Dirtiest snow-year in the Wasatch accelerated snowmelt by 17 days

The dry lakebed of the Great Salt Lake contributed the highest dust emissions per surface area during the 2022 season, which had the most dust deposition events and highest dust concentrations of any year since observations began in 2009

Peer-Reviewed Publication

UNIVERSITY OF UTAH

 

VIDEO: A DUST EVENT RECORDED ON MAY 17, 2023 BY A CAMERA LOCATED ON THE UNIVERSITY OF UTAH CAMPUS, FACING SOUTH. THE CAMERAS ARE MAINTAINED BY THE U'S DEPARTMENT OF ATMOSPHERIC SCIENCES AND MESO WEST. THIS EVENT WAS NOT INCLUDED IN THE STUDY, BUT IS TYPICAL OF SPRINGS STORMS THAT WERE INCLUDED IN THE STUDY. STRONG WINDS CAN LOFT DUST INTO THE ATMOSPHERE AND DEGRADE AIR QUALITY, AND DEPOSIT ONTO THE SNOWPACK ON THE WASATCH MOUNTAINS. DUST-ON-SNOW DEPOSITION REQUIRES A SPECIFIC SET OF FACTORS; NEARBY DUST SOURCES, RELATIVELY DRY CONDITIONS AND WINDS THAT ARE STRONG ENOUGH TO LOFT DUST INTO THE ATMOSPHERE. THESE CONDITIONS ARE OFTEN MET AHEAD OF WINDY SPRING STORMS. view more 

CREDIT: UNIVERSITY OF UTAH DEPARTMENT OF ATMOSPHERIC SCIENCES AND MESO WEST.

As the shrinking Great Salt Lake exposes an ever-growing area of its lakebed, wind-blown dust becomes more dangerous for those living in Utah’s most populous region. It also makes the snowpack dirty, which threatens the state’s most precious resource—water. 

In a new study, University of Utah researchers analyzed the impact of dust on snow during the 2022 season. They found that 2022 had the most dust deposition events and the highest snowpack dust concentrations of any year since observations began in 2009.

The dust caused the snowpack to disappear 17 days earlier than if no dust had been deposited. The researchers say the impact would have been more dramatic if not for the wet spring—frequent snowstorms buried the dusty layers, which delayed the impact on snowmelt.

To understand if record high dust-on-snow concentrations were linked to record low Great Salt Lake water levels, the authors identified the areas where each dust event originated. They found that the Great Salt Lake contributed 23% of total dust deposition and had the highest dust emissions per surface area. The Great Salt Lake Desert and the dry lakebeds of Sevier Lake and Tule Lake contributed 45% and 17% respectively, but with lower per area emissions.

Seasonal snowmelt from the Wasatch Mountains is the primary water source for the metropolitan Wasatch Front, surrounding agricultural valleys and the Great Salt Lake.

“You might see 17 days and think it’s no big deal, but our current snowmelt models don’t account for dust,” said McKenzie Skiles, assistant professor of geography at the U and senior author on the paper. “So, the snow is melting, water is coming out earlier and faster than we expect it to, and we’re not prepared to use it in the most efficient way. The landscape is also not expecting the water earlier, so it impacts watershed functionality as well as water availability downstream.”

The study published on June 15, 2023, in the journal Environmental Research Letters.

Skiles authored a 2018 study that found that a single dust event accelerated snowmelt in the Wasatch by one week. That paper identified the Great Salt Lake as a relatively new dust source due to historically low water levels. Subsequent years of prolonged drought, increased evaporation and sustained agriculture and domestic water consumption drove the Great Salt Lake to record lows in 2021 and 2022 and exposed even more dry lakebed.

“Anecdotally, we kept saying, ‘This is crazy—this is the dirtiest snow in the Wasatch I’ve seen since I started making observations,’” said Skiles. “Ultimately, after we analyzed everything, it was the dirtiest year.”

Digging a pit for science

The dust that blows into the Wasatch Mountains deposits a dark grimy layer atop the snowpack and impacts the snow’s albedo, a term that describes the amount of radiation reflected by a surface. The effect is like wearing a black shirt on a hot day—darker colors absorb more solar radiation and heat up faster than light colors. In the mountains, dirty snow heats up and melts faster than clean snow when exposed to the same temperatures.

