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April 28, 2026

Why the dawn chorus sounds different from place to place

Source: The Conversation – UK – By Carlos Abrahams, Senior Lecturer in Environmental Assessment – Director of Ecoacoustics, Nottingham Trent University

Each May, nature lovers get out of bed early to experience the seasonal wonder of birds singing, as the sun rises above the horizon to take part in International Dawn Chorus Day.

In Europe you may hear blackbirds, chiffchaffs and nightingales. In the US, cardinals, chickadees and blue jays. In East Africa, morning thrush, hornbills and wood doves. Each with their own song.

There is no single dawn chorus, but the harmonies of hundreds of bird voices at first light change from place to place in a huge wave that surfs around the world as the planet rotates.

A dawn chorus is part of a wider soundscape – the interaction between biological sounds from birds and other animals (biophony), natural physical sounds such as wind or water (geophony) and human‑generated sounds like traffic (anthrophony). The dawn chorus is often the most prominent component of the soundscape at sunrise, but it never exists in isolation.

Scientists believe that birds structure their early morning singing in a way that prevents overlap and masking of each other’s vocalisations. They use different pitches and timings to partition and share the acoustic space. Birds in open landscapes such as grasslands use shorter, scratchier sounding song phrases, while birds in woodlands use longer whistling notes – each evolved to allow the best transmission of their song in their own habitat. So birdsong is filtered by trees, grasses, across water and through urban areas, to create a soundscape phenomenon that differs very clearly from region to region.

In the Caledonian pinewoods of northern Scotland, the first morning sounds are often geophonic: wind moving through tall pine canopies. Typically before first light, male western capercaillies gather together to vie for females. The males fan out their tail feathers, puff out their chests and produce a series of clicks, pops and wheezing notes. These are short‑range sounds, shaped by the open understorey and the resonant qualities of the forest.

Fieldwork in these woods has shown how these vocalisations are tied to group mating activity (known as lekking) and can be used to assess the populations of this rare and declining species. These sounds indicate a specialised habitat that has remained untouched for a long time? and without much human disturbance, where the secretive birds can go about their lives, while contributing to the distinctive acoustic character of the pinewoods.

Move to a lowland heath in southern England though, and the differences are immediate. The geophony shifts to the dry hiss of wind across heather and scattered gorse. The dawn biophony is dominated by an assemblage of species that are rare across Europe. The nightjar might have been producing its continuous churring since well before first light. Woodlarks add clear, falling song phrases, while Dartford warblers deliver rapid, scratchy calls from gorse clumps. Research on heathland species has shown how these calls are useful indicators of local habitat quality and structure.

In urban areas, birds have to compete with the noises made by people and their machines. Cars, motorbikes, trains. Sirens and alarms. Nightclubs and pubs. The urban architecture often makes this worse, with reflective hard surfaces bouncing these noises around the streets, instead of absorbing them as natural spaces would.

Birds have to adjust their behaviour around this. Some advance or delay the timing of their singing; others increase volume or shift pitch to higher frequencies. Large‑scale studies indicate that spring soundscapes across Europe and the US are becoming quieter and less varied, due to changes and declines in bird communities, linked to climate change and habitat loss.

Because many people hear birds more often than they see them, changes in soundscape complexity can be one of the earliest signs that local biodiversity is under pressure. Long‑term listeners of bird song – whether through formal monitoring or casual early‑morning walks – may be detecting real ecological change.

Listen up

Understanding soundscapes can help make sense of these changes. A chorus lacking high‑frequency elements may indicate the loss of particular warblers; reduced low‑frequency components may point to declines in larger bird species.

Changes in the geophony, such as increased wind noise in fragmented woodland, can alter how well birds communicate. And increasing man-made noise can mask quieter species entirely, leading to an impression of silence even where birds are still present.

In the UK, pinewoods and heaths both depend upon active vegetation management for conservation and long‑term habitat stability. Maintaining these landscapes means maintaining the conditions that support their characteristic sounds.

Paying attention to how different places sound at first light can be a reminder that biodiversity is something we can hear as well as see. You can even compare it with the sounds that accompany sunrise from other places. Arts cooperative SoundCamp’s Reveil project offers a 24‑hour broadcast that relays sunrise sounds from microphones around the world, allowing us to track the soundscape as the Earth rotates through one full day each spring.

A dawn chorus is more than an aesthetic experience: it is a summary of local ecology, habitat condition and the pressures shaping both.

Carlos Abrahams is director of Naturesound Ltd, an ecoacoustics consultancy. He is a Fellow of the Chartered Institute of Ecology and Environmental Management.

– ref. Why the dawn chorus sounds different from place to place – https://theconversation.com/why-the-dawn-chorus-sounds-different-from-place-to-place-279906

April 28, 2026

Humidity and heat are killers for tropical birds – waxbill and hornbill studies highlight the dangers

Source: The Conversation – Africa (2) – By Andrew McKechnie, Professor of Zoology and South African Research Chair-holder, University of Pretoria

Humans are not the only species negatively affected by increasingly hot and humid conditions. Intense heatwaves sometimes kill large numbers of wild animals. Eastern Australia’s giant fruit bats, known as flying-foxes, provide possibly the most dramatic illustration. In late 2018, two days of extreme heat in the far north of Queensland wiped out one third of Australia’s population of spectacled flying-foxes. The species is now red-listed as endangered.

Bat biologists have identified high humidity as a major risk factor for these mass mortality events.

In late 2020, South Africa saw its first documented heat-related mass mortality event involving wild birds. Air temperatures in the typically humid Phongolo Nature Reserve in northern KwaZulu-Natal exceeded 45°C, about 10°C higher than average conditions. Staff in the reserve started seeing dead and dying birds. Most of the victims were songbirds, which are known to be more sensitive to extreme heat than many other groups of birds.

Of these, the worst-affected species was the blue waxbill, a charming little finch with a powder-blue face and belly that spends most of its time foraging for grass seeds in small flocks.

Blue waxbills made up nearly half the carcasses found by field rangers when they searched part of the reserve after the heat had passed.

The Phongolo mortality event added to the urgency of our research programme on the effects of climate change on Africa’s birds. The blue waxbills’ prominence among the victims identified them as a bellwether of the impacts of extreme heat on birds in the wetter south-eastern parts of the continent.

Since 2009, we have been leading a research team spanning the universities of Cape Town, Pretoria and several other local and overseas institutions. The over-arching goal of our research is understanding how climate change is affecting birds and other wildlife and developing methods to predict future effects.

Our expertise is mainly in behavioural ecology (Susie Cunningham) and evolutionary physiology (Andrew McKechnie). This combination has proven ideal for investigating how rising temperatures affect animals’ survival and reproduction.

