Revisiting the concept, urban practices, current advances, and future prospects of green infrastructure.

The inevitable increase in the human population's reliance on natural resources necessitates practical, and result-oriented solutions and strategies to enhance human's standard of living while minimizing its impact on essential resources. The global water resource depletion has spurred discourse among key international stakeholder in uniting efforts to achieve sustainability. For decades, the application of a combination of key strategies which relies on designing cities to promote the sustainable use of water and water resources have received global endorsement. The roadmap towards designing water-wise infrastructure in urban areas has derived from preexisting water conservation schemes. Green infrastructure (GI) is based on the key principle of the harmonious integration of natural elements and ecological processes to sustainably conserve natural resources. This paper aims to analyze and assess the development of sustainable and effective solutions for urban water quality management, by providing a comprehensive review of the concept of GI. We further digest the components and strategies of GI, its historical evolution, the rate of adoption and application on a regional scale and future prospects. GI with continued innovation and refinement, holds immense potential to mitigate the detrimental effects of urbanization on water resources and promote sustainable urban water management.

An atlas of regulatory elements in chicken: A resource for chicken genetics and genomics.

A comprehensive characterization of regulatory elements in the chicken genome across tissues will have substantial impacts on both fundamental and applied research. Here, we systematically identified and characterized regulatory elements in the chicken genome by integrating 377 genome-wide sequencing datasets from 23 adult tissues. In total, we annotated 1.57 million regulatory elements, representing 15 distinct chromatin states, and predicted about 1.2 million enhancer-gene pairs and 7662 super-enhancers. This functional annotation of the chicken genome should have wide utility on identifying regulatory elements accounting for gene regulation underlying domestication, selection, and complex trait regulation, which we explored. In short, this comprehensive atlas of regulatory elements provides the scientific community with a valuable resource for chicken genetics and genomics.

Bioretention cell incorporating Fe-biochar and saturated zones for enhanced stormwater runoff treatment.

Nitrogen (N) and phosphorus (P) removal in conventional bioretention systems is highly variable. Therefore, five novel experimental columns with different media configurations and constituents, and incorporating a saturated zone were developed and assessed to optimize the removal of N, P and other nutrients. Three types of media composed of the conventional mixed sand and soil media (T1), biochar-amended media (T2), and iron-coated biochar (ICB)-amended media (T3) were evaluated. Two of the experimental columns were designed with double-layer configurations, while the other three were of a single-layer structure. Removal efficiencies of nutrients in the experimental columns were evaluated and compared using simulated runoff. Also, the effect of media depth on the retention of P and denitrifying enzyme activity (DEA) in the bioretention columns were evaluated. The experimental column only filled with T3 showed the best performance for COD, ammonia (NH4+-N) and total phosphorus (TP) removal (94.6%, 98.3% and 93.70%, respectively), whereas columns filled with T2 performed poorly for TP removal (57.36%). For the removal of nitrate (NO3--N) and total nitrogen (TN), the columns using a single-layer and only filled with either T3 or T2 exhibited the best performance (93% and 97% TN removal, respectively). Overall, this study demonstrates that our proposed single-layered bioretention cell only filled with T3 and incorporating a saturated zone effectively improves the runoff quality, and can provide a new bioretention cell configuration for efficient stormwater treatment.