Landscape fires disproportionally affect high conservation value temperate peatlands, meadows, and deciduous forests, but only under low moisture conditions.

Landscape fires are a natural component of the Earth System. However, they are of growing global concern due to climate change exacerbating their multiple impacts on biodiversity, ecosystems, carbon storage, human health, economies, and wider society. Temperate regions are predicted to be at greatest risk of increasing fire activity due to climate change, where fires can seriously impact important ecosystems for biodiversity and carbon storage, such as peatlands and forests. There is insufficient literature on the background prevalence, distribution, and drivers of fires in these regions, especially within Europe, to assess and mitigate their risks. Using a global database of fire patches based on the MODIS FireCCI51 product, we address this knowledge gap by quantifying the current prevalence and size of fires in Polesia, a 150,000 km2 area comprising a mosaic of peatland, forest, and agricultural habitats in northern Ukraine and southern Belarus. Between 2001 and 2019, fires burned 31,062 km2 of land, and were most frequent in spring and autumn. Although most fires started in agricultural land, fires disproportionately affected natural and semi-natural land cover types, particularly in protected areas. Over one fifth of protected land burned. Coniferous forests were the most common land cover type in protected areas, but fires mostly occurred in meadows, open peatlands (especially fen and transition mires), and native deciduous forests. These land cover types were highly susceptible to fires under low soil moisture conditions, but the risk of fire was low under average or higher soil moisture conditions. Restoring and maintaining natural hydrological regimes could be an effective nature-based solution to increase the resilience of fire-vulnerable ecosystems and support global biodiversity and carbon storage commitments under the United Nations Framework Conventions on Climate Change and Convention on Biological Diversity.

N-alkylated linear heptamethine polyenes as potent non-azole leads against Candida albicans fungal infections.

In this study, eighteen heptamethine dyes were synthesised and their antifungal activities were evaluated against three clinically relevant yeast species.. The eighteen dyes were placed within classes based on their core subunit i.e. 2,3,3-trimethylindolenine (5a-f), 1,1,2-trimethyl-1H-benzo[e]indole (6a-f), or 2-methylbenzothiazole (7a-f). The results presented herein imply that the three families of cyanine dyes, in particular compounds 5a-f, show high potential as selective scaffolds to treat C. albicans infections. This opens up the opportunity for further optimisation and investigation of this class compounds for potential antifungal treatment.

Electroanalytical properties of chlorophenol red at disposable carbon electrodes: Implications for Escherichia coli detection.

The use of coliforms and Escherichia coli as indicator species for assessing the quality of water is well established and a large variety of methods based on ß-galactosidase (B-GAL) activity, inherent to the microbes within this classification, have arisen to enable their detection and enumeration. Chlorophenol red (CPR) is widely used as a chromogenic label, but its capacity for translation to electroanalytical devices has yet to be fully explored. The CPR moiety is capable of undergoing oxidation at carbon substrates (+0.7 V) giving rise to a variety of phenolic intermediates. Electrochemical, XPS and enzymatic techniques were employed to characterise the underpinning chemistry and the intermediate identified as a 1,2-quinone derivative in which the chlorine substituent is retained. The latter was found to accumulate at the electrode and, in contrast to the parent CPR, was found to be detected at a significantly less positive potential (+0.3 V). Bacterial hydrolysis of a CPR labelled substrate was demonstrated with the 1,2-quinone oxidation product found to accumulate at the electrode and detected using square wave voltammetry. Proof of concept for the efficacy of the alternative electrode pathway was established through the detection of E.coli after an incubation time of 2.5 h with no interference from the labelled substrates.

1,8-Substituted anthraquinones, anthrones and bianthrones as potential non-azole leads against fungal infections.

The synthesis of a variety of 1,8-substituted anthraquinones, anthrones and bianthrones and their potential as antifungal agents is evaluated. Preliminary screening against Schizosaccharomyces pombe (S. pombe), a fission yeast, and Saccharomyces cerevisiae (S. cerevisiae), a budding yeast, is reported. Both these yeast species demonstrate close homologue to a number of pathogenic fungi.