Hasil untuk "Physical geography"

Xinyuan Li, Samuel Bickel, Wisnu Adi Wicaksono et al.

Abstract Antibiotic resistance genes (ARGs) naturally serve ecological and adaptive functions in microorganisms, yet human activities have disrupted this balance, accelerating their enrichment and spread in the soil–plant system. As a key ARG transmission interface across One Health sectors, the soil–plant system warrants greater attention. This review synthesizes emerging evidence on the distribution and transmission of resistomes in the rhizosphere, phyllosphere, and endosphere, revealing the potential risk of soil–plant ARGs to human, animal, and plant health. However, major gaps remain, particularly in horizontal and vertical ARG transmission associated within the plant endosphere and across plant generations. Moreover, we summarize key factors shaping soil–plant ARG dynamics, including soil conditions, plant evolution and traits, and anthropogenic influences. Among these, climate change emerges as a global, long-term, and largely irreversible driver, altering soil properties, plant physiology, and microbial activity through drastic environmental shifts. We discuss the risks of climate-driven ARG dissemination and its broader ecological and agricultural implications. Addressing these challenges requires advanced monitoring methods, integrated data sources, and policy innovations. In this review, we highlight climate change as an emerging driver of ARG selection and dissemination, emphasizing its impact on soil–plant resistome and the need for future One Health research on climate-driven resistome shifts.

Shuitao Guo, Yingying Yao, Qiang Ji et al.

Study region: Yellow River Basin. Study focus: This study analyzes trends in groundwater storage (GWS) changes and their influencing factors in the Yellow River Basin (YRB) using GRACE satellite data and groundwater level measurements. The Soil-Water-Balance model was developed to simulate groundwater recharge (GWR), quantifying the discrepancies between GWS and GWR at the basin scale. Spatiotemporal changes in GWS and GWR are critical indicators for identifying regions at risk of depletion and evaluating groundwater sustainability. New hydrological insights for the region: The results indicate that between 2002 and 2022, the YRB experienced a reduction of 52.28 Gt in terrestrial water storage, with the GWS losing 77.02 Gt. Except for the significant increase in GWS in the source region, GWS decreased at a rate of 5.56 Gt/yr for entire basin. The annual GWR in the YRB was 103 mm/yr, showing a steady increase of 8.5 mm/decade. However, in the middle and lower reaches of the YRB, GWR failed to compensate for consumption. Approximately 73.71 % of the YRB area was identified as a groundwater risk zone. In the source region, natural factors such as precipitation and snowmelt are the primary drivers of groundwater changes. In contrast, afforestation and irrigation play key roles in the middle reaches, while agricultural is the dominant factor in the lower reaches.

Bernard Debarbieux

Elisabete Malafaia, Pedro Mocho, Fernando Escaso et al.

The first paleontological works on Mesozoic vertebrates from Portugal, carried out from the end of the 19th and the first half of the 20th century, provided the discovery of significant collections of vertebrate fossils. These collections are particularly relevant because they include several specimens collected from different regions of the Lusitanian Basin (some of the sites are currently inaccessible), whose fossil record is poorly known. Theropod remains are relatively scarce and generally consist of fragmentary material, mostly assigned to the megalosaurid Megalosaurus from the Middle Jurassic of England, the first dinosaur to be named and a “wastebasket” taxon used by many scientists to identify theropod material. The studied fossils mostly consist of isolated teeth and vertebrae collected from Upper Jurassic levels of the coastal region, with also some material from Lower and Upper Cretaceous strata from the central and northern sectors of the Lusitanian Basin. Here specimens attributed to Megalosaurus from different Portuguese institutions are reviewed and their taxonomic affinity and stratigraphic context are updated. Most specimens actually belong to different theropod groups, including several isolated teeth from different Upper Jurassic localities here assigned to Ceratosaurus, Torvosaurus, and Allosaurus, as well as an isolated tooth from the Lower Cretaceous that is attributed to an indeterminate allosauroid. Other theropod remains consist mostly of vertebral fragments of indeterminate avetheropods and allosauroids. Elements of other dinosaur groups are also represented, including a few vertebrae here referred to stegosaurians and iguanodontians, as well as a vertebra and some appendicular remains attributed to sauropods. Two vertebrae assigned to thalattosuchians were also identified. The study of this collection allows to better characterize the diversity of Late Jurassic dinosaur faunas from different areas of the Lusitanian Basin and provides some data on the poorly known Cretaceous fossil record of theropods from Portugal.

