Feature Articles on Population - Gender Imbalance in Hong Kong

Feature Articles on Population - Hong Kong Population Projections

In the middle of 2023, about 60 percent of the global population was living in Asia.The total world population amounted to 8.1 billion people on the planet. In other words 4.7 billion people were living in Asia as of 2023. Global populationDue to medical advances, better living conditions and the increase of agricultural productivity, the world population increased rapidly over the past century, and is expected to continue to grow. After reaching eight billion in 2023, the global population is estimated to pass 10 billion by 2060. Africa expected to drive population increase Most of the future population increase is expected to happen in Africa. The countries with the highest population growth rate in 2024 were mostly African countries. While around 1.47 billion people live on the continent as of 2024, this is forecast to grow to 3.9 billion by 2100. This is underlined by the fact that most of the countries wit the highest population growth rate are found in Africa. The growing population, in combination with climate change, puts increasing pressure on the world's resources.

1. Many migratory species are in decline across their geographical ranges. Single-population studies can provide important insights into drivers at a local scale, but effective conservation requires multi-population perspectives. This is challenging because relevant data are often hard to consolidate, and state-of-the-art analytical tools are typically tailored to specific datasets.
2. We capitalized on a recent data harmonization initiative (SPI-Birds) and linked it to a generalized modeling framework to identify the demographic and environmental drivers of large-scale population decline in migratory pied flycatchers (Ficedula hypoleuca) breeding across Britain.
3. We implemented a generalized integrated population model (IPM) to estimate age-specific vital rates, including their dependency on environmental conditions, and total and breeding population size of pied flycatchers using long-term (34–64 years) monitoring data from seven locations representative of the British breeding range. We then quantified the relative contributions of different vital rates and population structures to changes in short- and long-term population growth rates using transient life table response experiments (LTREs).
4. Substantial covariation in population sizes across breeding locations suggested that change was the result of large-scale drivers. This was supported by LTRE analyses, which attributed past changes in short-term population growth rates and long-term population trends primarily to variation in annual survival and dispersal dynamics, which largely act during migration and/or non-breeding season. Contributions of variation in local reproductive parameters were small in comparison, despite sensitivity to local temperature and rainfall within the breeding period.
5. We show that both short- and longer-term population changes of British-breeding pied flycatchers are likely linked to factors acting during migration and in non-breeding areas, where future research should be prioritized. We illustrate the potential of multi-population analyses for informing management at (inter)national scales and highlight the importance of data standardization, generalized and accessible analytical tools, and reproducible workflows to achieve them. Methods Data collection protocols are described in the paper, and further references provided therein. Raw data were harmonised and converted to a standard format by SPI-Birds (https://spibirds.org/) and then collated into the input data provided here using code deposited on https://github.com/SPI-Birds/SPI-IPM. Details on this step of data processing will be added to https://spi-birds.github.io/SPI-IPM/. The MCMC sample data files are the outputs of the integrated population models fitted in the study. Please refer to the published article and material deposited on the associated GitHub repository for more details.

Feature Articles on Population - The Profile of the Population in One-person Households

Emergency medical services (EMS) workforce demographics in the United States do not reflect the diversity of the population served. Despite some efforts by professional organizations to create a more representative workforce, little has changed in the last decade. This scoping review aims to summarize existing literature on the demographic composition, recruitment, retention, and workplace experience of underrepresented groups within EMS. Peer-reviewed studies were obtained from a search of PubMed, CINAHL, Web of Science, ProQuest Thesis and Dissertations, and non-peer-reviewed (“gray”) literature from 1960 to present. Abstracts and included full-text articles were screened by two independent reviewers trained on inclusion/exclusion criteria. Studies were included if they pertained to the demographics, training, hiring, retention, promotion, compensation, or workplace experience of underrepresented groups in United States EMS by race, ethnicity, sexual orientation, or gender. Studies of non-EMS fire department activities were excluded. Disputes were resolved by two authors. A single reviewer screened the gray literature. Data extraction was performed using a standardized electronic form. Results were summarized qualitatively. We identified 87 relevant full-text articles from the peer-reviewed literature and 250 items of gray literature. Primary themes emerging from peer-reviewed literature included workplace experience (n = 48), demographics (n = 12), workforce entry and exit (n = 8), education and testing (n = 7), compensation and benefits (n = 5), and leadership, mentorship, and promotion (n = 4). Most articles focused on sex/gender comparisons (65/87, 75%), followed by race/ethnicity comparisons (42/87, 48%). Few articles examined sexual orientation (3/87, 3%). One study focused on telecommunicators and three included EMS physicians. Most studies (n = 60, 69%) were published in the last decade. In the gray literature, media articles (216/250, 86%) demonstrated significant industry discourse surrounding these primary themes. Existing EMS workforce research demonstrates continued underrepresentation of women and nonwhite personnel. Additionally, these studies raise concerns for pervasive negative workplace experiences including sexual harassment and factors that negatively affect recruitment and retention, including bias in candidate testing, a gender pay gap, and unequal promotion opportunities. Additional research is needed to elucidate recruitment and retention program efficacy, the demographic composition of EMS leadership, and the prevalence of racial harassment and discrimination in this workforce.

