Aggregate stability in soils cultivated with eucalyptus.

The objective of this work was to evaluate the aggregate stability of tropical soils under eucalyptus plantation and native vegetation, and assess the relationships between aggregate stability and some soil chemical and physical properties. Argisols, Cambisol, Latosols and Plinthosol within three eucalyptus-cultivated regions, in the states of Espírito Santo, Rio Grande do Sul and Minas Gerais, Brazil, were studied. For each region, soils under native vegetation were compared to those under minimum tillage with eucalyptus cultivation. The aggregate stability was measured using the high‑energy moisture characteristic (HEMC) technique, i.e., the moisture release curve at very low suctions. This method compares the resistance of aggregates to slaking on a relative scale from zero to one. Thus, the aggregate stability from different soils and management practices can be directly compared. The aggregate stability ratio was greater than 50% for all soils, which shows that the aggregate stability index is high, both in eucalyptus and native vegetation areas. This suggests that soil management adopted for eucalyptus cultivation does not substantially modify this property. In these soils, the aggregate stability ratio does not show a good relationship with clay or soil organic matter contents. However, soil organic matter shows a positive relationship with clay content and cation exchange capacity

Erodibilidade de latossolos no Vale do Rio Doce, região centro-leste do Estado de Minas Gerais.

A capacidade de um solo sofrer erosão hídrica, ou seja, a sua susceptibilidade à erosão pode ser obtida através do fator erodibilidade, o qual é um atributo intrínseco de cada solo. O objetivo deste trabalho foi determinar os valores de erodibilidade para um Latossolo Vermelho (LV) e um Latossolo Vermelho-Amarelo (LVA) no Vale do Rio Doce, região Centro-Leste do Estado de Minas Gerais. Foram utilizados dados de perdas de solo e água coletados durante o período de 2002 a 2008, em parcelas (4 x 24 m) instaladas no campo, sob chuva natural, em solo sem cobertura

Escoamento superficial e perdas de solo em florestas de eucalipto no Rio Grande do Sul, RS.

O presente estudo foi realizado em um Argissolo Vermelho localizado na sub-bacia hidrográfica do horto florestal Terra Dura, município de Eldorado do Sul, RS, com o objetivo de avaliar as perdas de solo e água por erosão hídrica em florestas de eucalipto plantadas em 2004 (FE1) e 2001 (FE2); floresta nativa (FN) e solo descoberto (SD). Os sedimentos foram coletados no período de 2006 a 2010, através de parcelas padrão

Perda de solo por erosão em decorrência da ação de adubação fosfatada corretiva sobre a estabilidade de agregados.

A aplicação de fósforo em solos brasileiros é uma prática frequente e tal operação pode afetar alguns atributos do solo. Assim, com o objetivo de avaliar os efeitos da fosfatagem na estabilidade de agregados e nas perdas de solo por erosão de um Latossolo Vermelho Acriférrico típico de Lavras (MG), foram aplicados, em duas parcelas de 72 m2, o equivalente a 450 kg ha-1 de P2O5 a lanço mais 180 kg ha-1 de P2O5 em linhas. A estabilidade de agregados foi determinada por ultra-som para classes de 7,93 a 4,76; 4,76 a 2,00; 2,00 a 1,00; 1,00 a 0,50; 0,50 a 0,25 e < 0,25 mm, e por peneiramento úmido para a fração de 7,93 a 4,76 mm. Também foi estimada a perda de solo por erosão com uso do sistema de pinos. A fosfatagem reduziu significativamente a estabilidade de agregados por peneiramento a úmido e por ultra-som para agregados maiores que 1 mm e aumentou as perdas de solo em 2,85 vezes. Agregados maiores que 2 mm apresentaram estabilidade 2,83 vezes menor com fosfatagem, o que pareceu influenciar as perdas de solo. A fosfatagem reduziu o ponto de efeito salino nulo e aumentou a densidade de cargas negativas, o que explicou os resultados obtidos

Innovative approach to address challenges and opportunities to conservation agriculture adoption in Brazilian agricultural frontier.

Brazilian agriculture is facing another expansion cycle to the Cerrado region, more specific in the Northeast. The first agriculture expansion cycle to the Midwest was in seventies encouraged and developed by Brazilian Government with farmers from southern and southeast Brazil, which were traditional small farmers with some experience, low budget and a remarkable determination. All of these efforts after 20 years resulted in an outstanding development of a part of the country with economy based on agribusiness (soybean, corn, cotton, livestock, poultry, swine, etc.). In late nineties, another cycle initiated in the Cerrado Northeastern region known as MATOPIBA (acronyms of Maranhão, Tocantins, Piauí, and Bahia states). Bahia and Maranhão were more pronounced and became very strong over time. Recently, basically in the last 5 years Tocantins and Piauí states started to increase agricultural production in high rates, reaching in Tocantins state a 30% increase of crop area per year and 34 % increase of total grain production per year and soybean is the major crop. Most of technologies developed in other Cerrado regions are not well adapted to MATOPIBA and a technology transfer is necessary to address conservation agriculture principles to farmers, agronomists, consultants and extension agents

IT-SNOW: a snow reanalysis for Italy blending modeling, in situ data, and satellite observations (2010-2021)

