess urban ecosystem services (UES). Given that more than half of the world’s population lives in cities, understanding the dualism of the provision of and need for UES is of critical importance. Which UES are the focus of research, and what types of urban land use are examined? Are models or decision support systems used to assess the provision of UES? Are trade-offs considered? Do studies of UES engage stakeholders? To address these questions, we analyzed 217 papers derived from an ISI Web of Knowledge search using a set of standardized criteria. The results indicate that most UES studies have been undertaken in Europe, North America, and China, at city scale. Assessment methods involve bio-physical models, Geographical Information Systems, and valuation, but few study findings have been implemented as land use policy.