Datasets, conda environments and Softwares for the course "Population Genomics" of Prof Kasper Munch. This course material is maintained by the health data science sandbox. This webpage shows the latest version of the course material.

1. Data.tar.gz Contains the datasets and executable files for some of the softwares
   You can unpack by simply doing
   tar -zxf Data.tar.gz -C ./
   This will create a folder called Data with the uncompressed material inside
2. Course_Env.packed.tar.gz Contains the conda environment used for the course. This needs to be unpacked to adjust all the prefixes (Note this environment is created on Ubuntu 22.10). You do this in the command line by
   1. creating the folder Course_Env: mkdir Course_Env
   2. untar the file: tar -zxf Course_Env.packed.tar.gz -C Course_Env
   3. Activate the environment: conda activate ./Course_Env
   4. Run the unpacking script (it can take quite some time to get it done): conda-unpack
3. Course_Env.unpacked.tar.gz The same environment as above, but will work only if untarred into the folder /usr/Material - so use the version above if you are using it in another folder. This file is mostly to execute the course in our own cloud environment.
4. environment_with_args.yml The file needed to generate the conda environment. Create and activate the environment with the following commands:
   1. conda env create -f environment_with_args.yml -p ./Course_Env
   2. conda activate ./Course_Env

The data is connected to the following repository: https://github.com/hds-sandbox/Popgen_course_aarhus. The original course material from Prof Kasper Munch is at https://github.com/kaspermunch/PopulationGenomicsCourse.

Description

The participants will after the course have detailed knowledge of the methods and applications required to perform a typical population genomic study.

The participants must at the end of the course be able to:

• Identify an experimental platform relevant to a population genomic analysis.
• Apply commonly used population genomic methods.
• Explain the theory behind common population genomic methods.
• Reflect on strengths and limitations of population genomic methods.
• Interpret and analyze results of population genomic inference.
• Formulate population genetics hypotheses based on data

The course introduces key concepts in population genomics from generation of population genetic data sets to the most common population genetic analyses and association studies. The first part of the course focuses on generation of population genetic data sets. The second part introduces the most common population genetic analyses and their theoretical background. Here topics include analysis of demography, population structure, recombination and selection. The last part of the course focus on applications of population genetic data sets for association studies in relation to human health.

Curriculum

The curriculum for each week is listed below. "Coop" refers to a set of lecture notes by Graham Coop that we will use throughout the course.

