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Cities are using sheep to graze in urban landscapes and people love it

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NASHVILLE, Tenn. (AP) — Along the Cumberland River just north of downtown Nashville, Tennessee, tourists on party pontoons float past the recognizable skyline, but they also can see something a little less expected: hundreds of sheep nibbling on the grass along the riverbank.

The urban sheepherder who manages this flock, Zach Richardson, said sometimes the tourist boats will go out of their way to let their passengers get a closer glimpse of the Nashville Chew Crew grazing a few hundred yards away from densely populated residential and commercial buildings.

The joy people get from watching sheep graze is partly why they are becoming trendy workers in some urban areas.

“Everybody that comes out here and experiences the sheep, they enjoy it more than they would someone on a zero-turn mower or a guy with a leaf blower or a weed eater,” Richardson said.

Using sheep for prescribed grazing is not a new landscaping method, but more urban communities are opting for it to handle land management concerns such as invasive species, wildfire risks, protection of native vegetation and animal habitats and maintaining historic sites.

Nashville’s parks department hired the Chew Crew in 2017 to help maintain Fort Negley, a Civil War-era Union fortification that had weeds growing between and along its stones that lawnmowers could easily chip. Sheep now graze about 150 acres (60.7 hectares) of city property annually, including in the historic Nashville City Cemetery.

“It is a more environmentally sustainable way to care for the greenspace and oftentimes is cheaper than doing it with handheld equipment and staff,” said Jim Hester, assistant director of Metro Nashville Parks.

Living among the sheep — and often blending in — are the Chew Crew’s livestock guardian dogs, Anatolian shepherds, who are born and stay with them 24/7 to keep away nosy intruders, both the two-legged and the four-legged kinds. The flock is comprised of hair sheep, a type of breed that naturally sheds its hair fibers and often is used for meat.

Another important canine employee is Duggie, the border collie. With only a few whistles and commands from Richardson, Duggie can control the whole flock when they need to be moved, separated or loaded onto a trailer.

Across the country, another municipality also has become reliant on these hoofed nibblers. Santa Barbara, California, has been using grazing sheep for about seven years as one way to manage land buffers that can slow or halt the spread of wildfires.

“The community loves the grazers and it’s kind of a great way of community engagement,” said Monique O’Conner, open space planner for the city’s parks and recreation. “It’s kind of a new shiny way of land management.”

The grazed areas can change how fire moves, said Mark vonTillow, the wildland specialist for the Santa Barbara City Fire Department.

“So if a fire is coming down the hill and it’s going through a full brush field, and then all of a sudden it hits grazed area that’s sort of broken up vegetation, the fire behavior reacts drastically and drops to the ground,” vonTillow said. “That gives firefighters a chance to attack the fire.”

Even some universities have tried out herds of goats and sheep on campus property. In 2010, the University of Georgia had a privet problem that was overtaking a section of the campus not used by students or staff and pushing out native plants, said Kevin Kirsche, the school’s director of sustainability.

Rather than using chemicals or mowers, Kirsche said they hired Jennif Chandler to send in a herd of goats to strip the bark off the privet, stomp on roots and defoliate the branches.

“Bringing the goats to the site was an alternative means of removing invasive plants in a way that was nontoxic to the environment and friendly to people,” Kirsche said.

Around the same time, Richardson, the owner of Chew Crew who at the time was a UGA student studying landscape architecture, was inspired to create his own goat grazing business. The goats became the most popular four-legged creatures on campus, he said.

“What was fun and less expected was kind of the side projects and a life of its own developed around the Chew Crew,” Kirsche said. “We had art students doing time-lapse photography, documenting changes over time. One point we had a student dressed as a goat playing goat songs on the guitar and other students serving goat cheese and goat ice cream.”

Richardson, who moved his company to Nashville after finishing his degree, now prefers sheep over goats. Sheep are more flock-oriented and aren’t inclined to climb and explore as much as goats.

“I’ll never own another goat,” he admitted. “They are like little Houdinis. It’s like trying to fence in water.”

But sheep are not a silver bullet solution for all cities and their lands, according to O’Conner. “We want to educate the public on why we’re choosing to graze where we’re grazing,” she said.

Not every urban site is ideal. Chandler owns City Sheep and Goat in Colbert, Georgia, about 12.4 miles (20 kilometers) northeast of UGA’s campus in Athens, where her sheep graze on mostly residential properties and community projects such as Clyde Shepherd Nature Preserve in North Decatur, just outside of Atlanta.

In 2015, some of her sheep were attacked and killed by dogs who got through the electric fencing while in a public park. Those kinds of incidents have been rare, according to Chandler.

The sheep need to be moved regularly because they tire of the same plants and relocating reduces the chances of a predator attack, Chandler said.

Hundreds of sheep can impact the environment by spreading seeds. The city of Santa Barbara does environment surveys before bringing in grazers since it can also affect bird habitats and nests.

“Throwing like 500 sheep into an area is a much larger impact on the land and those soils than our native herbivores would have,” O’Conner said.

