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This article investigates how class of origin and intergenerational social mobility impact left-wing party support among new and old core left-wing electorates in the context of post-industrial electoral realignment and occupational transformation. We investigate the remaining legacy of political socialization in class of origin across generations of voters in the UK, Germany and Switzerland. We demonstrate that part of the contemporary middle-class left-wing support is a legacy of socialization under industrial class–party alignments, as many individuals from working-class backgrounds – traditional left-wing constituencies – have a different (post-industrial) class location than their parents. These enduring effects of production worker roots are weaker among younger generations and in more realigned contexts. Our findings imply that exclusively considering respondents' destination class underestimates the relevance of political socialization in class of origin, thereby overestimating electoral realignment. However, these past industrial alignments are currently unparalleled, as newer left-wing constituencies do not (yet) demonstrate similar legacies.

Fundamental transformations of underlying cleavage structures in advanced democracies should become evident in new collective identities. This article uses quantitative text analysis to investigate how voters describe their ingroups and outgroups in open-ended survey responses. I look at Switzerland, a paradigmatic case of electoral realignment along a “second,” universalism–particularism dimension of politics opposing the far right and the new left. Keyness statistics and a semi-supervised document scaling method (latent semantic scaling) serve to identify terms associated with the poles of this divide in voters’ responses, and hence to measure universalist/particularist identities. Based on voters’ own words, the results support the idea of collective identities consolidating an emerging cleavage: Voters’ identity descriptions relate to far right versus new left support, along with known sociostructural and attitudinal correlates of the universalism–particularism divide, and they reveal how groups opposed on this dimension antagonistically demarcate themselves from each other.

We review science-based adaptation strategies for western North American (wNA) forests that include restoring active fire regimes and fostering resilient structure and composition of forested landscapes. As part of the review, we address common questions associated with climate adaptation and realignment treatments that run counter to a broad consensus in the literature. These include the following: (1) Are the effects of fire exclusion overstated? If so, are treatments unwarranted and even counterproductive? (2) Is forest thinning alone sufficient to mitigate wildfire hazard? (3) Can forest thinning and prescribed burning solve the problem? (4) Should active forest management, including forest thinning, be concentrated in the wildland urban interface (WUI)? (5) Can wildfires on their own do the work of fuel treatments? (6) Is the primary objective of fuel reduction treatments to assist in future firefighting response and containment? (7) Do fuel treatments work under extreme fire weather? (8) Is the scale of the problem too great? Can we ever catch up? (9) Will planting more trees mitigate climate change in wNA forests? And (10) is post-fire management needed or even ecologically justified? Based on our review of the scientific evidence, a range of proactive management actions are justified and necessary to keep pace with changing climatic and wildfire regimes and declining forest heterogeneity after severe wildfires. Science-based adaptation options include the use of managed wildfire, prescribed burning, and coupled mechanical thinning and prescribed burning as is consistent with land management allocations and forest conditions. Although some current models of fire management in wNA are averse to short-term risks and uncertainties, the long-term environmental, social, and cultural consequences of wildfire management primarily grounded in fire suppression are well documented, highlighting an urgency to invest in intentional forest management and restoration of active fire regimes.

Forest landscapes across western North America (wNA) have experienced extensive changes over the last two centuries, while climatic warming has become a global reality over the last four decades. Resulting interactions between historical increases in forested area and density and recent rapid warming, increasing insect mortality, and wildfire burned areas, are now leading to substantial abrupt landscape alterations. These outcomes are forcing forest planners and managers to identify strategies that can modify future outcomes that are ecologically and/or socially undesirable. Past forest management, including widespread harvest of fire- and climate-tolerant large old trees and old forests, fire exclusion (both Indigenous and lightning ignitions), and highly effective wildfire suppression have contributed to the current state of wNA forests. These practices were successful at meeting short-term demands, but they match poorly to modern realities. Hagmann et al. review a century of observations and multiscale, multi-proxy, research evidence that details widespread changes in forested landscapes and wildfire regimes since the influx of European colonists. Over the preceding 10 millennia, large areas of wNA were already settled and proactively managed with intentional burning by Indigenous tribes. Prichard et al. then review the research on management practices historically applied by Indigenous tribes and currently applied by some managers to intentionally manage forests for resilient conditions. They address 10 questions surrounding the application and relevance of these management practices. Here, we highlight the main findings of both papers and offer recommendations for management. We discuss progress paralysis that often occurs with strict adherence to the precautionary principle; offer insights for dealing with the common problem of irreducible uncertainty and suggestions for reframing management and policy direction; and identify key knowledge gaps and research needs.