Why humidity can be a killer

During hot weather, humans and other animals depend on evaporation to offload heat. Evaporation may take place by sweating (the major cooling mechanism for humans), through panting (your dog on a hot day) or other pathways. The process of changing liquid water (sweat or saliva) into water vapour uses heat, so it cools the source of the water (the body). But the air is like a sponge: when it’s already humid (wet), the air can’t hold much more water vapour.

These conditions impede evaporation and thus heat loss. On a 40°C day in a desert like the Kalahari or Sahara, evaporative cooling is efficient because the air is dry and sweat can evaporate as soon as it reaches the skin’s surface. At the same temperature on a humid day in the coastal tropics, however, sweat cannot evaporate and forms drops on the skin. This severely reduces rates of heat loss.

If body temperature increases more than a few degrees above normal levels, nervous system function is compromised, organ damage starts to occur and proteins begin denaturing. This breakdown of physiological functioning can rapidly lead to death.

The journey

In early 2022, just over a year after the waxbill event, our Masters student Nazley Liddle set out to examine the role high humidity had played in the deaths of the waxbills. She also aimed to predict areas where risks of mortality will increase in future.

Nazley investigated the waxbills’ capacity to regulate their body temperature over a range of air temperatures and humidity levels. Her results confirmed that high humidity severely compromises the birds’ ability to avoid dangerous hyperthermia (getting too hot).

For example, she found that blue waxbills can tolerate air temperature up to 48°C under dry conditions, whereas under humid conditions similar to those on the day of the Phongolo mortality event they are unable to maintain a safe body temperature if air temperature exceeds 45.7°C.

Nazley then modelled how the waxbills will fare under hotter, more humid future conditions. The modelling showed that likelihood of mass mortality events for waxbills (and other birds with similar physiology) will increase greatly in coming decades. This ranged across much of Kruger National Park, south-eastern Zimbabwe and large parts of southern and central Mozambique, including the ferociously hot Zambezi Valley.

Predicted risk of mortality becomes three to seven times higher when humidity is taken into account, compared to increasing temperature alone. Many of these areas will simply become too hot and humid during the wet season for the species to persist.

The blue waxbill study should set alarm bells ringing. Most of Earth’s 11,000 bird species occur in the tropics, many experiencing hot, humid conditions for at least part of the year.

Another recent paper from our team reveals similar increases in projected future risks of lethal hyperthermia for trumpeter hornbills. This large, fruit-eating forest species found in southern Africa plays a critical role in seed dispersal. Although biologists have often viewed tropical lowlands as safe habitats for birds from the point of view of their physiological functioning, our work is showing that increasing humidity coupled with rising temperatures poses a serious threat to birds, bats and other animals of the tropics.

There are worrying signs that climate change has already caused widespread declines in tropical birds. During 2025, several teams of researchers reported substantial declines in bird abundance, even in intact rainforests that have not been affected directly by human activities such as slash-and-burn agriculture.

Most recently, population declines of 25%-38% since 1950 among tropical birds have been attributed to increasingly extreme heat events. Tellingly, these declines have been more pronounced in songbirds compared to other groups. Rising temperature and humidity is a global-scale problem. The only long-term solution is halting human-driven climate warming.

Andrew McKechnie receives funding from the National Research Foundation and University of Pretoria.

Susan Cunningham receives funding from the National Research Foundation and the University of Cape Town.

– ref. Humidity and heat are killers for tropical birds – waxbill and hornbill studies highlight the dangers – https://theconversation.com/humidity-and-heat-are-killers-for-tropical-birds-waxbill-and-hornbill-studies-highlight-the-dangers-271634

April 28, 2026

Will attendance-based grading improve school absenteeism?

Source: The Conversation – Canada – By Jess Whitley, Professor of Inclusive Education, L’Université d’Ottawa/University of Ottawa

School absenteeism is a major concern across Canada — and beyond.

As researchers with the Canadian School Attendance Partnership, we have been exploring this issue for a few years, motivated by concerns raised by families, community agencies and school districts.

Canada is one of the few countries without a clear national picture of school absenteeism.

We draw on pieces of data to get an informed estimate of this. Our data comes from the OECD’s global Programme for International Student Assessment, school district reports, news reports via freedom of information requests — and from research studies.

The most common international metric of “chronic absenteeism” refers to 10 per cent of missed instructional days in the year. Our figures suggest that across the provinces, figures range from 35 per cent to three-quarters of all students missing at least 10 per cent of instructional days annually.

Systemic barriers, mental health issues, insufficient school supports and intergenerational distrust of formal schooling are among the factors that intertwine to impact whether a student goes to school.

Need to disaggregate absenteeism data

But the story of absenteeism lies in part in the disaggregation of this data. Students with disabilities, those who are Indigenous and those who identify as 2SLGBTQI are among the most likely to miss school.

Many students with disabilities who miss school are not even counted in absenteeism data. They may experience informal exclusions via being sent home for behavioural reasons or may be placed on part-time schedules.

They are also suspended at higher rates — all of which results in them missing hours of social interaction and classroom instruction.

Factors pertaining to disability, mental health

The problem must also be understood amid the ongoing child and youth mental-health crisis.

Population research suggests roughly 70 per cent of Canadian students have experienced a decline in at least one area of mental health since 2020 and poor mental health is a well-known risk factor for absenteeism.

Different patterns of mental health have been uniquely associated with school absence: for example, anxiety and depression tend to be linked to school avoidance, whereas behaviours like aggression are more often associated with school exclusion and suspensions.

Children and youth with neurodevelopmental disabilities, such as ADHD and autism, are at a particularly high risk. These risks are cumulative, so that children with multiple mental-health challenges experience the most absences and impairments in daily functioning.

Research indicates that increased absenteeism can worsen existing mental-health challenges and vice versa.

While Canadian research is limited, data from other countries suggests contexts like family strain, socioeconomic disadvantage, sleep disruption, bullying and loneliness likely underlie the connection between absenteeism and mental health.

Absenteeism and academic achievement

School absenteeism, and its disproportionate rates for some student populations, is particularly worrisome given the powerful connections that exist between it and academic achievement.

Beyond access to classroom instruction and assessment, students who are chronically absent miss out on programs, peer connections, mentorship opportunities and school-based services.

These “missing links” impact students’ success and development — crucial for students with needs that put them at risk for poor academic outcomes.

New Brunswick, Ontario approach

Educators and leaders in different school districts across Canada understand the issues raised by absenteeism and are taking a variety of approaches to address them.

New Brunswick mounted a multi-tiered system of supports including school-based protocols and progressive strategies that include family and community partnerships.

In Ontario, the Ministry of Education recently shared its concerns about levels of school attendance, acknowledging the key link with academic achievement.

In response, the province has proposed legislation to make attendance worth 10-15 per cent of the final course mark in Grades 9 to 12. Students whose absences are approved by their family will not be penalized.

Is this approach likely to work? For the students with disabilities and mental health needs, not likely. Here are some reasons why.

Could students really attend if they chose?

