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Abstract Ecosystem services such as pollination and biocontrol may be severely affected by emerging nano/micro-plastics (NMP) pollution. Here, we synthesize the little-known effects of NMP on pollinators and biocontrol agents on the organismal, farm and landscape scale. Ingested NMP trigger organismal changes from gene expression, organ damage to behavior modifications. At the farm and landscape level, NMP will likely amplify synergistic effects with other threats such as pathogens, and may alter floral resource distributions in high NMP concentration areas. Understanding exposure pathways of NMP on pollinators and biocontrol agents is critical to evaluate future risks for agricultural ecosystems and food security.

Passive acoustic monitoring of soundscapes and biodiversity produces vast amounts of audio recordings, but the management and analyses of these raw data present technical challenges. A multitude of software solutions exist, but none can fulfil all purposes required for the management, processing, navigation, and analysis of acoustic data. The field of ecoacoustics needs a software tool that is free, evolving, and accessible. We take a step in that direction and present ecoSound-web: an open-source, online platform for ecoacoustics designed and built by ecologists and software engineers. ecoSound-web can be used for storing, re-sampling, organising, analysing, and sharing soundscape recording or metadata projects. Specifically, it allows manual annotation of soniferous animals and soundscape components, automatic annotation with deep-learning models for all birds and for UK bat species, peer-reviewing annotations, analysing audio in time and frequency dimensions, computing alpha acoustic indices, and providing reference sound libraries for different taxa. We present ecoSound-web’s structure and features, and describe its operation for typical use cases such as sampling bird and bat communities, using a primate call library, and the analysis of soundscape components and acoustic indices. ecoSound-web is available from: https://github.com/ecomontec/ecoSound-web

Among the leading issues that dominated debate throughout 2020, diversity on higher education campuses surfaced once again demanding change of existing as well as future practices. Addressing and incorporating diversified cultural perspectives require universities to do much more than issuing diversity statements. This research study employed Q-methodology to explore and compare the perspectives that one group of international students and one group of domestic students hold regarding the American model of the research university. The groups included Arab students studying at a public research university in the United States, and domestic American students studying at a public research university in the United States. Fifteen students from both groups--representing a total of 30 participants--were interviewed. Factor analysis indicated that students from both cultural backgrounds held unique perspectives regarding the value of the American model of the research university.

Passive acoustic monitoring of soundscapes and biodiversity produces vast amounts of audio recordings, but the management and analyses of these raw data present technical challenges. A multitude of software solutions exist, but none can fulfil all purposes required for the management, processing, navigation, and analysis of acoustic data. The field of ecoacoustics needs a software tool that is free, evolving, and accessible. We take a step in that direction and present ecoSound-web: an open-source, online platform for ecoacoustics designed and built by ecologists and software engineers. ecoSound-web can be used for storing, re-sampling, organising, analysing, and sharing soundscape recording or metadata projects. Specifically, it allows manual annotation of soniferous animals and soundscape components, automatic annotation with deep-learning models for all birds and for UK bat species, peer-reviewing annotations, analysing audio in time and frequency dimensions, computing alpha acoustic indices, and providing reference sound libraries for different taxa. We present ecoSound-web’s structure and features, and describe its operation for typical use cases such as sampling bird and bat communities, using a primate call library, and the analysis of soundscape components and acoustic indices. ecoSound-web is available from: https://github.com/ecomontec/ecoSound-web

