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When Trump was elected as US President and given the opportunity to implement his campaign promise of withdrawing the country from international climate change agreements, it sparked fears of a knock-on effect of non-commitment from other states that could result in the Paris Agreement's dismantlement. This article examines public opinion – which often influences governments' policy decisions – collected in early 2017 in 38 countries on his proposed withdrawal from international climate change agreements. On top of important individual-level predictors, disapproval of his proposal was higher in liberal democracies and countries that depend less on fossil fuels for electricity. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article examines the evolution of long-term trends in the prioritization of environmental protection in Britain over a period of four decades. It does so by compiling comparable questions tapping into the same underlying environmental dimension from a range of sources, including historical polling data that has only recently been made available to the research community. At the aggregate level, prioritization largely tracks changing economic conditions as well as key environmental events, with the winter of 2019 showing the highest recorded levels. Furthermore, trends in individuals' willingness to prioritize the environment may not always go in tandem with trends in environmental salience. At the individual level, educational attainment is the only consistently significant demographic correlate over time. However, there is evidence of increasing politicization of the environment, with left–right orientations only becoming an important correlate of environmental prioritization in recent years, in line with rising divergence on the issue at the elite level. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Lactiplantibacillus plantarum is a commensal bacterial species often found within the human gut. To expand our knowledge about this human-associated taxon with potential probiotic properties, here we present the draft genome sequence of Lactiplantibacillus plantarum strain APC2688, isolated from a human fecal sample.

Sequence comparison of 16S rRNA PCR amplicons is an established approach to taxonomically identify bacterial isolates and profile complex microbial communities. One potential application of recent advances in long-read sequencing technologies is to sequence entire rRNA operons and capture significantly more phylogenetic information compared to sequencing of the 16S rRNA (or regions thereof) alone, with the potential to increase the proportion of amplicons that can be reliably classified to lower taxonomic ranks. Here we describe GROND ( G enome-derived R ibosomal O pero n D atabase), a publicly available database of quality-checked 16S-ITS-23S rRNA operons, accompanied by multiple taxonomic classifications. GROND will aid researchers in analysis of their data and act as a standardised database to allow comparison of results between studies.