How climate awareness influences farmers’ adaptation decisions in Central America?

Central America is one of the regions with the highest vulnerability to climate change, with negative effects projected to affect its economy and food security. To address this issue, an integrative farm management approach such as Climate-Smart Agriculture can help reorient agricultural practices towards climate adaptation and food security. Past studies have shown that several factors can either hinder or encourage the adoptions of Climate-Smart practices, including subjective expectations and perceptions. Building on this literature, we analyze farmers' climate awareness and their perceptions regarding the change in climate patterns as well as their choices of farming practices to adapt to these changes. We show that reforestation was the preferred adaptation strategy among interviewed farmers and that educational profiles and the size of landholdings drive the adoption of this and other practices. Soil management and introduction of new crops are preferred by literate farms with large farmlands, whereas illiterate farmers with smaller farmland tend to move towards farm intensification with an increase in the utilization of external inputs. Our findings provide evidence to support the design of capacity development interventions targeting specific groups of farmers according to their main crop and education profile.How climate awareness influences farmers’ adaptation decisions in Central America?acceptedVersio

Crop variety management for climate adaptation supported by citizen science

publishedVersio

Data-driven decentralized breeding increases prediction accuracy in a challenging crop production environment

Crop breeding must embrace the broad diversity of smallholder agricultural systems to ensure food security to the hundreds of millions of people living in challenging production environments. This need can be addressed by combining genomics, farmers’ knowledge, and environmental analysis into a data-driven decentralized approach (3D-breeding). We tested this idea as a proof-of-concept by comparing a durum wheat (Triticum durum Desf.) decentralized trial distributed as incomplete blocks in 1,165 farmer-managed fields across the Ethiopian highlands with a benchmark representing genomic prediction applied to conventional breeding. We found that 3D-breeding could double the prediction accuracy of the benchmark. 3D-breeding could identify genotypes with enhanced local adaptation providing superior productive performance across seasons. We propose this decentralized approach to leverage the diversity in farmer fields and complement conventional plant breeding to enhance local adaptation in challenging crop production environments.publishedVersio

A importância das visitas técnicas para a formação do aluno de farmácia: relato de experiência / The importance of technical visits for the formation of pharmacy students: an experience report

A formação do farmacêutico envolve aulas teóricas, práticas, estágios curriculares e extracurriculares. Devido a extensa jornada acadêmica (entre 4000 a 5500 h), muitas vezes, não é possível a inclusão de visitas técnicas para que o discente vivencie outras possibilidades profissionais. Deste modo, este trabalho tem como objetivo relatar as experiências vivenciadas durante as visitas técnicas que o grupo Pet-farmácia realizou no ano de 2019, bem como analisar a contribuição destas para a formação do aluno. Foram selecionadas duas empresas que atuam na área de produção de cosméticos em nível de grande indústria e local. Também foi incluído um laboratório de controle de qualidade de alimentos. Após as visitas técnicas, o grupo se reuniu e fez uma análise das experiências vivenciadas e contribuições para a formação. Em cada cenário, os alunos puderam observar o papel do farmacêutico e sua contribuição para a equipe. As realidades de uma empresa Nacional e Local são bastante diferentes, bem como as metas de produção e o tamanho da equipe envolvida, porém, em ambas empresas, o farmacêutico está envolvido na rotina da indústria. No caso do controle de qualidade de alimentos, o farmacêutico realiza as atividades analíticas e emite laudos técnicos. Vivenciar estas realidades de perto, permitiu ao grupo ampliar sua visão do exercício da profissão farmacêutica, que no estado do Pará atuam, principalmente, em farmácias comunitárias, hospitalares, análises clínicas e estética. Além disso, permitiu fazer uma conexão das atividades teórico-práticas com a realidade da produção de cosméticos e controle de qualidade de medicamentos. Em síntese, as visitas técnicas podem ser uma importante estratégia para apresentação de novas possibilidades profissionais e excelente cenário de aprendizagem

A importância da antissepsia na odontologia: garantindo a higiene e a segurança

A busca por evidências científicas nesse cenário tem sido uma constante, com revisões sistemáticas realizadas em bases de dados como SciELO, Biblioteca Virtual em Saúde e Pubmed/Medline. A literatura científica unânime em relação à eficácia das técnicas de antissepsia e assepsia reforça a importância dessas medidas na prevenção de infecções e na garantia de um ambiente seguro para procedimentos médicos e odontológicos. Portanto, é imperativo que os cirurgiões-dentistas e profissionais de saúde em geral sigam rigorosamente os protocolos de assepsia e antissepsia. Essa prática não só protege os profissionais de possíveis contaminações, mas também demonstra um compromisso com a saúde e a segurança dos pacientes, assegurando a qualidade dos cuidados prestado

The future of coffee and cocoa agroforestry in a warmer Mesoamerica

Climate change threatens coffee production and the livelihoods of thousands of families in Mesoamerica that depend on it. Replacing coffee with cocoa and integrating trees in combined agroforestry systems to ameliorate abiotic stress are among the proposed alternatives to overcome this challenge. These two alternatives do not consider the vulnerability of cocoa and tree species commonly used in agroforestry plantations to future climate conditions. We assessed the suitability of these alternatives by identifying the potential changes in the distribution of coffee, cocoa and the 100 most common agroforestry trees found in Mesoamerica. Here we show that cocoa could potentially become an alternative in most of coffee vulnerable areas. Agroforestry with currently preferred tree species is highly vulnerable to future climate change. Transforming agroforestry systems by changing tree species composition may be the best approach to adapt most of the coffee and cocoa production areas. Our results stress the urgency for land use planning considering climate change effects and to assess new combinations of agroforestry species in coffee and cocoa plantations in Mesoamerica

