CropLife Europe Crop Development Database: An open-source, pan-European, harmonized crop development database for use in regulatory pesticide exposure modeling and risk assessment.

There is a regulatory need for crop development dates to assess current default values used within chemical exposure assessments as well as to justify refinements within risk assessments. However, a readily available pan-European crop phenology database covering key FOrum for the Co-ordination of pesticide fate models and their USe (FOCUS) crops and scenarios to meet this need is not currently available. Therefore, we describe the development of a harmonized, pan-European, CropLife Europe Crop Development Database (C2D2), that is fully aligned with this regulatory requirement utilizing efficacy trials data generated for regulatory submissions when registering plant protection products under Regulation (EU)1107/2009. Evaluation of C2D2 against an independent data set showed good agreement for equivalent time periods, crop growth stages, and geographical regions. We illustrate how this database can be used to evaluate existing default crop development dates mandated by regulatory agencies for use within exposure assessments. Despite the large data set compiled and the geographical coverage of C2D2, not all FOCUSsw/gw scenarios have sufficient data to facilitate comparison, with less significant scenarios, like FOCUSgw Porto, being underrepresented. For those scenarios with sufficient data, clear differences between C2D2 and crop development dates assumed in the FOCUS modeling framework (using the AppDate tool) are often indicated over many growth stages, suggesting that amendment of the existing representation of crop development within the risk assessment process may be required. C2D2 is freely available under a Creative Commons license to facilitate innovation in exposure science to allow for more accurate and realistic risk assessment leading to enhanced crop and environmental protection. Integr Environ Assess Manag 2023;00:1-15. © 2023 CropLife Europe (Corteva Agriscience) and The Authors. Integrated Environmental Assessment and Management published by Wiley Periodicals LLC on behalf of Society of Environmental Toxicology & Chemistry (SETAC).

Provenance of Aerosol Black Carbon over Northeast Indian Ocean and South China Sea and Implications for Oceanic Black Carbon Cycling.

Aerosol black carbon (BC) is a short-lived climate pollutant. The poorly constrained provenance of tropical marine aerosol BC hinders the mechanistic understanding of extreme climate events and oceanic carbon cycling. Here, we collected PM2.5 samples during research cruise NORC2016-10 through South China Sea (SCS) and Northeast Indian Ocean (NEIO) and measured the dual-carbon isotope compositions (δ13C-Δ14C) of BC using hydrogen pyrolysis technique. Aerosol BC exhibits six different δ13C-Δ14C isotopic spaces (i.e., isotope provinces). Liquid fossil fuel combustion, from shipping emissions and adjacent land, is the predominant source of BC over isotope provinces "SCS close to Chinese Mainland" (53.5%), "Malacca Strait" (53.4%), and "Open NEIO" (40.7%). C3 biomass burning is the major contributor to BC over isotope provinces "NEIO close to Southeast Asia" (55.8%), "Open NEIO" (41.3%), and "Open SCS" (40.0%). Coal combustion and C4 biomass burning show higher contributions to BC over "Sunda Strait" and "Open SCS" than the others. Overall, NEIO near the Bay of Bengal, Malacca Strait, and north SCS are three hot spots of fossil fuel-derived BC; the first two areas are also hot spots of biomass-derived BC. The comparable δ13C-Δ14C between BC in aerosol and dissolved BC in surface seawater may suggest atmospheric BC deposition as a potential source of oceanic dissolved BC.

Mandan, Hidatsa, and Arikara Nation Perspectives on Rez Dogs on the Fort Berthold Reservation in North Dakota, U.S.A.

The research on the relationships between free-roaming dogs, also referred to as reservation dogs or rez dogs, and Indigenous communities is extremely limited. This study aimed to document the cultural significance of rez dogs, challenges related to rez dogs, and community-specific solutions for rez dog issues affecting community health and safety from members of the Mandan, Hidatsa, and Arikara (MHA) Nation, also referred to as the Three Affiliated Tribes (TAT), who live on the Fort Berthold reservation in North Dakota, U.S.A. One hour semi-structured interviews with 14 community members of the MHA Nation were conducted in 2016. The interviews were analyzed via systematic and inductive coding using Gadamer's hermeneutical phenomenology. The primary intervention areas described by the participants included: culturally relevant information sharing, improved animal control policies and practices, and improved access to veterinary care and other animal services.

