Carbon Sequestration by Fruit Trees - Chinese Apple Orchards as an Example

Apple production systems are an important component in the Chinese agricultural sector with 1.99 million ha plantation. The orchards in China could play an important role in the carbon (C) cycle of terrestrial ecosystems and contribute to C sequestration. The carbon sequestration capability in apple orchards was analyzed through identifying a set of potential assessment factors and their weighting factors determined by a field model study and literature. The dynamics of the net C sink in apple orchards in China was estimated based on the apple orchard inventory data from 1990s and the capability analysis. The field study showed that the trees reached the peak of C sequestration capability when they were 18 years old, and then the capability began to decline with age. Carbon emission derived from management practices would not be compensated through C storage in apple trees before reaching the mature stage. The net C sink in apple orchards in China ranged from 14 to 32 Tg C, and C storage in biomass from 230 to 475 Tg C between 1990 and 2010. The estimated net C sequestration in Chinese apple orchards from 1990 to 2010 was equal to 4.5% of the total net C sink in the terrestrial ecosystems in China. Therefore, apple production systems can be potentially considered as C sinks excluding the energy associated with fruit production in addition to provide fruits

A synthetic analysis of greenhouse gas emissions from manure amended agricultural soils in China

Application of manure has been recommended as an effective strategy to mitigate climate change. However, the magnitude of greenhouse gases emission derived by application of manure to agricultural soils across environmental conditions still remains unclear. Here, we synthesized data from 379 observations in China and quantified the responses of soil nitrous oxide (N2O), carbon dioxide (CO2) and methane (CH4) emissions to manure (Org-M) in comparison to chemical fertilizers (Min-F) or non-fertilizers (Non-F). The results showed that N2O, CO2 and CH4 emissions were significantly affected by Org-M compared to Min-F (percentage change: −3, +15 and +60%, P <0.05) and Non-F (percentage change: +289, +84 and +83%, P<0.05), respectively. However, at the same amount of total N input, Org-M decreased soil N2O emission by 13% and CH4 emission by 12%, and increased soil CO2 emission by 26% relative to Min-F in upland soils. For paddy soils, N2O, CO2 and CH4 emissions differed by −3%, −36% and +84% between Org-M and Min-F (i.e., Org-M minus Min-F). Thus, practices such as application of manure instead of chemical fertilizer and decreasing nitrogen input rate need to be highly considered and optimized under different soils and climate conditions to mitigate GHGs emission in China

Progress on improving Agricultural Nitrogen use efficiency: UK-China viortual joint centers on Nitrogen Agronomy

Two virtual joint centers for nitrogen agronomy were established between the UK and China to facilitate collaborative research aimed at improving nitrogen use efficiency (NUE) in agricultural production systems and reducing losses of reactive N to the environment. Major focus areas were improving fertilizer NUE, use of livestock manures, soil health, and policy development and knowledge exchange. Improvements to fertilizer NUE included attention to application rate in the context of yield potential and economic considerations and the potential of improved practices including enhanced efficiency fertilizers, plastic film mulching and cropping design. Improved utilization of livestock manures requires knowledge of the available nutrient content, appropriate manure processing technologies and integrated nutrient management practices. Soil carbon, acidification and biodiversity were considered as important aspects of soil health. Both centers identified a range of potential actions that could be taken to improve N management, and the research conducted has highlighted the importance of developing a systemslevel approach to assessing improvement in the overall efficiency of N management and avoiding unintended secondary effects from individual interventions. Within this context, the management of fertilizer emissions and livestock manure at the farm and regional scales appear to be particularly important targets for mitigation

Integration of DNA Copy Number Alterations and Transcriptional Expression Analysis in Human Gastric Cancer

