Aim Urban environments provide unique challenges and opportunities for wildlife, including altered thermal regimes caused by the urban heat island (UHI) effect. Gloger's rule predicts that animals in warmer environments will exhibit more pheomelanin-based (reddish-brown) plumage. For species with colour polymorphisms, local warming may shift morph frequencies towards those with more pheomelanin. Eastern screech-owls (Megascops asio) have rufous, brown, and grey morphs, with a strong latitudinal cline where grey morphs increase in the northern areas of the species range, likely due to lower metabolic demands. We predicted that the proportion of rufous morphs will increase in warmer UHIs compared to the cooler surrounding rural areas.Location Eastern North America.Taxon Eastern screech-owl (Megascops asio).Methods We used community science images from Cornell's Macaulay Library and iNaturalist from throughout M. asio asio's range to quantify proportions of rufous versus non-rufous morphs across 26 UHIs and their adjacent rural area.Results Populations of eastern screech-owls within UHIs had significantly more rufous individuals compared to the surrounding rural areas, and there was a strong latitudinal cline in morph frequency. However, site-specific climatic variables did not predict differences in morphs between UHI and their surrounding rural sites.Main Conclusions Warmer urban microclimates within UHIs may favour pheomelanic morphs with higher metabolic demands, consistent with Gloger's rule. These results suggest that even relatively small-scale environmental differences can shape selection pressures among populations. These findings underscore the potential for urban environments to influence phenotypic variation and offer insight into how climate-driven selection may operate at fine spatial scales.
Since the "Mineral Revolution" of the late nineteenth and early twentieth Centuries, the mining industry has decisively shaped Southern African society. This article aims to show how maritime infrastructure and logistics were essential to the inland mining industry, and to link this theme to a revisiting of the concept of hinterlands. The article draws on the recent work of Campling and Col & aacute;s, to connect the social dynamics of capitalist reproduction, the natural contingencies of the sea and processes of port city building. The article seeks to contribute to the analysis of "hinterlands" by highlighting the centrality of political contestation and labor in the processes of circulation and in the provision of the infrastructure undergirding it. Shipping systems and ports, created against the constraints of rather unfavorable natural conditions, enabled the coming into being of the new spaces of production and urbanization in the African interior, on Atlantic islands and in the European metropolises. At the same time, imperial politics and military power shaped the establishment of shipping lines and channeled the flow of mineral products in certain geographical directions. The article shows how southern African mining urbanization connected, through shipping, to regional ports and metropolitan centers.
This article examines the aftermath of the 2025 Eaton Fire in Altadena, California, a historically Black, unincorporated community facing wildfire destruction, displacement pressures, and speculative redevelopment. Drawing on analysis of news reportage, visual culture, Octavia Butler's speculative fiction, and local community organizing, I argue that wildfire in Altadena cannot be understood as a singular environmental event but as part of a longer racial-spatial process shaped by structural abandonment, racial capitalism, and uneven vulnerability. At the same time, the article shows how residents mobilize memory, art, refusal, and collective care to resist disaster-driven dispossession and imagine alternative futures of recovery. Focusing on Sunny Mills's tintype photography and local postfire organizing, I demonstrate how speculative and creative practices function as geographic knowledge, enabling communities to narrate loss while asserting claims to land, belonging, and return. This article argues that the work of writer Octavia Butler, who hails from Altadena, is not just fiction, but a theory of speculative justice and futures. The article contributes to Black geographies and environmental justice scholarship by theorizing speculative world-building as a method for understanding disaster afterlives and for envisioning just recovery beyond technocratic resilience frameworks.
We obtain formulas for the maximum partial-dual genus of any orientable ribbon graph, and for the maximum partial-dual Euler-genus of any ribbon graph. This derivation involves the introduction of the partial-dual deficiency invariant , which is analogous to the Xuong deficiency ξ (G) . We also formulate a sufficient condition for a graph such that all ribbon graphs with that underlying graph have the same maximum partial-dual genus and the same maximum partial-dual Euler-genus.
What information is sufficient to learn the full richness of human scene understanding? The distributional hypothesis holds that the statistical co-occurrence of language and images captures the conceptual knowledge underlying visual cognition. Vision-language models (VLMs) are trained on massive paired text-image corpora but lack embodied experience, making them an ideal test of the distributional hypothesis. We report two experiments comparing descriptions generated by 18 VLMs to those of over 2000 human observers across 15 high-level scene understanding tasks, spanning general knowledge, affordances, sensory experiences, affective responses, and future prediction. Because many tasks lack ground truth answers, we developed a Human-Calibrated Cosine Distance (HCD) metric that measures VLM output similarity to the distribution of human responses, scaled by within-human variability. In Experiment 1, VLMs approached human-level performance on general knowledge tasks, but showed a robust deficit for affordance tasks that resisted prompt engineering and did not improve with newer model releases. In Experiment 2, we tested six mechanistic hypotheses for explaining this affordance gap, finding that the deficit was structural rather than stylistic and was not resolved by providing explicit spatial information. Corpus analyses revealed that image captioning datasets contain sparse agent-addressed affordance language, consistent with Gricean accounts of why embodied knowledge may be systematically underrepresented in language. Together, these findings suggest that distributional learning from images and text is insufficient for affordance-based scene understanding, implying that some dimensions of human visual cognition may require the kind of agent-centered, three-dimensional experience that no photograph or caption can encode.
