Hasil untuk "Environmental sciences"

N. L. Poff, J. Zimmerman

Brian L. Sullivan, Christopher Wood, Marshall J. Iliff et al.

J. Lehmann, S. Joseph

Y. Hautier, D. Tilman, F. Isbell et al.

S. Wunder

Xia Cao, Yang Jie, Ning Wang et al.

H. Ballard, Colin G. Dixon, Emily M. Harris

Abstract Citizen science by youth is rapidly expanding, but very little research has addressed the ways programs meet the dual goals of rigorous conservation science and environmental science education. We examined case studies of youth-focused community and citizen science (CCS) and analyzed the learning processes and outcomes, and stewardship activities for youth, as well as contributions to site and species management, each as conservation outcomes. Examining two programs (one coastal and one water quality monitoring) across multiple sites in the San Francisco Bay Area, CA, in- and out-of-school settings, we qualitatively analyzed in-depth observations and pre- and post-program interviews with youth and educators. First, we examined evidence from the programs' impacts on conservation in the form of contribution to site and species management. We found that youth work informed regional resource management and local habitat improvement. Second, we examined the youth participants' environmental science agency (ESA). ESA combines not only understanding of environmental science and inquiry practices, but also the youths' identification with those practices and their developing belief that the ecosystem is something on which they act. We found that youth developed different aspects of environmental science agency in each context. We identify three key CCS processes through which many of the youth developed ESA: ensuring rigorous data collection, disseminating scientific findings to authentic external audiences, and investigating complex social-ecological systems. Our findings suggest that when CCS programs for youth support these processes, they can foster youth participation in current conservation actions, and build their capacity for future conservation actions.

M. Cristescu, P. Hebert

The study of environmental DNA (eDNA) has the potential to revolutionize biodiversity science and conservation action by enabling the census of species on a global scale in near real time. To achieve this promise, technical challenges must be resolved. In this review, we explore the main uses of eDNA as well as the complexities introduced by its misuse. Current eDNA methods require refinement and improved calibration and validation along the entire workflow to lessen false positives/negatives. Moreover, there is great need for a better understanding of the “natural history” of eDNA—its origins, state, lifetime, and transportation—and for more detailed insights concerning the physical and ecological limitations of eDNA use. Although eDNA analysis can provide powerful information, particularly in freshwater and marine environments, its impact is likely to be less significant in terrestrial settings. The broad adoption of eDNA tools in conservation will largely depend on addressing current uncertainties in data interpretation.

Hao Zhang, Hao Zhang, Hao Zhang et al.

BackgroundHigh-altitude hypoxia disrupts intestinal homeostasis by impairing the epithelial barrier, triggering inflammation, and promoting microbial translocation. Berberine (BER), a natural isoquinoline alkaloid with antimicrobial and anti-inflammatory properties, has shown potential in protecting intestinal integrity; however, its efficacy under hypoxic conditions and its interaction with the gut microbiota remain unclear.MethodsA chronic hypoxia mouse model was used to investigate the protective effects of BER against intestinal injury. Microbiota dependency was assessed through antibiotic-mediated depletion and fecal microbiota transplantation (FMT), combined with 16S rRNA gene sequencing, metabolomics, and immune profiling. The functional role of a BER-responsive bacterium was validated by oral administration in antibiotic-treated mice.ResultsBER supplementation restored epithelial barrier integrity, including tight junctions, antimicrobial peptide expression, and goblet cell function, while reducing inflammation and epithelial apoptosis under hypoxic conditions. BER also reshaped gut microbial composition and network structure, accompanied by coordinated alterations in cecal metabolites, particularly purine metabolites and bile acids. Microbiota depletion abolished the protective effects of BER, whereas FMT from BER-treated donors recapitulated these effects, confirming a microbiota-dependent mechanism. Among BER-responsive taxa, Bacteroides thetaiotaomicron (B. thetaiotaomicron) emerged as a key effector, correlating with metabolite profiles and barrier integrity. Oral administration of B. thetaiotaomicron alone protected against hypoxia-induced intestinal injury, restoring mucin production and antimicrobial peptide expression, and attenuating inflammation and apoptosis. Mechanistically, both BER and B. thetaiotaomicron reactivated bile acid–FXR signaling and normalized intestinal immune homeostasis, including T-cell subset distribution.ConclusionThese findings demonstrate that BER protects against hypoxia-induced intestinal injury through microbiota-dependent metabolic and immune regulation. B. thetaiotaomicron acts as a central mediator of this protective effect, highlighting microbiota-targeted strategies as potential interventions for maintaining intestinal homeostasis under hypoxic stress.

