Drylands face urgent development challenges that are complex and interconnected, requiring holistic systems-based approaches. Here, we present a social-ecological systems framework to guide research, policy, and action across disciplines and sectors towards sustainability transformations in drylands for improved livelihoods and enhanced ecosystem, livestock, and human health. Our conceptual framework integrates three non-exclusive and complementary lenses of human-driven transformations: systemic, structural and enabling/grassroots change. Based on these three complementary lenses, along with three main phases of transformation and key associated actions, we briefly illustrate the framework's value through the case of the Karamoja cross-border region of East Africa. We show how the framework can be used as an entry point to identify and analyse key challenges and their interlinkages; envision desired social-ecological systems; and explore pathways towards sustainability. The framework provides actionable guidance to co-develop context-specific interventions that support sustainability transformations in drylands.

East Africa's pastoralist rangelands are undergoing unprecedented commercialisation and fragmentation as states seek to exploit the economic potential of the region. Land is rapidly becoming a tradeable asset and communal tenure is being formalised. This article asks how processes of demarcation, formalisation, and increasing commodification of land are impacting tenure security and conflict dynamics for pastoralist and agropastoralist communities. We foreground the importance of boundary-making and inter-regional interconnections in our analysis of these processes and their impacts. The article is based primarily on interview data from the neighbouring pastoralist rangelands of Karamoja sub-region, Uganda and West Pokot County, Kenya. A recent rush to acquire land for commercial mining and agriculture in Karamoja, and ongoing land reforms in West Pokot have precipitated land markets and scrambles to demarcate, title, and sell land to benefit from its rising value or to resist its capture by others. Land scrambles and claim-making, alongside more exclusionary ideas of tenure, are having profound impacts on conflict dynamics and tenure insecurity, which as we show often revolves around the materialisation of boundaries. By combining data from West Pokot and Karamoja, the article exemplifies how the recent surge in land commodification alongside demarcation and formalisation - and the impacts on conflict and tenure insecurity - are connected across the region.

Index-based livestock insurance (IBLI) is promoted as a proactive measure to protect against climaterelated risks. Despite initial efforts to introduce the insurance, its adoption has generally been low in most developing countries. This paper compares adopters and nonadopters of IBLI in four arid or semiarid counties in Kenya, focusing specifically on household demographics, climate effects, land tenure arrangements, and the interaction between other coping strategies and the decision to adopt livestock insurance. The household survey was conducted in 12 counties, whereby 491 respondents were interviewed, of which about 4.5% had insurance. The results showed that IBLI adoption was influenced by the socioeconomic, environmental, and existing adoption strategies. Lack of awareness was the most common reason (44.2% of respondents) for not adopting insurance, showing the need for simplifying information, because the respondents with more schooling were likely to purchase insurance. High precipitation reduced the need for livestock insurance due to low drought risk. Active fodder management positively influenced insurance uptake, likely due to the use of the indemnity for investment in other adaptive strategies. Otherwise, pastoralists were more likely to purchase insurance if they had to travel a long distance to the alternative grazing grounds. Likewise, insurance premiums limited insurance uptake due to the imperfect correlation between drought and indemnity payments (basis risk). Generally, insurance alone is not a panacea for pastoralists. Presently, they seem to be too expensive compared to the value they provide. Either the prediction accuracy of IBLIs must be increased, or premiums more heavily subsidized, for insurance to be a genuine alternative for pastoralists. (c) 2025 The Author(s). Published by Elsevier Inc. on behalf of The Society for Range Management. This is an open access article under the CC BY license ( http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/ )

Several political and academic arenas have been turning their focus to the seas. In the EU, the need to govern and plan sustainable uses of the seas has primarily been expressed through the implementation of the Marine Strategy Framework Directive (MSFD) and Maritime Spatial Planning Directive (MSPD). This paper analyses the different sea worlds as well as conceptualizations of the sea, expressed by recreationists on one hand, who experience the sea in terms of connections and as unbounded and alive, and the marine management documents on the other, where the sea is portrayed as a passive utility in need of organization. It argues that using particular frameworks, the process of sea governance provides grounds for cognitive inequality. The paper contributes to ontological politics by empirically portraying how the 'protected sea' mingles with sea realities, such as 'free seas', and '(un)safe seas', whereas the latter two are underrepresented in the policy documents.