Research provides minimal support for how effective incentives are in boosting attendance unless these are accompanied by broader reforms and targeted supports.

Incentives assume attendance is primarily a motivational issue — that students could attend if they chose to. But this isn’t always the case: think, for example, about a student who is kept home to watch younger siblings while a parent goes to work.

Attaching marks to attendance tends to benefit students already well-positioned to attend. Policies that rely on incentives risk shifting responsibility onto students rather than strengthening the conditions that make attendance possible.

What families say about complex reasons

Many of the families we have encountered in our research describe complex interactions between disabilities and mental-health needs that prevent their children from attending.

Parents may withdraw their child because of concerns about the learning or social environment, or their child may be sent home because of an educational assistant calling in sick or because of school concerns about student behaviour.

These students are also far more likely to be suspended and face various disciplinary consequences.

A narrow, grades-based approach to improving attendance fails to account for these students at best, and penalizes them at worst.

Problems with excused absences

Although the Ontario policy specifies that excused absences won’t affect grades, there’s strong evidence that all students are not equally likely to have absences formally excused.

Access to medical care, parental availability and resources, familiarity with school processes and relationships with schools all influence whether an absence is recorded as excused.

As a result, attendance-based grading policies can unintentionally compound existing inequities rather than reduce them.

Big-picture approaches

Effective approaches to increase attendance require a mix of systemic, big-picture approaches and student and family-focused solutions.

Collecting and sharing data that tells the different stories of student absences in a variety of ways can guide interventions.

Creating school environments that meaningfully include and support learning for all students, socially and academically, is key — these also need to prioritize relationships between students, families, educators and broader communities.

Accountability for absenteeism needs to be expanded beyond students, families and schools to include the broader societal resources that affect absenteeism for students with disabilities and others — resources like housing, social services, transportation and access to health care.

Absenteeism is not an individual but a societal issue. Solutions need to address the multiple layers in which students are embedded to have a chance of reversing this problem.

Jess Whitley receives funding from Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada.

David Smith receives funding from Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada.

Natasha McBrearty receives funding from Vanier, a research grant from the government of Canada.

Maria Rogers does not work for, consult, own shares in or receive funding from any company or organisation that would benefit from this article, and has disclosed no relevant affiliations beyond their academic appointment.

– ref. Will attendance-based grading improve school absenteeism? – https://theconversation.com/will-attendance-based-grading-improve-school-absenteeism-281101

April 28, 2026

When caregiving ideals don’t match reality in South Asian diaspora families

Source: The Conversation – Canada – By Navjot Gill-Chawla, Doctoral Candidate, Aging, Health and Well-being, University of Waterloo

In South Asian communities, caregiving is often seen as a moral responsibility rooted in family values. For many, there’s a shared understanding of what it means to “do the right thing” when it comes to caring for their family members.

These expectations, however, are not only understood cultural norms, they are also heavily perpetuated through media: shaped, reinforced and often idealized through the stories we consume, particularly in South Asian cinema.

Indian family drama films like Baghban, Avtaar, Kabhi Khushi Kabhie Gham and Piku, though they differ in story line and tone, share a powerful common thread: caregiving is not optional, it’s a reflection of character.

But as caregiving realities shift within diasporas, a growing gap emerges between these inherited ideals and what immigrant families can sustain. The conditions required to bolster these expectations are often difficult to maintain.

Films have defined ‘good’ caregiving

Research on caregiving in South Asian communities consistently highlights the central role of family responsibility, usually rooted in collectivist values, where care is embedded within intergenerational relationships — rarely discussed explicitly or questioned.

Films like Baghban, a 2003 family drama, have left a lasting imprint on how caregiving is imagined. The story is emotionally charged: aging parents who once gave everything to their children are neglected in return, a narrative that frames caregiving as a moral obligation, where devotion is rewarded and failure to provide it is treated as a personal shortcoming.

But Baghban isn’t an exception. It’s part of a broader cinematic pattern.

In Avtaar, aging parents are abandoned by their sons, reinforcing the idea that children who fail to care for their parents have violated a fundamental duty. The 1983 film centres individual responsibility, while leaving unexamined the conditions that might limit a family’s ability to provide care, such as financial instability, changing household structures or competing demands.

In Kabhi Khushi Kabhie Gham, respect for parents is central to the family structure, where deviation from parental expectations is portrayed as a rupture of ethics. The 2001 drama reinforces the idea that maintaining family bonds requires prioritizing parental expectations over individual circumstances or constraints.

More recently, in 2015, Piku offers a different, more contemporary portrayal. The comedy follows a daughter caring for her aging father while managing her career and personal life. Unlike earlier films, caregiving here is not romanticized. It is messy, frustrating, deeply human and constant. Yet even within this more grounded depiction, care remains largely individualized, with responsibility resting primarily on the daughter. This also highlights how caregiving often becomes a gendered duty rather than shared role.

These cinematic features present caregiving as something that unfolds within families without negotiation, planning or external support. Even when caregiving is shown as difficult, it is rarely depicted as something that could be shared beyond the family.

And over time, these portrayals become more than entertainment. They contribute to a shared cultural script of what “good caregiving” is supposed to look like.

Cultural expectations meet diaspora realities

For many South Asian families living outside their countries of origin, caregiving unfolds in a very different environment.

Migration reshapes family structures. Households become smaller. Extended family support may no longer be physically accessible. At the same time, dual-income households are common, and competing responsibilities — work, childcare and financial pressures — become part of everyday life.

Research has shown these structural shifts significantly influence caregiving capacity, even as cultural expectations remain strong.

This creates a relentless tension: expectations shaped in one reality are now being lived out in another. In many diaspora settings, families are navigating distance from extended relatives who might otherwise share caregiving responsibilities, limiting everyday support.

At the same time, access to culturally and linguistically appropriate services remains uneven, and the cost of formal care can be prohibitive. Caregiving is no longer supported by the same networks or resources, even as expectations remain unchanged.

When caregiving is seen as a natural extension of family roles, sometimes caregivers don’t identify themselves as such. As a result, they may be less likely to seek out or access formal supports, even when those supports are available. Studies have also highlighted how cultural expectations, combined with limited awareness of services and concerns about stigma, can further impact caregiving experiences and decision-making.

What emerges is not a lack of care but a mismatch between expectation and capacity. Families may feel a strong sense of responsibility but also find themselves constrained in ways that are rarely acknowledged in dominant narratives. When caregiving is framed primarily through ideals of sacrifice and devotion, there is little space to talk about anything else.

And this reality has consequences. Caregivers often take on significant emotional, physical and financial strain, increasing the risk for burnout. In many families, this responsibility falls disproportionately on women, who are more likely to balance caregiving alongside work and other household roles, intensifying these pressures.

Policies and services that don’t take cultural differences into account often assume that families will take on caregiving responsibilities without fully understanding the limited capacity immigrant families are often dealing with. This can result in insufficient support.

