Three pages written just after the September 2016 Artificial Light at Night conference for Nuovo Orione, one of the two reference magazines for amateur astronomers. The article was eventually published just in May, and some of the presented issues have been developed, but the article still has its points of interest.
This article makes a good pair with the other one I published on “the January issue of Le Stelle”. The latter was actually written after the article published in May, and it approaches the issue of light pollution from a slightly different angle.
A very interested audience, composed both by students, researchers, and full professors from the University of Pisa (plus a guest from the S. Anna School of Advanced Studies) attended the seminar summarizing the experiences by CNR IBIMET and the BuioMetria Partecipativa project in the fields of light pollution and promotion and protection of night skies. In the same occasion, we also had a glimpse of the activities which the Pisa University will develop over the next two years, following an initial set of studies started in 2015.
Luciano Massetti from CNR IBIMET in the first part of the seminar
The seminar also represented the opportunity to lay the foundations for the upcoming Summer round of night sky quality monitoring within the BuioMetria Partecipativa project.
Thanks again to the Department of Biology, and especially to Elena Maggi and Lisandro Benedetti Cecchi, for hosting this event.
The next occasion to hear it from the BuioMetria Partecipativa project will by in Milano on May 30. There will be a morning lecture at the Politecnico di Milano, followed by an evening talk at the library of Lucernate, just North of the city. The morning talk will have a wider scope (but will still touch the issue of light pollution), while the evening talk will be focused on how to use artificial light with more awareness (than the average of what we see happening roaming over the past nine years on this topic).
The BuioMetria Partecipativa tour continues, with a slightly revised angle and in a part of the country which contributed a lot to the 2005-2010 phase of the pibinko.org projects.
The event will be hosted by Consorzio Bibliotecario Nord-Ovest Milano, the consortium of the public libraries operating in the North-Western quadrant of the Milano province (about 40 facilities). We will be in the Lucernate Community Hall, Rho, just North of Milano.
Artificial light, and especially light powered by electricity, has represented one of the revolutions of our civilization, disconnecting human activities from the dawn-on/sunset-off pattern and improving security.
On the other hand, an excess of artificial light will determine significant impacts on landscape, ecology, energy consumption, human health, and security itself.
In 2008 the BuioMetria Partecipativa project was started, to provide awareness raising on artificial lighting issues, proposing a citizen science paradigm. From the Farma Valley, in Tuscany, about 100 km South of Florence and at the heart of one of the areas in Italy with the darkest skies due to low population and infrastructure density, the project has spread throughout the country, and has established significant collaborations internationally.
The presentation will provide an overview of the project and will announce some highlights of its 2017 campaign, where everybody can participate.
Please note: the official event page indicates a duration of two hours…we will surely be available for two hours, but the presentation will not be running for 120 minutes…ideally it will fit within one hour, and then we will have time for videos, photos, and interaction with the audience.
If you are in the Milan area and would like to attend, please write for additional information on how to reach the location.
On May 30, at 10.30AM, I will give a lecture at the Politecnico di Milano (the third since 2011). We will meet in the Aula Rossa, building 4A of the Department of Civil and Environmental Engineering, campus Leonardo. If you can’t make it, I will be in town from May 29 to May 31st, and there will probably be another outreach event in the evening of May 30, so there will be options to meet.
The presentation will provide highlights of a track record of projects started in 2006, where technicians and experts in geosciences and geotechnologies started a set of independent promotion and protection projects centered in a lesser know part of Southern Tuscany (the Farma Valley), including residents of the area in research and technology transfer projects.
These experiences were started in relation to little-known aspects of the region, not exactly at the core of environmental disciplines, such as ancient games, gradually making contact with topics which are more in the environmental engineering and land planning “mainstream”. This led the group to addressing renewable energy and energy efficiency, light pollution -with the peculiarity of the Farma Valley being at the centre of one of the darkest areas in Italy- optimization of alien species mitigation, environmental monitoring, and rural development.
The outcome of such an effort, which has not been made simple various factors, starting from the difficulty for many stakeholders to acknowledge the “out of the box” composition of the working group, has gradually showed and obtained recognition from different directions. From a research standpoint, we have activated collaborations on various EU-funded programs (FP7, COST and HORIZON2020), plus collaborations with Universities plus the Italian Research Council. Relevant results have also been obtained in the area of outreach and dissemination -with recurring coverage by national media- and education and training, with internships for various levels of students. Last but not least, these project have generated actual technology transfer and a positive socio-economic impact on the interested communities.
