Climate change effects on Black Sigatoka disease of banana

This is the final version. Available on open access from the Royal Society via the DOI in this record Data accessibility: JRA55 data are available from the Research Data Archive of the National Center for Atmospheric Research at https://rda.ucar.edu. SPAM crop distribution data area available from http://mapspam.info.Climate change has significantly altered species distributions in the wild and has the potential to affect the interactions between pests and diseases and their human, animal and plant hosts. While several studies have projected changes in disease distributions in the future, responses to historical climate change are poorly understood. Such analyses are required to dissect the relative contributions of climate change, host availability and dispersal to the emergence of pests and diseases. Here, we model the influence of climate change on the most damaging disease of a major tropical food plant, Black Sigatoka disease of banana. Black Sigatoka emerged from Asia in the late twentieth Century and has recently completed its invasion of Latin American and Caribbean banana-growing areas. We parametrize an infection model with published experimental data and drive the model with hourly microclimate data from a global climate reanalysis dataset. We define infection risk as the sum of the number of modelled hourly spore cohorts that infect a leaf over a time interval. The model shows that infection risk has increased by a median of 44.2% across banana-growing areas of Latin America and the Caribbean since the 1960s, due to increasing canopy wetness and improving temperature conditions for the pathogen. Thus, while increasing banana production and global trade have probably facilitated Black Sigatoka establishment and spread, climate change has made the region increasingly conducive for plant infection. This article is part of the theme issue 'Modelling infectious disease outbreaks in humans, animals and plants: approaches and important themes'. This issue is linked with the subsequent theme issue 'Modelling infectious disease outbreaks in humans, animals and plants: epidemic forecasting and control'.Biotechnology & Biological Sciences Research Council (BBSRC)European Union Horizon 202

Race, Gender and the Body in British Immigration Control: Subject to Examination

Evan Smith and Marinella Marmo’s new book, Race, Gender and the Body in British Immigration Control: Subject to Examination, finally gives full attention to a fascinating but often forgotten moment in the history of British immigration control: the virginity tests of South Asian migrants in the 1970s

Providing Family Centered Care Within Pediatric Integrated Care Settings

Parent engagement remains critical to pediatric care. Both pediatric medical and mental health care remains dependent upon parent/guardian engagement to support successful outcomes for children and adolescents. Efforts to enhance Family Centered Care (FCC) has been spotlighted within pediatric care since the 1950s and the inclusion of counselors within integrated behavior health (IBH) teams ushers a need for an evolved understanding of the implementation of FCC, including parent/guardian engagement across professional roles. Using an explanatory mixed-method design, I examined team implementation of Family Centered Care (FCC) among different provider types (e.g., physicians, nurses, licensed mental health providers, social workers, technicians) in a pediatric care setting. Results identified shared valuation of FCC and noted differences in delivery by professionals’ role type and care setting. Implications offer guidance for healthcare leadership, pediatric professionals, and counselor education programs to recognize strengths of FCC practices within multidisciplinary teams and invest in both program and counselor development within IBH settings

How does a company’s existing knowledge base result in radical innovation? An empirical study of Dutch companies in the life sciences and health-industry

The main objective of this thesis is to test how a company’s existing knowledge base results in radical innovation, proposing four behavioural process as mediators. Companies with broad knowledge seem to lack sufficient coordination to successfully complete an innovative process. This study proposes that combination and socialization are behavioural processes that could create new combinations of existing knowledge to detect new, unseen patterns to achieve radical innovation. Vice versa, the depth of knowledge could hinder a company, as it could mean that they lack the experience to tackle potential problems in the implementation phase. Furthermore, the depth of knowledge often leads to observational slowness. Therefore, externalization and internalization are proposed behavioural processes that serve as mediators to overcome these challenges and achieve radical innovation consequently. The conceptual model can be found below. These relationships are tested empirically on a sample of Dutch companies in the Life Sciences and Health Industry. The results and conclusions drawn from this study makes valuable contributions to both literature and practice. No significant mediating effect of internalization was found between a company’s deep knowledge base and radical innovation, nor the mediating effect of socialization between a company’s broad knowledge base and radical innovation. Nevertheless, significant results show that externalization partially mediates the relationship between a company’s deep knowledge base and radical innovation and combination mediates the relationship between company’s broad knowledge base and radical innovation. In conclusion, this study provides concrete behavioural processes to facilitate the relationship between a company’s knowledge base and the realization of radical innovation and offers a better understanding in this complex relationship

The policies of the state and targeting the poor in Egypt: Egypt\u27s transition to a welfare state?