Mainstream parties in Western Europe are increasingly struggling to hold together their base of support. As a lens for exploring this changing electoral landscape, this article focuses on the growing share of the electorate that is cross-pressured between conservative and progressive attitudes on economic and cultural issues. It argues that a stable asymmetry characterizes Western European mass attitudes: while support for the left is common among voters with progressive attitudes on both issues, it is enough to be conservative on one issue to turn right. Analyzing survey data collected from 1990 to 2017, the study shows that cross-pressures are resolved in favor of the right and examines the trade-offs this poses to center-right parties. These findings contribute to debates on electoral dealignment and realignment and shed light on the electoral choices of the center-right.

A growing field of sustainability science examines how environments are transformed through polycentric governance. However, many studies are only snapshot analyses of the initial design or the emergent structure of polycentric regimes. There is less systematic analysis of the longitudinal robustness of polycentric regimes. The problem of robustness is approached by focusing not only on the structure of a regime but also on its context and effectiveness. These dimensions are examined through a longitudinal analysis of the Great Barrier Reef (GBR) governance regime, drawing on in-depth interviews and demographic, economic, and employment data, as well as organizational records and participant observation. Between 1975 and 2011, the GBR regime evolved into a robust polycentric structure as evident in an established set of multiactor, multilevel arrangements addressing marine, terrestrial, and global threats. However, from 2005 onward, multiscale drivers precipitated at least 10 types of regime change, ranging from contextual change that encouraged regime drift to deliberate changes that threatened regime conversion. More recently, regime realignment also has occurred in response to steering by international organizations and shocks such as the 2016 mass coralbleaching event. The results show that structural density and stability in a governance regime can coexist with major changes in that regime’s context and effectiveness. Clear analysis of the vulnerability of polycentric governance to both diminishing effectiveness and the masking effects of increasing complexity provides sustainability science and governance actors with a stronger basis to understand and respond to regime change.

As home to ∼60% of the global population, low-lying coastal estuaries are increasingly vulnerable to storm tide flooding, especially under accelerating anthropogenic sea-level rise. Conventional approaches in estuarine flood mitigation have involved building and heightening hard-engineering structures. Recent evidence from small- to medium-sized estuaries highlights that managed realignment (MR)—relocating flood defences landward—is potentially more sustainable. However, the effectiveness of such MR on estuary-scale flood hazard reduction in large, urbanised estuaries where space for large-scale MR is limited remains poorly understood. To address this gap, we applied a calibrated 2D hydrodynamic simulation of the large (120 km2) urban Clyde estuary on Scotland’s west coast and compared it with existing simulations from eight other UK estuaries of varying size. Our simulations of varying MR sizes (0.15–3.3 km2) along the Clyde resulted in minimal estuary-scale reductions in peak water levels, flood extent, and tidal prism volume. In contrast, similar realignment measures applied to much smaller UK estuaries (3–108 km2) yielded more significant estuary-scale flood attenuation. Our results show that MR exhibits scale-dependent behaviour: the effectiveness of estuary-scale flood risk reduction is proportional to the size of MR relative to estuary size. Larger estuaries require significantly more realignment space to achieve meaningful estuary-scale flood hazard reduction. Conversely, smaller estuaries achieve flood hazard reduction benefits with comparatively smaller interventions as they are more sensitive to geometric changes. The scale-dependent behaviour identified here requires consideration when designing tidal flood risk alleviation strategies for estuaries around the globe, particularly where existing land uses and plans in highly urbanised estuaries may limit available space and/or increase the cost of realignment. Moreover, it also provides evidence that avoiding buildings (re)-development in the tidal floodplains of large estuaries is the best means of minimising future flood risk in a rapidly warming world.