Rethinking caregiving ideals

South Asian cinema has played a significant role in shaping how caregiving is imagined, emphasizing values of care, respect and family connection. These are not values that need to be discarded, but they do need to be situated within the realities families are navigating today.

And this is even more critical when those families are living outside of their collectivist countries of origin.

Caregiving is shaped by time, place and the systems that surround us, not just culture. Recognizing this allows for a more honest conversation about what caregiving looks like in practice and what families in the South Asian diaspora actually need to sustain it.

When expectations remain unchanged in the face of drastically shifting realities, the burden of care only grows. It is quietly carried by those trying to live up to ideals that were never designed for them in the first place.

Navjot Gill-Chawla does not work for, consult, own shares in or receive funding from any company or organisation that would benefit from this article, and has disclosed no relevant affiliations beyond their academic appointment.

– ref. When caregiving ideals don’t match reality in South Asian diaspora families – https://theconversation.com/when-caregiving-ideals-dont-match-reality-in-south-asian-diaspora-families-280546

April 28, 2026

EU enlargement is often deeply political – as Ukraine and Montenegro show

Source: The Conversation – UK – By Iveri Kekenadze Gustafsson, PhD Candidate in European Studies, Lund University

The EU formally unblocked a €90 billion (£78 billion) loan for Ukraine on April 23 after Hungary and Slovakia dropped their opposition. This move came over a week after defeat in parliamentary elections brought the 16-year tenure of Hungary’s prime minister, Viktor Orbán, to an end. He will be replaced by Péter Magyar of the pro-Europe Tisza party.

But at a summit simultaneously taking place in Cyprus, EU leaders struggled to agree on a membership timeline for Ukraine. This is despite the exceptional pace of the war-torn candidate country’s accession-related reforms. The hesitation of EU member states also comes even though the bloc has prioritised its enlargement agenda since Russia invaded Ukraine in 2022.

Meanwhile, another candidate country, Montenegro, is making progress on joining the bloc. Ambassadors from all EU member states said on April 22 that they had decided to set up an “ad hoc working party” to draft an accession treaty for the Balkan nation. The president of the European Council, António Costa, described this as “a big step” towards membership.

Montenegro wants to become the EU’s 28th member by 2028, concluding a process that began when it applied nearly two decades ago. It is aiming to close formal negotiations by the end of 2026 so the accession treaty can then be adopted and ratified by each of the EU’s 27 member states.

However, despite this formal progress, there are reservations about the quality of the reforms Montenegro is carrying out to align with EU standards. These reservations relate to the country’s efforts to combat corruption, ensure judicial independence and guarantee a free and pluralistic media environment.

The accession treaty is thus expected to include extensive transitional arrangements, a period after accession during which a new member does not fully participate in certain EU programmes and policies. This will give Montenegro time to adapt.

A map showing EU members and candidate countries. — Four frontrunners currently stand out in the EU membership queue: Montenegro, Albania, Moldova and Ukraine.
European Union, 2025, CC BY-NC-ND

Formally, EU enlargement is a merit-based process driven by a candidate country’s compliance with political, economic and legal standards. But politics play a role, too. This is showcased by the contrasting progress Ukraine and Montenegro have made towards EU membership.

Montenegro’s small size and membership of Nato make consensus among member states on its accession relatively easy to achieve. The same cannot be said for Ukraine. Its larger size, wartime context and the scale of its potential accession make Ukraine a far more contentious decision for member states.

Politicisation of enlargement

The politicisation of the enlargement process, where individual member states shape the accession process in line with their domestic preferences, is perhaps the main factor explaining why the EU has struggled to replicate Montenegro’s progress across other candidate countries.

Despite their readiness to move forward with opening negotiations, Ukraine and neighbouring Moldova’s formal accession progress has been stalled for several months. Decisions related to Ukraine’s EU membership, in particular, have been vetoed multiple times by Orbán.

The outgoing Hungarian prime minister leveraged bilateral disputes with Ukraine to justify blocking progress in accession talks. He linked concerns over energy security, as well as a disagreement over disrupted Russian oil supplies through Ukraine, to the country’s EU path. Orbán used these disputes to veto the opening of negotiations.

Even Montenegro may not enjoy a smooth path to EU membership if Croatia continues to link bilateral issues such as maritime disputes to enlargement. The disagreement between the two countries primarily concerns the Prevlaka peninsula. This is a strategically significant area, which controls access to Montenegro’s only deep-water bay and main naval base.

According to Zvezdana Kovač of the Centre for Civic Education, an organisation that monitors Montenegro’s progress towards joining the EU, Croatia is a “manageable risk” in Montenegro’s accession process. In a 2025 interview with the New Union Post website, she noted that Croatia’s responses “are not driven by a strategic desire to block Montenegro” and it retains “a clear interest” in having EU member states as its neighbours.

Vetoes driven by bilateral disputes have contributed to disillusionment in some candidate countries. In North Macedonia, which first applied for EU membership in 2004, Bulgaria’s continued veto over deep-seated language and identity disputes has helped bring to power a government led by Hristijan Mickoski that no longer prioritises accession at all costs.

The EU’s varied responses to protests and its contrasting relations with governments in Georgia and Serbia, two other candidate countries, have also alienated many particularly in Belgrade.

While the EU’s response to democratic backsliding in Georgia has been strict, targeting the ruling party by imposing visa restrictions for diplomatic passport holders, the approach to Aleksandar Vučić’s government in Serbia has been more cautious. Serbian opposition groups have reacted to this with dismay.

If the EU sees enlargement as central to its security, decisions cannot risk being derailed by one or two member states. Moving from unanimity to qualified majority voting in enlargement-related decisions would help speed up decision-making in the Council.

But, at the same time, the EU must ensure it does not admit countries that later fail to uphold its standards – a lesson drawn from Hungary’s increasingly authoritarian trajectory over the past 16 years of Orbán’s rule.

While Montenegro appears to be entering the final stage of its path to EU membership, disagreements over Ukraine’s timeline show that some member states have not fundamentally shifted their approach to using enlargement as a geopolitical tool.

For now, the EU is managing rather than overcoming politicisation in its accession process. This risks an enlargement policy that remains inconsistent and unreliable.

Iveri Kekenadze Gustafsson does not work for, consult, own shares in or receive funding from any company or organisation that would benefit from this article, and has disclosed no relevant affiliations beyond their academic appointment.

– ref. EU enlargement is often deeply political – as Ukraine and Montenegro show – https://theconversation.com/eu-enlargement-is-often-deeply-political-as-ukraine-and-montenegro-show-257055

April 28, 2026

Rape, sexual assault and long-term chronic health issues – our new study

Source: The Conversation – UK – By Sofie Abildgaard Jacobsen, PhD Candidate in the Department of Clinical Medicine – Clinic for Functional Disorders, Aarhus University

Global figures estimate that around one in six women will experience sexual assault during their lifetime. These figures are not only high but also extremely concerning, given that sexual assault is a deeply traumatic experience for someone to go through.