Bingnan Yang, Mi Zhang, Zhili Zhang et al.

With the advancements of deep learning methodologies, there have been significant strides in automating vector extraction. However, existing methods are often tailored to specific classes and are susceptible to the category variability, especially in the case of line and polygon shape objects. In this study, we propose UniVecMapper, a universal model designed to extract directional topological graphs of targets from remote sensing images, regardless of their classes. Initially, UniVecMapper leverages a topology-concentrated node detector (TNCD) to identify nodes of targets and wraps local features. Subsequently, a directional graph (DiG) generator is employed to predict the adjacency matrix of the detected nodes. To facilitate the learning of the DiG generator, we introduce a strategy namely perturbed graph supervision (PGS), which dynamically generates adjacency matrix labels based on unordered detected nodes. Comprehensive experiments conducted on the Inria, Massachusetts, and GID datasets demonstrated UniVecMapper’s universal and competitive performance in thematic vector graph extraction. Further evaluations on the multi-class polygon-shaped dataset LandCover.ai verified that UniVecMapper achieved state-of-the-art (SOTA) performance and can easily extend to multi-class tasks.

Martin Pickford, Christian De Muizon

Re-interpretation of the holotype and only known speci-men of Afrophoca libyca reveals that it represents a me-dium -sized anthracothere, Afromeryx zelteni, a species that is common in the basal Middle Miocene deposits at Gebel Zelten, Libya. This re-identification affects several recently published papers that have accepted it as the earliest known phocid, with repercussions on biogeographic scenarios and phylogeny reconstructions.

Maryam Aryasadr, Dariush Rahimi, Mehran Zand et al.

Global warming, human activities, and increased water demand have led to a decrease in the resilience of the environment. Their effects in dry climates like Iran lead to the reduction of surface water and a water table drop. To evaluate the adaptation strategy for water resources with climate change, the Cham Anjir watershed  was selected in the west of Iran. The geostatistical techniques are applied here. In this study, to detect climate change in the Cham Anjir watershed , hydrological-climatic data from 1991 to 2020 were used, and to adapt to climate change, a researcher-constructed questionnaire was employed. The results showed that annual temperature has increased. Long-term droughts have led to a decrease of available water. The local community has a correct understanding of climate change and its effects. Weak financial resources, lack of proper agricultural insurance support, weak training and technical consulting activities, lack of access to new technologies, and administrative bureaucracy are the most important obstacles to adaptation to climate change. Climate change adaptation programs include measures to meet essential needs, provide financial resources (short-term), improve irrigation and increase productivity (mid-term), and diversify economic activities (long-term) emphasized and accepted by the local community. The findings showed that the difference between local communities and technical experts with government experts is the most important obstacle in adapting strategies to climate change. Therefore, correcting the views of farmers and farm technicians with public sector experts is crucial for the success of climate change adaptation measures.

Elena V. Petrova, Artyom V. Gusarov, Achim A. Beylich

Buried river valleys from the Neogene–Quaternary time are widespread throughout the Middle Volga region of the Russian Plain. They have been studied for a long period, since the 1940s, with the last major generalizations dating back to the 1980s. This paper presents new results based on GIS mapping using materials from the state geological study of the region in 1960–1970, 1984–1996 and 2000–2002. On the whole, the pattern of the buried valley network is close to the modern valley network of the region. During the Quaternary, the right-sided displacement of the valley incisions prevailed. The incisions of modern river valleys are located above the Neogene (pre-Akchagyl) incisions almost throughout the entire territory. The vertical displacement amplitude ranges from 30 to 200 m. The morphometric characteristics of the paleovalleys (the depth and width of the incisions, as well as the gradients of the bottoms of the paleovalleys) exceeded modern ones. The maximum values were typical for the middle Paleo-Volga valley: the width of the valley reached 10 km, the incision depth was−201.4 m below sea level and the bottom gradient was 0.9–5.0 m/km. The most important factor that influenced the position of paleovalleys and their morphological appearance was fluctuations in the level of the Caspian paleowaterbody. According to this study, the development of paleovalleys began in the Miocene and ended in the Early Quaternary. The alluvial–lacustrine type of sedimentation was predominant. The results of this work contribute to the study of the paleogeography of the Cenozoic of the southeast of the Russian Plain.