A Shelf Stable Fmoc Hydrazine Resin for the Synthesis of Peptide Hydrazides.

C-terminal hydrazides are an important class of synthetic peptides with an ever expanding scope of applications, but their widespread application for chemical protein synthesis has been hampered due to the lack of stable resin linkers for synthesis of longer and more challenging peptide hydrazide fragments. We present a practical method for the regeneration, loading, and storage of trityl-chloride resins for the production of hydrazide containing peptides, leveraging 9-fluorenylmethyl carbazate. We show that these resins are extremely stable under several common resin storage conditions. The application of these resins to solid phase peptide synthesis (SPPS) is demonstrated through the synthesis of the 40-mer GLP-1R agonist peptide "P5". These studies support the broad utility of Fmoc-NHNH-Trt resins for SPPS of C-terminal hydrazide peptides.

Promising Findings that the Cultivating Healthy Intentional Mindful Educators' Program (CHIME) Strengthens Early Childhood Teachers' Emotional Resources: An Iterative Study.

Findings suggest that an eight-week mindfulness compassion-based program, Cultivating Healthy Intentional Mindful Educators (CHIME), is a feasible professional development intervention for early childhood (EC) teachers to support their emotion regulation and psychological and workplace well-being. We offer preliminary evidence that learning about mindfulness, self-compassion, and social-emotional learning supports EC teachers in strengthening their knowledge and application of practices to be more mindful and less emotionally reactive and emotionally exhausted at work. In analyzing both EC teacher feedback and survey data from two pilot studies, there was promising evidence that participating in CHIME enhanced awareness of emotions and the development of strategies to manage emotions. As CHIME is further developed and refined it will be integral to have collaborative engagement and participation from EC teachers and programs to ensure that learning these practices are relevant, helpful, meaningful, and sustainable.

Indigenous impacts on north Australian savanna fire regimes over the Holocene.

Fire is an essential component of tropical savannas, driving key ecological feedbacks and functions. Indigenous manipulation of fire has been practiced for tens of millennia in Australian savannas, and there is a renewed interest in understanding the effects of anthropogenic burning on savanna systems. However, separating the impacts of natural and human fire regimes on millennial timescales remains difficult. Here we show using palynological and isotope geochemical proxy records from a rare permanent water body in Northern Australia that vegetation, climate, and fire dynamics were intimately linked over the early to mid-Holocene. As the El Niño/Southern Oscillation (ENSO) intensified during the late Holocene, a decoupling occurred between fire intensity and frequency, landscape vegetation, and the source of vegetation burnt. We infer from this decoupling, that indigenous fire management began or intensified at around 3 cal kyr BP, possibly as a response to ENSO related climate variability. Indigenous fire management reduced fire intensity and targeted understory tropical grasses, enabling woody thickening to continue in a drying climate.

Using charcoal, ATR FTIR and chemometrics to model the intensity of pyrolysis: Exploratory steps towards characterising fire events.

This study describes a multivariate statistical model (derived using partial least squares regression, PLS-R) that derives charring intensity (reaction temperature and duration) from the attenuated total reflectance (ATR) Fourier Transform Infrared (FTIR) spectra of charcoal. Data for the model was obtained from a library of charcoal samples produced under laboratory conditions at charring intensities (CI) relevant to wildfires and a series of feedstocks representing common tree species collected from Australia. The PLS-R model developed reveals the potential of FTIR to determine the charring intensity of charcoal. Though limited by the differences between laboratory-produced charcoal and the more heterogeneous and less-structured charcoal produced in a wildfire, the method was tested against fossil charcoal from a well-dated sediment core collected from Thirlmere Lakes National Park, Australia and showed a distinct change in CI that can be related to other climatic and environmental proxies. We suggest that the method has the potential to offer insights into the conditions under which natural charcoal is formed including the modelling of charring intensities of fossil charcoal samples isolated from sediments, archaeological applications or characterisation of contemporary fire events from charcoal in soils.

