Losing sight of atmospheric sounds in televised nature documentary

The production of soundtracks for televised nature documentaries involves complexities in balancing the audience's sonic perceptions and emotions with audio content and scientific rigour. In addition, soundtracks need to be congruent with audience expectations and commercial imperatives. Popular televised nature documentaries often appear to be narrative melodramas with environmental soundscapes submerged by narration and music. This paper examines the correlations between perceptual agency, educational practices and production constraints with regards to sound production in nature documentaries. The purpose is a clarification surrounding the causative factors and results of the curious neglect for the sound of our natural world within an industry dedicated to the sensory portrayal of nature

A High-Quality Grapevine Downy Mildew Genome Assembly Reveals Rapidly Evolving and Lineage-Specific Putative Host Adaptation Genes

Downy mildews are obligate biotrophic oomycete pathogens that cause devastating plant diseases on economically important crops. Plasmopara viticola is the causal agent of grapevine downy mildew, a major disease in vineyards worldwide. We sequenced the genome of Pl. viticola with PacBio long reads and obtained a new 92.94 Mb assembly with high contiguity (359 scaffolds for a N50 of 706.5 kb) due to a better resolution of repeat regions. This assembly presented a high level of gene completeness, recovering 1,592 genes encoding secreted proteins involved in plant–pathogen interactions. Plasmopara viticola had a two-speed genome architecture, with secreted protein-encoding genes preferentially located in gene-sparse, repeat-rich regions and evolving rapidly, as indicated by pairwise dN/dS values. We also used short reads to assemble the genome of Plasmopara muralis, a closely related species infecting grape ivy (Parthenocissus tricuspidata). The lineage-specific proteins identified by comparative genomics analysis included a large proportion of RxLR cytoplasmic effectors and, more generally, genes with high dN/dS values. We identified 270 candidate genes under positive selection, including several genes encoding transporters and components of the RNA machinery potentially involved in host specialization. Finally, the Pl. viticola genome assembly generated here will allow the development of robust population genomics approaches for investigating the mechanisms involved in adaptation to biotic and abiotic selective pressures in this species

Chapitre 10 - Co-conception de changements techniques et organisationnels au sein des systèmes agricoles

Résumé. Les mutations en cours au sein de l’agriculture interrogent les travaux et les méthodes relatifs à la conception de systèmes agricoles innovants. Ce chapitre analyse la spécificité de cinq démarches de co-conception de systèmes techniques testées en France et dans différents pays d’Afrique et d’Amérique latine. Elles se basent sur des interactions fortes entre les acteurs impliqués dans ces démarches, facilitées par une diversité d’objets intermédiaires tels que la modélisation ou l’expérimentation agronomique en milieu paysan. Elles ont permis de produire des connaissances opérationnelles et scientifiques sur des changements techniques et leurs conditions de mise en œuvre à l’échelle de l’exploitation ainsi que sur les conditions institutionnelles favorables à l’émergence de nouveaux systèmes. Ces démarches mobilisent des compétences ne relevant pas seulement de l’agronomie. L’intégration de chercheurs relevant des sciences humaines s’avère centrale, en particulier pour analyser comment hybrider des connaissances multiples en vue d’accompagner l’innovation au sein des exploitations et des territoires

The quasi-universality of nestedness in the structure of quantitative plant-parasite interactions

Understanding the relationships between host range and pathogenicity for parasites, and between the efficiency and scope of immunity for hosts are essential to implement efficient disease control strategies. In the case of plant parasites, most studies have focused on describing qualitative interactions and a variety of genetic and evolutionary models has been proposed in this context. Although plant quantitative resistance benefits from advantages in terms of durability, we presently lack models that account for quantitative interactions between plants and their parasites and the evolution of these interactions. Nestedness and modularity are important features to unravel the overall structure of host-parasite interaction matrices. Here, we analysed these two features on 32 matrices of quantitative pathogenicity trait data gathered from 15 plant-parasite pathosystems consisting of either annual or perennial plants along with fungi or oomycetes, bacteria, nematodes, insects and viruses. The performance of several nestedness and modularity algorithms was evaluated through a simulation approach, which helped interpretation of the results. We observed significant modularity in only six of the 32 matrices, with two or three modules detected. For three of these matrices, modules could be related to resistance quantitative trait loci present in the host. In contrast, we found high and significant nestedness in 30 of the 32 matrices. Nestedness was linked to other properties of plant-parasite interactions. First, pathogenicity trait values were explained in majority by a parasite strain effect and a plant accession effect, with no parasite-plant interaction term. Second, correlations between the efficiency and scope of the resistance of plant genotypes, and between the host range breadth and pathogenicity level of parasite strains were overall positive. This latter result questions the efficiency of strategies based on the deployment of several genetically-differentiated cultivars of a given crop species in the case of quantitative plant immunity

A Roadmap for Using the UN Decade of Ocean Science for Sustainable Development in Support of Science, Policy, and Action