Course plan

1. Course intro and overview:
   • Coop chapters 1, 2, 3, Paper: Genome Diversity Project
2. Drift and the coalescent:
   • Coop chapter 4; Paper: Platypus
   • Exercise: Read mapping and base calling
3. Recombination:
   • Lecture: Review: Recombination in eukaryotes, Review: Recombination rate estimation
   • Exercise: Phasing and recombination rate
4. Population strucure and incomplete lineage sorting:
   • Lecture: Coop chapter 6, Review: Incomplete lineage sorting
   • Exercise: Working with VCF files
5. Hidden Markov models:
   • Lecture: Durbin chapter 3, Paper: population structure
   • Exercise: Inference of population structure and admixture
6. Ancestral recombination graphs:
   • Lecture: Paper: Approximating the ARG, Paper: Tree inference
   • Exercise: ARG dashboard exercises + Inference of trees along sequence
7. Past population demography:
   • Lecture: Coop chapter 4, Paper: PSMC, revisit Paper: Tree inference
   • Exercise: Inferring historical populations
8. Direct and linked selection:
   • Lecture: Coop chapters 12, 13, revisit Paper: Tree inference
9. Admixture:
   • Lecture: Review: Admixture, Paper: Admixture inference
   • Exercise: Detecting archaic ancestry in modern humans
10. Genome-wide association study (GWAS):
    • Lecture: Coop lecture notes 99-120
    • Exercise: GWAS quality control
11. Heritability:
    • Lecture: Coop Lecture notes Sec. 2.2 (p23-36) + Chap. 7 (p119-142)
    • Exercise: Association testing
12. Evolution and disease:
    • Lecture: Coop Lecture notes Sec. 11.0.1 (p217-221)
    • Exercise: Estimating heritability

This data collection contains de-identified clinical health service utilisation data from Bendigo Health and the General Practitioners Practices associated with the Loddon Mallee Murray Medicare Local. The collection also includes associated population health data from the ABS, AIHW and the Municipal Health Plans. Health researchers have a major interest in how clinical data can be used to monitor population health and health care in rural and regional Australia through analysing a broad range of factors shown to impact the health of different populations. The Population Health data collection provides students, managers, clinicians and researchers the opportunity to use clinical data in the study of population health, including the analysis of health risk factors, disease trends and health care utilisation and outcomes.Temporal range (data time period):2004 to 2014Spatial coverage:Bendigo Latitude -36.758711200000010000, Bendigo Longitude 144.283745899999990000

Feature Articles on Population - The Characteristics of Women and Men

Effective population size (Ne) is a particularly useful metric for conservation as it affects genetic drift, inbreeding and adaptive potential within populations. Current guidelines recommend a minimum Ne of 50 and 500 to avoid short-term inbreeding and to preserve long-term adaptive potential, respectively. However, the extent to which wild populations reach these thresholds globally has not been investigated, nor has the relationship between Ne and human activities. Through a quantitative review, we generated a dataset with 4610 georeferenced Ne estimates from 3829 unique populations, extracted from 723 articles. These data show that certain taxonomic groups are less likely to meet 50/500 thresholds and are disproportionately impacted by human activities; plant, mammal, and amphibian populations had a <54% probability of reaching = 50 and a <9% probability of reaching = 500. Populations listed as being of conservation concern according to the IUCN Red List had a smal...

The statistic shows the total population of India from 2019 to 2029. In 2023, the estimated total population in India amounted to approximately 1.43 billion people.

Total population in India

India currently has the second-largest population in the world and is projected to overtake top-ranking China within forty years. Its residents comprise more than one-seventh of the entire world’s population, and despite a slowly decreasing fertility rate (which still exceeds the replacement rate and keeps the median age of the population relatively low), an increasing life expectancy adds to an expanding population. In comparison with other countries whose populations are decreasing, such as Japan, India has a relatively small share of aged population, which indicates the probability of lower death rates and higher retention of the existing population.

With a land mass of less than half that of the United States and a population almost four times greater, India has recognized potential problems of its growing population. Government attempts to implement family planning programs have achieved varying degrees of success. Initiatives such as sterilization programs in the 1970s have been blamed for creating general antipathy to family planning, but the combined efforts of various family planning and contraception programs have helped halve fertility rates since the 1960s. The population growth rate has correspondingly shrunk as well, but has not yet reached less than one percent growth per year.

As home to thousands of ethnic groups, hundreds of languages, and numerous religions, a cohesive and broadly-supported effort to reduce population growth is difficult to create. Despite that, India is one country to watch in coming years. It is also a growing economic power; among other measures, its GDP per capita was expected to triple between 2003 and 2013 and was listed as the third-ranked country for its share of the global gross domestic product.