The Sustainable Livelihoods Approach (SLA) is often proposed to holistically capture vulnerability in assessments of livelihoods in aid and development programs. The full capacity of the approach has however only rarely been used in these assessments, lacking a clear account of processes of change and flexibility of assets, as well as the ability to quantify all capital assets of a livelihood system. The descriptions of livelihoods so far are in fact non-holistic. This paper attempts to use SLA in its full capacity through a quantification of the different capitals covered; natural, physical, economic, social and human. Further, the relationships between capitals are explored in a Chinese rural context of changing climate and land-use, and examples are given on how investments in one capital in reality can end up being accounted for in other capitals. The results indicate that through an analytical and process-oriented SLA, an effective tool for assessment of vulnerability can be developed. Such a tool would assist development organizations and policy-makers to target poverty traps and escape routes in the face of rapid and multiple changes.

Pastoralist adaptation strategies have to address multiple, overlapping, and often inter-related processes of socio-ecological change. The present study addresses the need for inter-regional comparative studies that account for different geographic, climate, and socio-economic contexts in order to understand how pastoralists adapt to changes in livelihood conditions. The paper uses data from a unique survey study of pastoralist households in four neighbouring counties in dryland Kenya. Taking our point of departure from an empirically based classification of the livelihood strategies available to pastoralists in the Horn of Africa, the survey offers novel insights into adaptation and fodder management strategies of pastoralist individuals and households. The results show that the use of migration as a strategy is more dependent on the ability to migrate than climate conditions. This is the case in localities where a substantial part of the land is subdivided, the population density is high, and where opportunities for migration are subsequently restricted. Diversification of livelihoods as a strategy is largely defined by opportunity. Intensification through active fodder management is mainly common in areas where there has been a proliferation of managed enclosures. Climate change will test the adaptive capacity of pastoralists in the studied region, and diversification and intensification strategies of both herd composition and livelihoods can be seen as strategies for increased climate resilience.

In this paper, we show how communities in Northern Kenya proactively engage an unfolding megaproject and the temporalities it evokes-the Lamu Port South Sudan Ethiopia Transport Corridor (LAPSSET). We argue that the latitude communities have in contending with megaprojects is broader and more dynamic than passive reception of or outright resistance against the futures promised. By introducing the concepts of entangling and fraying, we emphasise the agency communities create for themselves by appreciating their strategies and expressions of stabilising or troubling the "megaproject". While entangling refers to practices through which communities attach additional features to an otherwise rather stable vision of its "meganess", fraying, in contrast, describes the strands that splice off towards different spatio-temporal imaginaries. We discuss these practices in four instances of engaging LAPSSET: constructing temporary homes at project sites; engaging in land reform; disputing land acquisition at oil exploration sites; and contesting a planned resort city.

For low-order adaptive optics systems, a method that is able to correct for system aberrations in the final focal plane is presented. The paper presents a novel figure of merit, corresponding to the integrated non-normalized tip-tilt-free optical transfer function. The inherent singular value decomposition modal content of the interaction matrix is used to optimize this figure of merit. The method has proven to be stable and robust, providing a simple mean to facilitate diffraction limited imaging in an experimental setup for ophthalmic applications.

Drylands in Sub-Saharan Africa are subject to rapid and enduring population increase, agricultural expansion, land large-scale infrastructure developments, as well as climate change, affecting some 265 million pastoralists and agro-pastoralists. These changes are promoting a transition from traditional pastoralist ways of life characterized by seasonal mobility, towards more sedentary livelihoods based on more intensive and commercial uses of land-based resources. As part of of this ongoing transition, establishment of enclosures on pastoralist commons is emerging as a default, but highly contested, development pathway. Based on a review of the current enclosure debate across the natural, economic, and social sciences, with a geographical focus on the East African drylands, we discuss the potential and limitations of enclosures as land management tool, and propose a conceptual framework for how enclosures can act as an integral part of sustainable pastoralist land use. Such a framework constitute an important piece of the puzzle for more productively linking the urgent need of innovative ways of managing pastoralist rangelands, to the present international and national commitments to restoration of degraded lands.

Triggered by urbanization and changing land use, coastal transformation is a rapidly increasing phenomenon in the global south, driving dramatic livelihoods impacts. However, the existing literature on small-scale fisheries (SSF) has paid little attention to the way coastal transformations shape conditions for SSF livelihoods communities. This study proposes a new orientation in SSF studies by exploring the assemblage of entangled sociomaterial processes that account for coastal transformations by investigating waterfront transformation in a fishing community in Karnataka, India. Drawing on ethnographic fieldwork, we conclude that an entanglement of sociomaterial processes produces unequal outcomes among stakeholders that subsequently reinforce the political and economic marginalization of certain groups of waterfront users. Moreover, the investigated context-specific waterfront assemblage intimately connects to the broader context of national fishery policy, urbanization, and tourism, directing the way coastal space can and should be transformed. Such an analysis contributes to the understanding of changing livelihoods in SSF communities.