Bingxue Zhao, Qi Zhang, Hui Huang

Modeling realistic pedestrian trajectories requires accounting for both social interactions and environmental context, yet most existing approaches largely emphasize social dynamics. We propose \textbf{EnvSocial-Diff}: a diffusion-based crowd simulation model informed by social physics and augmented with environmental conditioning and individual--group interaction. Our structured environmental conditioning module explicitly encodes obstacles, objects of interest, and lighting levels, providing interpretable signals that capture scene constraints and attractors. In parallel, the individual--group interaction module goes beyond individual-level modeling by capturing both fine-grained interpersonal relations and group-level conformity through a graph-based design. Experiments on multiple benchmark datasets demonstrate that EnvSocial-Diff outperforms the latest state-of-the-art methods, underscoring the importance of explicit environmental conditioning and multi-level social interaction for realistic crowd simulation. Code is here: https://github.com/zqyq/EnvSocial-Diff.

Hyeongju Mun, In-Hwan Jin, Sohyeong Kim et al.

We introduce LivingWorld, an interactive framework for generating 4D worlds with environmental dynamics from a single image. While recent advances in 3D scene generation enable large-scale environment creation, most approaches focus primarily on reconstructing static geometry, leaving scene-scale environmental dynamics such as clouds, water, or smoke largely unexplored. Modeling such dynamics is challenging because motion must remain coherent across an expanding scene while supporting low-latency user feedback. LivingWorld addresses this challenge by progressively constructing a globally coherent motion field as the scene expands. To maintain global consistency during expansion, we introduce a geometry-aware alignment module that resolves directional and scale ambiguities across views. We further represent motion using a compact hash-based motion field, enabling efficient querying and stable propagation of dynamics throughout the scene. This representation also supports bidirectional motion propagation during rendering, producing long and temporally coherent 4D sequences without relying on expensive video-based refinement. On a single RTX 5090 GPU, generating each new scene expansion step requires 9 seconds, followed by 3 seconds for motion alignment and motion field updates, enabling interactive 4D world generation with globally coherent environmental dynamics. Video demonstrations are available at cvsp-lab.github.io/LivingWorld.

Michael J. O. Pocock, J. Tweddle, J. Savage et al.

Citizen science—the involvement of volunteers in data collection, analysis and interpretation—simultaneously supports research and public engagement with science, and its profile is rapidly rising. Citizen science represents a diverse range of approaches, but until now this diversity has not been quantitatively explored. We conducted a systematic internet search and discovered 509 environmental and ecological citizen science projects. We scored each project for 32 attributes based on publicly obtainable information and used multiple factor analysis to summarise this variation to assess citizen science approaches. We found that projects varied according to their methodological approach from ‘mass participation’ (e.g. easy participation by anyone anywhere) to ‘systematic monitoring’ (e.g. trained volunteers repeatedly sampling at specific locations). They also varied in complexity from approaches that are ‘simple’ to those that are ‘elaborate’ (e.g. provide lots of support to gather rich, detailed datasets). There was a separate cluster of entirely computer-based projects but, in general, we found that the range of citizen science projects in ecology and the environment showed continuous variation and cannot be neatly categorised into distinct types of activity. While the diversity of projects begun in each time period (pre 1990, 1990–99, 2000–09 and 2010–13) has not increased, we found that projects tended to have become increasingly different from each other as time progressed (possibly due to changing opportunities, including technological innovation). Most projects were still active so consequently we found that the overall diversity of active projects (available for participation) increased as time progressed. Overall, understanding the landscape of citizen science in ecology and the environment (and its change over time) is valuable because it informs the comparative evaluation of the ‘success’ of different citizen science approaches. Comparative evaluation provides an evidence-base to inform the future development of citizen science activities.