In addition to an overall summary of the projects, the presentation will outline the dissemination and citizen science program for the coming months, where it will be possible to participate both as tourists, possibly during the Summer season, but preferably as students or researchers, with the possibility of collaborating with ongoing activities and proposing new topics.
Andrea Giacomelli, MS in environmental engineering (Politecnico di Milano, 1993) and PhD in Hydrology (Politecnico di Milano, 1997), specialized in geographic information systems and environmental data management. He has 23 years of professional experience, spread across different sectors: university, applied research and technology transfer, consulting, and project management in corporate environments. Since 2011 he operates as a freelancer, based in Southern Tuscany. In 2006 he started a series of projects focused on the protection and promotion of lesser known resources in the fields of culture, environment, and open innovation, including a significant component of community engagement elements (participatory processes, events, communication) and a strong level of “contamination” with arts, collaborating also with photographers and musicians, including live events.
Tuesday, May 16, 2017, from 2PM to 4PM in room A of the Polo Didattico Nobili, Pisa University, Italy, there will be a lecture on “Artificial Light at Night: Perspectives between Tuscany and Europe on Research, Outreach, and Citizen Science“. The lecturers will be Luciano Massetti, Senior Technologist at the Institute of Biometeorology of the National Research Council, and Andrea Giacomelli, MSc Environmentla Engineering and PhD in Hydrology, manager of the BuioMetria Partecipativa project. The event is hosted by the Department of Biology, thanks to the collaboration with Dr Elena Maggi
postdoctoral fellow from the Marine Biology and Ecology group in Pisa.
The event will be an opportunity to learn about the state of the art on the issue of artificial light at night from a perspective combining research, dissemination, and engagements of experts from various disciplines, and analyzing both risks and opportunities related to the use of this resource.
The talks will combine a local viewpoint with a global one: experiences ongoing in lesser known rural areas, such as Southern Tuscany (which -together with the Tuscan archipelago- represents in Italy one of the areas with the best night sky quality) will be reviewed in relation to a wider framework, accounting for the experiences of the lecturers in European research networks and other international initiatives.
The afternoon will also be the opportunity to present the program of activities where everybody -from experts to citizens- may participate during the Summer and the following months, continuing the night sky brightness monitoring campaign started in 2008 with the BuioMetria Partecipativa project (which for 2017 will propose some marine options, as an extension to its scope).
After the lecture, some of the attendees will move to La Torre del Luppolo, via Fucini 13, where it will be possible to further discuss the issues presented in “after hours” mode (from 6PM to 8PM).
The event is organized by: Dipartimento di Biologia dell’Università di Pisa, CNR IBIMET, associazione Attivarti.org e pibinko.org.
Admission to the event is free, but for organizational issues an e-mail to emaggi@biologia.unipi.it. will be appreciated if you plan to attend. How to reach the venue By train: from the Pisa Centrale train station walk North, along Corso Italia. Cross the Arno river on Ponte di Mezzo. Turn left on Lungarno Pacinotti. At the traffic light of the following bridge (Ponte Solferino) take a right in via Roma, and keep walking to the intersection with via Volta. By car: toll parkings exist on Lungarno Simonelli, via Roma or piazza Carrata, driving from Lungarno Pacinotti For more information
It’s not really our choice, but in several cases when we schedule public measurement seassions with the BuioMetria Partecipativa project we then get overcast weather conditions.
In fact, one of the triggers of the project, back in 2008, was to minimize the impact of Murphy’s Law by disconnecting the measurements from the expert and from a specific event, and having the sensors circulate among citizens, so at the end a year, the cloud issue is solved. However, at the end of the day, according to the weather forecast for Southern Tuscany, it’s going to be pretty hard to follow the plan we sketched in the past weeks and published in our April 24 newsletter.
In any case, at least in one of the evenings we will conduct a survey in the area of the Belagaio Natural Reserve to identify interesting locations for the measurements, which we will then collect as soon as cloud cover will allow.
Rain or shine, the meet-up at the Boscaiolo restaurant in Torniella is confirmed from 7.30PM on April 30. Even if we will have no fresh night sky brightness measurements, this will be an interesting opportunity to refresh some issue on protection and promotion of night skies, starting from the relationship between rural areas, natural reserves, and urban areas. We will also be curious of checking other initiatives which should occur in other locations worldwide in the context of the International Dark Sky Week.