The Snow Hydrology Research to Operations (Snow HydRO) Lab, which Skiles directs, studies this phenomenon using instrumentation at the Atwater Study Plot, a research site near the Alta Ski Resort in Alta, Utah. Their instruments record the physical elements that control snow accumulation and snowmelt, including albedo. The researchers use these observations and a model to remove the dust darkening impact and estimate how snow would melt if the dust were absent.

“Our model represents snowmelt under observed conditions. We then run the model again with the snow-darkening impact by dust removed. This allows us to say, ‘If there was no dust and the snow surface was brighter, then how much longer would the snow have stuck around?’ The difference between these scenarios allows us to quantify snowmelt acceleration due to dust,” said Otto Lang, PhD student and co-author of the study.

The researchers also regularly dig large snow pits that expose the dirty layers representing all dust events that had been buried by subsequent snowstorms. They sample each layer to measure the amount of dust deposited by each dust event, and to track the different layers through the winter.

Don’t need a weatherman to know which way the dust blows…

…You need Derek Mallia, a research assistant professor in the Department of Atmospheric Sciences at the U and co-author of the study. Strong winds can loft dust into the atmosphere and degrade air quality, which can trigger yellow or red air pollution warnings. Dust-on-snow deposition requires a specific set of factors; nearby dust sources, relatively dry conditions and winds that are strong enough to loft dust into the atmosphere. Mallia developed a dust transport model that can pinpoint where the dust on snow originated by synthesizing meteorological and soil data. For every dust event, Mallia ran his model to identify dust sources that were responsible for accelerating snow melt in the Wasatch Mountains.

"We were expecting large areas like the Great Salt Lake Desert to be a major source of dust, but we were somewhat surprised that we observed such large contributions of dust coming from the Great Salt Lake, and especially Farmington Bay. While the lake’s dust sources are much smaller than the West Desert in terms of area, the exposed dry lakebeds are much closer to the Wasatch Mountains,” said Mallia. “These results suggest that the Great Salt Lake is an important factor when it comes to accelerating snow melt across the Wasatch Front and will become a bigger player if it continues to shrink.”

The future of dust in the Wasatch.

There’s no need to imagine what dustier winters would mean to the Wasatch snowpack; just look at Colorado where Skiles also conducts dust-on-snow research. The southern Colorado Plateau deposits dark, red dust onto its slopes that accelerates snowmelt by one to two months. Over the same period of observation, dust-on-snow levels in Colorado have always been higher than in Utah. That may be changing.

“This year we saw dust event after dust event after dust event. I kept saying, ‘It looks like Colorado. It doesn't look like previous winters in Utah to me,’” Skiles said. “We got really lucky that we had so many spring snowstorms. If we are approaching Colorado’s dust-on-snow regime, it will have a dramatic impact that we haven't seen yet. But we could be getting there.”

A snow pit on May 10, 2022. All of the previous dust events are preserved in layers in a snow pit that is maintained throughout the 2022 winter season at the Alta study plot.

CREDIT

Otto Lang

(a) Snow pit at the Alta Study Plot on date of peak Snow Water Equivalent. Melt pooling and ice lenses form when liquid water pools at a capillary barrier within the snowpack and are highlighted in the image so that they can be differentiated from the dust layers. (b) Image showing a typical pre-frontal dust-on-snow event in the Wasatch Mountains.

CREDIT

Enviro Res Letters—June-2023

JOURNAL

Environmental Research Letters

METHOD OF RESEARCH

Observational study

SUBJECT OF RESEARCH

Not applicable

ARTICLE TITLE

The shrinking Great Salt Lake contributes to record high dust-on-snow deposition in the Wasatch Mountains during the 2022 snowmelt season

ARTICLE PUBLICATION DATE

15-Jun-2023

 

Wildfire smoke threatens already endangered orangutans

Vocal changes monitored in new study

Peer-Reviewed Publication

CORNELL UNIVERSITY

 

IMAGE: BORNEO ORANGUTAN. view more 

CREDIT: WENDY ERB, YANG CENTER, CORNELL LAB OF ORNITHOLOGY.