A global carbon and nitrogen isotope perspective on modern and ancient human diet.

Stable carbon and nitrogen isotope analyses are widely used to infer diet and mobility in ancient and modern human populations, potentially providing a means to situate humans in global food webs. We collated 13,666 globally distributed analyses of ancient and modern human collagen and keratin samples. We converted all data to a common "Modern Diet Equivalent" reference frame to enable direct comparison among modern human diets, human diets prior to the advent of industrial agriculture, and the natural environment. This approach reveals a broad diet prior to industrialized agriculture and continued in modern subsistence populations, consistent with the human ability to consume opportunistically as extreme omnivores within complex natural food webs and across multiple trophic levels in every terrestrial and many marine ecosystems on the planet. In stark contrast, isotope dietary breadth across modern nonsubsistence populations has compressed by two-thirds as a result of the rise of industrialized agriculture and animal husbandry practices and the globalization of food distribution networks.

Landscape rules predict optimal superhighways for the first peopling of Sahul.

Archaeological data and demographic modelling suggest that the peopling of Sahul required substantial populations, occurred rapidly within a few thousand years and encompassed environments ranging from hyper-arid deserts to temperate uplands and tropical rainforests. How this migration occurred and how humans responded to the physical environments they encountered have, however, remained largely speculative. By constructing a high-resolution digital elevation model for Sahul and coupling it with fine-scale viewshed analysis of landscape prominence, least-cost pedestrian travel modelling and high-performance computing, we create over 125 billion potential migratory pathways, whereby the most parsimonious routes traversed emerge. Our analysis revealed several major pathways-superhighways-transecting the continent, that we evaluated using archaeological data. These results suggest that the earliest Australian ancestors adopted a set of fundamental rules shaped by physiological capacity, attraction to visually prominent landscape features and freshwater distribution to maximize survival, even without previous experience of the landscapes they encountered.

Prediction of Anaerobic Power From Standing Long Jump in NCAA Division IA Football Players.

ABSTRACT: Mann, JB, Bird, M, Signorile, JF, Brechue, WF, and Mayhew, JL. Prediction of anaerobic power from standing long jump in NCAA Division IA football players. J Strength Cond Res 35(6): 1542-1546, 2021-Despite the popularity of the standing long jump (SLJ), limited research has explored the estimation of power developed during this test. The purpose of this study was to determine SLJ power from jump distance and selected anthropometric measures in NCAA Division IA football players. Height (Ht), body mass (Wt), thigh length, and lower leg length (LL) were measured in 58 players, allowing calculation of leg ratios of thigh length·Ht-1, LL·Ht-1, and TL·SL-1. Players performed 2-3 maximal familiarization trials of SLJ followed by 2 maximal jumps from a 3-dimension force plate sampling at 1,000 Hz. Standing long jump distance (intraclass correlation coefficient [ICC] = 0.944) and power (ICC = 0.926) calculated from resultant force and velocity vectors were highly reliable. Standing Ht (r = 0.40), Wt (r = 0.36), lower leg length (r = 0.43), total leg length (thigh + LLs) (r = 0.38), and best SLJ (r = 0.52) were significantly related (p < 0.05) to peak power, but none accounted for more than 27% of the common variance. Step-wise multiple regression identified SLJ and body mass as the only significant variables necessary to predict peak power (Power [W] = 32.49·SLJ [cm] + 39.69·Wt [kg] - 7,608, R = 0.86, SEE = 488 W, CV% = 9.3%). Standing long jump contributed 56.8% to the known variance, whereas Wt contributed 43.2%. Thus, a combination of SLJ and Wt can be used to effectively estimate explosive power in Division IA college football players.

Stochastic models support rapid peopling of Late Pleistocene Sahul.

