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Humanistic geographers distinguish between space and place: “What begins as undifferentiated space becomes place as we get to know it better and endow it with value” (Tuan, 1977, page 6). In this essay, we seek to demonstrate how mathematics education researchers and mathematics instructors may find space and place illuminating for understanding important aspects of students’ learning experiences during the coronavirus pandemic—and possibly beyond. Specifically, after introducing the terms and relating them to the context of a university mathematics class, we exemplify how home and class places collided for three undergraduate mathematics students forced to deal with the abrupt transition to online education. We conclude by discussing implications of attending to space and place for designers and researchers of (pandemic) online instruction and make connections to how the pandemic and attending to space and place can serve as a catalyst for reshaping undergraduate mathematics education.

Accelerating the pace of microbiome science to enhance crop productivity and agroecosystem health will require transdisciplinary studies, comparisons among datasets, and synthetic analyses of research from diverse crop management contexts. However, despite the widespread availability of crop-associated microbiome data, variation in field sampling and laboratory processing methodologies, as well as metadata collection and reporting, significantly constrains the potential for integrative and comparative analyses. Here we discuss the need for agriculture-specific metadata standards for microbiome research, and propose a list of "required" and "desirable" metadata categories and ontologies essential to be included in a future minimum information metadata standards checklist for describing agricultural microbiome studies. We begin by briefly reviewing existing metadata standards relevant to agricultural microbiome research, and describe ongoing efforts to enhance the potential for integration of data across research studies. Our goal is not to delineate a fixed list of metadata requirements. Instead, we hope to advance the field by providing a starting point for discussion, and inspire researchers to adopt standardized procedures for collecting and reporting consistent and well-annotated metadata for agricultural microbiome research.

Accelerating the pace of microbiome science to enhance crop productivity and agroecosystem health will require transdisciplinary studies, comparisons among datasets, and synthetic analyses of research from diverse crop management contexts. However, despite the widespread availability of crop-associated microbiome data, variation in field sampling and laboratory processing methodologies, as well as metadata collection and reporting, significantly constrains the potential for integrative and comparative analyses. Here we discuss the need for agriculture-specific metadata standards for microbiome research, and propose a list of "required" and "desirable" metadata categories and ontologies essential to be included in a future minimum information metadata standards checklist for describing agricultural microbiome studies. We begin by briefly reviewing existing metadata standards relevant to agricultural microbiome research, and describe ongoing efforts to enhance the potential for integration of data across research studies. Our goal is not to delineate a fixed list of metadata requirements. Instead, we hope to advance the field by providing a starting point for discussion, and inspire researchers to adopt standardized procedures for collecting and reporting consistent and well-annotated metadata for agricultural microbiome research.

Microorganisms are vital in mediating the earth's biogeochemical cycles; yet, despite our rapidly increasing ability to explore complex environmental microbial communities, the relationship between microbial community structure and ecosystem processes remains poorly understood. Here, we address a fundamental and unanswered question in microbial ecology: 'When do we need to understand microbial community structure to accurately predict function?' We present a statistical analysis investigating the value of environmental data and microbial community structure independently and in combination for explaining rates of carbon and nitrogen cycling processes within 82 global datasets. Environmental variables were the strongest predictors of process rates but left 44% of variation unexplained on average, suggesting the potential for microbial data to increase model accuracy. Although only 29% of our datasets were significantly improved by adding information on microbial community structure, we observed improvement in models of processes mediated by narrow phylogenetic guilds via functional gene data, and conversely, improvement in models of facultative microbial processes via community diversity metrics. Our results also suggest that microbial diversity can strengthen predictions of respiration rates beyond microbial biomass parameters, as 53% of models were improved by incorporating both sets of predictors compared to 35% by microbial biomass alone. Our analysis represents the first comprehensive analysis of research examining links between microbial community structure and ecosystem function. Taken together, our results indicate that a greater understanding of microbial communities informed by ecological principles may enhance our ability to predict ecosystem process rates relative to assessments based on environmental variables and microbial physiology.

From the onset of ecosystem development, pioneering microorganisms are the engines that drive ecosystem processes by decomposing organic matter, mineralizing nutrients, and weathering primary minerals. Despite their importance, we know very little about how microbial assembly occurs during early ecosystem development, how it relates to environmental characteristics and function, what importance it has for aboveground plant communities, and whether it varies in different parts of the world. The overall objective of my dissertation research was to explore the processes and mechanisms of soil microbial succession along a series of actively retreating glacial chronosequences. I used three climatically, geographically, and geologically distinct glacial sites: Easton Glacier, Washington, USA, Mendenhall Glacier, Alaska, USA, and Puca Glacier, Peru. The chosen sites differed with regard to soil forming state factors (organisms, geology, climate) and rates of succession, providing the unique opportunity to test the generality of microbial succession across sites.

Enr.: 11/2008

Non-PR, IFPRI1, FCND, Many of the challenges facing children now are a function of the changing times, including increases in urbanization, political violence, changing family forms, and, in some a cases, decreased supplies of adequate food. This paper reviews the evolving nature of these risks. In addition, the paper analyzes the development of formal and informal strategies to ameliorate the vulnerability and promote the resilience of young children to these risks. The paper identifies four stages in the research process regarding risks for children: (1) identification of the risk; (2) clarification of etiology and consequences; (3) recognition of resilience among some individuals; and (4) definition of factors in resilience and implications for intervention.

In West Africa, health-seeking behaviour can be better understood by assessing how women differ from each other, rather than how they differ from men, in terms of their socioeconomic and political power within the domestic environment. Anthropological and demographic data were collected among rural Malian Fulani and Dogon populations who possess similar health beliefs and who live in the same ecological area. However, real differences between the two ethnic groups were reflected in variations in maternal status defined according to women’s support and/or autonomy in their households. When a child becomes sick, status obligations result in limited degrees of co-operation between marital female relatives. By contrast, on a day-to-day basis such assistance is rarely forthcoming and women rely on their own unmarried daughters or on external kin networks for surrogate child care. It is concluded that variations in health behaviour and mortality outcomes within these populations reflect not simply ‘ethnic’ differences in beliefs or culture, but rather real differences in mothers’ social positions within their family environments and in their access to household resources for children’s treatment and care.