Ithaca, N.Y.--For months following peatland wildfires in Borneo, the behavior and voices of critically endangered orangutans change, according to a new study led by a researcher from the Cornell Lab of Ornithology.

These pronounced changes make it possible to assess the health of wild populations by monitoring the frequency and quality of their sounds – an alternative to the dangers posed by trying to study the animals in person during a wildfire. The study published June 13, in the journal iScience.

“The animals move around less to conserve energy,” said lead author Wendy Erb, a Cornell Lab postdoctoral associate. “The orangutans also don’t vocalize as much and their voices take on the equivalent of a human smoker’s hack. Their voices are deeper, more raspy and shakier. These vocal features have been linked to inflammation, stress and disease–including COVID-19–in human and nonhuman animals.”

Wildfires have been increasing in frequency and severity across Indonesia, as they have in other parts of the world, often related to climate change. In Indonesia, wildfire occurrence is also closely linked to El Niño cycles of warming in the Pacific Ocean. But unlike other types of wildfires, peatland fires can smolder underground for weeks and produce exceptionally high emissions of hazardous gases and particulate matter.

Erb, in the Cornell Lab’s K. Lisa Yang Center for Conservation Bioacoustics, worked with a team from the Tuanan Orangutan Research Program to collect data on adult male orangutans in Borneo. During the fire season, the region experienced its highest concentrations of particulate matter, with average daily concentrations rising nearly 12 times higher than the amount classified as hazardous to human health by the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency.

Critically endangered orangutans are well known as “indicator species” because their health and behavior reflect the quality of their environments. Increasingly frequent and prolonged exposure to toxic smoke could have severe consequences for orangutans and other animals.

This research highlights the urgent need to understand the long-term and indirect impacts of Indonesia’s peatland fires, beyond the immediate loss of forests and their inhabitants.

“By uncovering the linkages between acoustic, behavioral, and energetic shifts in orangutans, this research can help scientists and wildlife managers safely monitor the health of this critically endangered species using acoustic methods,” Erb said. “I see huge potential for passive acoustic monitoring to deepen our understanding of the effects of wildfire smoke on wildlife populations worldwide.”

This project received funding from Rutgers University, the American Association of University Women, and all those who donated to support efforts to fight the wildfires at Tuanan. This research would not have been possible without the Dayak people who have cared for the forests of Kalimantan for millennia and especially the people of Tuanan, who shared their deep knowledge of the forest.

Reference:

Wendy M. Erb, Elizabeth J. Barrow, Alexandra N. Hofner, Jessica L. Lecorchick, Tatang Mitra Setia, and Erin R. Vogel. Wildfire smoke linked to vocal changes in wild Bornean orangutans. iScience. June 2023.

 

Smoke from burning peat is especially dangerous because of its particulate matter.

CAPTION

Firefighters and peat fire smoke in a forest.

CREDIT

Wendy Erb, Yang Center, Cornell Lab of Ornithology.

JOURNAL

iScience

DOI

10.1016/j.isci.2023.107088 

METHOD OF RESEARCH

Observational study

SUBJECT OF RESEARCH

Animals

ARTICLE TITLE

Wildfire smoke linked to vocal changes in wild Bornean orangutans.

ARTICLE PUBLICATION DATE

13-Jun-2023

Shock to the crop system

New study evaluates how climate shocks impact the planted and harvested areas for crops

Peer-Reviewed Publication

UNIVERSITY OF DELAWARE

 

IMAGE: DONGYANG WEI, A DOCTORAL CANDIDATE IN THE DEPARTMENT OF GEOGRAPHY AND SPATIAL SCIENCES, AND KYLE DAVIS, ASSISTANT PROFESSOR IN THE DEPARTMENT OF GEOGRAPHY AND SPATIAL SCIENCES AND THE DEPARTMENT OF PLANT AND SOIL SCIENCES, AS WELL AS A RESIDENT FACULTY MEMBER WITH UD’S DATA SCIENCE INSTITUTE, LED A NEW STUDY THAT FOCUSED ON CROP PRODUCTION SHOCKS AND HOW THEY ARE AFFECTED BY VARIATIONS IN PLANTED AND HARVESTED AREAS. view more 

CREDIT: UNIVERSITY OF DELAWARE/ EVAN KRAPE

As the world faces more climate variability and extremes in the face of global warming, sudden environmental changes add an extra layer of stress to food production in the United States and around the world. It is critical, then, to figure out how the areas in which crops are planted and harvested respond to these stressors, which can bring on ‘shocks’ in production – or, put differently, sudden and statistically significant crop declines. 