The peopling of Sahul (the combined continent of Australia and New Guinea) represents the earliest continental migration and settlement event of solely anatomically modern humans, but its patterns and ecological drivers remain largely conceptual in the current literature. We present an advanced stochastic-ecological model to test the relative support for scenarios describing where and when the first humans entered Sahul, and their most probable routes of early settlement. The model supports a dominant entry via the northwest Sahul Shelf first, potentially followed by a second entry through New Guinea, with initial entry most consistent with 50,000 or 75,000 years ago based on comparison with bias-corrected archaeological map layers. The model's emergent properties predict that peopling of the entire continent occurred rapidly across all ecological environments within 156-208 human generations (4368-5599 years) and at a plausible rate of 0.71-0.92 km year-1. More broadly, our methods and approaches can readily inform other global migration debates, with results supporting an exit of anatomically modern humans from Africa 63,000-90,000 years ago, and the peopling of Eurasia in as little as 12,000-15,000 years via inland routes.

Regulatory groundwater monitoring: Realistic residues of pinoxaden and metabolites at vulnerable locations.

A bespoke groundwater monitoring programme was designed to generate a database of pinoxaden and metabolite concentrations in shallow groundwater at agricultural locations across Europe. The data generated from this programme represent a higher tier refinement of modelled exposure estimates and provide realistic information on groundwater quality at vulnerable locations which will aid plant protection product (PPP) assessment in Europe in relation to Regulation (EC) No. 1107/2009. The Regulatory GeoPEARL_3.3.3 model developed by RIVM was used to estimate the vulnerability of cereal growing regions to leaching of two pinoxaden metabolites across the entire EU at a 1 km2 level using 20 years of daily weather data (MARS, EU JRC). Seventy sites located within the upper 50th percentile of leaching vulnerability from this modelling exercise, crop density and shallow groundwater were selected for monitoring groundwater. Retrospective and prospective pinoxaden product applications at candidate sites were recorded and these data used to place sites in the distribution for Europe. The 70 sites all fulfil the site assessment criteria and have no confining layers which may prevent or delay leaching. All sites equipped with groundwater wells had a minimum of two pinoxaden applications in the preceding four years to cereal crops. A total of 1326 samples were analysed from up to 90 down hydraulic gradient wells at 70 locations between June 2015 and July 2018. Results indicate that pinoxaden and pinoxaden metabolites are very unlikely to reach shallow groundwater at concentrations greater than 0.1 µg/L for relevant metabolites, or 10 µg/L for non-relevant metabolites, respectively (Sanco/221/2000-rev.10). Over 38 months of groundwater monitoring the annual average and 90th percentile for pinoxaden or its metabolites never exceeded 0.1 µg/L and it is proposed that these data infer that exposure to these metabolites is minimal.

Net landscape carbon balance of a tropical savanna: Relative importance of fire and aquatic export in offsetting terrestrial production.

The magnitude of the terrestrial carbon (C) sink may be overestimated globally due to the difficulty of accounting for all C losses across heterogeneous landscapes. More complete assessments of net landscape C balances (NLCB) are needed that integrate both emissions by fire and transfer to aquatic systems, two key loss pathways of terrestrial C. These pathways can be particularly significant in the wet-dry tropics, where fire plays a fundamental part in ecosystems and where intense rainfall and seasonal flooding can result in considerable aquatic C export (ΣFaq ). Here, we determined the NLCB of a lowland catchment (~140 km2 ) in tropical Australia over 2 years by evaluating net terrestrial productivity (NEP), fire-related C emissions and ΣFaq (comprising both downstream transport and gaseous evasion) for the two main landscape components, that is, savanna woodland and seasonal wetlands. We found that the catchment was a large C sink (NLCB 334 Mg C km-2  year-1 ), and that savanna and wetland areas contributed 84% and 16% to this sink, respectively. Annually, fire emissions (-56 Mg C km-2  year-1 ) and ΣFaq (-28 Mg C km-2  year-1 ) reduced NEP by 13% and 7%, respectively. Savanna burning shifted the catchment to a net C source for several months during the dry season, while ΣFaq significantly offset NEP during the wet season, with a disproportionate contribution by single major monsoonal events-up to 39% of annual ΣFaq was exported in one event. We hypothesize that wetter and hotter conditions in the wet-dry tropics in the future will increase ΣFaq and fire emissions, potentially further reducing the current C sink in the region. More long-term studies are needed to upscale this first NLCB estimate to less productive, yet hydrologically dynamic regions of the wet-dry tropics where our result indicating a significant C sink may not hold.