The health of the ocean, central to human well-being, has now reached a critical point. Most fish stocks are overexploited, climate change and increased dissolved carbon dioxide are changing ocean chemistry and disrupting species throughout food webs, and the fundamental capacity of the ocean to regulate the climate has been altered. However, key technical, organizational, and conceptual scientific barriers have prevented the identification of policy levers for sustainability and transformative action. Here, we recommend key strategies to address these challenges, including (1) stronger integration of sciences and (2) ocean-observing systems, (3) improved science-policy interfaces, (4) new partnerships supported by (5) a new ocean-climate finance system, and (6) improved ocean literacy and education to modify social norms and behaviors. Adopting these strategies could help establish ocean science as a key foundation of broader sustainability transformations

Innovation et développement dans les systèmes agricoles et alimentaires

L’innovation est souvent présentée comme l’un des principaux leviers pour promouvoir un développement plus durable et plus inclusif. Dans les domaines de l’agriculture et de l’alimentation, l’innovation est marquée par des spécificités liées à sa relation à la nature, mais aussi à la grande diversité d’acteurs concernés, depuis les agriculteurs jusqu’aux consommateurs, en passant par les services de recherche et de développement. L’innovation émerge des interactions entre ces acteurs, qui mobilisent des ressources et produisent des connaissances dans des dispositifs collaboratifs, afin de générer des changements. Elle recouvre des domaines aussi variés que les pratiques de production, l’organisation des marchés, ou les pratiques alimentaires. L’innovation est reliée aux grands enjeux de développement : innovation agro-écologique, innovation sociale, innovation territoriale, etc. Cet ouvrage porte un regard sur l’innovation dans les systèmes agricoles et alimentaires. Il met un accent particulier sur l’accompagnement de l’innovation, en interrogeant les méthodes et les organisations, et sur l’évaluation de l’innovation au regard de différents critères. Il s’appuie sur des réflexions portées par différentes disciplines scientifiques, sur des travaux de terrain conduits tant en France que dans de nombreux pays du Sud, et enfin sur les expériences acquises en accompagnant des acteurs qui innovent. Il combine des synthèses sur l’innovation et des études de cas emblématiques pour illustrer les propos. L’ouvrage est destiné aux enseignants, professionnels, étudiants et chercheurs

‘Insounds’: human sonic permeability and the practice of cinema sound design within ecologies of silences

This research establishes a link between the human experience of living in sound and the practice of cinema sound design. Environmental ‘silences’ are the absorbed but often cognitively dismissed sonic entities of the everyday. Their perceived ubiquity provides cinematic vocabulary that includes the expressions ‘room tone’, ‘silence’, ‘atmospheres’, ‘backgrounds’, and ‘ambiences’. Movies are framed by social constructs, and the qualities of cinematic silences allow for primal discoveries of affective sonic activities that ‘feel silent’. My project aims to embody ‘silences’ as dynamic spaces that echo human lifelong sonic absorption and state of being ‘insounds’, of being part of the sonic matter moulding the coenesthetic system of the body. The exploration of this paradigm generates a sonic awareness that in turn encourages an expansive attention to bodily and auditory perceptions. A phenomenological approach to the creative practice of cinema sound design provides an alternative and innovative view on sonic affect and created silences in film. As a practice-based research project, resulting in an exhibition supported by an exegesis, this investigation is qualitative, multidisciplinary, and experimental in both the approaches to data collection and the design of the exhibited work. The creative processes associated with the data gathering, as well as with the design of the exhibition and its multimodal artifacts, offer a different paradigm of sound as a way of knowing. In order to explore ways in which Western contemporary soundscapes are perceived and silences are conceived, selected research participants have contributed unique interpretations of the same cinematic script. The creators of the exhibited artifacts are professional cinema sound designers, a screenwriter, a storyboard artist and myself as I act at once as art practitioner, curator and PhD researcher. The knowledge gained provides inter-relational views on sonic affect, acoustic ecologies, semiotics of film sound and the professional practice of cinema sound design. ‘Inaudible Visions, Oscillating Silences’ is the title of the exhibition marking the end of the study’s explorations of creative and curatorial practices. The use and display of different mediums, text, images and sound, allows the researcher to acknowledge all participants’ contribution to the research. The designed perambulatory path articulates the research journey of all participants and provides a physical integration of the exegesis within the exhibition. By triggering awareness to the sound of the everyday, the gallery’s exploration allows for different experiential possibilities of silences and states of being ‘insounds’. The PhD thereby contributes to an understanding of everyday soundscapes in addition to the specific uses of atmospheric sound in cinematic practices

Environmental silence and its renditions in a movie soundtrack

Audio technology and contemporary sonic environments have affected perceptual habits at both individual and communal levels. As the perception of sound fluctuates between modes of attention and inattention, the narrative expectations generated by sonic materials may follow patterns of individual physical response that would in turn modify some communal perceptions of environmental soundscapes, silences in particular. In current sound design practice and the mainstream movie industry, the use of absolute silence as an absence of sound seems almost irrelevant. Film silence has become the complex technical product of mixing sounds, a view that departs from silence as a broad sound element added to vocal enunciation, music and special sound effects. As a subtle component of a narrative, cinematic silence may be at the junction of representation and reproduction of the acoustic biomass that we create and communicate to others. This paper examines how the subjective enaction of audio-filmic silence could develop from evolving acoustic ecologies, corporeal integration and cultural convention. In such a context, film silence could be a reciprocal tool that may generate modes of expression used to assess our personal and communal notions of environmental silences