Scientific Bases for a Participatory Forest Landscape Management

In Madagascar – a biodiversity hotspot of international importance – the villagers depend on the forest first for its soil as a reserve of arable land as well as a shelter and a pasture for the herds, and second for the production of timber, charcoal and other forest products. Most of the currently proposed conservation management systems for forests do not take into consideration villagers’ needs, in Madagascar too; indeed degradation and deforestation have continuously occurred in places where the forest is under great pressure. In targeting the improvement of the livelihood of local populations and the maintenance of “multifunctionality”, especially the ecological value of the forest, the present project aims at developing scientific criteria for a sustainable management of forest landscapes in western Madagascar at a regional scale. A detailed inventory of resources and a specific understanding of stakeholder requirements and strategies will allow drawing an accurate picture of the human-forest interface. A participatory approach paves the way for realistic management criteria that are really adequate to the ecological and social situations. The management criteria will provide a tool for further discussions on landscape management in central Menabe

Who wants to conserve remaining forest fragments in the Manompana corridor?

Contiguous forests in Madagascar are continuously converted into forest fragments due to deforestation, and dispersed into landscape mosaics dominated by agriculture. These fragments are of increasing importance for biodiversity conservation as well as for the well being of rural inhabitants, providing a high diversity of timber and non - timber forest products. An increasing number of international projects are therefore trying to preserve remaining forests and to transfer the management of these forests to local communities. However, it is not known how important the preservation of forest fragments are to local people. We therefore explore the importance of forest fragments as a source of cash income to different groups separated by wealth level and access to forest resources. A multi - method research approach was taken, based on score application exercises as well as interviews with individual households and focus groups. Our study site was located at the east coast of Madagascar in the Manompana corridor. Results show that some groups are significantly more interested in the preservation of forest fragments than others. Interest is significantly related to the wealth of local inhabitants as well as to the walking distance between villages and forest resources. Nevertheless, interest in resource preservation does not depend on how important fragments are to local people, but rather on the awareness about resource scarcity

Recommandations pour une agriculture plus écologique respectant les besoins socio - écono-miques locaux, région du Menabe Central, côte ouest de Madagascar

Dans le Menabe Central (côte ouest de Madagascar), les paysages forestiers deviennent toujours plus ouverts, le taux de déforestation avoisinant les 0,7 % . La déforestation étant notamment due à des défrichements pour l’agriculture qui est la principale activité de la région, une gestion agricole écologiquement durable apparaît comme une nécessité urgente. Afin de ne pas défavoriser les populations locales vivant dans des conditions socio-économiques difficiles (81,3 % de la population malgache vivait encore en - dessous du seuil de pauvreté en 2010), cet aménagement agricole doit également viser à proposer des  recommandations socio - économiquement rentables. Cette étude vise donc à confirmer l’hypothèse selon laquelle une agriculture plus écologique – permettant aux agriculteurs de se sédentariser sur leurs terres et diminuant les défrichements forestiers – qui fournirait des produits économiquement rentables sur le long terme répondrait aux nécessités socio-économiques et écologiques locales. La présente étude conclut en mettant en évidence quatre recommandations : i) La riziculture devrait être privilégiée ; ii) les techniques agro - forestières et les utilisations de fertilisants naturels devraient être encouragées ; iii) des alternatives permettant de diversifier le revenu des populations rurales, telle que la rizipisciculture, devraient être soutenues ; et iv) un aménagement des surfaces sylvicoles défrichées devrait être mis en place de manière participative.In the Central Menabe region on the west cost of Madagascar, traditional uses of forest resources create an increasingly open landscape. The current annual rate of loss of Malagasy dense dry forest, the natural forest type of the region, is 0.7 % . Agriculture represents the principal activity of people in Central Menabe, and the main reason for the decrease in forest cover. In the current difficult socio-economical context (81.3 % of the Malagasy population lived under the poverty line in 2010), where a threat to dry forests clearly exists, it is therefore urgent to propose scientifically-sound and participatory recommendations for ecologically sustainable and socio - economically profitable agricultural use of the Central Menabe landscape. The objective of this study is to confirm the hypothesis that a more sustainable form of agriculture – promoting farmers’ permanent use of cultivated fields – would generate high value economic products, and contribute to the socio - economic and environmental needs of the region. To meet this objective, the study answers three research questions: i) What are the principal products of the villager economy? ii) what is the role of traditional agriculture in deforestation?; and, iii) what is the potential for, and the expectations of the local populations towards, more sedentary agricultural techniques? The research uses methods from both social (scoring and questionnaires) and natural sciences (inventories and measures of clearings), and was carried out in six villages representative of the Central Menabe region. Two villages mainly practiced rice cultivation, two mainly carried out slash and burn cultivation (of maize, cassava and peanut), and two practiced both slash and burn and rice cultivation. Half of the villages were situated near a national road and have thus an easy access to regional markets; the three other villages were more remote. In total 120 inhabitants were involved in 72 different scoring exercises and 288 participated in a questionnaire survey. Mann-Whitney and chi - square tests were used to test for statistical significance in observed differences.Analyses confirm that rice is the main pillar of the villager economy in the region, and that – at the village scale – this product serves a strong commercial demand which is not always satisfied. Farmers take a weak interest in the consumption of products from slash and burn cultivation (low demand), although the majority of people that cultivate maize, cassava or peanut perceive slash and burn cultivation as a source of alimentary or financial security (subsistence or sale). Give

Transcriptional analysis of temporal gene expression in germinating Clostridium difficile 630 endospores.

