Impacts of climate change on plant diseases – opinions and trends

There has been a remarkable scientific output on the topic of how climate change is likely to affect plant diseases in the coming decades. This review addresses the need for review of this burgeoning literature by summarizing opinions of previous reviews and trends in recent studies on the impacts of climate change on plant health. Sudden Oak Death is used as an introductory case study: Californian forests could become even more susceptible to this emerging plant disease, if spring precipitations will be accompanied by warmer temperatures, although climate shifts may also affect the current synchronicity between host cambium activity and pathogen colonization rate. A summary of observed and predicted climate changes, as well as of direct effects of climate change on pathosystems, is provided. Prediction and management of climate change effects on plant health are complicated by indirect effects and the interactions with global change drivers. Uncertainty in models of plant disease development under climate change calls for a diversity of management strategies, from more participatory approaches to interdisciplinary science. Involvement of stakeholders and scientists from outside plant pathology shows the importance of trade-offs, for example in the land-sharing vs. sparing debate. Further research is needed on climate change and plant health in mountain, boreal, Mediterranean and tropical regions, with multiple climate change factors and scenarios (including our responses to it, e.g. the assisted migration of plants), in relation to endophytes, viruses and mycorrhiza, using long-term and large-scale datasets and considering various plant disease control methods

Mental health consultations in a prison population: a descriptive study

BACKGROUND: The psychiatric morbidity among prison inmates is substantially higher than in the general population. We do, however, have insufficient knowledge about the extent of psychiatric treatment provided in our prisons. The aim of the present study was to give a comprehensive description of all non-pharmacological interventions provided by the psychiatric health services to a stratified sample of prison inmates. METHODS: Six medium/large prisons (n = 928) representing 1/3 of the Norwegian prison population and with female and preventive detention inmates over-sampled, were investigated cross-sectionally. All non-pharmacological psychiatric interventions, excluding pure correctional programs, were recorded. Those receiving interventions were investigated further and compared to the remaining prison population. RESULTS: A total of 230 of the 928 inmates (25 %) had some form of psychiatric intervention: 184 (20 %) were in individual psychotherapy, in addition 40 (4 %) received ad hoc interventions during the registration week. Group therapy was infrequent (1 %). The psychotherapies were most often of a supportive (62 %) or behavioural-cognitive (26 %) nature. Dynamic, insight-oriented psychotherapies were infrequent (8 %). Concurrent psychopharmacological treatment was prevalent (52 %). Gender and age did not correlate with psychiatric interventions, whereas prisoner category (remanded, sentenced, or preventive detention) did (p < 0.001). Most inmates had a number of defined problem areas, with substance use, depression, anxiety, and personality disorders most prevalent. Three percent of all inmates were treated for a psychotic disorder. Remand prisoners averaged 14 sessions per week per 100 inmates, while sentenced inmates and those on preventive detention averaged 22 and 25 sessions per week per 100 inmates, respectively. Five out of six psychiatric health services estimated the inmates' psychiatric therapy needs as adequately met, both overall and in the majority of individual cases. CONCLUSION: Our results pertain only to prisons with adequate primary and mental health services and effective diversion from prison of individuals with serious mental disorders. Given these important limitations, we do propose that the service estimates found may serve as a rough guideline to the minimum number of sessions a prison's psychiatric health services should be able to fulfil in order to serve the inmates psychiatric needs. The results rely on the specialist services' own estimates only. Future studies should take other important informants, including the inmates themselves, into consideration

Partnership and Capacity Building of Local Governance

Partnership is about sharing of power, responsibility and achievements. According to the World Bank Public Private Partnership (PPP) promoting group, ―partnership refer to informal and shortterm engagements of non-governmental organizations, the private sector and/or government agencies that join forces for a shared objective; to more formal, but still short-term private sector engagements for the provision of specific services, for example, annual outsourcing arrangements for janitorial services for a school or operations of the school cafeteria; to more complex contractual arrangements, such as build, operate, transfer regimes, where the private sector takes on considerable risk and remains engaged long term; or to full privatizations‖ (World Bank Group 2014, 29).© Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2020. This is a post-peer-review, pre-copyedit version of an article published in Partnerships for the Goals. Encyclopedia of the UN Sustainable Development Goals. The final authenticated version is available online at: http://dx.doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-71067-9_21-1.fi=vertaisarvioitu|en=peerReviewed

A review of advanced air distribution methods - theory, practice, limitations and solutions

Ventilation and air distribution methods are important for indoor thermal environments and air quality. Effective distribution of airflow for indoor built environments with the aim of simultaneously offsetting thermal and ventilation loads in an energy efficient manner has been the research focus in the past several decades. Based on airflow characteristics, ventilation methods can be categorized as fully mixed or non-uniform. Non-uniform methods can be further divided into piston, stratified and task zone ventilation. In this paper, the theory, performance, practical applications, limitations and solutions pertaining to ventilation and air distribution methods are critically reviewed. Since many ventilation methods are buoyancy driving that confines their use for heating mode, some methods suitable for heating are discussed. Furthermore, measuring and evaluating methods for ventilation and air distribution are also discussed to give a comprehensive framework of the review

Efficacy of Resistance to Scab in Transgenic ‘McIntosh’ Apple Exposed to Populations of Venturia inaequalis

ReportMcIntosh apples which have been transformed to express an endochitinase gene from Trichoderma harzianum have demonstrated substantial resistance to apple scab in previous greenhouse trials. We inoculated transgenic and control McIntosh trees with ascosporic and conidial inoculum, and recorded disease development and plant growth in a greenhouse and orchard study. In greenhouse evaluations, all transgenic lines developed statistically equivalent levels of scab when compared to the McIntosh control with both inoculum sources. Transgenic trees in the orchard generally had fewer leaves per tree, were shorter, smaller in diameter, and had fewer side branches than the nontransformed control McIntosh early in the growing season. However, this was primarily a reflection of different tree sizes among the transgenic lines and control trees when planted in 1999. With only one exception (TM961), current-season shoot length was not significantly different among the transgenic lines and the control McIntosh. In the orchard, the incidence of scab infection (percentage of leaves infected) on all four transgenic lines (including the vector control) was significantly equivalent to that recorded on the untransformed control McIntosh. However, disease severity (percentage of the leaf surface colonized) was significantly lower on all the transgenic lines

Building Energy Management Through Fault Detection Analysis Using Pattern Recognition Techniques Applied on Residual Neural Networks

In this paper a fault detection analysis through a neural networks ensembling approach and statistical pattern recognition techniques is presented. Abnormal consumption or faults are detected by analyzing the residual values, which are the difference between the expected and the real operating data. The residuals are more sensitive to faults and insensitive to noise. In this study, first, the experimentation is carried out over two months monitoring data set for the lighting energy consumption of an actual office building. Using a fault free data set for the training, an artificial neural networks ensemble (ANNE) is used for the estimation of hourly lighting energy consumption in normal operational conditions. The fault detection is performed through the analysis of the magnitude of residuals using peak outliers detection method. Second, the fault detection analysis is also carried out through statistical pattern recognition techniques on structured residuals of lighting power consumption considering different influencing attributes i.e. number of people, global solar radiation etc. Moreover the results obtained from these methods are compared to minimize the false anomalies and to improve the FDD process. Experimental results show the effectiveness of the ensembling approach in automatic detection of abnormal building lighting energy consumption. The results also indicate that statistical pattern recognition techniques applied to residuals are useful for detecting and isolating the faults as well as noise