Molecular Decolonization: An Indigenous Microcosm Perspective of Planetary Health.

Indigenous peoples are resilient peoples with deep traditional knowledge and scientific thought spanning millennia. Global discourse on climate change however has identified Indigenous populations as being a highly vulnerable group due to the habitation in regions undergoing rapid change, and the disproportionate burden of morbidity and mortality already faced by this population. Therefore, the need for Indigenous self-determination and the formal recognition of Indigenous knowledges, including micro-level molecular and microbial knowledges, as a critical foundation for planetary health is in urgent need. Through the process of Indigenous decolonization, even at the smallest molecular scale, we define a method back to our original selves and therefore to our planetary origin story. Our health and well-being is directly reflected at the planetary scale, and we suggest, can be rooted through the concept of molecular decolonization, which through the English language emerged from the 'First 1000 Days Australia' and otherwise collectively synthesized globally. It is through our evolving understanding of decolonization at a molecular level, which many of our Indigenous cultural and healing practices subtly embody, that we are better able to translate the intricacies within the current Indigenous scientific worldview through Western forms of discourse.

Land transformation in tropical savannas preferentially decomposes newly added biomass, whether C3 or C4 derived.

As tropical savannas are undergoing rapid conversion to other land uses, native C3 -C4 vegetation mixtures are often transformed to C3 - or C4 -dominant systems, resulting in poorly understood changes to the soil carbon (C) cycle. Conventional models of the soil C cycle are based on assumptions that more labile components of the heterogenous soil organic C (SOC) pool decompose at faster rates. Meanwhile, previous work has suggested that the C4 -derived component of SOC is more labile than C3 -derived SOC. Here we report on long-term (18 months) soil incubations from native and transformed tropical savannas of northern Australia. We test the hypothesis that, regardless of the type of land conversion, the C4 component of SOC will be preferentially decomposed. We measured changes in the SOC and pyrogenic carbon (PyC) pools, as well as the carbon isotope composition of SOC, PyC and respired CO2 , from 63 soil cores collected intact from different land use change scenarios. Our results show that land use change had no consistent effect on the size of the SOC pool, but strong effects on SOC decomposition rates, with slower decomposition rates at C4 -invaded sites. While we confirm that native savanna soils preferentially decomposed C4 -derived SOC, we also show that transformed savanna soils preferentially decomposed the newly added pool of labile SOC, regardless of whether it was C4 -derived (grass) or C3 -derived (forestry) biomass. Furthermore, we provide evidence that in these fire-prone landscapes, the nature of the PyC pool can shed light on past vegetation composition: while the PyC pool in C4 -dominant sites was mainly derived from C3 biomass, PyC in C3-dominant sites and native savannas was mainly derived from C4 biomass. We develop a framework to systematically assess the effects of recent land use change vs. prior vegetation composition.

Author Correction: Savanna in equatorial Borneo during the late Pleistocene.

An amendment to this paper has been published and can be accessed via a link at the top of the paper.

Early Last Interglacial ocean warming drove substantial ice mass loss from Antarctica.