Managed realignment (MR) involves the landward relocation of sea defences to foster the (re)creation of coastal wetlands and achieve nature-based coastal protection. The wider application of MR is impeded by knowledge gaps related to lacking data on its effectiveness under extreme surges and the role of changes in vegetation cover, for example due to sea-level rise. We employ a calibrated and validated hydrodynamic model to explore relationships between surge attenuation, MR width(/area) and vegetation cover for the MR site of Freiston Shore, UK. We model a range of extreme water levels for four scenarios of variable MR width. We further assess the effects of reduced vegetation cover for the actual MR site and for the scenario of the site with the largest width. We show that surges are amplified for all but the largest two site scenarios, suggesting that increasing MR width results in higher attenuation rates. Substantial surge attenuation (up to 18 cm km−1) is only achieved for the largest site. The greatest contribution to the attenuation in the largest site scenario may come from water being reflected from the breached dike. While vegetation cover has no statistically significant effect on surge attenuations in the original MR site, higher coverage leads to higher attenuation rates in the largest site scenario. We conclude that at the open coast, only large MR sites (> 1148 m width) can attenuate surges with return periods > 10 years, while increased vegetation cover and larger MR widths enable the attenuation of even higher surges.

Objective Test a practical realignment approach to compensate the technical variability of MR radiomic features. Methods T1 phantom images acquired on 2 scanners, FLAIR and contrast-enhanced T1-weighted (CE-T1w) images of 18 brain tumor patients scanned on both 1.5-T and 3-T scanners, and 36 T2-weighted (T2w) images of prostate cancer patients scanned in one of two centers were investigated. The ComBat procedure was used for harmonizing radiomic features. Differences in statistical distributions in feature values between 1.5- and 3-T images were tested before and after harmonization. The prostate studies were used to determine the impact of harmonization to distinguish between Gleason grades (GGs). Results In the phantom data, 40 out of 42 radiomic feature values were significantly different between the 2 scanners before harmonization and none after. In white matter regions, the statistical distributions of features were significantly different ( p < 0.05) between the 1.5- and 3-T images for 37 out of 42 features in both FLAIR and CE-T1w images. After harmonization, no statistically significant differences were observed. In brain tumors, 41 (FLAIR) or 36 (CE-T1w) out of 42 features were significantly different between the 1.5- and 3-T images without harmonization, against 1 (FLAIR) or none (CE-T1w) with harmonization. In prostate studies, 636 radiomic features were significantly different between GGs after harmonization against 461 before. The ability to distinguish between GGs using radiomic features was increased after harmonization. Conclusion ComBat harmonization efficiently removes inter-center technical inconsistencies in radiomic feature values and increases the sensitivity of studies using data from several scanners. Key Points • Radiomic feature values obtained using different MR scanners or imaging protocols can be harmonized by combining off-the-shelf image standardization and feature realignment procedures. • Harmonized radiomic features enable one to pool data from different scanners and centers without a substantial loss of statistical power caused by intra- and inter-center variability. • The proposed realignment method is applicable to radiomic features from different MR sequences and tumor types and does not rely on any phantom acquisition.

Comprehensive two-dimensional gas chromatography with time-of-flight mass spectrometry (GC × GC-TOFMS) is one the most powerful analytical platforms for chemical investigations of complex biological samples. It produces large datasets that are rich in information, but highly complex, and its consistency may be affected by random systemic fluctuations and/or changes in the experimental parameters. This study details the optimization of a data processing strategy that compensates for severe 2D pattern misalignments and detector response fluctuations for saliva samples analyzed across 2 years. The strategy was trained on two batches: one with samples from healthy subjects who had undergone dietary intervention with high/low-Maillard reaction products (dataset A), and the second from healthy/unhealthy obese individuals (dataset B). The combined untargeted and targeted pattern recognition algorithm (i.e., UT fingerprinting) was tuned for key process parameters, the signal-to-noise ratio (S/N), and MS spectrum similarity thresholds, and then tested for the best transform function (global or local, affine or low-degree polynomial) for pattern realignment in the temporal domain. Reliable peak detection achieved its best performance, computed as % of false negative/positive matches, with a S/N threshold of 50 and spectral similarity direct match factor (DMF) of 700. Cross-alignment of bi-dimensional (2D) peaks in the temporal domain was fully effective with a supervised operation including multiple centroids (reference peaks) and a match-and-transform strategy using affine functions. Regarding the performance-derived response fluctuations, the most promising strategy for cross-comparative analysis and data fusion included the mass spectral total useful signal (MSTUS) approach followed by Z- score normalization on the resulting matrix.