Intentionality and visibility in state- and society-led climate approaches: towards a more comprehensive understanding of local adaptation initiatives

Research into local climate adaptation has often focused on highly visible, intentional public policies that seek to improve resilience to climate threats, or how societal actors have reacted to changing climatic conditions. We argue that these approaches neglect a range of unintentional and/or hidden initiatives, which deliver implicit and/or hitherto under-appreciated adaptation benefits. We present an analytical framework to organise studies of these under-explored initiatives, which advances social scientific conceptualisations of what local climate adaptation consists of and provides a heuristic for selecting appropriate methods of enquiry to examine it. Drawing on empirical research into the adaptation activities of municipalities and small businesses in Germany, we apply this framework to expand our knowledge of how communities are building climate resilience, gain a better understanding of the full range of adaptation activities within individual localities, and pose questions about the role of state and societal actors in addressing common problems

Intentionality and visibility in state- and society-led climate approaches: towards a more comprehensive understanding of local adaptation initiatives

Research into local climate adaptation has often focused on highly visible, intentional public policies that seek to improve resilience to climate threats or how societal actors have reacted to changing climatic conditions. We argue that these approaches neglect a range of unintentional and/or hidden initiatives, which deliver implicit and/or hitherto under-appreciated adaptation benefits. We present an analytical framework to organise studies of these under-explored initiatives, which advances social scientific conceptualisations of what local climate adaptation consists of and provides a heuristic for selecting appropriate methods of enquiry to examine it. Drawing on empirical research into the adaptation activities of municipalities and small businesses in Germany, we apply this framework to expand our knowledge of how communities are building climate resilience, gain a better understanding of the full range of adaptation activities within individual localities, and pose questions about the role of state and societal actors in addressing common problems.</p

Molecular Adaptation of rbcL in the Heterophyllous Aquatic Plant Potamogeton

Heterophyllous aquatic plants show marked phenotypic plasticity. They adapt to environmental changes by producing different leaf types: submerged, floating and terrestrial leaves. By contrast, homophyllous plants produce only submerged leaves and grow entirely underwater. Heterophylly and submerged homophylly evolved under selective pressure modifying the species-specific optima for photosynthesis, but little is known about the evolutionary outcome of habit. Recent evolutionary analyses suggested that rbcL, a chloroplast gene that encodes a catalytic subunit of RuBisCO, evolves under positive selection in most land plant lineages. To examine the adaptive evolutionary process linked to heterophylly or homophylly, we analyzed positive selection in the rbcL sequences of ecologically diverse aquatic plants, Japanese Potamogeton.Phylogenetic and maximum likelihood analyses of codon substitution models indicated that Potamogeton rbcL has evolved under positive Darwinian selection. The positive selection has operated specifically in heterophyllous lineages but not in homophyllous ones in the branch-site models. This suggests that the selective pressure on this chloroplast gene was higher for heterophyllous lineages than for homophyllous lineages. The replacement of 12 amino acids occurred at structurally important sites in the quaternary structure of RbcL, two of which (residue 225 and 281) were identified as potentially under positive selection.Our analysis did not show an exact relationship between the amino acid replacements and heterophylly or homophylly but revealed that lineage-specific positive selection acted on the Potamogeton rbcL. The contrasting ecological conditions between heterophyllous and homophyllous plants have imposed different selective pressures on the photosynthetic system. The increased amino acid replacement in RbcL may reflect the continuous fine-tuning of RuBisCO under varying ecological conditions

Developing a European longitudinal and interprofessional curriculum for clinical reasoning

Clinical reasoning is a complex and crucial ability health professions students need to acquire during their education. Despite its importance, explicit clinical reasoning teaching is not yet implemented in most health professions educational programs. Therefore, we carried out an international and interprofessional project to plan and develop a clinical reasoning curriculum with a train-the-trainer course to support educators in teaching this curriculum to students. We developed a framework and curricular blueprint. Then we created 25 student and 7 train-the-trainer learning units and we piloted 11 of these learning units at our institutions. Learners and faculty reported high satisfaction and they also provided helpful suggestions for improvements. One of the main challenges we faced was the heterogeneous understanding of clinical reasoning within and across professions. However, we learned from each other while discussing these different views and perspectives on clinical reasoning and were able to come to a shared understanding as the basis for developing the curriculum. Our curriculum fills an important gap in the availability of explicit clinical reasoning educational materials both for students and faculty and is unique with having specialists from different countries, schools, and professions. Faculty time and time for teaching clinical reasoning in existing curricula remain important barriers for implementation of clinical reasoning teaching