Along the levee of the Cumberland River, the side of the greenway where the park uses mowers looks manicured like a golf course. On the other side where the Chew Crew ewes are munching, an ecosystem is flourishing.

“There’s rabbits, butterflies, groundhogs, turtles, nesting birds,” Richardson said. “The list goes on. It’s way more diverse. Even though we’ve removed some of the vegetation, there’s still a habitat that can support wildlife.”

Richardson checks on his flock daily, but he also often receives pictures and videos that people take of the sheep because his phone is listed on the electric fence.

“If the sheep can be a catalyst to connect back to nature just for a split second or spark a kid’s imagination to go down to the river and catch a crawdad, I think more of that is good,” Richardson said.

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STD epidemic slows as new syphilis and gonorrhea cases fall in US

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NEW YORK (AP) — The U.S. syphilis epidemic slowed dramatically last year, gonorrhea cases fell and chlamydia cases remained below prepandemic levels, according to federal data released Tuesday.

The numbers represented some good news about sexually transmitted diseases, which experienced some alarming increases in past years due to declining condom use, inadequate sex education, and reduced testing and treatment when the COVID-19 pandemic hit.

Last year, cases of the most infectious stages of syphilis fell 10% from the year before — the first substantial decline in more than two decades. Gonorrhea cases dropped 7%, marking a second straight year of decline and bringing the number below what it was in 2019.

“I’m encouraged, and it’s been a long time since I felt that way” about the nation’s epidemic of sexually transmitted infections, said the CDC’s Dr. Jonathan Mermin. “Something is working.”

More than 2.4 million cases of syphilis, gonorrhea and chlamydia were diagnosed and reported last year — 1.6 million cases of chlamydia, 600,000 of gonorrhea, and more than 209,000 of syphilis.

Syphilis is a particular concern. For centuries, it was a common but feared infection that could deform the body and end in death. New cases plummeted in the U.S. starting in the 1940s when infection-fighting antibiotics became widely available, and they trended down for a half century after that. By 2002, however, cases began rising again, with men who have sex with other men being disproportionately affected.

The new report found cases of syphilis in their early, most infectious stages dropped 13% among gay and bisexual men. It was the first such drop since the agency began reporting data for that group in the mid-2000s.

However, there was a 12% increase in the rate of cases of unknown- or later-stage syphilis — a reflection of people infected years ago.

Cases of syphilis in newborns, passed on from infected mothers, also rose. There were nearly 4,000 cases, including 279 stillbirths and infant deaths.

“This means pregnant women are not being tested often enough,” said Dr. Jeffrey Klausner, a professor of medicine at the University of Southern California.

What caused some of the STD trends to improve? Several experts say one contributor is the growing use of an antibiotic as a “morning-after pill.” Studies have shown that taking doxycycline within 72 hours of unprotected sex cuts the risk of developing syphilis, gonorrhea and chlamydia.

In June, the CDC started recommending doxycycline as a morning-after pill, specifically for gay and bisexual men and transgender women who recently had an STD diagnosis. But health departments and organizations in some cities had been giving the pills to people for a couple years.

Some experts believe that the 2022 mpox outbreak — which mainly hit gay and bisexual men — may have had a lingering effect on sexual behavior in 2023, or at least on people’s willingness to get tested when strange sores appeared.

Another factor may have been an increase in the number of health workers testing people for infections, doing contact tracing and connecting people to treatment. Congress gave $1.2 billion to expand the workforce over five years, including $600 million to states, cities and territories that get STD prevention funding from CDC.

Last year had the “most activity with that funding throughout the U.S.,” said David Harvey, executive director of the National Coalition of STD Directors.

However, Congress ended the funds early as a part of last year’s debt ceiling deal, cutting off $400 million. Some people already have lost their jobs, said a spokeswoman for Harvey’s organization.

Still, Harvey said he had reasons for optimism, including the growing use of doxycycline and a push for at-home STD test kits.

Also, there are reasons to think the next presidential administration could get behind STD prevention. In 2019, then-President Donald Trump announced a campaign to “eliminate” the U.S. HIV epidemic by 2030. (Federal health officials later clarified that the actual goal was a huge reduction in new infections — fewer than 3,000 a year.)

There were nearly 32,000 new HIV infections in 2022, the CDC estimates. But a boost in public health funding for HIV could also also help bring down other sexually transmitted infections, experts said.

“When the government puts in resources, puts in money, we see declines in STDs,” Klausner said.

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The Associated Press Health and Science Department receives support from the Howard Hughes Medical Institute’s Science and Educational Media Group. The AP is solely responsible for all content.

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World’s largest active volcano Mauna Loa showed telltale warning signs before erupting in 2022

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WASHINGTON (AP) — Scientists can’t know precisely when a volcano is about to erupt, but they can sometimes pick up telltale signs.

That happened two years ago with the world’s largest active volcano. About two months before Mauna Loa spewed rivers of glowing orange molten lava, geologists detected small earthquakes nearby and other signs, and they warned residents on Hawaii‘s Big Island.