The psychological consequences of sexual assault, such as post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD), anxiety and depression, are well known. But most people are less aware that sexual violence can also affect a person’s physical health – for sometimes months or years to come.

Existing research in this area has mostly focused on pelvic pain, gastrointestinal problems, or short-term pain in the months following an assault.

But as we found in our recent study, survivors of sexual assault can often experience persistent physical symptoms across the entire body for many years after being attacked or assaulted.

These symptoms fall under what clinicians call functional somatic disorders. These are conditions with persistent physical symptoms that aren’t fully explained by other medical or mental health conditions. And they can cause significant distress and seriously affect a person’s daily life. These include conditions such as Fibromyalgia, ME/CFS (myalgic encephalomyelitis/chronic fatigue syndrome), and irritable bowel syndrome (IBS).

Hidden trauma

As part of our recent research, we used data from a large Danish health study that followed thousands of adults over several years, looking for how many of those people had a functional somatic disorder at a given time, and how many would develop a functional somatic disorder over time.

What we found in our study was that people who had experienced sexual assault were 69% more likely to report or develop ongoing physical health problems compared to those who had not experienced sexual violence.

The risk of developing more widespread health problems (meaning several persistent and bothersome symptoms affecting different parts of the body) was six times higher among survivors of sexual assault in our data.

Overall, survivors reported more symptoms. And these symptoms were often more severe and affected multiple parts of the body.

Findings from our earlier study also found that the more severe the assault, the greater the risk of developing long-term physical health problems.

Persistent pain, fatigue, and other bodily symptoms can follow sexual violence.
pexels polina zimmerman, CC BY

In our research we also found that sexual assault appeared to have a particularly strong impact compared to other forms of abuse, such as emotional and physical abuse. This is probably because sexual violence can activate several stress‑related systems in the body.

Sexual trauma can disrupt emotional regulation and keep the body in a prolonged state of physiological alert. Over time, this may make pain and other bodily sensations harder to regulate. Trauma can also heighten sensitivity in the nervous system, so signals that would normally fade can instead become amplified. For some, it seems this can then become entrenched and may contribute to the development of functional somatic disorders.

Lasting impact

As our recent research shows, sexual assault is not only a severely traumatic experience for someone to go through. But it’s also an important public health issue. With potential long-lasting consequences for a person’s mental and physical health.

Indeed, these findings suggest that some people with unexplained pain or persistent somatic symptoms may carry a hidden history of trauma. Even if they do not disclose these experiences directly to a doctor.

It’s clear then that there needs to be a greater recognition of the connection between sexual trauma and physical symptoms within the medical system. At sexual assault referral centres, for example, professionals could make survivors of sexual assault aware of the possibility of long-term somatic symptoms as well as psychological ones.

This may help to normalise someone’s experience of sexual violence. It may also help to reduce shame and ensure that treatment encompasses the full spectrum of the trauma’s impact.

People working in healthcare should be aware that if they’re treating someone with a functional somatic disorder, there’s a possibility that person has experienced sexual violence.
pexels/yankrukov, CC BY

On a wider level, sexual assault should be considered a significant risk factor for both mental and physical health difficulties. And more must be done to inform doctors and nurses in all areas of healthcare about the hidden health risks of sexual assault and rape.

Indeed, raising awareness and improving understanding would lead to more validation of survivors’ experiences and greater trust in healthcare systems for patients.

This is important because supporting someone after sexual violence means more than just treatment – it means care that understands trauma and that gives survivors the support they truly need.

This article was commissioned as part of a partnership between Videnskab.dk and The Conversation.

Sofie Abildgaard Jacobsen receives funding from The Danish Victims Foundation. She is affiliated with SundFornuft – Tænketanken for Sundhedspolitik (Common Sense – The Health Policy Think Tank).

– ref. Rape, sexual assault and long-term chronic health issues – our new study – https://theconversation.com/rape-sexual-assault-and-long-term-chronic-health-issues-our-new-study-271587

April 28, 2026

Michaelina Wautier review: an astoundingly skilled painter returned to her rightful place in the spotlight

Source: The Conversation – UK – By Gabriele Neher, Associate Professor in History of Art, University of Nottingham

The first modern mention of the Flemish painter Michaelina Wautier (1614–1689) introduces an artist who defies expectation. Referring to her monumental Triumph of Bacchus (1655–59), Gustav Glück, the first art historian to serve as curator of Vienna’s Kunsthistorisches Museum, wrote in 1903 that “even in an age of female emancipation, one would hardly wish to ascribe this picture, which shows a highly vigorous, almost coarse conception, to a woman’s hand”.

And thereby hangs the achievement of Wautier: she may have been able to paint “like a man”, but in most of her works, she does not feel the need to do so. Instead, Michaelina Wautier emerges as an artist with a distinctive style of her own.

The Royal Academy of Arts (RA) in London is currently host to the most complete representation of her work to date. It is a landmark exhibition that reintroduces an artist who in her day was highly successful and championed by the court and elite in Brussels; but, who subsequently almost disappeared from public and scholarly notice for close on 300 years.

Restoring Wautier to a place in the artistic canon through an exhibition in the Royal Academy of Arts seems especially apt for an artist who defies expectation. The RA was the first institution to provide professional training for artists in Britain. Wautier’s work and the RA’s presentation of it shows clear evidence of the sort of training that was at the time the exclusive prerogative of male artists.

The point on her training is made straight away through the image that opens the show, a graceful and confident Study of the Medici Ganymede Bust (1654). The drawing depicts the famous ancient Roman sculpture, which was at the time in Rome. Drawing competently was a much valued skill and the Ganymede suggests not only a meticulously trained artist, but one whose work is up-to-date and reflects contemporary trends.

Many will be questioning where she sits in relation to the titan of Baroque painting and her contemporary, Artemisia Gentileschi (1593–1654) – the favourite subject of feminist art history. Both women disappear from view after the 1650s, both worked with close relatives (Wautier with her brother, Gentileschi with her father), both were championed by high-ranking patrons. But this is where the similarities end.

Gentileschi’s violent personal history has often overshadowed the discussion of her consummate skill and mastery of her craft. For instance, works like the Beheading of Holofernes (1612) are frequently interpreted as responses to her experience of sexual violence.

In Wautier’s case, however, there just isn’t much known about her life beyond bare facts such as who her parents were, that she shared a studio with her brother in Brussels and that she never married. This lack of information is partially due to the artist’s will going up in the flames of the French bombardment of Brussels in 1695.

So where for Gentileschi it feels as if we can’t separate the art from the biography; in Wautier’s case, there is nothing but the art. And, what wonderful art it is too.

