How efficient are pre-dams as reservoir guardians? A long-term study on nutrient retention.

Assessing nutrient loading and processing is crucial for water quality management in lakes and reservoirs. Quantifying and reducing external nutrient inputs in these systems remains a significant challenge. The difficulty arises from low monitoring frequencies of the highly dynamic external inputs and the limited availability of measures to reduce diffuse source loading.

Infiltration of secondary treated wastewater into an oxic aquifer: Hydrochemical insights from a large-scale sand tank experiment.

To mitigate groundwater level decline, managed aquifer recharge (MAR) with secondary treated wastewater (STWW) is increasingly considered and implemented. However, the effectiveness and potential risks of such systems need evaluation prior to implementation. In this study, we present a large-scale sand tank experiment to analyse processes related to the infiltration of real STWW through the vadose zone and subsequent mixing with oxic native groundwater.

Enhanced wheat productivity in saline soil through the combined application of poultry manure and beneficial microbes.

Background: Soil salinity is one of the major menaces to food security, particularly in dealing with the food demand of the ever-increasing global population. Production of cereal crops such as wheat is severely affected by soil salinity and improper fertilization. The present study aimed to examine the effect of selected microbes and poultry manure (PM) on seedling emergence, physiology, nutrient uptake, and growth of wheat in saline soil.

Shifts in mycorrhizal types of fungi and plants in response to fertilisation, warming and herbivory in a tundra grassland.

Climate warming is severely affecting high-latitude regions. In the Arctic tundra, it may lead to enhanced soil nutrient availability and interact with simultaneous changes in grazing pressure. It is presently unknown how these concurrently occurring global change drivers affect the root-associated fungal communities, particularly mycorrhizal fungi, and whether changes coincide with shifts in plant mycorrhizal types.

Carbon and energy balance of biotechnological glycolate production from microalgae in a pre-industrial scale flat panel photobioreactor.

Glycolate is produced by microalgae under photorespiratory conditions and has the potential for sustainable organic carbon production in biotechnology. This study explores the glycolate production balance in Chlamydomonas reinhardtii, using a custom-built 10-L flat panel bioreactor with sophisticated measurements of process factors such as nutrient supply, gassing, light absorption and mass balances. As a result, detailed information regarding carbon and energy balance is obtained to support techno-economic analyses.

Genome-centric analyses of 165 metagenomes show that mobile genetic elements are crucial for the transmission of antimicrobial resistance genes to pathogens in activated sludge and wastewater.

Unlabelled: Wastewater is considered a reservoir of antimicrobial resistance genes (ARGs), where the abundant antimicrobial-resistant bacteria and mobile genetic elements facilitate horizontal gene transfer. However, the prevalence and extent of these phenomena in different taxonomic groups that inhabit wastewater are still not fully understood. Here, we determined the presence of ARGs in metagenome-assembled genomes (MAGs) and evaluated the risks of MAG-carrying ARGs in potential human pathogens.

The Role of Glutathione and Sulfhydryl Groups in Cadmium Uptake by Cultures of the Rainbow Trout RTG-2 Cell Line.

The aim of this study is to investigate the role of cellular sulfhydryl and glutathione (GSH) status in cellular cadmium (Cd) accumulation using cultures of the rainbow trout cell line RTG-2. In a first set of experiments, the time course of Cd accumulation in RTG-2 cells exposed to a non-cytotoxic CdCl concentration (25 μM) was determined, as were the associated changes in the cellular sulfhydryl status. The cellular levels of total GSH, oxidized glutathione (GSSG), and cysteine were determined with fluorometric high-performance liquid chromatography (HPLC), and the intracellular Cd concentrations were determined with inductively coupled plasma mass spectrometry (ICP-MS).

Drivers of soil microbial and detritivore activity across global grasslands.

Covering approximately 40% of land surfaces, grasslands provide critical ecosystem services that rely on soil organisms. However, the global determinants of soil biodiversity and functioning remain underexplored. In this study, we investigate the drivers of soil microbial and detritivore activity in grasslands across a wide range of climatic conditions on five continents.

Multidimensional responses of grassland stability to eutrophication.

Eutrophication usually impacts grassland biodiversity, community composition, and biomass production, but its impact on the stability of these community aspects is unclear. One challenge is that stability has many facets that can be tightly correlated (low dimensionality) or highly disparate (high dimensionality). Using standardized experiments in 55 grassland sites from a globally distributed experiment (NutNet), we quantify the effects of nutrient addition on five facets of stability (temporal invariability, resistance during dry and wet growing seasons, recovery after dry and wet growing seasons), measured on three community aspects (aboveground biomass, community composition, and species richness).

Superior anodic electro-fermentation by enhancing capacity for extracellular electron transfer.