Now a study of the volcano’s lava confirms their timeline for when the molten rock below was on the move.

“Volcanoes are tricky because we don’t get to watch directly what’s happening inside – we have to look for other signs,” said Erik Klemetti Gonzalez, a volcano expert at Denison University, who was not involved in the study.

Upswelling ground and increased earthquake activity near the volcano resulted from magma rising from lower levels of Earth’s crust to fill chambers beneath the volcano, said Kendra Lynn, a research geologist at the Hawaiian Volcano Observatory and co-author of a new study in Nature Communications.

When pressure was high enough, the magma broke through brittle surface rock and became lava – and the eruption began in late November 2022. Later, researchers collected samples of volcanic rock for analysis.

The chemical makeup of certain crystals within the lava indicated that around 70 days before the eruption, large quantities of molten rock had moved from around 1.9 miles (3 kilometers) to 3 miles (5 kilometers) under the summit to a mile (2 kilometers) or less beneath, the study found. This matched the timeline the geologists had observed with other signs.

The last time Mauna Loa erupted was in 1984. Most of the U.S. volcanoes that scientists consider to be active are found in Hawaii, Alaska and the West Coast.

Worldwide, around 585 volcanoes are considered active.

Scientists can’t predict eruptions, but they can make a “forecast,” said Ben Andrews, who heads the global volcano program at the Smithsonian Institution and who was not involved in the study.

Andrews compared volcano forecasts to weather forecasts – informed “probabilities” that an event will occur. And better data about the past behavior of specific volcanos can help researchers finetune forecasts of future activity, experts say.

(asterisk)We can look for similar patterns in the future and expect that there’s a higher probability of conditions for an eruption happening,” said Klemetti Gonzalez.

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The Associated Press Health and Science Department receives support from the Howard Hughes Medical Institute’s Science and Educational Media Group. The AP is solely responsible for all content.

The Canadian Press. All rights reserved.

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Waymo’s robotaxis now open to anyone who wants a driverless ride in Los Angeles

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Waymo on Tuesday opened its robotaxi service to anyone who wants a ride around Los Angeles, marking another milestone in the evolution of self-driving car technology since the company began as a secret project at Google 15 years ago.

The expansion comes eight months after Waymo began offering rides in Los Angeles to a limited group of passengers chosen from a waiting list that had ballooned to more than 300,000 people. Now, anyone with the Waymo One smartphone app will be able to request a ride around an 80-square-mile (129-square-kilometer) territory spanning the second largest U.S. city.

After Waymo received approval from California regulators to charge for rides 15 months ago, the company initially chose to launch its operations in San Francisco before offering a limited service in Los Angeles.

Before deciding to compete against conventional ride-hailing pioneers Uber and Lyft in California, Waymo unleashed its robotaxis in Phoenix in 2020 and has been steadily extending the reach of its service in that Arizona city ever since.

Driverless rides are proving to be more than just a novelty. Waymo says it now transports more than 50,000 weekly passengers in its robotaxis, a volume of business numbers that helped the company recently raise $5.6 billion from its corporate parent Alphabet and a list of other investors that included venture capital firm Andreesen Horowitz and financial management firm T. Rowe Price.

“Our service has matured quickly and our riders are embracing the many benefits of fully autonomous driving,” Waymo co-CEO Tekedra Mawakana said in a blog post.

Despite its inroads, Waymo is still believed to be losing money. Although Alphabet doesn’t disclose Waymo’s financial results, the robotaxi is a major part of an “Other Bets” division that had suffered an operating loss of $3.3 billion through the first nine months of this year, down from a setback of $4.2 billion at the same time last year.

But Waymo has come a long way since Google began working on self-driving cars in 2009 as part of project “Chauffeur.” Since its 2016 spinoff from Google, Waymo has established itself as the clear leader in a robotaxi industry that’s getting more congested.

Electric auto pioneer Tesla is aiming to launch a rival “Cybercab” service by 2026, although its CEO Elon Musk said he hopes the company can get the required regulatory clearances to operate in Texas and California by next year.

Tesla’s projected timeline for competing against Waymo has been met with skepticism because Musk has made unfulfilled promises about the company’s self-driving car technology for nearly a decade.

Meanwhile, Waymo’s robotaxis have driven more than 20 million fully autonomous miles and provided more than 2 million rides to passengers without encountering a serious accident that resulted in its operations being sidelined.

That safety record is a stark contrast to one of its early rivals, Cruise, a robotaxi service owned by General Motors. Cruise’s California license was suspended last year after one of its driverless cars in San Francisco dragged a jaywalking pedestrian who had been struck by a different car driven by a human.

Cruise is now trying to rebound by joining forces with Uber to make some of its services available next year in U.S. cities that still haven’t been announced. But Waymo also has forged a similar alliance with Uber to dispatch its robotaxi in Atlanta and Austin, Texas next year.

Another robotaxi service, Amazon’s Zoox, is hoping to begin offering driverless rides to the general public in Las Vegas at some point next year before also launching in San Francisco.

The Canadian Press. All rights reserved.

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