Bo Li, Cheng Liu, Qihou Hu et al.

Limitations in the current capability of monitoring PM_2.5 adversely impact air quality management and health risk assessment of PM_2.5 exposure. Commonly, ground-based monitoring networks are established to measure the PM_2.5 concentrations in highly populated regions and protected areas such as national parks, yet large gaps exist in spatial coverage. Satellite-derived aerosol optical properties serve to complement the missing spatial information of ground-based monitoring networks. However, satellite remote sensing AODs are hampered under cloudy/hazy conditions or during nighttime. Here we strive to overcome the long-standing restriction that surface PM_2.5 cannot be obtained with satellite remote sensing under cloudy/hazy conditions or during nighttime. In this work, we introduce a deep spatiotemporal neural network (ST-NN) and demonstrate that it can artfully fill these observational gaps. We quantified the quantitative impact of input variables on the results using sensitivity and visual analysis of the model. This technique provides ground-level PM_2.5 concentrations with a high spatial resolution (0.01°) and 24-h temporal coverage, hour-by-hour, complete coverage. In central and eastern China, the 10-fold cross-validation results show that R² is between 0.8 and 0.9, and RMSE is between 6 and 26 (µg m⁻³). The relative error varies in different concentration ranges and is generally less than 20%. Better constrained spatiotemporal distributions of PM_2.5 concentrations will contribute to improving health effects studies, atmospheric emission estimates, and air quality predictions.

Ilaria Pretelli, Monique Borgerhoff Mulder, Richard McElreath

Humans live in diverse, complex niches where survival and reproduction are conditional on the acquisition of knowledge. Humans also have long childhoods, spending more than a decade before they become net producers. Whether the time needed to learn has been a selective force in the evolution of long human childhood is unclear, because there is little comparative data on the growth of ecological knowledge throughout childhood. We measured ecological knowledge at different ages in Pemba, Zanzibar (Tanzania), interviewing 93 children and teenagers between 4 and 26 years. We developed Bayesian latent-trait models to estimate individual knowledge and its association with age, activities, household family structure and education. In the studied population, children learn during the whole pre-reproductive period, but at varying rates, with the fastest increases in young children. Sex differences appear during middle childhood and are mediated by participation in different activities. In addition to providing a detailed empirical investigation of the relationship between knowledge acquisition and childhood, this study develops and documents computational improvements to the modelling of knowledge development.

Jingxian Wei, Wenze Yue, Mengmeng Li et al.

Human perception of urban landscape, which signifies to what extent urban landscape is appreciated by local dwellers, informs human-oriented policies that reinforce public participation. Yet, conventional studies on human perception of urban landscape are largely dependent on individual experience, which may restrict the co-production of knowledge that can be operationalized across spatial scales and sectors. In this study, we mapped human perception of urban landscape in Shanghai by leveraging an advanced deep-learning approach and street-view images. Specifically, the ResNet50 model was employed to map four critical perceptions, i.e., security, depression, vitality, and aesthetic, at parcel level. We further explored the relationship between human perception and land-use types. Our results show that highly urbanized area (Puxi district encompassed by the Inner Ring Road) is perceived as more secure and vital, but more depressing. Besides, human perception varies substantially across different land-use types, among which administrative and service land is favored with regard to all the four perception types. This study advances our understanding of urban landscape through the lens of human perception, and provides nuanced insights into steering human settlement towards sustainability by strategically promoting mixed land use.

