Project description:Low concentrations of pharmaceutical compounds were shown to induce transcriptional responses in isolated microorganisms, which could have consequences on ecosystem dynamics. In order to test if these transcriptional responses could also be observed in complex river microbial communities, biofilm reactors were inoculated with water from two distinct rivers and supplemented with environmentally relevant doses of four pharmaceutical products (erythromycin-ER, gemfibrozil-GM, sulfamethazine-SN and sulfamethoxazole-SL). To follow the expression of functional genes, we constructed a 9,600 features anonymous DNA microarray platform onto which cDNA from the various biofilms was hybridized.
Project description:More than 70,000 large dams have been built worldwide. With growing water stress and demand for energy, this number will continue to increase in the foreseeable future. Damming greatly modifies the ecological functioning of river systems. In particular, dam reservoirs sequester nutrient elements and, hence, reduce downstream transfer of nutrients to floodplains, lakes, wetlands, and coastal marine environments. Here, we quantify the global impact of dams on the riverine fluxes and speciation of the limiting nutrient phosphorus (P), using a mechanistic modeling approach that accounts for the in-reservoir biogeochemical transformations of P. According to the model calculations, the mass of total P (TP) trapped in reservoirs nearly doubled between 1970 and 2000, reaching 42 Gmol y(-1), or 12% of the global river TP load in 2000. Because of the current surge in dam building, we project that by 2030, about 17% of the global river TP load will be sequestered in reservoir sediments. The largest projected increases in TP and reactive P (RP) retention by damming will take place in Asia and South America, especially in the Yangtze, Mekong, and Amazon drainage basins. Despite the large P retention capacity of reservoirs, the export of RP from watersheds will continue to grow unless additional measures are taken to curb anthropogenic P emissions.
Project description:The plan-form structure of the world's river basins contains extensive information regarding tectonic, paleo-geographic and paleo-climate conditions, but interpretation of this structure is complicated by the need to disentangle these processes from the autogenic behavior of fluvial processes. One method of interpreting this structure is by integrating channel length and drainage area as characterized by the scaling relationship between slope and area, resulting in a characteristic length parameter, referred to in recent studies as χ. In this paper, we apply this methodology at a continental scale by calculating χ for the world's river networks. Mapping of χ', a modified version of χ including the influence of precipitation distribution on river discharge and correction of base level for χ' in closed basins, illustrates the geometric structure of global river networks, thus highlighting where tectonics or changing climate have resulted in an apparent disequilibrium of the river channel geometry. Our global χ maps quantify a dynamic view of Earth's river networks and help to identify past and ongoing evolution of Earth's landscape.
Project description:Rivers are among the most diverse, dynamic, and productive ecosystems on Earth. River flow regimes are constantly changing, but characterizing and understanding such changes have been challenging from a long-term and global perspective. By analyzing water extent variations observed from four-decade Landsat imagery, we here provide a global attribution of the recent changes in river regime to morphological dynamics (e.g., channel shifting and anabranching), expansion induced by new dams, and hydrological signals of widening and narrowing. Morphological dynamics prevailed in ~20% of the global river area. Booming reservoir constructions, mostly skewed in Asia and South America, contributed to ~32% of the river widening. The remaining hydrological signals were characterized by contrasting hotspots, including prominent river widening in alpine and pan-Arctic regions and narrowing in the arid/semi-arid continental interiors, driven by varying trends in climate forcing, cryospheric response to warming, and human water management. Our findings suggest that the recent river extent dynamics diverge based on hydroclimate and socio-economic conditions, and besides reflecting ongoing morphodynamical processes, river extent changes show close connections with external forcings, including climate change and anthropogenic interference.
Project description:Changes in a river's width reflect natural and anthropogenic impacts on local and upstream/downstream hydraulic and hydrologic processes. Temporal variation of river width also impacts biogeochemical exchange and reflects geomorphologic evolution. However, while global maps of mean river width and dynamic water surface extent exist, there is currently no standardized global assessment of river widths that documents changes over time. Therefore, we made repeated width measurements from Landsat images for all rivers wider than 90 m collected from 1984 to 2020 (named Global LOng-term river Width, GLOW), which consists of ∼1.2 billion cross-sectional river width measurements, with an average of 3,000 width measurements per 10-km reach. With GLOW, we investigated the temporal variations of global river width, quantified by the interquartile range (IQR) and temporal trend. We found that 85% of global rivers have a width IQR <150 m. We also found that 37% of global river segments show significant temporal trends in width over the past 37 years, and this number is higher (46%) for human-regulated rivers. Further, we leveraged machine learning to identify the most important factors explaining river width variations and revealed that these driving factors are significantly different between free-flowing and non-free-flowing rivers. Specifically, the most important factor driving temporal variations in river width is the climate for free-flowing rivers, and is soil condition for human-impacted rivers. Finally, we anticipate that this study and the public release of GLOW will improve the understanding of river dynamics and catalyze additional interdisciplinary studies.
Project description:Colorectal polypectomy is offten incompletely performed with high variability between endoscopists, resulting in interval cancer or repeated procedures. Current available scoring systems for polypectomy technique are lacking in different areas so the investigators developed the Global Polypectomy Assessment Tool (GPAT) which is an online video-based assessment tool for any colorectal polypectomy.
The goal of the study is to assess the validity of GPAT through demonstrating the inter-rater agreement (Fleiss Kappa (κ)). GPAT has 20 items, contains evidence-based statements to aid interpretation, calculates an overall quality score and a complexity score.