The oceans comprise 70% of the surface area of our planet, contain some of the world’s richest natural resources and are one of the most significant drivers of global climate patterns. As the marine environment continues to increase in importance as both an essential resource reservoir and facilitator of global change, it is apparent that to find long-term sustainable solutions for our use of the sea and its resources and thus to engage in a sustainable blue economy, an integrated interdisciplinary approach is needed. As a result, interdisciplinary working is proliferating. We report here our experiences of forming interdisciplinary teams (marine ecologists, ecophysiologists, social scientists, environmental economists and environmental law specialists) to answer questions pertaining to the effects of anthropogenic-driven global change on the sustainability of resource use from the marine environment, and thus to transport ideas outwards from disciplinary confines. We use a framework derived from the literature on interdisciplinarity to enable us to explore processes of knowledge integration in two ongoing research projects, based on analyses of the purpose, form and degree of knowledge integration within each project. These teams were initially focused around a graduate program, explicitly designed for interdisciplinary training across the natural and social sciences, at the Gothenburg Centre for Marine Research at the University of Gothenburg, thus allowing us to reflect on our own experiences within the context of other multi-national, interdisciplinary graduate training and associated research programs.

Dryland livestock production systems are changing in many parts of the world, as a result of growing human populations and associated pressure on water and land. Based on a combination of social and natural science methods, we studied a 30-year transformation process from pastoralism to a livestock-based agro-pastoral system in northwestern Kenya, with the overall aim to increase the understanding of the ongoing transition towards intensified agro-pastoralist production systems in dryland East Africa.Key to this transformation was the use of enclosures for land rehabilitation, fodder production, and land and livestock management. Enclosures have more soil carbon and a higher vegetation cover than adjacent areas with open grazing. The level of adoption of enclosures as a management tool has been very high, and their use has enabled agricultural diversification, e.g. increased crop agriculture, poultry production and the inclusion of improved livestock. Following the use of enclosures, livelihoods have become less dependent on livestock migration, are increasingly directed towards agribusinesses and present new opportunities and constraints for women. These livelihood changes are closely associated with, and depend on, an ongoing privatization of land under different tenure regimes.The results indicate that the observed transformation provides opportunities for a pathway towards a sustainable livestock-based agro-pastoral system that could be valid in many dryland areas in East Africa. However, we also show that emergent risks of conflicts and inequalities in relation to land, triggered by the weakening of collective property rights, pose a threat to the sustainability of this pathway.

Retinal imaging is limited due to optical aberrations caused by imperfections in the optical media of the eye. Consequently, diffraction limited retinal imaging can be achieved if optical aberrations in the eye are measured and corrected. Information about retinal pathology and structure on a cellular level is thus not available in a clinical setting but only from histological studies of excised retinal tissue. In addition to limitations such as tissue shrinkage and distortion, the main limitation of histological preparations is that longitudinal studies of disease progression and/or results of medical treatment are not possible. Adaptive optics (AO) is the science, technology and art of capturing diffraction-limited images in adverse circumstances that would normally lead to strongly degraded image quality and loss of resolution. In non-military applications, it was first proposed and implemented in astronomy. AO technology has since been applied in many disciplines, including vision science, where retinal features down to a few microns can be resolved by correcting the aberrations of ocular optics. As the focus of this chapter is on AO retinal imaging, we will focus our description to this particular field.

Peter Albers Ferran Alegre Kathleen A. Alexander Matt Allender Gerard Andrews Ellen Ariel Douglas L. Armstrong Jon M. Arnemo Jill Arnold Carter T. Atkinson Jeremy Ayotte Laurie A. Baeten Karoun H. Bagamian Anne E. Ballmann Ana Balseiro Carsten Bandt Jose M. Barbanti Michelle Barbieri Jacques Barrat Bruno Bassano Giorgio Battelli Antonio Battisti Claudia Baule Wes Baumgartner Julie Bebak-Williams Melissa Behr Jeff Bender Kathy L. Bentson John Berezowski Richard Bessen Ian Beveridge Jon Bielby Laura Bigler Chad J. Bishop Jesse Blanton David S. Blehert Trent K. Bollinger R. Bonett Nicole Borel Richard G. Botzler Melissa Bourgeois Dwight Bownan Walter M. Boyce Justin Boyles Chris Brand Seth Britch Daniel Brown Justin D. Brown John A. Bryan II Nancy Bunbury Robin Burke Mónica G. Candela * Our database is imperfect; we apologize for misspellings of names and to anyone whose name may have been omitted. Journal of Wildlife Diseases, 48(4), 2012, pp. 1119–1123 # Wildlife Disease Association 2012

............................................................................................................................................. I Acknowledgements ............................................................................................................................II Table of