Major disturbance events can have large impacts on the demography and dynamics of animal populations. Hurricanes are one example of an extreme climatic event, predicted to increase in intensity due to climate change, and thus expected to be a considerable threat to population viability. However, little is understood about the underlying demographic mechanisms shaping population response following these extreme disturbances. Here, we analyze 45 years of the most comprehensive free-ranging nonhuman primate demographic dataset to determine the effects of major hurricanes on the variability and maintenance of long-term population fitness. For this, we use individual-level data to build matrix population models and perform perturbation analyses. Despite reductions in population growth rate mediated through reduced fertility, our study reveals a demographic buffering during hurricane years. As long as survival does not decrease, our study shows that hurricanes do not result in detrimental eff...

ABSTRACT: The uptake of the theory of knowledge, formulated by the educator Paulo Freire, was what guided the Projeto MOVA-Brasil during its twelve years of existence (2003-2015). Conceived by the Insitituto Paulo Freire (IPF), the Federação Única dos Petroleiros (FUP) and by the Petrobras, the Projeto MOVA-Brasil contributed for the social transformation of the terrritories where it acted. The methodological process of the Movimento de Educação de Jovens e Adultos (MOVA) articulated the practice of citizenship literacy and politicization as contribution to the political incidence in the spaces of popular participation. The praxis of Popular Education in Human Rights enabled the multiple social segments, among which are the prison system, traditional comunities, indigenous population, riverside population, people from the countryside and the urban area, combined with the educators, the construction of the educative processes that would give visibility to the low offering of public services and, at the same time, that included themselves in public spaces, which, historically, have been excluded from the democratic participation.

Population density estimates in terrestrial vertebrates

The annual population growth in the Philippines increased by 0.1 percentage points (+13.16 percent) in 2023 in comparison to the previous year. This was the first time during the observed period that the population growth has increased in the Philippines. Population growth refers to the annual change in population, and is based on the balance between birth and death rates, as well as migration.

