Food and sustainability: the sustainable food system index

Sustainable transitions have become the guiding principles of today’s century with food systems at the core of it. Food and nutrition illustrate a basic human need, inevitable for any living organism, and deeply entangled within the ecosystem. Thus, food systems represent predominant endeavours when aiming towards Agenda 2030. In line with displaying complex socio-ecological processes, heavily affected by ongoing interrelations among human and natural components, three categories identify as crucial for sustainable food systems – food security, ecosystem stability and resilience and sociocultural wellbeing. In combination with the research aim of assessing the sustainability degree of performing food systems in place, a Sustainable Food System Index (SFSI) has been established. The SFSI measures food system sustainability across 33 countries among 3 categories and 9 dimensions by employing 39 indicators, 65 sub-indicators and 38 sub-sub-indicators. The results display the varying degree of sustainable food systems among performing countries across selected indicators. The overall index score highlights Sweden as the front runner, closely followed by France and the United Kingdom, while laggards illustrate Ethiopia, Nigeria and India. With food systems being caught in a vicious circle with the ecosystem and the environment, economically poor regions are particularly vulnerable due to its smallholder dependency on agricultural systems. The SFSI outcomes provide more insights into the sustainability’s state of analysed food systems in the categories of food safety, ecosystem stability and resilience, as well as sociocultural wellbeing and might serve as foundation for future sustainable food system research.Transições sustentáveis têm se tornado os princípios orientadores do século de hoje, com sistemas alimentares em seu núcleo. Alimentação e nutrição ilustram uma necessidade humana básica, inevitável para qualquer organismo vivo e, profundamente entrelaçada com o ecossistema. Assim, sistemas alimentares representam esforços predominantes ao focar na Agenda 2030. Em consonância com a apresentação de processos socio-ecológicos complexos, fortemente afetados por interrelações entre componentes naturais e humanos em curso, três categorias identificam-se como essenciais aos sistemas alimentares sustentáveis: segurança alimentar, estabilidade e resiliência do ecossistema, e bem-estar sociocultural. Em combinação com o objetivo da pesquisa de avaliar o grau de desempenho de sustentabilidade de sistemas alimentares decorrentes, foi criado um Índice de Sistema Alimentar Sustentável (SAS). O SAS mede a sustentabilidade do sistema alimentar em 33 países dentro de 3 categorias e 9 dimensões ao empregar 39 indicadores, 65 sub-indicadores e 38 sub-sub indicadores. Os resultados mostram o grau variável de sistemas alimentares sustentáveis entre países nos indicadores selecionados. O resultado geral do índice destaca a Suécia como líder, seguida de perto por França e Reino Unido, enquanto como retardatários ilustram Etiópia, Nigéria e Índia. Com sistemas alimentares sendo apanhados em círculos viciosos com o ecossistema e meio-ambiente, regiões economicamente pobres são particularmente vulneráveis devido a suas baixas dependências em sistemas de agricultura. Os resultados do SAS fornecem mais insights no estado da sustentabilidade dos sistemas alimentares analisados nas categorias de segurança alimentar, estabilidade e resiliência do ecossistema, tanto quanto de bem-estar sociocultural e, deve servir como fundação para futuras pesquisas sobre sistema alimentar sustentável

Effects of temperature on gene expression in embryos of the coral Montastraea faveolata

<p>Abstract</p> <p>Background</p> <p>Coral reefs are expected to be severely impacted by rising seawater temperatures associated with climate change. This study used cDNA microarrays to investigate transcriptional effects of thermal stress in embryos of the coral <it>Montastraea faveolata</it>. Embryos were exposed to 27.5°C, 29.0°C, and 31.5°C directly after fertilization. Differences in gene expression were measured after 12 and 48 hours.</p> <p>Results</p> <p>Analysis of differentially expressed genes indicated that increased temperatures may lead to oxidative stress, apoptosis, and a structural reconfiguration of the cytoskeletal network. Metabolic processes were downregulated, and the action of histones and zinc finger-containing proteins may have played a role in the long-term regulation upon heat stress.</p> <p>Conclusions</p> <p>Embryos responded differently depending on exposure time and temperature level. Embryos showed expression of stress-related genes already at a temperature of 29.0°C, but seemed to be able to counteract the initial response over time. By contrast, embryos at 31.5°C displayed continuous expression of stress genes. The genes that played a role in the response to elevated temperatures consisted of both highly conserved and coral-specific genes. These genes might serve as a basis for research into coral-specific adaptations to stress responses and global climate change.</p