Wautier excelled in portraiture, with her elegant palette and her mastery of textures – be it hair or textiles. In her portraits, especially in the depiction of children, she is vivacious and lively and so observant of quirks and foibles. You can see this in her Five Senses (1650) series. For instance, Smell features a little blond boy clutching a rotten egg in one hand and pinching his nose shut with the other, recoiling from the egg’s stench.

Despite their brilliance, however, she never signed her portraits. She did, however, sign two large-scale religious paintings, a Mystic Marriage of Saint Catherine of Alexandria and an intriguing and unusual panel depicting the Education of the Virgin. Both panels centre around educated, confident, elegant female protagonists, defined by their actions.

These paintings defy contemporary ideas that women artists excelled at imitation but lacked the capacity to imagine and create a subject from scratch. Wautier signs these paintings “invenit et fecit”, which translates as “invented and executed”. Here she is staking her claim to possessing the imagination to execute significant work at large scale. She attests to be a master of her craft, and this is nowhere more apparent than in the centrepiece of the Royal Academy’s exhibition, her immense Triumph of Bacchus.

Here, Wautier tackles the epitome of artistic mastery: a large-scale mythological subject that featured in the work of her most significant contemporaries, such as Andrea Mantegna, Titian and of course the artist who dominated the market in Flanders and the Netherlands, Peter Paul Rubens.

Wautier’s Triumph of Bacchus is larger than that of her male competitors, and she combines in her image the fleshiness of the central male nude with the grace and the elegance of Titian. She presents the viewer with a powerful image of a flabby Bacchus reclining in a wheelbarrow, surrounded by his followers. Wautier’s skill in painting a variety of male nudes in a range of poses looks effortlessly competent, with the Bacchus becoming the work that firmly places her within art history, a masterpiece designed to defy the challenge that a woman can not paint like a man.

This one can, but she takes the challenge up a notch with the intriguing inclusion of a self portrait. Wautier depicts herself as an elegant, bare-breasted Bacchante, a female follower of Bacchus, clad in a striking robe of salmon-pink, looking out at the viewer, the only person to do so in the array of figures depicted. Wautier’s Bacchante stands tall and proud, inviting the viewer to look at her. But it’s Wautier who controls this gaze; in the painting, a sallow-skinned faun attempts to grab the Amazonian, composed woman. She shrugs off his leering, and ignores him grabbing her hair. She is in charge.

Michaelina Wautier is on at The Royal Academy in London until June 21, 2026

Gabriele Neher does not work for, consult, own shares in or receive funding from any company or organisation that would benefit from this article, and has disclosed no relevant affiliations beyond their academic appointment.

– ref. Michaelina Wautier review: an astoundingly skilled painter returned to her rightful place in the spotlight – https://theconversation.com/michaelina-wautier-review-an-astoundingly-skilled-painter-returned-to-her-rightful-place-in-the-spotlight-281462

April 28, 2026

Tapping your genome with AI and quantum computing could deliver on the promise of personalized medicine – but practical and ethical hurdles remain

Source: The Conversation – USA – By Gary Skuse, Professor of Bioinformatics, Rochester Institute of Technology

While quantum computing has a long way to go, it can open tantalizing new doors for the field of genomics. herstockart/iStock via Getty Images Plus

Decades after researches first sequenced the human genome, scientists throughout the world are still working to understand it. Despite diligent global efforts to link uncommon variations in DNA sequences with human disease, progress has been slow, in large part due to limitations in scientific understanding and in part due to limitations in computational technologies.

Artificial intelligence has the potential to help scientists decipher the millions of genetic variations present in the genomes of different people in order to identify which ones lead to disease and which ones do not. In order to fully exploit the power of AI, however, scientists need to compare the genomes of thousands or tens of thousands of people. This task not only requires intense computational effort, it is also prone to error and will take years to complete.

Quantum computing has the potential to facilitate that process. We are researchers with a long-standing interest in finding ways to use genetics in the clinic and developing new technologies to study the human genome. Combining quantum computing with AI has the potential to accelerate genomic analysis far beyond traditional methods. For time-sensitive medical conditions, faster decoding of genetic information can directly inform urgent treatment decisions and, in some cases, be lifesaving.

Conventional vs. quantum computing

In conventional computing, individual bits of information – binary digits, also called bits – can represent only two states: namely, 0 and 1.

However, the qubits used in quantum computing can have more than two distinct states. Adding qubits together increases the number of states exponentially. The power of quantum computers lies in being able to check all the possibilities at once for problems with large numbers of variables, rather than one at a time like even the fastest possible classical computer must do. This allows quantum computers to solve certain types of problems, such as factoring large numbers for today’s encryption schemes and performing combinatorial optimization to find the best route through a large number of points.

Quantum computers work much differently from the computer you’re likely using to read this article.

Still, quantum computing is currently in its infancy. Despite the enormous potential of this technology, computer scientists are dealing with challenges related to its scalability, error correction, hardware development and the setting of standards.

There are also significant time and cost constraints associated with ameliorating these challenges. Experts in the field estimate that it may be at least a decade before quantum computing will be truly useful outside of the laboratory.

Bigger and better data analysis

If researchers are able to overcome these challenges, combining AI and quantum computing may not only enable scientists and clinicians to better understand the human genome but also to leverage that understanding to improve patient care.

Currently, researchers are able to use AI to analyze genomic data in combination with limited amounts of other biological information, such as gene activity, epigenomics, RNA signatures and protein function. Quantum computing could allow AI to process increasingly more massive and highly detailed datasets.

This might look like integrating large-scale genetic, protein and spatial datasets with clinical, demographic and real-time physiological data. This systems-level approach enables a more comprehensive and accurate understanding of complex biological systems beyond DNA sequence alone that could be used to improve public health.

In other words, quantum computing could make it possible to sequence a patient’s genome and combine that information with other information about how their body works at the molecular level to improve the accuracy of diagnoses and determine the best course of treatment in hours instead of months.

Challenges in access and privacy

Like many burgeoning technologies, combining AI with quantum computing has inherent and inescapable challenges. In particular, there are several ethical issues related to healthcare access.

One will be the cost. New technologies are typically expensive and that will likely widen the gap between those who can afford the best healthcare and those who cannot. Anticipating these costs and finding preemptive creative solutions is necessary to allow everyone to benefit equally.

While there are likely many approaches to reducing out-of-pocket expenses for healthcare, federal legislation could mandate affordable or free genetic information-based care to those in greatest financial need. Similar to the 2008 Genetic Information Nondiscrimination Act, which prohibits discrimination based on genetics, a new law could prohibit healthcare providers from withholding genetic information-based care from those who cannot afford it.

