An enhanced integrated approach to knowledgeable high-resolution environmental quality assessment

Sustaining urban environmental quality requires effective policy measures that integrate local monitoring and contextualized high-resolution modelling with actionable scenarios. Knowledgeable decision making in this field can nowadays be supported by an array of atmospheric models, but their transfer into an Integrated Urban hydrometeorological, climate and environmental Services (IUS) remains challenging. Methodological aspects that are beyond pure technicalities of the model-to-model coupling are still poorly explored. Modeling downscaling chains lack their most user-relevant link - urban-to-neighborhood scale observations and models. This study looks at a socio-environmental context of the high-resolution atmospheric modeling in the case study of the Arctic urban cluster of Apatity and Kirovsk, Russia. We demonstrate that atmospheric dynamics of the lowermost, turbulent air layers is highly localized during the most influential episodes of atmospheric pollution. Urban micro-climates create strong circulations (winds) that are sensitive to the local environmental context. As the small-scale turbulence dynamics is not spatially resolved in meteorological downscaling or statistical modeling, capturing this local context requires specialized turbulence-resolving (large-eddy simulation) models. Societal acceptance of the urban modeling could be increased in the IUS with horizontally integrated modeling driven by localized scenarios. This study presents an enhanced integrated approach, which incorporates a large-eddy simulation model PALM into meteorological downscaling chains of a climate model (EC-EARTH), a numerical weather prediction - atmospheric chemical transport model (ENVIRO-HIRLAM) and a regional-scale meteorological model (COSMO-CLM). We discuss how this approach could be further developed into an environmental component of a digital "smart city".Peer reviewe

Overview: Recent advances in the understanding of the northern Eurasian environments and of the urban air quality in China – a Pan-Eurasian Experiment (PEEX) programme perspective

The Pan-Eurasian Experiment (PEEX) Science Plan, released in 2015, addressed a need for a holistic system understanding and outlined the most urgent research needs for the rapidly changing Arctic-boreal region. Air quality in China, together with the long-range transport of atmospheric pollutants, was also indicated as one of the most crucial topics of the research agenda. These two geographical regions, the northern Eurasian Arctic-boreal region and China, especially the megacities in China, were identified as a "PEEX region". It is also important to recognize that the PEEX geographical region is an area where science-based policy actions would have significant impacts on the global climate. This paper summarizes results obtained during the last 5 years in the northern Eurasian region, together with recent observations of the air quality in the urban environments in China, in the context of the PEEX programme. The main regions of interest are the Russian Arctic, northern Eurasian boreal forests (Siberia) and peatlands, and the megacities in China. We frame our analysis against research themes introduced in the PEEX Science Plan in 2015. We summarize recent progress towards an enhanced holistic understanding of the land-atmosphere-ocean systems feedbacks. We conclude that although the scientific knowledge in these regions has increased, the new results are in many cases insufficient, and there are still gaps in our understanding of large-scale climate-Earth surface interactions and feedbacks. This arises from limitations in research infrastructures, especially the lack of coordinated, continuous and comprehensive in situ observations of the study region as well as integrative data analyses, hindering a comprehensive system analysis. The fast-changing environment and ecosystem changes driven by climate change, socio-economic activities like the China Silk Road Initiative, and the global trends like urbanization further complicate such analyses. We recognize new topics with an increasing importance in the near future, especially "the enhancing biological sequestration capacity of greenhouse gases into forests and soils to mitigate climate change" and the "socio-economic development to tackle air quality issues".Peer reviewe

EVALUATION OF ADHERENCE AND INSULIN INJECTION PRACTICES IN PEOPLE WITH TYPE II DIABETES MELLITUS

The practice of insulin injection in people with Diabetes Mellitus must be carried out appropriately and obediently by the patient for optimal regulation of glycemic control, preventing complications, and improving quality of life. This study was conducted to identify the description of insulin injection adherence and insulin injection practice in individuals with type 2 diabetes mellitus. This study was a quantitative research design with a cross-sectional approach using a questionnaire distributed to 32 respondents. The research was held at Club Prolanis Manado. Descriptive data analysis was conducted to describe the research variables. The findings showed that 100% of the respondents adhered well to insulin injections (Auto compliance > 80%), most respondents do not prime to check insulin flow and expel air before injecting insulin (78.1%), most respondents rotate the injection locations (75%), most respondents do not experience lipodystrophy (87.5%), more than half of the respondents experienced pain (53.1%), most of the respondents did not experience insulin leakage (81.2%), more than half of the respondents pinched during injection (56.2%), most of the respondents waited 10 seconds before removing the needle (75%). Skills and adherence in injecting insulin must be improved through continuous education and evaluation to achieve optimal glycemic control

PAN EURASIAN EXPERIMENT (PEEX) - A RESEARCH INITIATIVE MEETING THE GRAND CHALLENGES OF THE CHANGING ENVIRONMENT OF THE NORTHERN PAN-EURASIAN ARCTIC-BOREAL AREAS

The Pan-Eurasian Experiment (PEEX) is a new multidisciplinary, global change research initiative focusing on understanding biosphere-ocean-cryosphere-climate interactions and feedbacks in Arctic and boreal regions in the Northern Eurasian geographical domain. PEEX operates in an integrative way and it aims at solving the major scientific and society relevant questions in many scales using tools from natural and social sciences and economics. The research agenda identifies the most urgent large scale research questions and topics of the land-atmosphere-aquatic-anthropogenic systems and interactions and feedbacks between the systems for the next decades. Furthermore PEEX actively develops and designs a coordinated and coherent ground station network from Europe via Siberia to China and the coastal line of the Arctic Ocean together with a PEEX-modeling platform. PEEX launches a program for educating the next generation of multidisciplinary researcher and technical experts. This expedites the utilization of the new scientific knowledge for producing a more reliable climate change scenarios in regional and global scales, and enables mitigation and adaptation planning of the Northern societies. PEEX gathers together leading European, Russian and Chinese research groups. With a bottom-up approach, over 40 institutes and universities have contributed the PEEX Science Plan from 18 countries. In 2014 the PEEX community prepared Science Plan and initiated conceptual design of the PEEX land-atmosphere observation network and modeling platform. Here we present the PEEX approach as a whole with the specific attention to research agenda and preliminary design of the PEEX research infrastructure

Cajal bodies and the nucleolus are required for a plant virus systemic infection

The nucleolus and Cajal bodies (CBs) are prominent interacting subnuclear domains involved in a number of crucial aspects of cell function. Certain viruses interact with these compartments but the functions of such interactions are largely uncharacterized. Here, we show that the ability of the groundnut rosette virus open reading frame (ORF) 3 protein to move viral RNA long distances through the phloem strictly depends on its interaction with CBs and the nucleolus. The ORF3 protein targets and reorganizes CBs into multiple CB-like structures and then enters the nucleolus by causing fusion of these structures with the nucleolus. The nucleolar localization of the ORF3 protein is essential for subsequent formation of viral ribonucleoprotein (RNP) particles capable of virus long-distance movement and systemic infection. We provide a model whereby the ORF3 protein utilizes trafficking pathways involving CBs to enter the nucleolus and, along with fibrillarin, exit the nucleus to form viral 'transport-competent' RNP particles in the cytoplasm