Background: Genomic instability with frequent DNA copy number alterations is one of the key hallmarks of carcinogenesis. The chromosomal regions with frequent DNA copy number gain and loss in human gastric cancer are still poorly defined. It remains unknown how the DNA copy number variations contributes to the changes of gene expression profiles, especially on the global level. Principal Findings: We analyzed DNA copy number alterations in 64 human gastric cancer samples and 8 gastric cancer cell lines using bacterial artificial chromosome (BAC) arrays based comparative genomic hybridization (aCGH). Statistical analysis was applied to correlate previously published gene expression data obtained from cDNA microarrays with corresponding DNA copy number variation data to identify candidate oncogenes and tumor suppressor genes. We found that gastric cancer samples showed recurrent DNA copy number variations, including gains at 5p, 8q, 20p, 20q, and losses at 4q, 9p, 18q, 21q. The most frequent regions of amplification were 20q12 (7/72), 20q12-20q13.1 (12/72), 20q13.1-20q13.2 (11/72) and 20q13.2-20q13.3 (6/72). The most frequent deleted region was 9p21 (8/72). Correlating gene expression array data with aCGH identified 321 candidate oncogenes, which were overexpressed and showed frequent DNA copy number gains; and 12 candidate tumor suppressor genes which were down-regulated and showed frequent DNA copy number losses in human gastric cancers. Three networks of significantly expressed genes in gastric cancer samples were identified by ingenuity pathway analysis. Conclusions: This study provides insight into DNA copy number variations and their contribution to altered gene expression profiles during human gastric cancer development. It provides novel candidate driver oncogenes or tumor suppressor genes for human gastric cancer, useful pathway maps for the future understanding of the molecular pathogenesis of this malignancy, and the construction of new therapeutic targets. © 2012 Fan et al.published_or_final_versio

Gauging policy-driven large-scale vegetation restoration programmes under a changing environment: Their effectiveness and socio-economic relationships

Large-scale ecological restoration has been widely accepted globally as an effective strategy for combating environmental crises and to facilitate sustainability. Assessing the effectiveness of ecological restoration is vital for researchers, practitioners, and policy-makers. However, few practical tools are available to perform such tasks, particularly for large-scale restoration programmes in complex socio-ecological systems. By taking a “before and after” design, this paper formulates a composite index (Ej) based on comparing the trends of vegetation cover and vegetation productivity to assess ecological restoration effectiveness. The index reveals the dynamic and spatially heterogenic process of vegetation restoration across different time periods, which can be informative for ecological restoration management at regional scales. Effectiveness together with its relationship to socio-economic factors is explored via structural equation modeling for three time periods. The results indicate that the temporal scale is a crucial factor in representing restoration effectiveness, and that the effects of socio-economic factors can also vary with time providing insight for improving restoration effectiveness. A dual-track strategy, which promotes the development of tertiary industry in absorbing the rural labor force together with improvements in agricultural practices, is proposed as a promising strategy for enhancing restoration effectiveness. In this process, timely and long-term ecological restoration monitoring is advocated, so that the success and sustainability of such programmes is ensured, together with more informative decision making where socio-ecological interactions at differing temporal scales are key concerns

ZSE-VITS: A Zero-Shot Expressive Voice Cloning Method Based on VITS

Voice cloning aims to synthesize the voice with a new speaker&rsquo;s timbre from a small amount of the new speaker&rsquo;s speech. Current voice cloning methods, which focus on modeling speaker timbre, can synthesize speech with similar speaker timbres. However, the prosody of these methods is flat, lacking expressiveness and the ability to control the expressiveness of cloned speech. To solve this problem, we propose a novel method ZSE-VITS (zero-shot expressive VITS) based on the end-to-end speech synthesis model VITS. Specifically, we use VITS as the backbone network and add the speaker recognition model TitaNet as the speaker encoder to realize zero-shot voice cloning. We use explicit prosody information to avoid effects from the speaker information and adjust speech prosody using the prosody information prediction and prosody fusion methods directly. We widen the pitch distribution of the train datasets using pitch augmentation to improve the generalization ability of the prosody model, and we fine-tune the prosody predictor alone in the emotion corpus to learn prosody prediction of various styles. The objective and subjective evaluations of the open datasets show that our method can generate more expressive speech and adjust prosody information artificially without affecting the similarity of speaker timbre