Close-up of face of person viewing computer screen, colorful DNA sequence reflected on their glasses — Biological data inherently comes with a privacy risk.
Tek Image/Science Photo Library

Another challenge will be availability. These technologies will likely first be available at only the top medical centers in the country, which traditionally have the research funding and the cadre of skilled scientists and clinicians needed to develop new diagnostic methods and treatments. Consequently, the latest advances in health technology will be unavailable to people who physically or financially cannot travel to receive the best medical care.

A combination of telemedicine, centralized laboratories and shared data could potentially help make new technologies more accessible.

There are also privacy concerns intrinsic to sharing personal health data. Truly anonymizing personal information remains a challenge, and privacy concerns are likely to prevent some people from taking advantage of potentially lifesaving technologies.

One approach that may quell these fears is a model called federated blockchain governance. This approach involves sharing control of a blockchain, which is a digital ledger used to track transactions, among a small group of institutions rather than a single entity or the general public. Limiting the number of trusted curators of genetic data reduces the risk of privacy violations or security breaches and subsequently increases the chance that patient data will remain private.

Improving public health

Despite these challenges, combining advances in quantum computing and AI has the potential to significantly drive innovation and improve public health.

When scientists and clinicians are able to accurately identify the genetic basis of disease and potential risk factors, they will not only be able to develop better treatments but also help patients and healthcare providers know what symptoms to look for among those predisposed to certain conditions.

Taken together, this knowledge can improve public health, reduce the cost of healthcare and improve quality of life.

The authors do not work for, consult, own shares in or receive funding from any company or organization that would benefit from this article, and have disclosed no relevant affiliations beyond their academic appointment.

– ref. Tapping your genome with AI and quantum computing could deliver on the promise of personalized medicine – but practical and ethical hurdles remain – https://theconversation.com/tapping-your-genome-with-ai-and-quantum-computing-could-deliver-on-the-promise-of-personalized-medicine-but-practical-and-ethical-hurdles-remain-280015

April 28, 2026

Facial recognition data is a key to your identity – if stolen, you can’t just change the locks

Source: The Conversation – USA – By Jonathan S. Weissman, Principal Lecturer of Cybersecurity, Rochester Institute of Technology

When you’re out and about, your face isn’t just visible − it’s captured. John Keeble/Getty Images

A woman strolls into a grocery store, thinking about grabbing some apples. Before she even reaches the produce aisle, a security camera has scanned her face. Whether the system is checking for shoplifters or simply logging her arrival, her face has joined a digital ledger, a trace she can’t easily erase. Retailers, banks, airports, stadiums and office buildings are doing the same.

But what if the woman’s facial information is stolen or misused? If a cybercriminal steals her password, she can change it. If they acquire her credit card number, she can cancel the card. But she can’t reset or revoke the appearance of her cheekbones.

Facial recognition systems don’t keep actual images. They convert a face into a mathematical template that maps the positions and proportions of the face’s features. When another camera scans a person later, the system checks their live face against these templates to confirm an identity.

In my work as a cybersecurity professor at Rochester Institute of Technology, I have found that even though templates are more secure than photos – which anyone online can capture and manipulate – templates, too, can be stolen. Once that happens, these digital keys create a lifelong vulnerability. If a facial recognition database is breached, the “locks” that a template opens – accessing a bank app, getting through security at an airport, entering an office building – can’t be reset. A person’s face is permanent, and so is the threat.

The threat isn’t theoretical. Biometric data has been stolen in data breaches. In 2024, biometric data from a facial recognition system used at bars and clubs in Australia was hacked. And in 2019, biometric data from a pilot facial recognition system set up by U.S. Customs and Border Protection was breached in an attack on a subcontractor’s network. It’s not clear whether anyone’s stolen biometric data has been exploited, however.

a sandwichboard sign outside a stadium — Catching a ballgame? Security cameras might be catching and digitizing your face.
AP Photo/Matt Slocum

Tracking your face

All biometric identifiers carry risks. Fingerprints and iris scans, however, are typically used in controlled situations, such as unlocking a person’s phone or allowing someone to enter a building. In these cases, a person has to deliberately look at a scanner. Cameras in public spaces, in contrast, can capture faces as people walk by, from a distance and without the people whose faces are scanned realizing it.

If a fingerprint or iris database is breached, a thief still needs to physically present that finger or eye, or a fake of it, to a scanner. However, someone could match a stolen facial template against images from surveillance cameras or photos circulating online, making it easier to identify a person of interest or track someone’s movements and activities.

There’s also a big difference, technically and ethically, between keeping a face on a phone versus handing it over to a database. On modern Apple devices and many Android systems, biometric data used to unlock the devices is stored locally in a dedicated hardware chip and is not shared with the manufacturer or cloud services for authentication. As a result, a breach of corporate or cloud systems would not expose these device-level biometric templates.

Some street and security cameras in public are passive, just watching as people pass by, with no long-term records. But others may be following people’s steps, linking faces to databases and creating a persistent digital trail. The risk rises when organizations use systems to track particular people across multiple databases. Airport systems could compare a traveler’s face against passport or airline databases. Stadiums may compare faces against local security watch lists or law enforcement lists. The company that manages Madison Square Garden has used facial recognition to bar entry to lawyers at firms that represented people who sued the company.

Some large retail chains, such as Wegmans and Target, also use facial recognition systems in their theft prevention efforts. Every new capture adds another permanent record.

People hold small cardboard images of Amazon CEO Jeff Bezos in front of their faces. — Demonstrators hold images of Amazon CEO Jeff Bezos in front of their faces during a protest over the company’s facial recognition system.
AP Photo/Elaine Thompson

Many companies do not have expertise in cybersecurity and rely on third-party vendors to manage their data. If those centralized systems are breached – or the datasets are linked across platforms, vendors or data brokers – your face can become a sort of persistent identifier, which can be used to expose or track you. In some cases, when combined with other compromised data, your captured face can lower the barrier to impersonating you.

When a person’s face meets their data

A face can function like a “primary key” – a unique and stable identifier that connects records. If one database links a facial template to an email address, and a data breach connects that email to financial or personal records, an identity thief with a stolen template could access all that information.

And combining a template with AI tools such as deepfakes or three-dimensional face models could, in some cases, allow a criminal to impersonate an individual in systems that require proof of a live face, slipping into a forged digital identity like slipping into a costume.

When criminals combine biometric templates with other leaked data, such as logins for social media profiles or home addresses, they can build “super-profiles” connected to many of a person’s activities. Because the face acts as a permanent linking key, this level of identity theft is difficult to reverse.

How to minimize the threat

People are still figuring out how to live with widespread biometric collection. The convenience of smoothly passing security checks or making purchases is appealing, but it often comes with a permanent risk to privacy and security.

To lessen the threat, organizations can follow several data privacy best practices. They can keep only information that is necessary, erase the rest quickly and encrypt every mathematical template. They can store only encrypted templates rather than raw photos. They can use safeguarding techniques, such as the latest liveness detection techniques, to help ensure that their systems are interacting with real people rather than photographs, masks or deepfakes. And they can adopt a privacy-by-design approach, which means they will keep data only as long as necessary, clearly document how it’s used and restrict who has access.

