The implications for potential marginal land resources of cassava across worldwide under climate change challenges.

The demand for energy plants is foreseen to grow as worldwide energy and climate policies promote the use of bioenergy for climate change mitigation. To avoid competing with food production, it's critical to assess future changes in marginal land availability for energy plant development. Using a machine learning method, boosted regression tree, this study modeled potential marginal land resources suitable for cassava under current and different climate change scenarios, based on cassava occurrence records and environmental covariates. The findings revealed that, currently, over 80% of the 1357.24 Mha of available marginal land for cassava cultivation is distributed in Africa and South America. Under three climate change scenarios, by 2030, worldwide suitable marginal land resources were predicted to grow by 39.71Mha, 66.21 Mha, and 39.31Mha for the RCP4.5, RCP6.0, and RCP8.5 scenarios, respectively; by 2050, the potential marginal land suitable for cassava will increase by 38.98Mha, 83.02 Mha, and 55.43Mha, respectively; by 2080, the global marginal land resources were estimated to rise by 40.82 Mha, 99.74 Mha, and 21.87 Mha from now, respectively. Our results highlight the impacts of climate change on potential marginal land resources of cassava across worldwide, which provide the basis for assessing bioenergy potential in the future.

Quantifying risk factors and potential geographic extent of African swine fever across the world.

African swine fever (ASF) has spread to many countries in Africa, Europe and Asia in the past decades. However, the potential geographic extent of ASF infection is unknown. Here we combined a modeling framework with the assembled contemporary records of ASF cases and multiple covariates to predict the risk distribution of ASF at a global scale. Local spatial variations in ASF risk derived from domestic pigs is influenced strongly by livestock factors, while the risk of having ASF in wild boars is mainly associated with natural habitat covariates. The risk maps show that ASF is to be ubiquitous in many areas, with a higher risk in areas in the northern hemisphere. Nearly half of the world's domestic pigs (1.388 billion) are in the high-risk zones. Our results provide a better understanding of the potential distribution beyond the current geographical scope of the disease.

Geographical Detector-based influence factors analysis for Echinococcosis prevalence in Tibet, China.

Echinococcosis, caused by genus Echinococcus, is the most pathogenic zoonotic parasitic disease in the world. In Tibet of the People's Republic of China, echinococcosis refers principally to two types of severe zoonosis, cystic echinococcosis (CE) and alveolar echinococcosis (AE), which place a serious burden on public health and economy in the local community. However, research on the spatial epidemiology of echinococcosis remains inadequate in Tibet, China. Based on the recorded human echinococcosis data, maps of the spatial distribution of human CE and AE prevalence in Tibet were produced at city level and county level respectively, which show that the prevalence of echinococcosis in northern and western Tibet was much higher than that in other regions. We employ a geographical detector to explore the influencing factors for causing CE and AE while sorting information on the maps of disease prevalence and environment factors (e.g. terrain, population, and yak population). The results of our analysis showed that biological factors have the most impact on the prevalence of echinococcosis, of which the yak population contributes the most for CE, while the dog population contributes the most for AE. In addition, the interaction between various factors, as we found out, might further explain the disease prevalence, which indicated that the echinococcosis prevalence is not simply affected by one single factor, but by multiple factors that are correlated with each other complicatedly. Our results will provide an important reference for the evaluation of the echinococcosis risk, control projects, and prevention programs in Tibet.

Quinoline-3-carboxamide derivatives as potential cholesteryl ester transfer protein inhibitors.

A series of novel quinoline-3-carboxamide derivatives 10-17 and 23-27 were designed and synthesized as cholesteryl ester transfer protein (CETP) inhibitors. All of them exhibited activity against CETP. Particularly, compounds 24 and 26 displayed the best activity against CETP with the same inhibitory rate of 80.1%.