Understanding who the poor are and what defines their level of deprivation is critical in the state\u27s responsibility to its citizens. This thesis looks at how the Egyptian State targets the poor through the narrative of poverty during the last sixty years. While the state has historically addressed this issue within the broader context of societal welfare, it has not always specifically targeted the marginalized and vulnerable groups. The Egyptian State has transitioned from authoritarian socialism, to a rentier economy, and then to a free market state without upsetting the status quo of the ruling bureaucracy and state agents. Recently, it has tried to become a more welfare-oriented regime, attempting to cater to a population without really progressing or acknowledging the problem of poverty. This thesis aims to shed light on a particular relationshipâ the social contract between the impoverished and the state. I do this by examining how the problem of poverty in Egypt came to the government toward this particular group of people in order to understand some of the broader processes of poverty reduction, welfare, and social protection in Egypt

Tropical protected areas reduced deforestation carbon emissions by one third from 2000-2012

This is the final version. Available on open access from Springer Nature via the DOI in this recordTropical deforestation is responsible for around one tenth of total anthropogenic carbon emissions, and tropical protected areas (PAs) that reduce deforestation can therefore play an important role in mitigating climate change and protecting biodiversity and ecosystem services. While the effectiveness of PAs in reducing deforestation has been estimated, the impact on global carbon emissions remains unquantified. Here we show that tropical PAs overall reduced deforestation carbon emissions by 4.88 Pg, or around 29%, between 2000 and 2012, when compared to expected rates of deforestation controlling for spatial variation in deforestation pressure. The largest contribution was from the tropical Americas (368.8 GgC y-1), followed by Asia (25.0 GgC y-1) and Africa (12.7 GgC y-1). Variation in PA effectiveness is largely driven by local factors affecting individual PAs, rather than designations assigned by governments

Modelling coffee leaf rust risk in Colombia with climate reanalysis data.

PublishedJournal ArticleThis is the final version of the article. Available from Royal Society via the DOI in this record.Many fungal plant diseases are strongly controlled by weather, and global climate change is thus likely to have affected fungal pathogen distributions and impacts. Modelling the response of plant diseases to climate change is hampered by the difficulty of estimating pathogen-relevant microclimatic variables from standard meteorological data. The availability of increasingly sophisticated high-resolution climate reanalyses may help overcome this challenge. We illustrate the use of climate reanalyses by testing the hypothesis that climate change increased the likelihood of the 2008-2011 outbreak of Coffee Leaf Rust (CLR, Hemileia vastatrix) in Colombia. We develop a model of germination and infection risk, and drive this model using estimates of leaf wetness duration and canopy temperature from the Japanese 55-Year Reanalysis (JRA-55). We model germination and infection as Weibull functions with different temperature optima, based upon existing experimental data. We find no evidence for an overall trend in disease risk in coffee-growing regions of Colombia from 1990 to 2015, therefore, we reject the climate change hypothesis. There was a significant elevation in predicted CLR infection risk from 2008 to 2011 compared with other years. JRA-55 data suggest a decrease in canopy surface water after 2008, which may have helped terminate the outbreak. The spatial resolution and accuracy of climate reanalyses are continually improving, increasing their utility for biological modelling. Confronting disease models with data requires not only accurate climate data, but also disease observations at high spatio-temporal resolution. Investment in monitoring, storage and accessibility of plant disease observation data are needed to match the quality of the climate data now available.This article is part of the themed issue 'Tackling emerging fungal threats to animal health, food security and ecosystem resilience'.We thank Gerry and Clemencia Brown for their sponsorship of A.D. S.G. acknowledges support from the University of Utrecht