Zhangxin Wang, M. Elimelech, Shihong Lin

I. Seguro, K. Vikström, K. Vikström et al.

<p>The balance between the uptake of CO<span class="inline-formula">₂</span> by phytoplankton photosynthesis and the production of CO<span class="inline-formula">₂</span> from prokaryoplankton, zooplankton and phytoplankton respiration controls how much carbon can be stored in the ocean and hence how much remains in the atmosphere to affect climate. Yet, despite its crucial role, knowledge on the respiration of plankton groups is severely limited because traditional methods cannot differentiate the respiration of constituent groups within the plankton community. The reduction of the iodonitrotetrazolium salt (INT) to formazan, which when converted to oxygen consumption (O<span class="inline-formula">₂</span>C) using an appropriate conversion equation, provides a proxy for both total and size fractionated plankton respiration. However, the method has not been thoroughly tested with prokaryoplankton. Here we present respiration rates, as O<span class="inline-formula">₂</span>C and formazan formation (INT<span class="inline-formula">_R</span>), for a wide range of relevant marine prokaryoplankton including the gammaproteobacteria <i>Halomonas venusta</i>, the alphaproteobacteria <i>Ruegeria pomeroyi</i> and <i>Candidatus Pelagibacter ubique</i> (SAR11), the actinobacteria <i>Agrococcus lahaulensis</i>, and the cyanobacteria <i>Synechococcus marinus</i> and <i>Prochlorococcus marinus</i>. All species imported and reduced INT, but the relationship between the rate of O<span class="inline-formula">₂</span>C and INT<span class="inline-formula">_R</span> was not constant between oligotrophs and copiotrophs. The range of measured O<span class="inline-formula">₂</span>C <span class="inline-formula"><math xmlns="http://www.w3.org/1998/Math/MathML" id="M9" display="inline" overflow="scroll" dspmath="mathml"><mo>/</mo></math><span><svg:svg xmlns:svg="http://www.w3.org/2000/svg" width="8pt" height="14pt" class="svg-formula" dspmath="mathimg" md5hash="880d1b22cfae9b4167ff115d05c6894c"><svg:image xmlns:xlink="http://www.w3.org/1999/xlink" xlink:href="bg-22-6225-2025-ie00001.svg" width="8pt" height="14pt" src="bg-22-6225-2025-ie00001.png"/></svg:svg></span></span> INT<span class="inline-formula">_R</span> conversion equations equates to an up to 40-fold difference in derived O<span class="inline-formula">₂</span>C. These results suggest that when using the INT method in natural waters, a constant O<span class="inline-formula">₂</span>C <span class="inline-formula"><math xmlns="http://www.w3.org/1998/Math/MathML" id="M13" display="inline" overflow="scroll" dspmath="mathml"><mo>/</mo></math><span><svg:svg xmlns:svg="http://www.w3.org/2000/svg" width="8pt" height="14pt" class="svg-formula" dspmath="mathimg" md5hash="8550e2e9970f84100ffbfa4da4f4f543"><svg:image xmlns:xlink="http://www.w3.org/1999/xlink" xlink:href="bg-22-6225-2025-ie00002.svg" width="8pt" height="14pt" src="bg-22-6225-2025-ie00002.png"/></svg:svg></span></span> INT<span class="inline-formula">_R</span> relationship cannot be assumed, but must be determined for each plankton community studied.</p>

Zaki Ahmed, Ali Al-Kifaie Abbas M.

Iron oxide (Fe₂O₃) nanoparticles demonstrate significant antibacterial properties combined with facile synthesis potential. This study examines the concentration-dependent antimicrobial effects against Escherichia coli and Staphylococcus aureus. Field emission scanning electron microscopy (FESEM) characterization reveals agglomerated, irregularly shaped nanoparticles with crystalline sizes ranging from 35.73 to 71.49 nm, exhibiting semi-spherical morphology. X-ray diffraction (XRD) analysis confirms polycrystalline structure with rectangular tetrahedral geometry. Antibacterial assessment shows pronounced inhibition zones, with E. coli exhibiting maximum sensitivity at 0.08 g nanoparticle concentration. The crystalline structure and morphological characteristics correlate with observed antimicrobial efficacy, suggesting structure-dependent biological activity. These findings highlight the potential of Fe₂O₃ nanoparticles as effective antimicrobial agents, with implications for biomedical and industrial applications.

Lihua Liu, Yi Chen, Mingli Xu

Executive accountability is increasingly viewed as a critical mechanism for improving corporate environmental performance, especially in state-owned enterprises (SOEs) that dominate high-emission sectors such as energy, infrastructure, and heavy industry. This study examines whether China's Accountability System for Irregular Operations and Investments (ASIOI) curbs environmental violations in SOEs. Exploiting the staggered regional implementation of ASIOI as a quasi-natural experiment, we find that the policy leads to a significant reduction in SOE environmental misconduct. Drawing on a criminology-based cost-benefit framework, we identify three underlying mechanisms: strengthened internal controls, increased green investment, and enhanced green innovation. Further analyses reveal that the deterrent effect of ASIOI is more pronounced in SOEs that exhibit weaker regulatory oversight and stronger incentives to commit violations. By focusing on politically embedded SOEs, this study shows how accountability mechanisms can catalyze proactive green transformation, enhancing the strategic role of public governance in sustainability transitions.

Jacob Morrison, Clara Na, Jared Fernandez et al.