Anodic electro-fermentation (AEF), where an anode replaces the terminal electron acceptor, shows great promise. Recently a Lactococcus lactis strain blocked in NAD regeneration was demonstrated to use ferricyanide as an alternative electron acceptor to support fast growth, but the need for high concentrations of this non-regenerated electron acceptor limits practical applications. To address this, growth of this L.

The recovery of European freshwater biodiversity has come to a halt.

Owing to a long history of anthropogenic pressures, freshwater ecosystems are among the most vulnerable to biodiversity loss. Mitigation measures, including wastewater treatment and hydromorphological restoration, have aimed to improve environmental quality and foster the recovery of freshwater biodiversity. Here, using 1,816 time series of freshwater invertebrate communities collected across 22 European countries between 1968 and 2020, we quantified temporal trends in taxonomic and functional diversity and their responses to environmental pressures and gradients.

Fe-zeolites for the adsorption and oxidative degradation of nitroaromatic compounds in water.

Nitroaromatic compounds (NACs) are prominent explosives. In this context, these toxic substances were released into the environment and cause long-lasting groundwater contamination. In preparation of a possible in-situ remediation, colloidal Fe-zeolites were investigated for their capabilities as adsorbents and oxidation catalysts.

Restoration ecology through the lens of coexistence theory.

Advances in restoration ecology are needed to guide ecological restoration in a variable and changing world. Coexistence theory provides a framework for how variability in environmental conditions and species interactions affects species success. Here, we conceptually link coexistence theory and restoration ecology.

The structure of root-associated fungal communities is related to the long-term effects of plant diversity on productivity.

Root-associated fungi could play a role in determining both the positive relationship between plant diversity and productivity in experimental grasslands, and its strengthening over time. This hypothesis assumes that specialized pathogenic and mutualistic fungal communities gradually assemble over time, enhancing plant growth more in species-rich than in species-poor plots. To test this hypothesis, we used high-throughput amplicon sequencing to characterize root-associated fungal communities in experimental grasslands of 1 and 15 years of age with varying levels of plant species richness.

Fast and easy bioassay for the necrotizing fungus Botrytis cinerea on poplar leaves.

Background: Necrotizing pathogens pose an immense economic and ecological threat to trees and forests, but the molecular analysis of these pathogens is still in its infancy because of lacking model systems. To close this gap, we developed a reliable bioassay for the widespread necrotic pathogen Botrytis cinerea on poplars (Populus sp.), which are established model organisms to study tree molecular biology.

Corrigendum: Microbial identification, high-resolution microscopy and spectrometry of the rhizosphere in its native spatial context.

[This corrects the article DOI: 10.3389/fpls.2021.

Genetic diversity and community composition of arbuscular mycorrhizal fungi associated with root and rhizosphere soil of the pioneer plant .

The pioneering plant had a strong modulation effect on arbuscular mycorrhizal fungi (AMF) communities. Irrespective of geographical location, community composition of AMF in rhizosphere soil differed from that of the root. Co-occurrence network analysis revealed two AMF keystone species in rhizosphere soil () and roots () of .

Defining Hydrogeological Site Similarity with Hierarchical Agglomerative Clustering.

Hydrogeological information about an aquifer is difficult and costly to obtain, yet essential for the efficient management of groundwater resources. Transferring information from sampled sites to a specific site of interest can provide information when site-specific data is lacking. Central to this approach is the notion of site similarity, which is necessary for determining relevant sites to include in the data transfer process.

Decision-making of citizen scientists when recording species observations.

Citizen scientists play an increasingly important role in biodiversity monitoring. Most of the data, however, are unstructured-collected by diverse methods that are not documented with the data. Insufficient understanding of the data collection processes presents a major barrier to the use of citizen science data in biodiversity research.

Evapotranspiration dynamics in aerated and non-aerated subsurface flow treatment wetlands.

This study reports the seasonal dynamics of evapotranspiration (ET) and evaporation (E) in different subsurface flow treatment wetlands operating in a temperate European climate. Daily water balances were compiled over the course of ten years (August 2010-July 2020). The study includes non-aerated horizontal flow wetlands (25 cm deep and 50 cm deep) as well as horizontal flow and vertical flow wetlands.

r2ogs5: Calibration of Numerical Groundwater Flow Models with Bayesian Optimization in R.

Large-scale and high-resolution groundwater models are currently becoming increasingly important in order to clarify the extent to which climate trends and extreme weather affect the groundwater balance regionally. As a result, the parameterization of groundwater models is becoming more detailed and more complex, making conventional calibration methods too time-consuming. Moderating the computational demand to find optimal solutions for the resulting potentially multi-modal objective function requires intelligent and efficient global optimization methods.