Towards more resilient food systems for smallholder farmers in the Peruvian Altiplano: the potential of community-based climate services

Experiences from the disastrous 2016 El Niño revealed that its forecast, although available, was not known, accessed or understood by a large part of agricultural communities living in remote rural areas. This is all the more striking since these population groups are particularly vulnerable to adverse climate events as their livelihoods heavily depend on climate-sensitive agricultural production. In the framework of Climandes, a twinning project between the meteorological services of Peru and Switzerland, we implemented and evaluated the impact of community-based climate services that were co-developed with the target smallholder communities of the semi-arid highlands of the southern Peruvian Andes, where small-scale farmers are especially exposed to adverse climate events due to high inter-annual climate variability and weak socio-economic capacities. In this chapter we analyse the project implementation through a socio-economic lens. Research results generated alongside the project indicate that the well-directed user engagement resulted in a strong increase of trust in the weather service SENAMHI Peru and led to improved consideration of the information provided in the respective decision-making processes. We highlight the key steps that proved to be indispensable for the implementation of meaningful and sustainable climate services. The project outcomes point to the great and widely untapped potential of community-based climate services to reduce vulnerability and strengthen resilience of smallholder farmers in the face of changing climate conditions

Differential Gene Expression in Liver, Gill, and Olfactory Rosettes of Coho Salmon (Oncorhynchus kisutch) After Acclimation to Salinity

Most Pacific salmonids undergo smoltification and transition from freshwater to saltwater, making various adjustments in metabolism, catabolism, osmotic, and ion regulation. The molecular mechanisms underlying this transition are largely unknown. In the present study, we acclimated coho salmon (Oncorhynchus kisutch) to four different salinities and assessed gene expression through microarray analysis of gills, liver, and olfactory rosettes. Gills are involved in osmotic regulation, liver plays a role in energetics, and olfactory rosettes are involved in behavior. Between all salinity treatments, liver had the highest number of differentially expressed genes at 1616, gills had 1074, and olfactory rosettes had 924, using a 1.5-fold cutoff and a false discovery rate of 0.5. Higher responsiveness of liver to metabolic changes after salinity acclimation to provide energy for other osmoregulatory tissues such as the gills may explain the differences in number of differentially expressed genes. Differentially expressed genes were tissue- and salinity-dependent. There were no known genes differentially expressed that were common to all salinity treatments and all tissues. Gene ontology term analysis revealed biological processes, molecular functions, and cellular components that were significantly affected by salinity, a majority of which were tissue-dependent. For liver, oxygen binding and transport terms were highlighted. For gills, muscle, and cytoskeleton-related terms predominated and for olfactory rosettes, immune response-related genes were accentuated. Interaction networks were examined in combination with GO terms and determined similarities between tissues for potential osmosensors, signal transduction cascades, and transcription factors