As the performance of artificial intelligence systems has dramatically increased, so too has the environmental impact of creating these systems. While many model developers release estimates of the power consumption and carbon emissions from the final training runs for their latest models, there is comparatively little transparency into the impact of model development, hardware manufacturing, and total water usage throughout. In this work, we estimate the real-world environmental impact of developing a series of language models, ranging from 20 million to 13 billion active parameters, trained on up to 5.6 trillion tokens each. When accounting for hardware manufacturing, model development, and our final training runs, we find that our series of models released 493 metric tons of carbon emissions, equivalent to powering about 98 homes in the United States for one year, and consumed 2.769 million liters of water, equivalent to about 24.5 years of water usage by a person in the United States, even though our data center is extremely water-efficient. We measure and report the environmental impact of our model development; to the best of our knowledge we are the first to do so for LLMs, and we find that model development, the impact of which is generally not disclosed by most model developers, amounted to ~50% of that of training. By looking at detailed time series data for power consumption, we also find that power usage throughout training is not consistent, fluctuating between ~15% and ~85% of our hardware's maximum power draw, with negative implications for grid-scale planning as demand continues to grow. We close with a discussion on the continued difficulty of estimating the environmental impact of AI systems, and key takeaways for model developers and the public at large.

ATLAS Collaboration

ATLAS, a general-purpose experiment at the Large Hadron Collider (LHC), makes use of a large internationally-distributed computing infrastructure, including over $10^6$ TB of managed data on disk and tape and almost one million simultaneously running CPU cores. Upgrades for the High-Luminosity LHC (HL-LHC) will increase the required computing resources by a factor of 3-4 by the beginning of the 2030s, and by an order of magnitude before the conclusion of data taking at the beginning of the 2040s. These resources are spread over around 100 computing sites worldwide. Efforts are underway within the experiment to evaluate and mitigate various aspects of the environmental impact of the sites, with the additional long-term goal of making recommendations to the sites that will significantly reduce the total expected environmental impact in the HL-LHC era. These efforts take several forms: building awareness in the experiment community, adjusting aspects of the computing policy, and modifications of data center configurations, either in ways that take advantage of particular features of ATLAS workloads or in generic ways that reduce the environmental impact of the computing resources. This paper describes the ongoing investigations and approaches that have already provided useful and actionable outcomes.

Tabea Turrini, Daniel Dörler, Anett Richter et al.

Abstract Citizen science offers significant innovation potential in science, society and policy. To foster environmental and conservation goals, citizen science can (i) generate new knowledge, (ii) enhance awareness raising and facilitate in-depth learning as well as (iii) enable civic participation. Here, we investigate how these aims are realised in citizen science projects and assess needs and challenges for advancing citizen science and stimulating future initiatives. To this end, we conducted a quantitative, web-based survey with 143 experts from the environmental and educational sector in Germany, Austria and Switzerland. Our findings show that citizen science project managers pursue goals related to all three areas of potential impact. Interestingly, enabling civic participation was considered slightly less important in relation to generating new knowledge and creating learning opportunities. Different areas of necessary action emerge from our analysis. To fully realize the potential of citizen science for generating knowledge, priority should be given to enhance capacities to more effectively share research results with the scientific community through publication, also in scientific journals. Systematic evaluation is needed to gain a better understanding of citizen science learning outcomes, for which criteria need to be developed. Fostering project formats that allow participants to get involved in the whole research process – from posing the study question to implementing results – could enhance the transformative aspect of citizen science at a societal level. Important structural aspects that need to be addressed include adjustments in funding schemes, facilitation of communication between citizens and academia-based scientists, and offers for training, guidance and networking.

Hongyun Si, Jiangang Shi, Daizhong Tang et al.

Since the theory of planned behavior (TPB) was proposed by Ajzen in 1985, it has attracted extensive interest and been widely applied worldwide. Although an increasing number of studies have employed the TPB in the domain of environmental science, there have been no attempts to retrospectively analyze existing articles. The current study aimed to holistically understand the application status of the TPB in environmental science from a knowledge domain visualization perspective. A total of 531 journal articles were obtained through the Scopus database to perform a bibliometric analysis and content analysis. The results showed that waste management, green consumption, climate and environment, saving and conservation, and sustainable transportation are the primary research topics; the United States (U.S.), Mainland China, the United Kingdom (UK), and Malaysia are the most productive countries/regions. Moreover, the cross-disciplinary situations, main source journals, and key articles were revealed. Furthermore, the extended factors, integrated theories, major methods, specific groups, and control variables of environmental science research using the TPB were elaborated and integrated into a comprehensive application framework. Constructive criticisms were ultimately discussed. The findings contribute in several ways to help relevant researchers learn about the application of TPB to environmental science and provide new insights and holistic references for further research on environment-related behavior.