These production shocks are a big concern in terms of food stability and many crops in the United States—such as corn, cotton, soybeans, and wheat — are all experiencing more frequent production reductions as a result of these shocks.

A new study published in the Nature Sustainability scientific journal and led by the University of Delaware’s Dongyang Wei looked at these production shocks and, specifically, how they are affected by variations in planted and harvested areas. 

Kyle Davis, assistant professor in the Department of Geography and Spatial Sciences and the Department of Plant and Soil Sciences, as well as a resident faculty member with UD’s Data Science Institute, is coordinating author on the paper.

Wei, a doctoral candidate in the Department of Geography and Spatial Sciences, said prior studies have focused on crop yield and how the yield variability affects production but very few studies have looked at the role of planted and harvested areas. Because production is the combined result of how much area a farmer plants (the planted area), how much of that area they can harvest (the harvested area) and the yield of the crop in that area, it is important to evaluate all three of these factors when assessing production stability.

“What we did was to focus on the U.S., the world’s largest producer and exporter of cereal grains, to see how these three components—crop yield, planted area, and harvested area—affected food production stability and to what degree they are related to climate extremes,” said Wei. 

For the study, the researchers looked at county-level data on seven crops: barley, corn, cotton, sorghum, soybeans, spring wheat, and winter wheat.

These are the main crops that are grown in the United States, accounting for about 70 percent of the country’s total cropland. In addition to being widely produced, they have a lot of readily available data that covers a long time period. As a result, the researchers were able to look at data sets from 1978-2020. 

“Agriculture is one of the sectors most directly exposed to the effects of climate change,” said Davis. “Understanding how the stability of crop production is influenced by variations in yield, planted area, and harvested area – and how these influences may differ between crops – is critical to more effectively adapting agriculture in the face of rising climate change and extreme climate events. Dongyang’s research is an important contribution to our understanding on this topic.”

Using time-series data and statistical methods to detect how frequently shocks occur, they found that shocks in planted and harvested areas co-occur with more than half of the production shocks for the study crops. 

They then looked at the extent to which each of the three components contribute to the size of a production shock and found that while yield fluctuations contribute more than the other two components for corn, cotton, soybean and winter wheat, changes in planted and harvested areas play a more important role in the magnitude of production shocks for barley, sorghum and winter wheat. 

Wei said this is important because it shows that researchers should focus on all three variables instead of simply focusing on the yield and ignoring the planted and harvested areas. 

“We want to raise the importance of considering all three of the components when we are facing rising climate variability and climate disruptions on the food systems,” said Wei. “Yield is important, but an exclusive focus on yield stability severely constrains the solution space. If we want to have greater flexibility in adapting agriculture to climate change, we should focus on ways to stabilize planted and harvested areas too. The producers’ decisions on cropping patterns can play a crucial role in stabilizing food production.” 

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JOURNAL

Nature Sustainability

DOI

10.1038/s41893-023-01152-2 

ARTICLE TITLE

Key role of planted and harvested area fluctuations in US crop production shocks

ARTICLE PUBLICATION DATE

15-Jun-2023

This salty gel could harvest water from desert air

A new material developed by MIT engineers exhibits “record-breaking” vapor absorption.

Peer-Reviewed Publication

MASSACHUSETTS INSTITUTE OF TECHNOLOGY

 

IMAGE: MIT ENGINEERS HAVE SYNTHESIZED A SUPERABSORBENT MATERIAL THAT CAN SOAK UP A RECORD AMOUNT OF MOISTURE FROM THE AIR, EVEN IN DESERT-LIKE CONDITIONS. PICTURED ARE THE HYDROGEL DISCS SWOLLEN IN WATER. view more 

CREDIT: IMAGE: GUSTAV GRAEBER AND CARLOS D. DÍAZ-MARÍN

MIT engineers have synthesized a superabsorbent material that can soak up a record amount of moisture from the air, even in desert-like conditions. 