The future response of the Antarctic ice sheet to rising temperatures remains highly uncertain. A useful period for assessing the sensitivity of Antarctica to warming is the Last Interglacial (LIG) (129 to 116 ky), which experienced warmer polar temperatures and higher global mean sea level (GMSL) (+6 to 9 m) relative to present day. LIG sea level cannot be fully explained by Greenland Ice Sheet melt (∼2 m), ocean thermal expansion, and melting mountain glaciers (∼1 m), suggesting substantial Antarctic mass loss was initiated by warming of Southern Ocean waters, resulting from a weakening Atlantic meridional overturning circulation in response to North Atlantic surface freshening. Here, we report a blue-ice record of ice sheet and environmental change from the Weddell Sea Embayment at the periphery of the marine-based West Antarctic Ice Sheet (WAIS), which is underlain by major methane hydrate reserves. Constrained by a widespread volcanic horizon and supported by ancient microbial DNA analyses, we provide evidence for substantial mass loss across the Weddell Sea Embayment during the LIG, most likely driven by ocean warming and associated with destabilization of subglacial hydrates. Ice sheet modeling supports this interpretation and suggests that millennial-scale warming of the Southern Ocean could have triggered a multimeter rise in global sea levels. Our data indicate that Antarctica is highly vulnerable to projected increases in ocean temperatures and may drive ice-climate feedbacks that further amplify warming.

Biochar-based fertilizer: Supercharging root membrane potential and biomass yield of rice.

Biochar-based compound fertilizers (BCF) and amendments have proven to enhance crop yields and modify soil properties (pH, nutrients, organic matter, structure etc.) and are now in commercial production in China. While there is a good understanding of the changes in soil properties following biochar addition, the interactions within the rhizosphere remain largely unstudied, with benefits to yield observed beyond the changes in soil properties alone. We investigated the rhizosphere interactions following the addition of an activated wheat straw BCF at an application rates of 0.25% (g·g-1 soil), which could potentially explain the increase of plant biomass (by 67%), herbage N (by 40%) and P (by 46%) uptake in the rice plants grown in the BCF-treated soil, compared to the rice plants grown in the soil with conventional fertilizer alone. Examination of the roots revealed that micron and submicron-sized biochar were embedded in the plaque layer. BCF increased soil Eh by 85 mV and increased the potential difference between the rhizosphere soil and the root membrane by 65 mV. This increased potential difference lowered the free energy required for root nutrient accumulation, potentially explaining greater plant nutrient content and biomass. We also demonstrate an increased abundance of plant-growth promoting bacteria and fungi in the rhizosphere. We suggest that the redox properties of the biochar cause major changes in electron status of rhizosphere soils that drive the observed agronomic benefits.

A rapid throughput technique to isolate pyrogenic carbon by hydrogen pyrolysis for stable isotope and radiocarbon analysis.

RATIONALE: Rapid, reliable isolation of pyrogenic carbon (PyC; also known as char, soot, black carbon, or biochar) for the determination of stable carbon isotope (δ13 C) composition and radiocarbon (14 C) dating is needed across multiple fields of research in geoscience, environmental science and archaeology. Many current techniques do not provide reliable isolation from contaminating organics and/or are relatively time-consuming. Hydrogen pyrolysis (HyPy) does provide reliable isolation of PyC, but the current methodology is time consuming. METHODS: We explored the potential for subjecting multiple samples to HyPy analysis by placing up to nine individual samples in custom-designed borosilicate sample vessels in a single reactor run. We tested for cross-contamination between samples in the same run using materials with highly divergent radiocarbon activities (~0.04-116.3 pMC), δ13 C values (-11.9 to -26.5‰) and labile carbon content. We determined 14 C/13 C using accelerator mass spectrometry and δ13 C values using an elemental analyser coupled to a continuous flow isotope ratio mass spectrometer. RESULTS: Very small but measurable transfer between samples of highly divergent isotope composition was detectable. For samples having a similar composition, this cross-contamination is considered negligible with respect to measurement uncertainty. For samples having divergent composition, we found that placing a sample vessel loaded with silica mesh adsorbent between samples eliminated measurable cross-contamination in all cases for both 14 C/13 C and δ13 C values. CONCLUSIONS: It is possible to subject up to seven samples to HyPy in the same reactor run for the determination of radiocarbon content and δ13 C value without diminishing the precision or accuracy of the results. This approach enables an increase in sample throughput of 300-600%. HyPy process background values are consistently lower than the nominal laboratory process background for quartz tube combustion in the NERC Radiocarbon Laboratory, indicating that HyPy may also be advantageous as a relatively 'clean' radiocarbon pre-treatment method.