Objective: To describe whether detecting plasma microbial cell-free DNA by next-generation sequencing (NGS) provided additional information compared to routine cultures or led to change in antimicrobial management. Design and setting: This is a retrospective cohort study evaluating NGS tests performed on patients who were admitted to an 11-acute care hospital health system in the greater Houston area between May 2022 and May 2023. Repeat tests on the same patient encounter were included if >7 days from previous test. Routine microbiology data was compared if test was collected within 7 days before or after NGS testing. Results: During the study period there were 135 unique patient encounters identified with an NGS order. Of which, 74.1% were ≥18 years of age and 46.7% were immunocompromised. A total of 143 NGS tests were ordered, with 4 not being run due to quality control issues. Out of 139 NGS tests completed, 76 (54.7%) were positive for at least one organism. When compared to routine testing, NGS alone was positive in 29 (20.9%) instances, routine testing alone was positive in 17 (12.2%) instances, both were positive in 44 (31.7%) instances, and both were negative in 49 (35.3%) instances. In the 44 instances that both NGS and routine testing were positive, 15 (34.1%) were concordant for all organisms. In total, NGS identified 92 more organisms (69 bacterial, 8 fungal, and 15 viral) compared to routine testing and routine testing identified 42 more organisms (28 bacterial, 6 fungal, 11 viral, and 1 parasite) compared to NGS. Fifty-six changes to antibiotic therapy were made within 48 hours of the NGS test resulting, with 16 of these changes being directly attributed to NGS test. Nine of these changes being escalations and seven being de-escalations. Conclusion: NGS may aid in determining further testing, earlier detection of pathogens, and detection of pathogens outside of routine testing resulting in direct changes to antimicrobials. However, results need to be interpreted with caution. NGS can miss pertinent pathogens and is difficult to interpret when commensal organisms are detected, both of which can lead to unnecessary testing or treatment. There is an absence of a clear algorithm for the use of NGS testing and the test comes with a high price and unclear utility. Further studies are needed to determine which patients may most benefit from NGS testing.

The study abroad experience at the university level is an increasingly important developmental opportunity. Unfortunately, while campuses within the United States collectively enroll a growing number of international students, the number of American students studying abroad during an undergraduate degree program remains consistently low. This is especially true among African American students. This case study examines the perceptions of undergraduate African American students regarding institutional barriers to study abroad. Supporting extant literature, perceived cost and restrictions on financial aid for studying abroad topped the reasons for not pursuing study abroad. In addition, the largest influences on the decision by African American students to participate in study abroad are family and friends. However, minimal institutional awareness of these influencers was present. To increase African American participation in study abroad, the findings highlight the need for focused institutional actions that include involving African American campus resources, carefully considering study abroad destinations, and strategic communication.

Abstract Background As vaccines for COVID-19 became available, many countries introduced an obligation in 2021 for employees to prove their COVID-19 status at work, known in Germany as the 3G rule (vaccinated, recovered, tested). In view of the controversial debate, there was concern that employees might try to avoid providing mandatory COVID-19 certificates by taking sick leave. The aim of this study was to investigate whether mandatory COVID-19 tests in the workplace led to such an evasive response. Method For an empirical panel analysis, we collected data from official sources and combined aggregated health insurance data on sick leave, epidemiological data on laboratory-confirmed COVID-19 infections, and vaccination rates for the German states from September 2021 to January 2022. We used a regional panel data analysis to estimate the impact of the mandatory COVID-19 certificates at the workplace on workers’ sick leave. The regional vaccination rate reflected differences in treatment intensity. Results This study contributes to the limited evidence on the potential impact of introducing mandatory COVID-19 certificates at the workplace on sickness absence rates. In fact, our results showed that after controlling for infection rates, a one percentage point lower vaccination rate led to a 0.021 percentage point increase in the sickness absence rate when the 3G rule came into effect. This effect was measured with high statistical precision. In addition, in robustness checks, we controlled for a number of other possible influencing factors that may have affected sickness behaviours, such as time-varying labour market situations. However, the results remained robust. Conclusions The results of our empirical panel analysis implied that mandatory COVID-19 certificates in the workplace led to evasive responses and to additional days of sick leave of a relevant magnitude. Testing obligations were meant to help contain the epidemic. However, when introducing controversial obligations, it is important to consider evasive responses and to design the rules appropriately and communicate them convincingly.