Vermögen und Reichtum in Österreich

Vermögen ist in Österreich sehr ungleich verteilt. Seit der HFCS-Vermögenserhebung der Oesterreichischen Nationalbank (OeNB) und von Wissenschaftler:innen durchgeführten Hochschätzungen lässt sich besser beziffern, wie groß die Vermögenskonzentration tatsächlich ist. Österreich steht innerhalb der Eurozone mit an der Spitze der Vermögensungleichheit. Die große Mehrheit der in Österreich lebenden Bevölkerung empfindet die bestehende Vermögensverteilung als ungerecht. Vermögensteuern sind ein Weg, die Schieflage zu reduzieren. Das reichste 1 % verfügt über rund 40 % des gesamten Nettovermögens, während die ärmere Hälfte gerade einmal 2,8 % des Nettovermögens besitzt. Die hohe Vermögenskonzentration hat negative wirtschaftliche, demokratiepolitische und ökologische Konsequenzen. Der Überreichtum kann durch Vermögenssteuern reduziert werden.In Austria, wealth is very unequally distributed. Thanks to the HFCS wealth survey conducted by the Austrian National Bank and projections by researchers, it has become easier to quantify the actual extent of wealth concentration. Regarding wealth, Austria is one of the most unequal countries in the Euro area. The vast majority of the population of Austria perceives the existing distribution of wealth as unfair. Wealth taxes are one way to reduce this imbalance. The richest 1 % owns around 40 % of the total net wealth, while the poorer half owns just 2.8 % of net wealth. High wealth concentration has negative impacts on economy, democracy, and the environment. Wealth concentration can be reduced through the introduction of wealth taxes

ENVIRONMENTS and EOL : identification of Environment Ontology terms in text and the annotation of the Encyclopedia of Life

© The Author(s), 2015. This article is distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License. The definitive version was published in Bioinformatics 31 (2015): 1872-1874, doi:10.1093/bioinformatics/btv045.The association of organisms to their environments is a key issue in exploring biodiversity patterns. This knowledge has traditionally been scattered, but textual descriptions of taxa and their habitats are now being consolidated in centralized resources. However, structured annotations are needed to facilitate large-scale analyses. Therefore, we developed ENVIRONMENTS, a fast dictionary-based tagger capable of identifying Environment Ontology (ENVO) terms in text. We evaluate the accuracy of the tagger on a new manually curated corpus of 600 Encyclopedia of Life (EOL) species pages. We use the tagger to associate taxa with environments by tagging EOL text content monthly, and integrate the results into the EOL to disseminate them to a broad audience of users.The Encyclopedia Of Life Rubenstein Fellows Program [CRDF EOL-33066-13/E33066], the LifeWatchGreece Research Infrastructure [384676-94/GSRT/ NSRF(C&E)] and the Novo Nordisk Foundation Center for Protein Research [NNF14CC0001]

Seqenv : linking sequences to environments through text mining

Understanding the distribution of taxa and associated traits across different environments is one of the central questions in microbial ecology. High-throughput sequencing (HTS) studies are presently generating huge volumes of data to address this biogeographical topic. However, these studies are often focused on specific environment types or processes leading to the production of individual, unconnected datasets. The large amounts of legacy sequence data with associated metadata that exist can be harnessed to better place the genetic information found in these surveys into a wider environmental context. Here we introduce a software program, seqenv, to carry out precisely such a task. It automatically performs similarity searches of short sequences against the ‘‘nt’’ nucleotide database provided by NCBI and, out of every hit, extracts–if it is available–the textual metadata field. After collecting all the isolation sources from all the search results, we run a text mining algorithm to identify and parse words that are associated with the Environmental Ontology (EnvO) controlled vocabulary. This, in turn, enables us to determine both in which environments individual sequences or taxa have previously been observed and, by weighted summation of those results, to summarize complete samples. We present two demonstrative applications of seqenv to a survey of ammonia oxidizing archaea as well as to a plankton paleome dataset from the Black Sea. These demonstrate the ability of the tool to reveal novel patterns in HTS How to cite this article Sinclair et al. (2016), Seqenv: linking sequences to environments through text mining. PeerJ 4:e2690; DOI 10.7717/peerj.2690 and its utility in the fields of environmental source tracking, paleontology, and studies of microbial biogeography

The ocean sampling day consortium.

