The development of ultrasonic cleaning dates from the middle of the 20th century and has become a method of choice for a range of surface cleaning operations. The reasons why this has happened and ...the methods of assessing the efficiency of ultrasonic cleaning baths are reviewed.
Rising temperatures are amplifying drought‐induced stress and mortality in forests globally. It remains uncertain, however, whether tree mortality across drought‐stricken landscapes will be ...concentrated in particular climatic and competitive environments. We investigated the effects of long‐term average climate i.e. 35‐year mean annual climatic water deficit (CWD) and competition (i.e. tree basal area) on tree mortality patterns, using extensive aerial mortality surveys conducted throughout the forests of California during a 4‐year statewide extreme drought lasting from 2012 to 2015. During this period, tree mortality increased by an order of magnitude, typically from tens to hundreds of dead trees per km2, rising dramatically during the fourth year of drought. Mortality rates increased independently with average CWD and with basal area, and they increased disproportionately in areas that were both dry and dense. These results can assist forest managers and policy‐makers in identifying the most drought‐vulnerable forests across broad geographic areas.
Herbarium specimens have long been a cornerstone of taxonomic research but are only recently being recognized for their potential as a source of spatially and temporally extensive data on plant ...functional traits. Many researchers in trait-based disciplines, including functional ecologists and evolutionary biologists alike, remain surprisingly unaware of this powerful use of herbaria. This review brings together disparate studies to synthesize the past, current, and potential future uses of specimens as functional trait data sources, answering the following questions. First, what insights using specimens (including traits measured, approaches used, and research questions answered) have been made to date? Second, what new trait-based insights (including potential contributions to global trait databases and recent advancements such as machine learning and high-throughput phenotyping) can be made from herbarium specimens? And third, how can inherent limitations and collection biases be addressed when using specimens in unanticipated ways (including new analytical approaches and improved methods for collecting)? I conclude by identifying what is needed to foster the future of herbaria as big data sources of plant traits. Most notably, plant collecting must be continued, expanded beyond predominantly systematists, and intentionally revised with downstream trait measurements in mind. Furthermore, community-wide standards are needed to integrate otherwise disconnected data and directly link newly derived measurements back to specimen records. Specimens serve as reliable (and necessary) sources of phenotypic data, enabling us to answer questions across phylogenetic, temporal, and spatial dimensions that are otherwise not possible to answer. Herbaria should be embraced as centers for functional trait research.
1366 I. 1366 II. 1367 III. 1368 IV. 1368 V. 1369 VI. 1370 VII. 1372 VIII. 1372 IX. 1376 X. 1377 1377 References 1377 SUMMARY: The aim of producing sustainable liquid biofuels and chemicals from ...lignocellulosic biomass remains high on the sustainability agenda, but is challenged by the costs of producing fermentable sugars from these materials. Sugars from plant biomass can be fermented to alcohols or even alkanes, creating a liquid fuel in which carbon released on combustion is balanced by its photosynthetic capture. Large amounts of sugar are present in the woody, nonfood parts of crops and could be used for fuel production without compromising global food security. However, the sugar in woody biomass is locked up in the complex and recalcitrant lignocellulosic plant cell wall, making it difficult and expensive to extract. In this paper, we review what is known about the major polymeric components of woody plant biomass, with an emphasis on the molecular interactions that contribute to its recalcitrance to enzymatic digestion. In addition, we review the extensive research that has been carried out in order to understand and reduce lignocellulose recalcitrance and enable more cost‐effective production of fuel from woody plant biomass.
Data integration enables global biodiversity synthesis Heberling, J Mason; Miller, Joseph T; Noesgaard, Daniel ...
Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences - PNAS,
02/2021, Letnik:
118, Številka:
6
Journal Article
Recenzirano
Odprti dostop
The accessibility of global biodiversity information has surged in the past two decades, notably through widespread funding initiatives for museum specimen digitization and emergence of large-scale ...public participation in community science. Effective use of these data requires the integration of disconnected datasets, but the scientific impacts of consolidated biodiversity data networks have not yet been quantified. To determine whether data integration enables novel research, we carried out a quantitative text analysis and bibliographic synthesis of >4,000 studies published from 2003 to 2019 that use data mediated by the world's largest biodiversity data network, the Global Biodiversity Information Facility (GBIF). Data available through GBIF increased 12-fold since 2007, a trend matched by global data use with roughly two publications using GBIF-mediated data per day in 2019. Data-use patterns were diverse by authorship, geographic extent, taxonomic group, and dataset type. Despite facilitating global authorship, legacies of colonial science remain. Studies involving species distribution modeling were most prevalent (31% of literature surveyed) but recently shifted in focus from theory to application. Topic prevalence was stable across the 17-y period for some research areas (e.g., macroecology), yet other topics proportionately declined (e.g., taxonomy) or increased (e.g., species interactions, disease). Although centered on biological subfields, GBIF-enabled research extends surprisingly across all major scientific disciplines. Biodiversity data mobilization through global data aggregation has enabled basic and applied research use at temporal, spatial, and taxonomic scales otherwise not possible, launching biodiversity sciences into a new era.
Summary
Wheat is the most widely grown crop globally, providing 20% of all human calories and protein. Achieving step changes in genetic yield potential is crucial to ensure food security, but ...efforts are thwarted by an apparent trade‐off between grain size and number. Expansins are proteins that play important roles in plant growth by enhancing stress relaxation in the cell wall, which constrains cell expansion.
Here, we describe how targeted overexpression of an α‐expansin in early developing wheat seeds leads to a significant increase in grain size without a negative effect on grain number, resulting in a yield boost under field conditions.
The best‐performing transgenic line yielded 12.3% higher average grain weight than the control, and this translated to an increase in grain yield of 11.3% in field experiments using an agronomically appropriate plant density.
This targeted transgenic approach provides an opportunity to overcome a common bottleneck to yield improvement across many crops.
See also the Commentary on this article by Cosgrove, 230: 403‐405.
This article reviews several approaches to assessing schizotypal traits using a wide variety of self-report and interview measures. It makes a distinction between clinical approaches largely based on ...syndrome and symptom definitions, and psychometric approaches to measuring personality traits. The review presents a brief description of the content and psychometric properties of both sets of measures; these cover both the broad rubric of schizotypy often, but not exclusively based on DSM conceptions, as well as measures with a more specific focus. Measurement of schizotypy has taken place within clinical and nonclinical research utilizing a range of designs and methodologies. Several of these are elucidated with respect to the assessment choices open to researchers, and the implications of the measures chosen. These paradigms include the case-control study, "high risk"/"ultra-high risk" groups, a variety of nonclinical groups and other groups of interest, large scale epidemiology and "in vivo" designs. Evidence from a wide variety of designs continues to provide evidence of the validity of both clinical and personality approaches to schizotypal assessment.
Widespread specimen digitization has greatly enhanced the use of herbarium data in scientific research. Publications using herbarium data have increased exponentially over the last century. Here, we ...review changing uses of herbaria through time with a computational text analysis of 13,702 articles from 1923 to 2017 that quantitatively complements traditional review approaches. Although maintaining its core contribution to taxonomic knowledge, herbarium use has diversified from a few dominant research topics a century ago (e.g., taxonomic notes, botanical history, local observations), with many topics only recently emerging (e.g., biodiversity informatics, global change biology, DNA analyses). Specimens are now appreciated as temporally and spatially extensive sources of genotypic, phenotypic, and biogeographic data. Specimens are increasingly used in ways that influence our ability to steward future biodiversity. As we enter the Anthropocene, herbaria have likewise entered a new era with enhanced scientific, educational, and societal relevance.
Few published research studies focusing on supply chain disruptions and humanitarian logistics examine the response and recovery phases in post-disaster operations. We present a goal ...programming-based multiple-objective integrated response and recovery model to investigate strategic supply distribution and early-stage network restoration decisions. The model prescribes equity- or fairness-based compromise solutions for user-desired goals, given limited capacity, budget, and available resources. An experimental study demonstrates how different decision making strategies can be formulated to understand important dimensions of decision making. The efficient frontiers are generated to understand the trade-off between objectives and to analyze capacity-related planning strategies. Hazus-generated regional case studies for two regions, South Carolina and California, demonstrate the applicability of our proposed model in post-disaster operations.
PDF
