(ragweed) pollen - A growing aeroallergen of concern in South Africa.

Background: Ragweed is an invasive, highly allergenic weed predicted to expand its habitat with warming global temperatures. Several species have been identified in South Africa for well over a century; however, its presence remained undetected by allergists and aerobiologists until the development of an extensive aerospora monitoring system across South African urban areas since 2019. This paper presents the inventory of preliminary investigation of the airborne pollen and the taxonomic identification of ragweed species.

The South African Pollen Monitoring Network: Insights from 2 years of national aerospora sampling (2019-2021).

Background: Pollen monitoring has been discontinuously undertaken in South Africa, a country with high biodiversity, a seasonal rainfall gradient, and nine biomes from arid to subtropical. The South African Pollen Monitoring Network was set up in 2019 to conduct the first long-term national aerospora monitoring across multiple biomes, providing weekly reports to allergy sufferers and healthcare providers.

Methods: Daily airborne pollen concentrations were measured from August 2019 to August 2021 in seven cities across South Africa.

Exploring wastewater nitrogen and phosphorus flows in urban and rural areas in China for the period 1970 to 2015.

China has experienced rapid population growth and increasing human N and P discharge from point sources. This paper presents a new spatial and temporal model-based, province-scale inventory of N and P in wastewater using detailed information on the location and functioning of 4436 WWTPs covering China for the period 1970-2015. China's nutrient discharge to surface water increased 22-fold from 177 to 3908 Gg N yr and 29-fold from 20 to 577 Gg P yr in urban areas between 1970 and 2015.

Inland Waters Increasingly Produce and Emit Nitrous Oxide.

Nitrous oxide (NO) is a long-lived greenhouse gas and currently contributes ∼10% to global greenhouse warming. Studies have suggested that inland waters are a large and growing global NO source, but whether, how, where, when, and why inland-water NO emissions changed in the Anthropocene remains unclear. Here, we quantify global NO formation, transport, and emission along the aquatic continuum and their changes using a spatially explicit, mechanistic, coupled biogeochemistry-hydrology model.

Proximity to livestock farms and COVID-19 in the Netherlands, 2020-2021.

Objectives: In the Netherlands, during the first phase of the COVID-19 epidemic, the hotspot of COVID-19 overlapped with the country's main livestock area, while in subsequent phases this distinct spatial pattern disappeared. Previous studies show that living near livestock farms influence human respiratory health and immunological responses. This study aimed to explore whether proximity to livestock was associated with SARS-CoV-2 infection.