Ocean Sampling Day was initiated by the EU-funded Micro B3 (Marine Microbial Biodiversity, Bioinformatics, Biotechnology) project to obtain a snapshot of the marine microbial biodiversity and function of the world's oceans. It is a simultaneous global mega-sequencing campaign aiming to generate the largest standardized microbial data set in a single day. This will be achievable only through the coordinated efforts of an Ocean Sampling Day Consortium, supportive partnerships and networks between sites. This commentary outlines the establishment, function and aims of the Consortium and describes our vision for a sustainable study of marine microbial communities and their embedded functional traits

The ocean sampling day consortium

Ocean Sampling Day was initiated by the EU-funded Micro B3 (Marine Microbial Biodiversity, Bioinformatics, Biotechnology) project to obtain a snapshot of the marine microbial biodiversity and function of the world’s oceans. It is a simultaneous global mega-sequencing campaign aiming to generate the largest standardized microbial data set in a single day. This will be achievable only through the coordinated efforts of an Ocean Sampling Day Consortium, supportive partnerships and networks between sites. This commentary outlines the establishment, function and aims of the Consortium and describes our vision for a sustainable study of marine microbial communities and their embedded functional traits

Location-Specific Responses to Thermal Stress in Larvae of the Reef-Building Coral Montastraea faveolata

The potential to adapt to a changing climate depends in part upon the standing genetic variation present in wild populations. In corals, the dispersive larval phase is particularly vulnerable to the effects of environmental stress. Larval survival and response to stress during dispersal and settlement will play a key role in the persistence of coral populations.To test the hypothesis that larval transcription profiles reflect location-specific responses to thermal stress, symbiont-free gametes from three to four colonies of the scleractinian coral Montastraea faveolata were collected from Florida and Mexico, fertilized, and raised under mean and elevated (up 1 to 2 degrees C above summer mean) temperatures. These locations have been shown to exchange larvae frequently enough to prevent significant differentiation of neutral loci. Differences among 1,310 unigenes were simultaneously characterized using custom cDNA microarrays, allowing investigation of gene expression patterns among larvae generated from wild populations under stress. Results show both conserved and location-specific variation in key processes including apoptosis, cell structuring, adhesion and development, energy and protein metabolism, and response to stress, in embryos of a reef-building coral.These results provide first insights into location-specific variation in gene expression in the face of gene flow, and support the hypothesis that coral host genomes may house adaptive potential needed to deal with changing environmental conditions

The Ocean Sampling Day Consortium

Ocean Sampling Day was initiated by the EU-funded Micro B3 (Marine Microbial Biodiversity, Bioinformatics, Biotechnology) project to obtain a snapshot of the marine microbial biodiversity and function of the world’s oceans. It is a simultaneous global mega-sequencing campaign aiming to generate the largest standardized microbial data set in a single day. This will be achievable only through the coordinated efforts of an Ocean Sampling Day Consortium, supportive partnerships and networks between sites. This commentary outlines the establishment, function and aims of the Consortium and describes our vision for a sustainable study of marine microbial communities and their embedded functional traits

Differential cross section measurements for the production of a W boson in association with jets in proton–proton collisions at √s = 7 TeV

Measurements are reported of differential cross sections for the production of a W boson, which decays into a muon and a neutrino, in association with jets, as a function of several variables, including the transverse momenta (pT) and pseudorapidities of the four leading jets, the scalar sum of jet transverse momenta (HT), and the difference in azimuthal angle between the directions of each jet and the muon. The data sample of pp collisions at a centre-of-mass energy of 7 TeV was collected with the CMS detector at the LHC and corresponds to an integrated luminosity of 5.0 fb[superscript −1]. The measured cross sections are compared to predictions from Monte Carlo generators, MadGraph + pythia and sherpa, and to next-to-leading-order calculations from BlackHat + sherpa. The differential cross sections are found to be in agreement with the predictions, apart from the pT distributions of the leading jets at high pT values, the distributions of the HT at high-HT and low jet multiplicity, and the distribution of the difference in azimuthal angle between the leading jet and the muon at low values.United States. Dept. of EnergyNational Science Foundation (U.S.)Alfred P. Sloan Foundatio