We present IT-SNOW, a serially complete and multi-year snow reanalysis for Italy (similar to 301 x 10(3) km(2)) - a transitional continental-to-Mediterranean region where snow plays an important but still poorly constrained societal and ecological role. IT-SNOW provides similar to 500 m daily maps of snow water equivalent (SWE), snow depth, bulk snow density, and liquid water content for the initial period 1 September 2010-31 August 2021, with future updates envisaged on a regular basis. As the output of an operational chain employed in real-world civil protection applications (S3M Italy), IT-SNOW ingests input data from thousands of automatic weather stations, snow-covered-area maps from Sentinel-2, MODIS (Moderate Resolution Imaging Spectroradiometer), and H SAF products, as well as maps of snow depth from the spatialization of over 350 on-the-ground snow depth sensors. Validation using Sentinel-1-based maps of snow depth and a variety of independent, in situ snow data from three focus regions (Aosta Valley, Lombardy, and Molise) show little to no mean bias compared to the former, and root mean square errors are of the typical order of 30-60 cm and 90-300 mm for in situ, measured snow depth and snow water equivalent, respectively. Estimates of peak SWE by IT-SNOW are also well correlated with annual streamflow at the closure section of 102 basins across Italy (0.87), with ratios between peak water volume in snow and annual streamflow that are in line with expectations for this mixed rain-snow region (22 % on average and 12 % median). Examples of use allowed us to estimate 13.70 +/- 4.9 Gm3 of water volume stored in snow across the Italian landscape at peak accumulation, which on average occurs on 4 March +/- 10 d. Nearly 52 % of the mean seasonal SWE is accumulated across the Po river basin, followed by the Adige river (23 %), and central Apennines (5 %). IT-SNOW is freely available at https://doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.7034956 (Avanzi et al., 2022b) and can contribute to better constraining the role of snow for seasonal to annual water resources - a crucial endeavor in a warming and drier climate

High-resolution satellite products improve hydrological modeling in northern Italy

Satellite-based Earth observations (EO) are an accurate and reliable data source for atmospheric and environmental science. Their increasing spatial and temporal resolutions, as well as the seamless availability over ungauged regions, make them appealing for hydrological modeling. This work shows recent advances in the use of high-resolution satellite-based EO data in hydrological modeling. In a set of six experiments, the distributed hydrological model Continuum is set up for the Po River basin (Italy) and forced, in turn, by satellite precipitation and evaporation, while satellite-derived soil moisture (SM) and snow depths are ingested into the model structure through a data-assimilation scheme. Further, satellite-based estimates of precipitation, evaporation, and river discharge are used for hydrological model calibration, and results are compared with those based on ground observations. Despite the high density of conventional ground measurements and the strong human influence in the focus region, all satellite products show strong potential for operational hydrological applications, with skillful estimates of river discharge throughout the model domain. Satellite-based evaporation and snow depths marginally improve (by 2 % and 4 %) the mean Kling–Gupta efficiency (KGE) at 27 river gauges, compared to a baseline simulation (KGEmean= 0.51) forced by high-quality conventional data. Precipitation has the largest impact on the model output, though the satellite data on average shows poorer skills compared to conventional data. Interestingly, a model calibration heavily relying on satellite data, as opposed to conventional data, provides a skillful reconstruction of river discharges, paving the way to fully satellite-driven hydrological applications.</p

TLR9 ligation in pancreatic stellate cells promotes tumorigenesis

Modulation of Toll-like receptor (TLR) signaling can have protective or protumorigenic effects on oncogenesis depending on the cancer subtype and on specific inflammatory elements within the tumor milieu. We found that TLR9 is widely expressed early during the course of pancreatic transformation and that TLR9 ligands are ubiquitous within the tumor microenvironment. TLR9 ligation markedly accelerates oncogenesis, whereas TLR9 deletion is protective. We show that TLR9 activation has distinct effects on the epithelial, inflammatory, and fibrogenic cellular subsets in pancreatic carcinoma and plays a central role in cross talk between these compartments. Specifically, TLR9 activation can induce proinflammatory signaling in transformed epithelial cells, but does not elicit oncogene expression or cancer cell proliferation. Conversely, TLR9 ligation induces pancreatic stellate cells (PSCs) to become fibrogenic and secrete chemokines that promote epithelial cell proliferation. TLR9-activated PSCs mediate their protumorigenic effects on the epithelial compartment via CCL11. Additionally, TLR9 has immune-suppressive effects in the tumor microenvironment (TME) via induction of regulatory T cell recruitment and myeloid-derived suppressor cell proliferation. Collectively, our work shows that TLR9 has protumorigenic effects in pancreatic carcinoma which are distinct from its influence in extrapancreatic malignancies and from the mechanistic effects of other TLRs on pancreatic oncogenesis

Alternative approach to the optimality of the threshold strategy for spectrally negative Levy processes

Consider the optimal dividend problem for an insurance company whose uncontrolled surplus precess evolves as a spectrally negative Levy process. We assume that dividends are paid to the shareholders according to admissible strategies whose dividend rate is bounded by a constant. The objective is to find a dividend policy so as to maximize the expected discounted value of dividends which are paid to the shareholders until the company is ruined. Kyprianou, Loeffen and Perez [28] have shown that a refraction strategy (also called threshold strategy) forms an optimal strategy under the condition that the Levy measure has a completely monotone density. In this paper, we propose an alternative approach to this optimal problem.Comment: 16 page