Consumers can take steps as well. In places with privacy laws, such as California, Illinois and the European Union, people can submit a data access request to see what biometric data a company holds and, in some cases, ask for its deletion. They can also ask retailers anywhere what data is collected, how long it is kept and how it’s protected.

Jonathan S. Weissman does not work for, consult, own shares in or receive funding from any company or organization that would benefit from this article, and has disclosed no relevant affiliations beyond their academic appointment.

– ref. Facial recognition data is a key to your identity – if stolen, you can’t just change the locks – https://theconversation.com/facial-recognition-data-is-a-key-to-your-identity-if-stolen-you-cant-just-change-the-locks-278289

April 28, 2026

Your local storm forecast is likely based on weather miles away – we’re trying to bring it closer to home

Source: The Conversation – USA (2) – By Chris Vagasky, Meteorologist and Research Program Manager, University of Wisconsin-Madison

Weather apps might see that a storm is coming, but mesonets capture what’s happening as it arrives with local real-time data. Patrick Emerson/Flickr, CC BY-SA

Whether you’re planning a weekend hike, deciding what to wear to work or preparing your home for severe storms, the weather forecast is essential. You might instinctively grab your smartphone and check an app for an instant weather update.

But how many times have you looked at your app, only to step outside and see the sky painting a different picture than what’s on your screen?

As a meteorologist who operates a weather station network in Wisconsin, I’ve heard many of the same cliches time and again: “The weatherman is always wrong!” “Just wait five minutes and the weather will be different!”

Before you blame the local forecasters, let’s talk about where the data in your weather app comes from, and why it might not always show what you expect. It’s why my colleagues and I are working to bring forecast data closer to home.

The nuts and bolts of weather forecasting

Earth is huge. It has a diameter of 7,926 miles (12,756 kilometers) at the equator and has 62 miles (100 kilometers) of atmosphere overhead.

If you want a perfect weather forecast, you will have to precisely measure every molecule of the atmosphere, land and water, and perfectly predict how they will interact with each other for the next minute, day or week. This is, of course, physically impossible.

Instead, scientists run computer models. These models take the observations we do have and simulate the weather on a large scale to a remarkable degree of accuracy. In fact, storm track forecasts from the National Hurricane Center were among its best ever in 2025, and forecasts using machine learning are starting to improve those forecasts even further.

These models are hungry for data. Supercomputers ingest measurements from satellites, weather balloons, Doppler radar, lightning detection networks, buoys, surface weather stations and other measurement platforms to solve the equations that provide weather predictions.

When you open your phone, your weather app isn’t doing the meteorology – it’s just showing the output of the model’s calculations. Even though they generally aren’t tailored by a local meteorologist, these short-term forecasts are usually pretty good. But they could be better.

All weather is local

You’ve probably seen it before: It’s raining on one side of the street and not on the other. You flip on the news to see the nearest airport received an inch of rain, but your garden is dry.

There are more than 2,500 airports in the United States with weather stations, which is where much of the weather data shared on TV and online is collected. But for many people, the closest airport is more than 20 miles (32 kilometers) away. This is especially true in rural areas.

A map shows large gaps in many states, particularly across the West but also in large parts of Mississippi, Alabama, Missouri and Arkansas, as well as regions of the Northeast. — All of the areas in green are more than 20 miles from an airport weather station. In many cases, that means they’re 20 miles or farther from the weather observations feeding their local forecasts.
Chris Vagasky

Because of the chaotic nature of weather, the only way to truly know what’s happening in your yard is to measure the weather in your yard. But not everyone is interested in installing a rain gauge or personal weather station.

Filling the gaps

To bridge this gap, many states and universities have established local weather station networks called mesonets – short for mesoscale networks, meaning intermediate scale. These weather stations are installed in locations to ensure everyone in the state is within 20 miles of the nearest station.

Nationally, there are nearly 3,000 mesonet stations installed in 38 states, with more networks planned.

Like the weather stations at airports, mesonets measure things like air temperature and relative humidity, air pressure, rainfall or melted snow, and wind speed and direction – often every five minutes.

Many mesonets collect additional data such as soil moisture levels to help farmers. Some even have camera images updated every five minutes to show current weather conditions. Mesonet data is then shared through websites or direct data transmission so that the public, weather forecasters and researchers can easily access it.

I lead the team at Wisconet, a new mesonet that just finished installing 78 weather stations across Wisconsin. Our stations are installed on 10-foot-tall (3-meter) tripods in open areas near orchards and cranberry marshes, farms and airfields, schools and other educational centers, and on city, state and federally owned lands.

A tall tripod with various weather equipment and a solar panel for power. — Wisconet weather stations, like this one in Amery, Wisc., provide local weather data for areas where forecasts used to be based on what was happening many miles away.
Caitlin Wienkes, Wisconet

These added weather stations are already proving useful. On Aug. 18, 2025, slow-moving thunderstorms moved over a Wisconet station, with more than 3 inches of rain falling in just a couple of hours. The National Weather Service was able to issue a flash flood warning for the area because of the data provided by that station.

In addition to providing a near-real-time snapshot of the local weather, mesonets help farmers decide when to run irrigation systems, spray pesticides or plant crops. They also help provide better weather warnings, particularly when tornadoes and other storms intensify over small areas that farther-away weather stations would miss.

A nationwide network of networks

Because of the immense value of high-frequency weather and soil measurements, the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration leads a National Mesonet Program. The program collects weather data from public, private and academic sources, validates the quality of the data, and ensures it flows to users, including the National Weather Service. National Weather Service forecasters use that data to make more timely and accurate severe weather warnings.

Congress is considering expanding that program, with legislation proposed in the House and the Senate. The bills aim to authorize $50 million to $70 million annually to the National Mesonet Program between 2026 and 2030 to improve and expand mesonets across the country. An expansion would mean more weather stations and new capabilities, like real-time snowfall, fire weather and air quality measurements, closer to the people who rely on them.

So the next time you check your smartphone and grumble because the app doesn’t match the weather in your backyard, remember that all weather is local. If you don’t have a nearby mesonet station, the nearest measurements may be many miles away.

This work is supported by the Institute for Rural Partnerships, project award no. 2023-70500-38915, from the U.S. Department of Agriculture’s National Institute of Food and Agriculture. Any opinions, findings, conclusions, or recommendations expressed in this publication are those of the author and should not be construed to represent any official USDA or U.S. Government determination or policy.

Wisconet receives monthly payments for their data from the National Mesonet Program.

– ref. Your local storm forecast is likely based on weather miles away – we’re trying to bring it closer to home – https://theconversation.com/your-local-storm-forecast-is-likely-based-on-weather-miles-away-were-trying-to-bring-it-closer-to-home-280985