A. B. Harper, A. B. Harper, K. E. Williams et al.

<p>Drought is predicted to increase in the future due to climate change, bringing with it myriad impacts on ecosystems. Plants respond to drier soils by reducing stomatal conductance in order to conserve water and avoid hydraulic damage. Despite the importance of plant drought responses for the global carbon cycle and local and regional climate feedbacks, land surface models are unable to capture observed plant responses to soil moisture stress. We assessed the impact of soil moisture stress on simulated gross primary productivity (GPP) and latent energy flux (LE) in the Joint UK Land Environment Simulator (JULES) vn4.9 on seasonal and annual timescales and evaluated 10 different representations of soil moisture stress in the model. For the default configuration, GPP was more realistic in temperate biome sites than in the tropics or high-latitude (cold-region) sites, while LE was best simulated in temperate and high-latitude (cold) sites. Errors that were not due to soil moisture stress, possibly linked to phenology, contributed to model biases for GPP in tropical savanna and deciduous forest sites. We found that three alternative approaches to calculating soil moisture stress produced more realistic results than the default parameterization for most biomes and climates. All of these involved increasing the number of soil layers from 4 to 14 and the soil depth from 3.0 to 10.8 m. In addition, we found improvements when soil matric potential replaced volumetric water content in the stress equation (the “soil14_psi” experiments), when the critical threshold value for inducing soil moisture stress was reduced (“soil14_p0”), and when plants were able to access soil moisture in deeper soil layers (“soil14_dr*2”). For LE, the biases were highest in the default configuration in temperate mixed forests, with overestimation occurring during most of the year. At these sites, reducing soil moisture stress (with the new parameterizations mentioned above) increased LE and increased model biases but improved the simulated seasonal cycle and brought the monthly variance closer to the measured variance of LE. Further evaluation of the reason for the high bias in LE at many of the sites would enable improvements in both carbon and energy fluxes with new parameterizations for soil moisture stress. Increasing the soil depth and plant access to deep soil moisture improved many aspects of the simulations, and we recommend these settings in future work using JULES or as a general way to improve land surface carbon and water fluxes in other models. In addition, using soil matric potential presents the opportunity to include plant functional type-specific parameters to further improve modeled fluxes.</p>

Gilberto Pastorello, Carlo Trotta, Eleonora Canfora et al.

A Correction to this paper has been published: https://doi.org/10.1038/s41597-021-00851-9.

Christoph Schild, Ingo Zettler

Whereas voice pitch is strongly linked to people's perceptions in contexts of sexual selection, such as attractiveness and dominance, evidence that links voice pitch to actual behaviour or the formidability of a speaker is sparse and mixed. In this registered report, we investigated how male speakers’ voice pitch is linked to fighting success in a dataset comprising 135 (amateur) mixed martial arts and 189 (amateur) boxing fights. Based on the assumption that voice pitch is an honest signal of formidability, we expected lower voice pitch to be linked to higher fighting success. The results indicated no significant relation between a fighter's voice pitch, as directly measured before a fight, and successive fighting success in both mixed martial arts fighters and boxers.

O. Gureje, G. Simon, T. Ustun et al.

R. Cess, Minghua Zhang, P. Minnis et al.

FÁBIO GUIMARÃES OLIVA, Maria Augusta Martins da Silva

Resumo: Este artigo efetua monitoramento sistemático da hidrodinâmica das marés de sizígia e analisa o comportamento morfodinâmico de um ambiente costeiro de micromaré. Busca-se compreender como a dinâmica das marés pode gerar impactos em zonas costeiras e, assim, dar suporte à gestão destes ambientes. Foram realizados levantamentos de campo durante o inverno e a primavera na praia de Itacoatiara (Niterói/RJ) para a execução de perfis praiais e aferição dos alcances máximos das correntes de maré. O método baseou-se em Emery (1961) para a elaboração dos perfis topográficos que expressam as mudanças morfológicas exibidas pelo ambiente. Os dados apontaram consideráveis alcances máximos das correntes e comportamento morfodinâmico que resulta em significativas variações morfológicas que podem condicionar a atuação da hidrodinâmica das marés. A análise dos resultados mostra a relevância da dinâmica das marés e de suas interações com a topografia praial para o planejamento e a gestão integrada da zona costeira.

A. Noulas, S. Scellato, C. Mascolo et al.

Location-Based Social Networks (LBSN) present so far the most vivid realization of the convergence of the physical and virtual social planes. In this work we propose a novel approach on modeling human activity and geographical areas by means of place categories. We apply a spectral clustering algorithm on areas and users of two metropolitan cities on a dataset sourced from the most vibrant LBSN, Foursquare. Our methodology allows the identification of user communities that visit similar categories of places and the comparison of urban neighborhoods within and across cities. We demonstrate how semantic information attached to places could be plausibly used as a modeling interface for applications such as recommender systems and digital tourist guides.

Guangyu Pei, M. Gerla, X. Hong et al.

E. Cerin, E. Leslie, Lorinne du Toit et al.