By the way: if the weather forecast for Sunday will be confirmed to be sunny, why not come to the Farma Valley for a day out, and then close your excursion with our meeting in Torniella?
With a few days of delay due to minor technical issues, please see the recording of the April 7 webinar I gave together with Etruschi from Lakota on the subject of : “How Free/Open Source Geomatics can integrate in Rural Communities to improve Resilience and Quality of Life“.
The title came out somewhat convoluted, but the talk is definitely more linear. The video was published on the YouTube channel of the Geoforall Network, an international consortium of open-source geomatics labs (if you are not in the field: folks working with lots of multi-coloured maps on computers). With repect to the thumbnails of the videos from other webinars, you might note a difference: instead of the typical slide with a flowchart, or a map, or a bullet list, you see young rockers in action. This is in fact because the presentation, about 45 minutes overall, combines the talking part with a couple of songs performed live during the webinar, on topics related to rural issues, together with some short intervals when the topic was changing (allowing the main presenter to recover some stamina). An introduction to the webinar, providing some of the rationale is provided in a blog post from April 6.
Please enjoy, and let us know if you like the geomatics and music combination:
Thanks again to Geoforall (Rafael Moreno-Sanchez) and ASPRS (David Alvarez) for inviting us.
Davide: introduce yourself… My name is Davide Dominoni, a postdoctoral researcher affiliated with the Netherlands Institute of Ecology in Wageningen, the Netherlands, and the University of Glasgow in Scotland. My background is in Natural Sciences and Conservation Biology. After my Master’s degree at the University of Parma, Italy, I left my home country and worked as research and field assistant in Ireland and Australia before moving to Germany to start my PhD. How did you get involved in light pollution studies?
It started with my PhD in Germany. I was always interested in anthropogenic impacts on wildlife, and I knew I wanted to do a PhD related to urban ecology. When I saw the job offer for a PhD on the eco-physiological effects of light pollution in the European blackbird, I thought it would have been an excellent opportunity to develop my interests. Could you tell us a little about the scope of your research, and your most relevant findings to date? My research integrates two main concepts. First, light is the most potent environmental factor that regulates the rhythms of life, because it signals when is the right time to be awake, to forage or to sleep, and it also indicates daylength, thus whether it is summer or winter, for instance. Light has therefore profound effects on the behaviour and physiology of virtually all organisms. Examples are daily rhythms of singing behaviour of birds or the up and down movement of leaves on plants, and the migration of millions of animals that happens at specific times of the year. Second, because organisms have adapted to these natural light/dark cycles, they have developed physiological and molecular mechanisms to synchronise to such cycles and even anticipate them. My research started from a simple hypothesis: if organisms tune their behaviour and physiology to natural light/dark cycles, then light pollution should affect such processes because it can disrupt such cycles. In order to test this hypothesis, I first had to demonstrate that wild animals are exposed to light pollution in the first place. This is not trivial: animals move and can easily seek and hide in dark places to avoid light. To this scope I used tiny light loggers are deployed them on wild European blackbirds that were breeding in the city of Munich, in Germany, and in a nearby dark forest. Birds in the city were exposed to much higher light at night than the forest cousins, but the light intensity was still quite low if compared to the brightness of street lamps. Thus, the next question was whether such relatively low levels of light could impact the blackbirds behaviour and physiology. To answer this I brought city and forest birds to the laboratory and exposed to the same levels of light at night that I recorded in the field, to rule out any other confounding variables that may co-vary with light in the city, such as noise and temperature. What I found was impressive: birds exposed to light levels 20 times lower than the intensity of a typical street lamp bred 1 month earlier and show twice as much nocturnal activity than birds exposed to a dark, forest-like night.
Although these results were strong and intriguing, at the end of the PhD I was left with an important question: is light pollution bad, good, or neutral for birds? To solve this dilemma I had to integrate different approaches from different fields of research.
First, I used molecular techniques to understand what biochemical pathways were altered by light pollution, and what we know about such pathways. I found strong effects on pathways related to stress and cognitive function, suggesting that light pollution has to power to fundamentally altered processes that are now to be link to survival and reproductive success. Second, I went back to the field to understand what the long-term effects of light pollution are on the fitness of wild birds. This is an ongoing, 7-year project that is a part of a large initiative called “Light on Nature”. It is a Dutch project were street lamps of different colours are mounted in several different forests across the Netherlands. My own research looks at long-term physiological changes in the songbird Great tit. This species breeds in nest-boxes, which makes it ideal to recapture the same bird several times to obtain physiological samples, but also to look at age-related changes in reproductive success and survival, what we called “senescence”. I hope that this will better inform both science and policy-makers about the long-term effects of light pollution, as well as indicate what type of light colour might mitigate such effects, which is a very important issue as the current trend is to replace the old Tungsten lamps with LED lights.