As the material absorbs water vapor, it can swell to make room for more moisture. Even in very dry conditions, with 30 percent relative humidity, the material can pull vapor from the air and hold in the moisture without leaking. The water could then be heated and condensed, then collected as ultrapure water. 

The transparent, rubbery material is made from hydrogel, a naturally absorbent material that is also used in disposable diapers. The team enhanced the hydrogel’s absorbency by infusing it with lithium chloride — a type of salt that is known to be a powerful dessicant. 

The researchers found they could infuse the hydrogel with more salt than was possible in previous studies. As a result, they observed that the salt-loaded gel absorbed and retained an unprecedented amount of moisture, across a range of humidity levels, including very dry conditions that have limited other material designs. 

If it can be made quickly, and at large scale, the superabsorbent gel could be used as a passive water harvester, particularly in the desert and drought-prone regions, where the material could continuously absorb vapor, that could then be condensed into drinking water. The researchers also envision that the material could be fit onto air conditioning units as an energy-saving, dehumidifying element. 

“We’ve been application-agnostic, in the sense that we mostly focus on the fundamental properties of the material,” says Carlos Díaz-Marin, a mechanical engineering graduate student and member of the Device Research Lab at MIT. “But now we are exploring widely different problems like how to make air conditioning more efficient and how you can harvest water. This material, because of its low cost and high performance, has so much potential.”

Díaz-Marin and his colleagues have published their results in a paper appearing today in Advanced Materials. The study’s MIT co-authors are Gustav Graeber, Leon Gaugler, Yang Zhong, Bachir El Fil, Xinyue Liu, and Evelyn Wang. 

“Best of both worlds”

In MIT’s Device Research Lab, researchers are designing novel materials to solve the world’s energy and water challenges. In looking for materials that can help to harvest water from the air, the team zeroed in on hydrogels — slippery, stretchy gels that are mostly made from water and a bit of cross-linked polymer. Hydrogels have been used for years as absorbent material in diapers because they can swell and soak up a large amount of water when it comes in contact with the material.

“Our question was, how can we make this work just as well to absorb vapor from the air?” Díaz-Marin says. 

He and his colleagues dug through the literature and found that others had experimented with mixing hydrogels with various salts. Certain salts, such as the rock salt used to melt ice, are very efficient at absorbing moisture, including water vapor. And the best among them is lithium chloride, a salt that is capable of absorbing over 10 times its own mass in moisture. Left in a pile on its own, lithium chloride could attract vapor from the air, though the moisture would only pool around the salt, with no means of retaining the absorbed water. 

So, researchers have attempted to infuse the salt into hydrogel — producing a material that could both hold in moisture and swell to accommodate more water. 

“It’s the best of both worlds,” says Graeber, who is now a principal investigator at Humboldt University in Berlin. “The hydrogel can store a lot of water, and the salt can capture a lot of vapor. So it’s intuitive that you’d want to combine the two.”

Time to load

But the MIT team found that others reached a limit to the amount of salt they could load into their gels. The best performing samples to date were hydrogels that were infused with 4 to 6 grams of salt per gram of polymer. These samples absorbed about 1.5 grams of vapor per gram of material in dry conditions of 30 percent relative humidity. 

In most studies, researchers had previously synthesized samples by soaking hydrogels in salty water and waiting for the salt to infuse into the gels. Most experiments ended after 24 to 48 hours, as researchers found the process was too slow, and not very much salt ended up in the gels. When they tested the resulting material’s ability to absorb water vapor, the samples soaked up very little, as they contained little salt to absorb the moisture in the first place. 

What would happen if the material synthesis was allowed to go on, say, for days, and even weeks? Could a hydrogel absorb even more salt, if given enough time? For an answer, the MIT team carried out experiments with polyacrylamide (a common hydrogel) and lithium chloride (a superabsorbent salt). After synthesizing tubes of hydrogel through standard mixing methods, the researchers sliced the tubes into thin disks and dropped each disk into a solution of lithium chloride with a different salt concentration. They took the disks out of solution each day to weigh them and determine the amount of salt that had infused into the gels, then returned them to their solutions. 