Summary: Ecosystem services such as pollination and natural pest control are crucial for sustainable agriculture and affected by landscape complexity. Landscape complexity is associated with field size; therefore, studies in regions with large field sizes and regions with small field sizes are required for a comprehensive understanding of the landscape complexity-ecosystem service relationship. We conduct a systematic review, which shows that a majority of the studies are conducted in the US and Europe. Among the top 10 countries with the highest number of publications, China is the only one with extensive agricultural areas with very small fields (

Abstract Fallow pilot policies exist in China but fallow priority areas have yet to be identified based on eco-environmental stressors and spatial cost-benefit analyses. Here we use a multi-criteria optimization algorithm to determine fallow priority areas based on soil pollution, groundwater overexploitation, land quality, and ecological protection redlines delineation data and with high-cost effectiveness. By considering five spatial scenarios on three objective functions, we find most notably that fallowing the top 20% of priority areas, the benefit of pollution control and environmental protection can be achieved by up to 98.7% and 64.7%, respectively. Our results show that effective fallow prioritization on cultivated land may reduce implementation costs by up to 509.3 billion USD, corresponding to 13.6% of China’s budget in 2021. Thus, effective fallow prioritization will promote sustainable land use by pursuing goals between benefits and cost synergistically and allow budget allocation to other sustainable agricultural targets based on agricultural diversification.

Abstract Administrative labour market data for Germany do not contain detailed information on working hours. This poses a serious challenge for many empirical research questions. Between 2010 and 2014, however, it is possible to merge a supplementary data source containing information on working hours reported by employers for each job to the German Social Accident Insurances. One complicating factor is that employers were allowed to report actual working hours, contractual working hours or a full-time worker reference value, and it is not obvious from the data which re-porting scheme was actually used. In this report, we describe this supplementary data source and propose a correction procedure that maps all data entries so that they uniformly reflect contractual working time. After this correction, the distribution of contractual weekly working hours in the combined administrative labour market data closely resembles the distribution from the German Structural Earnings Survey.

Summary: The global food system must meet the increasing demand for food, fiber, and energy while reducing environmental impacts. The UN Food System Summit (UNFSS) has made a clear call to action for a global food systems transformation. We argue that three major discrepancies remain, potentially delaying the urgent implementation of the call to action. First, Nature-based Solutions (NbS) are not sufficiently focused on agriculture, leading to funding allocation issues. Second, a mismatch of agroecology with technology innovations may slow scaling agroecological farming. Lastly, agricultural diversification must move beyond organic landscapes and into conventional agriculture. As a solution, principles of NbS should be clear on agricultural integration. Moreover, stakeholder awareness must increase that agroecology does not necessarily conflict with agricultural technologies. Future agricultural models must apply measures such as agricultural diversification in conjunction with technology innovations to then ascertain an overall timely and successful implementation of the UNFSS call to action.

The effects of globalization have been studied, mainly, from a corporatization perspective (Kleypas and & McDougal 2012) and have used classic economic and academic capitalism theories (Walker 2009), and administrative theoretical frameworks (Barrow, Didou-Aupetit, and Mallea 2003). Such views have contributed to the widespread adoption of a business model of the university that emphasizes knowledge production and the view of education as a commodity (Murphy 2006; de Wit 2011). A common response is the adoption, and in some cases the local adaptation, of the American model of the research university (AMRU) [a model that has its roots in the United Kingdom and is employed in Australia, so it is also referred to as the Anglo-Saxon model of the research university (Teichler 1998; Wanger, Azizova and Wang 2009; Wang and Wanger 2011)]. Within the Arab Gulf region, efforts to emulate the research university model are well documented (Obst and Kirk 2010). This study accordingly assesses the perceptions of Arab Gulf students of the AMRU and compares them to the perceptions of American students.