Clostridium difficile is the leading cause of hospital acquired diarrhoea in industrialised countries. Under conditions that are not favourable for growth, the pathogen produces metabolically dormant endospores via asymmetric cell division. These are extremely resistant to both chemical and physical stress and provide the mechanism by which C. difficile can evade the potentially fatal consequences of exposure to heat, oxygen, alcohol, and certain disinfectants. Spores are the primary infective agent and must germinate to allow for vegetative cell growth and toxin production. While spore germination in Bacillus is well understood, little is known about C. difficile germination and outgrowth. Here we use genome-wide transcriptional analysis to elucidate the temporal gene expression patterns in C. difficile 630 endospore germination. We have optimized methods for large scale production and purification of spores. The germination characteristics of purified spores have been characterized and RNA extraction protocols have been optimized. Gene expression was highly dynamic during germination and outgrowth, and was found to involve a large number of genes. Using this genome-wide, microarray approach we have identified 511 genes that are significantly up- or down-regulated during C. difficile germination (p≤0.01). A number of functional groups of genes appeared to be co-regulated. These included transport, protein synthesis and secretion, motility and chemotaxis as well as cell wall biogenesis. These data give insight into how C. difficile re-establishes its metabolism, re-builds the basic structures of the vegetative cell and resumes growth

Unsupervised, Efficient and Semantic Expertise Retrieval

We introduce an unsupervised discriminative model for the task of retrieving experts in online document collections. We exclusively employ textual evidence and avoid explicit feature engineering by learning distributed word representations in an unsupervised way. We compare our model to state-of-the-art unsupervised statistical vector space and probabilistic generative approaches. Our proposed log-linear model achieves the retrieval performance levels of state-of-the-art document-centric methods with the low inference cost of so-called profile-centric approaches. It yields a statistically significant improved ranking over vector space and generative models in most cases, matching the performance of supervised methods on various benchmarks. That is, by using solely text we can do as well as methods that work with external evidence and/or relevance feedback. A contrastive analysis of rankings produced by discriminative and generative approaches shows that they have complementary strengths due to the ability of the unsupervised discriminative model to perform semantic matching.Comment: WWW2016, Proceedings of the 25th International Conference on World Wide Web. 201

Effect of tcdR Mutation on Sporulation in the Epidemic Clostridium difficile Strain R20291

Citation: Girinathan, B. P., Monot, M., Boyle, D., McAllister, K. N., Sorg, J. A., Dupuy, B., & Govind, R. (2017). Effect of tcdR Mutation on Sporulation in the Epidemic Clostridium difficile Strain R20291. Msphere, 2(1), 14. doi:10.1128/mSphere.00383-16Clostridium difficile is an important nosocomial pathogen and the leading cause of hospital-acquired diarrhea. Antibiotic use is the primary risk factor for the development of C. difficile-associated disease because it disrupts normally protective gut flora and enables C. difficile to colonize the colon. C. difficile damages host tissue by secreting toxins and disseminates by forming spores. The toxin-encoding genes, tcdA and tcdB, are part of a pathogenicity locus, which also includes the tcdR gene that codes for TcdR, an alternate sigma factor that initiates transcription of tcdA and tcdB genes. We created a tcdR mutant in epidemic-type C. difficile strain R20291 in an attempt to identify the global role of tcdR. A site-directed mutation in tcdR affected both toxin production and sporulation in C. difficile R20291. Spores of the tcdR mutant were more heat sensitive than the wild type (WT). Nearly 3-fold more taurocholate was needed to germinate spores from the tcdR mutant than to germinate the spores prepared from the WT strain. Transmission electron microscopic analysis of the spores also revealed a weakly assembled exosporium on the tcdR mutant spores. Accordingly, comparative transcriptome analysis showed many differentially expressed sporulation genes in the tcdR mutant compared to the WT strain. These data suggest that regulatory networks of toxin production and sporulation in C. difficile strain R20291 are linked with each other. IMPORTANCE C. difficile infects thousands of hospitalized patients every year, causing significant morbidity and mortality. C. difficile spores play a pivotal role in the transmission of the pathogen in the hospital environment. During infection, the spores germinate, and the vegetative bacterial cells produce toxins that damage host tissue. Thus, sporulation and toxin production are two important traits of C. difficile. In this study, we showed that a mutation in tcdR, the toxin gene regulator, affects both toxin production and sporulation in epidemic-type C. difficile strain R20291