In the end, they found that, indeed, given more time, hydrogels took up more salt. After soaking in salty solution for 30 days, hydrogels incorporated up to 24, versus the previous record of 6 grams of salt per gram of polymer. 

The team then put various samples of the salt-laden gels through absorption tests across a range of humidity conditions. They found that the samples could swell and absorb more moisture at all humidity levels, without leaking. Most notably, the team reports that at very dry conditions of 30 percent relative humidity, the gels captured a “record-breaking” 1.79 grams of water per gram of material. 

“Any desert during the night would have that low relative humidity, so conceivably, this material could generate water in the desert,” says Díaz-Marin, who is now looking for ways to speed up the material’s superabsorbent properties. 

“The big, unexpected surprise was that, with such a simple approach, we were able to get the highest vapor uptake reported to date,” Graeber says. “Now, the main focus will be kinetics and how quickly we can get the material to uptake water. That will allow you to cycle this material very quickly, so that instead of recovering water once a day, you could harvest water maybe 24 times a day.” 

This research was supported, in part, by the U.S. Office of Energy Efficiency and Renewable  Energy and the Swiss National Science Foundation. 

###

Written by Jennifer Chu

Paper: “Extreme Water Uptake of Hygroscopic Hydrogels Through Maximized Swelling-Induced Salt Loading”

https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1002/adma.202211783

 

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JOURNAL

Advanced Materials

DOI

10.1002/adma.202211783 

ARTICLE TITLE

“Extreme Water Uptake of Hygroscopic Hydrogels Through Maximized Swelling-Induced Salt Loading”

 Genome editing used to create disease resistant rice

Finding can increase yield of a crop that feeds half the world

Peer-Reviewed Publication

UNIVERSITY OF CALIFORNIA - DAVIS

 

IMAGE: RICE BLAST IN A CALIFORNIA RICE CROP. US AND CHINESE RESEARCHERS USED CRISPR GENOME EDITING TO CREATE A HIGH-YIELDING RICE VARIETY RESISTANT TO THIS MAJOR FUNGAL PEST. view more 

CREDIT: UCANR

Researchers from the University of California, Davis, and an international team of scientists used the genome-editing tool CRISPR-Cas to create disease resistant rice plants, according to a new study published in the journal Nature June 14.

Small-scale field trials in China showed that the newly created rice variety, developed through genome editing of a newly discovered gene, exhibited both high yields and resistance to the fungus that causes a serious disease called rice blast. Rice is an essential crop that feeds half of the world’s population. 

Guotian Li, a co-lead author of the study, initially discovered a mutant known as a lesion mimic mutant while working as a postdoctoral scholar in Pamela Ronald’s lab at UC Davis. Ronald is co-lead author and Distinguished Professor in the Department of Plant Pathology and the Genome Center. 

“It’s quite a step forward that his team was able to improve this gene, making it potentially useful for farmers. That makes it important,” Ronald said. 

The roots of the discovery began in Ronald’s lab, where they created and sequenced 3,200 distinct rice strains, each possessing diverse mutations. Among these strains, Guotian identified one with dark patches on its leaves. 

“He found that the strain was also resistant to bacterial infection, but it was extremely small and low yielding,” Ronald said. “These types of ‘lesion mimic’ mutants have been found before but only in a few cases have they been useful to farmers because of the low yield.”

Working with CRISPR

Guotian continued the research when he joined Huazhong Agricultural University in Wuhan, China. 

He used CRISPR-Cas9 to isolate the gene related to the mutation and used genome editing to recreate that resistance trait, eventually identifying a line that had good yield and was resistant to three different pathogens, including the fungus that causes rice blast. 

In small-scale field trials planted in disease-heavy plots, the new rice plants produced five times more yield than the control rice, which was damaged by the fungus, Ronald said.

“Blast is the most serious disease of plants in the world because it affects virtually all growing regions of rice and also because rice is a huge crop,” Ronald said. 

Future applications

The researchers hope to recreate this mutation in commonly grown rice varieties. Currently they have only optimized this gene in a model variety called “Kitaake” that is not grown widely. They also hope to target the same gene in wheat to create disease-resistant wheat. 

