Hydrochemistry and trophic state change in a large reservoir in the Brazilian northeast region under intense drought conditions

The study shows changes on physical and chemical water parameters and of trophic state in a large reservoir in the Brazilian semiarid region following decreasing reservoir volume due to rainfall shortage during four consecutive years. The monitoring period, between November 2011 and May 2014, assessed approximately 50% water volume reduction and 10 meters’ decrease of reservoir water level that degraded water quality. Decrease in reservoir volume, strong evaporation and the permanent influence of anthropogenic activities, favored the concentration of salts and accumulation of nutrients and of increasing pH. Thermal stratification of the water column occurred when volume was maximum and lead to a significant reduction in dissolved oxygen in the hypolimnion (0.07 to 2.62 mg L–1). Diminishing volume resulted in mixing of the hypolimnion nutrient-rich and oxygen-poor waters in the entre water column and changed the initial oligotrophic condition to eutrophic. However, the temporal scale of the response of the reservoir’s trophic state differs in the different areas of the reservoir. Whereas deeper areas accumulating nutrients from aquaculture and agriculture progressively became mesotrophic and eventually eutrophic; shallower regions far from direct anthropogenic influences, changed their trophic sate much later, but rapidly turned into super-eutrophic conditions, probably due to more intense sediment resuspension and water mixing. Trophic State Index followed nutrient increase during most of the period. However, it also responded to an increase in chlorophyll a concentrations when the reservoir achieved its minimum volume, in particular in the shallower areas. The results suggest that this type of reservoir systems are vulnerable to eutrophication during extended drought periods and that a better assessment of the maximum support capacity for reservoir activities, particularly aquaculture, must be re-assessed taking into consideration worst case scenarios forecasted by global climate change

Cosmoglobe: Towards end-to-end CMB cosmological parameter estimation without likelihood approximations

We implement support for a cosmological parameter estimation algorithm as proposed by Racine et al. (2016) in Commander, and quantify its computational efficiency and cost. For a semi-realistic simulation similar to Planck LFI 70 GHz, we find that the computational cost of producing one single sample is about 60 CPU-hours and that the typical Markov chain correlation length is $\sim$100 samples. The net effective cost per independent sample is $\sim$6 000 CPU-hours, in comparison with all low-level processing costs of 812 CPU-hours for Planck LFI and WMAP in Cosmoglobe Data Release 1. Thus, although technically possible to run already in its current state, future work should aim to reduce the effective cost per independent sample by at least one order of magnitude to avoid excessive runtimes, for instance through multi-grid preconditioners and/or derivative-based Markov chain sampling schemes. This work demonstrates the computational feasibility of true Bayesian cosmological parameter estimation with end-to-end error propagation for high-precision CMB experiments without likelihood approximations, but it also highlights the need for additional optimizations before it is ready for full production-level analysis.Comment: 10 pages, 8 figures. Submitted to A&

The BINGO Project IX: Search for Fast Radio Bursts -- A Forecast for the BINGO Interferometry System

The Baryon Acoustic Oscillations (BAO) from Integrated Neutral Gas Observations (BINGO) radio telescope will use the neutral Hydrogen emission line to map the Universe in the redshift range $0.127 \le z \le 0.449$, with the main goal of probing BAO. In addition, the instrument optical design and hardware configuration support the search for Fast Radio Bursts (FRBs). In this work, we propose the use of a BINGO Interferometry System (BIS) including new auxiliary, smaller, radio telescopes (hereafter \emph{outriggers}). The interferometric approach makes it possible to pinpoint the FRB sources in the sky. We present here the results of several BIS configurations combining BINGO horns with and without mirrors ($4$ m, $5$ m, and $6$ m) and 5, 7, 9, or 10 for single horns. We developed a new {\tt Python} package, the {\tt FRBlip}, which generates synthetic FRB mock catalogs and computes, based on a telescope model, the observed signal-to-noise ratio (S/N) that we used to compute numerically the detection rates of the telescopes and how many interferometry pairs of telescopes (\emph{baselines}) can observe an FRB. FRBs observed by more than one baseline are the ones whose location can be determined. We thus evaluate the performance of BIS regarding FRB localization. We found that BIS will be able to localize 23 FRBs yearly with single horn outriggers in the best configuration (using 10 outriggers of 6 m mirrors), with redshift $z \leq 0.96$; the full localization capability depends on the number and the type of the outriggers. Wider beams are best to pinpoint FRB sources because potential candidates will be observed by more baselines, while narrow beams look deep in redshift. The BIS can be a powerful extension of the regular BINGO telescope, dedicated to observe hundreds of FRBs during Phase 1. Many of them will be well localized with a single horn + 6 m dish as outriggers.(Abridged)Comment: 12 pages, 9 figures, 5 tables, submitted to A&

Atividade enzimática de fosfatases em solo cultivado com milho inoculado com micro-organismos solubilizadores de fosfato e adubado com fontes de fósforo de diferente solubilidade.

FertBio 2016

Guarana (Paullinia cupana var. sorbilis), an anciently consumed stimulant from the Amazon rain forest: the seeded-fruit transcriptome.

Guarana (Paullinia cupana var. sorbilis) is a plant native to the central Amazon basin. Roasted seed extracts have been used as medicinal beverages since pre-Colombian times, due to their reputation as stimulants, aphrodisiacs, tonics, as well as protectors of the gastrointestinal tract. Guarana plants are commercially cultivated exclusively in Brazil to supply the national carbonated soft-drink industry and natural product stores around the world. In this report, we describe and discuss the annotation of 15,387 ESTs from guarana seeded-fruits, highlighting sequences from the flavonoid and purine alkaloid pathways, and those related to biotic stress avoidance. This is the largest set of sequences registered for the Sapindaceae family