Passive acoustic monitoring of soundscapes and biodiversity produces vast amounts of audio recordings, but the management and analysis of these raw data present technical challenges. A multitude of software solutions exist, but none can fulfil all purposes required for the management, processing, navigation, analysis, and dissemination of acoustic data. The field of ecoacoustics needs a software tool that is free, evolving, and accessible. We take a step in that direction and present ecoSound-web: an open-source, online platform for ecoacoustics designed and built by ecologists and software engineers. ecoSound-web can be used for storing, organising, and sharing soundscape projects, manually creating and peer-reviewing annotations of soniferous animals and phonies, analysing audio in time and frequency, computing alpha acoustic indices, and providing reference sound libraries for different taxa. We present ecoSound-web’s features, structure, and compare it with similar software. We describe its operation mode and the workflow for typical use cases such as the sampling of bird and bat communities, the use of a primate call library, and the analysis of phonies and acoustic indices. ecoSound-web is available from: https://github.com/ecomontec/ecoSound-web

Pesticide use on tropical crops has increased substantially in recent decades, posing a threat to biodiversity and ecosystem services. Amphibians and reptiles are common in tropical agricultural landscapes, but few field studies measure pesticide impacts on these taxa. Here we combine 1-year of correlative data with an experimental field approach from Indonesia. We show that while pesticide application cannot predict amphibian or reptile diversity patterns in cocoa plantations, our experimental exposure to herbicides and insecticides in vegetable gardens eliminated amphibians, whereas reptiles were less impacted by insecticide and not affected by herbicide exposure. The pesticide-driven loss of a common amphibian species known to be a pest-control agent (mainly invertebrate predation) suggests a strong indirect negative effect of pesticides on this service. We recommend landscape-based Integrated Pest Management and additional ecotoxicological studies on amphibians and reptiles to underpin a regulatory framework and to assure recognition and protection of their ecosystem services.

Passive acoustic monitoring of soundscapes and biodiversity produces vast amounts of audio recordings, but the management and analyses of these raw data present technical challenges. A multitude of software solutions exist, but none can fulfil all purposes required for the management, processing, navigation, analysis, and dissemination of acoustic data. The field of ecoacoustics needs a software tool that is free, evolving, and accessible. We take a step in that direction and present ecoSound-web: an open-source, online platform for ecoacoustics designed and built by ecologists and software engineers. ecoSound-web can be used for storing, organising, and sharing soundscape projects, manually creating and peer-reviewing annotations of soniferous animals and phonies, analysing audio in time and frequency, computing alpha acoustic indices, and providing reference sound libraries for different taxa. We present ecoSound-web’s features, structure, and compare it with similar software. We describe its operation mode and the workflow for typical use cases such as the sampling of bird and bat communities, the use of a primate call library, and the analysis of phonies and acoustic indices. ecoSound-web is available from: https://github.com/ecomontec/ecoSound-web

Soon after commencement of the SARS-CoV-2 disease outbreak of 2019 (COVID-19), it became evident that the receptor-binding domain of the viral spike protein is the target of neutralizing antibodies that comprise a critical element of protective immunity to the virus. This study addresses the relative lack of information regarding actual antibody concentrations and binding affinities in convalescent plasma (CP) samples from COVID-19 patients and extends these analyses to post-vaccination (PV) samples to estimate protective IgG antibody (Ab) levels. A direct enzyme-linked immunosorbent assay (ELISA) was used to measure IgG anti-spike protein (SP) antibodies (Abs) relative to human chimeric spike S1 Ab standards. Microplate wells were coated with recombinant SP. Affinities of Ab binding to SP were determined by previously described methods. Binding affinities were also determined in an RBD-specific sandwich ELISA. Two indices of protective immunity were determined as permutations of Ab molar concentration divided by affinity as dissociation constant (KD). The range and geometric means of Ab concentrations in 21 CP and 21 PV samples were similar and a protective Ab level of 7.5 μg/ml was determined for the latter population, based on 95% of the normal distribution of the PV population. A population (n = 21) of plasma samples from individuals receiving only one vaccination with the BNT162b2 or mRNA-1273 vaccines (PtV) exhibited a geometric mean Ab concentration significantly (p < 0.03) lower than the PV population. The results of this study have implications for future vaccine development, projection of protective efficacy duration, and understanding of the immune response to SARS-CoV-2 infection. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]