“A lot of these lesion mimic mutants have been discovered and sort of put aside because they have low yield. We’re hoping that people can go look at some of these and see if they can edit them to get a nice balance between resistance and high yield,” Ronald said. 

Rashmi Jain with the UC Davis Department of Plant Pathology and Genome Center also contributed to the research, as did scientists from BGI-Shenzhen, Huazhong Agricultural University, Jiangxi Academy of Agricultural Sciences, Northwest A&F University and Shandong Academy of Agricultural Sciences, China; the Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory and UC Berkeley; the University of Adelaide, Australia; and the University of Bordeaux, France.

Research in the Ronald lab was supported by the National Science Foundation, the National Institutes of Health and the Joint Bioenergy Institute funded by the US Department of Energy.

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JOURNAL

Nature

DOI

10.1038/s41586-023-06205-2 

METHOD OF RESEARCH

Experimental study

SUBJECT OF RESEARCH

Not applicable

ARTICLE TITLE

Genome editing of a rice CDP-DAG synthase confers multipathogen resistance.

ARTICLE PUBLICATION DATE

14-Jun-2023

COI STATEMENT

Guotian Li, Gan She and Xinyu Han are coinventors on a provisional patent application no. 202111041400.3 filed by Huazhong Agricultural University entitled ‘The OsRBL1 truncated protein and its application in balancing disease resistance and yield in rice’ that covers rbl1 and rbl1Δ12 lines. The remaining authors declare no competing interests.

Light Pollution Special Issue

Reports and Proceedings

AMERICAN ASSOCIATION FOR THE ADVANCEMENT OF SCIENCE (AAAS)

Light pollution is increasing around the globe, both in its intensity and geographic extent. Researchers are documenting its impact on ecosystems, human health, and culture, while warning that the wasted light has financial costs, environmental impacts, and is responsible for substantial greenhouse gas emissions. In a special issue of Science, five papers discuss the growing adverse impacts of light pollution, along with the regulatory and technological solutions that could help mitigate its effects.

Artificial light at night has variable and complex impacts on plants, animals, and entire ecosystems, according to a paper by Annika Jägerbrand and Kamiel Spoelstra. They discuss how species respond to light pollution in various ways that often differ from other species, making it difficult to develop ways to mitigate the negative impacts of light across an ecosystem. Increasing light pollution is causing habitat loss, disruption of food webs, and declining insect populations.

In a second paper, Karolina Zielinska-Dabkowska and colleagues discuss how the human body responds to nocturnal light exposure. There are effects on visual, circadian, and neurobehavioral systems, due to exposure to urban streetlights, outdoor sporting arenas, and illuminated advertising. They highlight inequities in the levels of exposure to light pollution experienced by different human populations, and the cultural impacts of losing sight of the night sky.

In a third paper, Antonia Varela Perez discusses how professional and amateur astronomers are affected by light pollution. Rapidly increasing sources of pollution for astronomers include large constellations of satellites in orbit, radio-frequency interference, and the deployment of LED lighting that produces more blue light than earlier technologies. Varela Perez argues that locally designated dark sky areas provide benefits for tourism, but there is an urgent need for broader international regulations.

Miroslav Kocifaj and colleagues write in a fourth paper that researchers need better ways to measure and monitor artificial light at night to improve our understanding of light pollution’s causes and to develop mitigation strategies. They discuss how light pollution is measured from the ground and from space by remote sensing, using technologies including photometers, drones, and all-sky cameras. They argue that current data collection practices are affected by meteorological conditions, and that more information could be extracted from them if this is taken into account.

In a fifth paper, Martin Morgan-Taylor examines existing light pollution regulations in various jurisdictions and discusses how they can be improved. Morgan-Taylor suggests that better communication of the carbon emissions and economic waste of light pollution, along with an emphasis on safe but not excessive levels of outdoor lighting, could convince the public and commercial users to reduce the light pollution they generate.

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JOURNAL

Science

DOI

10.1126/science.adi4552 

ARTICLE TITLE

Losing the darkness

ARTICLE PUBLICATION DATE

16-Jun-2023