Surf breaks are increasingly recognized as valuable coastal resources that support recreation, culture, local economies, and human wellbeing. Over the past two decades, research and practice on surf conservation have expanded considerably across disciplines such as coastal and environmental management, tourism and oceanography. While formal mechanisms for surf break management have evolved in some jurisdictions, they are often absent or weakly integrated into formal coastal governance. There is a need for both surf-specific legal instruments and stronger alignment with existing environmental laws and planning frameworks. This Short Communication reflects on key perspectives from the 2026 World Surfing Conservation Conference, held on the Gold Coast, Australia, February 13th-19th 2026. The event convened a diverse international community including researchers, policymakers, practitioners, Indigenous representatives, advocates, athletes and industry stakeholders. In lieu of formal proceedings this article offers a thematic analysis of the 131 conference presentations and recommendations for further embedding a focus on surf resources within mainstream coastal management. The analysis identifies surf protection initiatives and governance gaps as dominant themes alongside opportunities to better connect surf conservation with biodiversity protection. Four priorities are identified: (1) Mainstream surf management within formal coastal governance frameworks, recognizing the spatial and socio-cultural dimensions of surf breaks as natural resources; (2) Leverage existing governance instruments that are already in place for the protection and sustainable management of other natural resources; (3) Apply community values and economic valuation frameworks to support decision-making on surf break management; (4) Ensure that responsibility and accountability for the long-term protection of surf resources is provided and maintained by the relevant governmental authorities.
Across many immigrant destination countries, recent immigration law enforcement has expanded in scope and salience, intensifying public debate over deportation, criminal punishment, and the treatment of immigrants in the criminal legal system. Drawing on focal concerns theory, the current study uses the U.S. as an empirical case and a 4 (country of origin: Syria, China, Russia, or Mexico) & times; 2 (crime severity: felony drug offense or misdemeanor trespassing) & times; 2 (possibility of judicial error: certain or uncertain witness) & times; 2 (legality: valid work visa or expired tourist visa) online survey experiment with a national sample of U.S. adults to examine public preferences for deportation and criminal punishment of immigrants arrested for non-immigration offenses. Results indicate that legality is significantly associated with both deportation and imprisonment preferences, and that respondents rely on overlapping considerations when evaluating immigrants' deportability and criminal culpability. Although the uncertainty of evidence reduces imprisonment preferences, it has no effect on deportation preferences, suggesting greater public tolerance for errors and mistakes in the context of immigrant removal. Together, these findings suggest that punishment decisions involving immigrants are shaped in part by concerns about undocumented status, even when individuals are formally processed through the criminal legal system.
We have used k-resolved inverse photoemission spectroscopy to measure the temperature-dependent intensity of radiative transitions into unoccupied electronic states of Ni(110) along its Gamma Y- high-symmetry line in the surface Brillouin zone. Our measurements yield a strong temperature dependence of a transition into an unoccupied crystal-derived surface state. This temperature dependence weakens as the position of the state moves away from the Y- high-symmetry point. We use a Debye-Waller model to interpret the intensity attenuation of the direct transitions with increasing temperature. From our results of a transition into the sp sp-derived bulk state observed at similar to 1 eV above the Fermi level, we estimate the effective surface Debye temperature of Ni(110) to be 240 +/- 20 K.
We study data-driven learning of ecological and epidemic dynamics governed by nonlinear reaction and reaction–diffusion systems. We consider both neural approaches for learning the underlying reaction dynamics from trajectory data and Sparse Identification of Nonlinear Dynamics (SINDy) for discovering sparse, interpretable governing equations. A key component of this work is a partial-learning framework for reaction–diffusion systems. The prescribed diffusion operator is projected onto a reduced-order space and explicitly retained during differentiable integration, while only the unknown local eco-epidemic reaction is learned. This enables efficient training on fine spatial grids by evaluating the neural reaction only at a small set of informative nodes. The reduced solution is then reconstructed on the original fine grid and evaluated over both the training interval and an unseen future prediction horizon. Finally, the learned neural reaction is processed by SINDy to recover a sparse, interpretable symbolic model of the underlying dynamics. Experiments with clean and noisy data demonstrate high predictive accuracy, implicit denoising, computational efficiency, and the ability to recover sparse reaction models.
Small-scale fisheries support coastal livelihoods and food security across the Global South but increasingly operate in industrialising coastal environments marked by environmental degradation and governance complexity. Understanding fishers’ conservation attitudes is therefore important for context-responsive governance. This study examined 898 small-scale fishers in Rayong and Trat, Thailand, across three domains: psychological orientations toward nature, environmental knowledge and issue awareness, and perceived ecological change. Survey locations were classified as industrial or non-industrial according to their proximity to industrial facilities. Associations were examined between eight conservation-attitude measures and socio-cultural identity, socio-demographic and life-course factors, livelihood dependence, and spatial context. Spatial context and religious affiliation were each significantly associated with six measures. However, the two largest effect sizes among categorical comparisons were observed for spatial context, while religious differences were small. The spatial categories differed in selected value orientations and perceptions of changes in fish catch, whereas MPA awareness showed no statistically significant spatial difference. Gender and livelihood dependence showed limited, measure-specific associations, while life-course factors showed weak correlations. MPA awareness therefore did not necessarily vary in parallel with value orientations or perceptions of changes in fish catch. Integrating value orientations, policy awareness, and perceived ecological change helps explain why standardised approaches may not suit heterogeneous coastal communities. Governance responses should be based on local diagnosis rather than fixed policy packages and adapted to social–ecological and institutional conditions. Engaging with fishers’ experiential knowledge may help align conservation interventions with locally perceived environmental change in comparable industrialising coastal regions.