To what extent your findings on birds may help to understand effects on humans?
My research has profound implications for human health too, as we are becoming more and more a 24-h society where we are constantly exposed to light. This is known to be a problem for human health, but studies on humans are mostly correlative, and the use of laboratory models such as mice and rats can only partially solve the problems because they are nocturnal animals. Birds are diurnal and warm-blooded, like us, they live in cities and show strong responses to light pollution. Plus, it is relatively easy to study them both in the wild and in the lab, making it easy to obtain several samples from the same animal or to follow it for its entire life, which is helpful if we want to really grasp the long-term effects of light pollution.
Experts in Tuscan hydrology might be puzzled recalling that the confluence of the Farma Creek and the Cecina river does not exist. In fact, they are not even part of the same catchment, so what’s up?
However, at times confluences may be created among territories and people. Unlike water, these occasionally flow not following the currents and -without having to oppose the flow – will propose thoughts and actions dealing with environment, resources, and culture.
Tomorrow, Friday Apr. 7, from 6 to 7PM CET, there will be a webinar by Andrea Giacomelli, aka pibinko, PhD and MS in Environmental Engineering with over twenty years of international experience in geographic information systems together with Dario Canal, Simone Sandrucci, Pietro Marini, and Luigi Ciampini (i.e. four out of five of the Etruschi from Lakota).
Ray Daytona and the Googoobombos, Roselle (Tuscany), August 2012
The presentation will review activities conducted over the past ten years, which from 2015 saw growing interactions among the authors in the area of outreach and dissemination intertwining scientific topics and music.
Mixing science and music or other performing arts is not innnovative in general, nor for the authors, who have been dealing with music for years: Etruschi as professional musicians and pibinko as creator of events and producer of projects with varying levels of musical presence. Indeed, the peculiarity of this experiment is in the process through which it started, i.e. connecting territories which are not far away but are normally disconnected, and outside of “traditional” scientific or artistic research.
After about a year of brainstorming, things went operational in December 2016, with the Farma Valley Winter Fest, where Etruschi from Lakota were the main act of the event, in parallelo with the presentation of the “alpha version” of the Farma Valley Community map.
Castelnuovo Val di Cecina, 5-3-2017
This first gig paved the way for a subsequent poster presentation at the FOSS4G-IT conference at the Faculty of Engineering in Genoa, Italy, on Feb. 9, and the closing set related to the presentation of the updated Farma Valley Community map as one of the events in the International Open Data Day in Castelnuovo Val di Cecina. Now we wait for tomorrow’s webinar.
This originates from a call for topics by two international networks: GeoForAll, composed by over 100 open-source geomatics labs (if you are not in the business, figure folks working with multi-colour maps on large computers) spread across five continents, and the American Society of Photogrammetry and Remote Sensing (ASPRS).
The webinar will be in English, and since a significant part of the audience is expected to be in the USA, the time will be from 6 to 7PM CET.
To follow the webinar you may register and be online tomorrow, or see the recording which will be published by GeoForAll after the event.
Politecnico di Milano, maggio 2015
This is not the first international presentation we have on our BuioMetria Partecipativa project on participatory night sky quality monitoring, open-source mapping, or promotion of unknown parts of Tuscany. Since 2007 we gave presentations in the USA (Illinois and California), Scotland, Germany, China, United Arab Emirates, Romania, and for the European Commission. Furthermore, we invited international experts in the Farma Valley in 2012 and 2015. Still, there is interest from the hosting organizations to hear experiences from our “lesser known” territorities and -vice versa- we are curious of the feedback we will have from a very remote audience.
In the presentation we will also give some highlight on the Spring-Summer calendar of events representing the promotinal part of our team’s activities. After the webinar the information will be added as an update for pibinko.org’s calendar.
Three pages written just after the September 2016 Artificial Light at Night conference for Nuovo Orione, one of the two reference magazines for amateur astronomers. The article was eventually published just in May, and some of the presented issues have been developed, but the article still has its points of interest.
It’s not really our choice, but in several cases when we schedule public measurement seassions with the 