We used this dataset to assess the strength of isolation due to geographic and macroclimatic distance across island and mainland systems, comparing published measurements of phenotypic traits and neutral genetic diversity for populations of plants and animals worldwide. The dataset includes 112 studies of 108 species (72 animals and 36 plants) in 868 island populations and 760 mainland populations, with population-level taxonomic and biogeographic information, totalling 7438 records. Methods Description of methods used for collection/generation of data: We searched the ISI Web of Science in March 2017 for comparative studies that included data on phenotypic traits and/or neutral genetic diversity of populations on true islands and on mainland sites in any taxonomic group. Search terms were 'island' and ('mainland' or 'continental') and 'population*' and ('demograph*' or 'fitness' or 'survival' or 'growth' or 'reproduc*' or 'density' or 'abundance' or 'size' or 'genetic diversity' or 'genetic structure' or 'population genetics') and ('plant*' or 'tree*' or 'shrub*or 'animal*' or 'bird*' or 'amphibian*' or 'mammal*' or 'reptile*' or 'lizard*' or 'snake*' or 'fish'), subsequently refined to the Web of Science categories 'Ecology' or 'Evolutionary Biology' or 'Zoology' or 'Genetics Heredity' or 'Biodiversity Conservation' or 'Marine Freshwater Biology' or 'Plant Sciences' or 'Geography Physical' or 'Ornithology' or 'Biochemistry Molecular Biology' or 'Multidisciplinary Sciences' or 'Environmental Sciences' or 'Fisheries' or 'Oceanography' or 'Biology' or 'Forestry' or 'Reproductive Biology' or 'Behavioral Sciences'. The search included the whole text including abstract and title, but only abstracts and titles were searchable for older papers depending on the journal. The search returned 1237 papers which were distributed among coauthors for further scrutiny. First paper filter To be useful, the papers must have met the following criteria: Overall study design criteria: Include at least two separate islands and two mainland populations; Eliminate studies comparing populations on several islands where there were no clear mainland vs. island comparisons; Present primary research data (e.g., meta-analyses were discarded); Include a field study (e.g., experimental studies and ex situ populations were discarded); Can include data from sub-populations pooled within an island or within a mainland population (but not between islands or between mainland sites); Island criteria: Island populations situated on separate islands (papers where all information on island populations originated from a single island were discarded); Can include multiple populations recorded on the same island, if there is more than one island in the study; While we accepted the authors' judgement about island vs. mainland status, in 19 papers we made our own judgement based on the relative size of the island or position relative to the mainland (e.g. Honshu Island of Japan, sized 227 960 km² was interpreted as mainland relative to islands less than 91 km²); Include islands surrounded by sea water but not islands in a lake or big river; Include islands regardless of origin (continental shelf, volcanic); Taxonomic criteria: Include any taxonomic group; The paper must compare populations within a single species; Do not include marine species (including coastline organisms); Databases used to check species delimitation: Handbook of Birds of the World (www.hbw.com/); International Plant Names Index (https://www.ipni.org/); Plants of the World Online(https://powo.science.kew.org/); Handbook of the Mammals of the World; Global Biodiversity Information Facility (https://www.gbif.org/); Biogeographic criteria: Include all continents, as well as studies on multiple continents; Do not include papers regarding migratory species; Only include old / historical invasions to islands (>50 yrs); do not include recent invasions; Response criteria: Do not include studies which report community-level responses such as species richness; Include genetic diversity measures and/or individual and population-level phenotypic trait responses; The first paper filter resulted in 235 papers which were randomly reassigned for a second round of filtering. Second paper filter In the second filter, we excluded papers that did not provide population geographic coordinates and population-level quantitative data, unless data were provided upon contacting the authors or could be obtained from figures using DataThief (Tummers 2006). We visually inspected maps plotted for each study separately and we made minor adjustments to the GPS coordinates when the coordinates placed the focal population off the island or mainland. For this study, we included only responses measured at the individual level, therefore we removed papers referring to demographic performance and traits such as immunity, behaviour and diet that are heavily reliant on ecosystem context. We extracted data on population-level mean for two broad categories of response: i) broad phenotypic measures, which included traits (size, weight and morphology of entire body or body parts), metabolism products, physiology, vital rates (growth, survival, reproduction) and mean age of sampled mature individuals; and ii) genetic diversity, which included heterozygosity,allelic richness, number of alleles per locus etc. The final dataset includes 112 studies and 108 species. Methods for processing the data: We made minor adjustments to the GPS location of some populations upon visual inspection on Google Maps of the correct overlay of the data point with the indicated island body or mainland. For each population we extracted four climate variables reflecting mean and variation in temperature and precipitation available in CliMond V1.2 (Kritikos et al. 2012) at 10 minutes resolution: mean annual temperature (Bio1), annual precipitation (Bio12), temperature seasonality (CV) (Bio4) and precipitation seasonality (CV) (Bio15) using the "prcomp function" in the stats package in R. For populations where climate variables were not available on the global climate maps mostly due to small island size not captured in CliMond, we extracted data from the geographically closest grid cell with available climate values, which was available within 3.5 km away from the focal grid cell for all localities. We normalised the four climate variables using the "normalizer" package in R (Vilela 2020), and we performed a Principal Component Analysis (PCA) using the psych package in R (Revelle 2018). We saved the loadings of the axes for further analyses. References:

Bruno Vilela (2020). normalizer: Making data normal again.. R package version 0.1.0. Kriticos, D.J., Webber, B.L., Leriche, A., Ota, N., Macadam, I., Bathols, J., et al.(2012). CliMond: global high-resolution historical and future scenario climate surfaces for bioclimatic modelling. Methods Ecol. Evol., 3, 53--64. Revelle, W. (2018) psych: Procedures for Personality and Psychological Research, Northwestern University, Evanston, Illinois, USA, https://CRAN.R-project.org/package=psych Version = 1.8.12. Tummers, B. (2006). DataThief III. https://datathief.org/

Figures and Supporting information included in the article Coastal proximity of populations in 22 Pacific Island Countries and Territories. https://journals.plos.org/plosone/article?id=10.1371/journal.pone.0223249 https://sdd.spc.int/mapping-coastal

Spatial datasets utilized to conduct the spatial analysis and additional information from the research article: Coastal proximity of populations in 22 Pacific Island Countries and Territories.

https://journals.plos.org/plosone/article?id=10.1371/journal.pone.0223249 https://sdd.spc.int/mapping-coastal

Analysis in R to explore shifts in population size structure of Acropora, Pocillopora, and Stylophora at Ngetngod reef in Palau.

Feature Articles on Population - A Profile of Youths