chirps: API Client for the CHIRPS Precipitation Data in R

The chirps package provides functionalities for reproducible analysis in R (R Core Team, 2020) using the CHIRPS (Funk et al., 2015) data. CHIRPS is daily precipitation data set developed by the Climate Hazards Group (Funk et al., 2015) for high resolution precipitation gridded data. Spanning 50◦ S to 50◦ N (and all longitudes) and ranging from 1981 to nearpresent (normally with a 45 day lag), CHIRPS incorporates 0.05 arc-degree resolution satellite imagery, and in-situ station data to create gridded precipitation time series for trend analysis and seasonal drought monitoring (Funk et al., 2015). Additionally, the package provides the API client for the IMERG (Huffman et al., 2014) and ESI (SERVIR Global, 2019a) data. The Integrated Multi-satelliE Retrievals for GPM (IMERG) data provides near-real time global observations of rainfall at 0.5 arc-degree resolution, which can be used to estimate total rainfall accumulation from storm systems and quantify the intensity of rainfall and flood impacts from tropical cyclones and other storm systems. IMERG is a daily precipitation dataset available from 2015 to near-present. The evaporative stress index (ESI) data describes temporal anomalies in evapotranspiration produced weekly at 0.25 arc-degree resolution for the entire globe (Anderson et al., 2011). The ESI data is based on satellite observations of land surface temperature, which are used to estimate water loss due to evapotranspiration (the sum of evaporation and plant transpiration from the Earth’s land and ocean surface to the atmosphere). The ESI data is available from 2001 to near-present. When using these data sets in publications please cite Funk et al. (2015) for CHIRPS, Huffman et al. (2014) for IMERG and SERVIR Global (2019a) for ESI

chirps: API Client for the CHIRPS Precipitation Data in R

The chirps package provides functionalities for reproducible analysis in R (R Core Team, 2020) using the CHIRPS (Funk et al., 2015) data. CHIRPS is daily precipitation data set developed by the Climate Hazards Group (Funk et al., 2015) for high resolution precipitation gridded data. Spanning 50◦ S to 50◦ N (and all longitudes) and ranging from 1981 to nearpresent (normally with a 45 day lag), CHIRPS incorporates 0.05 arc-degree resolution satellite imagery, and in-situ station data to create gridded precipitation time series for trend analysis and seasonal drought monitoring (Funk et al., 2015). Additionally, the package provides the API client for the IMERG (Huffman et al., 2014) and ESI (SERVIR Global, 2019a) data. The Integrated Multi-satelliE Retrievals for GPM (IMERG) data provides near-real time global observations of rainfall at 0.5 arc-degree resolution, which can be used to estimate total rainfall accumulation from storm systems and quantify the intensity of rainfall and flood impacts from tropical cyclones and other storm systems. IMERG is a daily precipitation dataset available from 2015 to near-present. The evaporative stress index (ESI) data describes temporal anomalies in evapotranspiration produced weekly at 0.25 arc-degree resolution for the entire globe (Anderson et al., 2011). The ESI data is based on satellite observations of land surface temperature, which are used to estimate water loss due to evapotranspiration (the sum of evaporation and plant transpiration from the Earth’s land and ocean surface to the atmosphere). The ESI data is available from 2001 to near-present. When using these data sets in publications please cite Funk et al. (2015) for CHIRPS, Huffman et al. (2014) for IMERG and SERVIR Global (2019a) for ESI

How climate awareness influences farmers’ adaptation decisions in Central America?

Central America is one of the regions with the highest vulnerability to climate change, with negative effects projected to affect its economy and food security. To address this issue, an integrative farm management approach such as Climate-Smart Agriculture can help reorient agricultural practices towards climate adaptation and food security. Past studies have shown that several factors can either hinder or encourage the adoptions of Climate-Smart practices, including subjective expectations and perceptions. Building on this literature, we analyze farmers' climate awareness and their perceptions regarding the change in climate patterns as well as their choices of farming practices to adapt to these changes. We show that reforestation was the preferred adaptation strategy among interviewed farmers and that educational profiles and the size of landholdings drive the adoption of this and other practices. Soil management and introduction of new crops are preferred by literate farms with large farmlands, whereas illiterate farmers with smaller farmland tend to move towards farm intensification with an increase in the utilization of external inputs. Our findings provide evidence to support the design of capacity development interventions targeting specific groups of farmers according to their main crop and education profile

Rank-based data synthesis of heterogeneous trials to identify the effects of climatic factors on the reaction of Musa genotypes to black leaf streak disease

Synthesis of crop trial data can generate insights that are not available from the analysis of individual studies, but such synthesis is often constrained by the heterogeneity of data among studies. Rank-based data synthesis provides the flexibility to combine data of heterogeneous types and from different sources. We demonstrate the application of rank-based data synthesis of heterogeneous trial data to assess the effect of climatic factors on the reaction of several Musa genotypes to black leaf streak disease (BLSD; caused by Pseudocercospora fijiensis [sexual morph: Mycosphaerella fijiensis]). We aggregated data from the main public repositories of Musa trial data. We applied model-based recursive partitioning with the Plackett-Luce model, using climatic data as covariates. The model identified the maximum length of the dry spell as the main variable influencing differences in genotypic response to BLSD, dividing the aggregated trial dataset into humid and dry environments. We found differences in the reaction of genotypes to BLSD between these environments. In humid environments, NARITA 8 was found to be the most resistant genotype, while in dry environments FHIA-01 was the best performing improved genotype. We also assessed reliability, which is the probability of outperforming the reference genotype (Calcutta 4). In humid environments NARITA 2, NARITA 8 and FHIA-01 had the highest reliability, while in dry environments only the landrace Saba surpassed 50% reliability. The information generated by our data synthesis approach supports selecting Musa genotypes for further evaluations at new locations