Does access to improved grain storage technology increase farmers' welfare? Experimental evidence from maize farming in Ethiopia

Hugo De Groote Bart Minten (2024, [Artículo])

Seasonal price variability for cereals is two to three times higher in Africa than on the international reference market. Seasonality is even more pronounced when access to appropriate storage and opportunities for price arbitrage are limited. As smallholder farmers typically sell their production after harvest, when prices are low, this leads to lower incomes as well as higher food insecurity during the lean season, when prices are high. One solution to reduce seasonal stress is the use of improved storage technologies. Using data from a randomised controlled trial, in a major maize-growing region of Western Ethiopia, we study the impact of hermetic bags, a technology that protects stored grain against insect pests, so that the grain can be stored longer. Despite considerable price seasonality—maize prices in the lean season are 36% higher than after harvesting—we find no evidence that hermetic bags improve welfare, except that access to these bags allowed for a marginally longer storage period of maize intended for sale by 2 weeks. But this did not translate into measurable welfare gains as we found no changes in any of our welfare outcome indicators. This ‘near-null’ effect is due to the fact that maize storage losses in our study region are relatively lower than previous studies suggested—around 10% of the quantity stored—likely because of the widespread use of an alternative to protect maize during storage, for example a cheap but highly toxic fumigant. These findings are important for policies that seek to promote improved storage technologies in these settings.

Hermetic Storage Randomised Controlled Trial CIENCIAS AGROPECUARIAS Y BIOTECNOLOGÍA STORAGE PILOT FARMS SEASONALITY WELFARE MAIZE

Sustainable maize intensification through site-specific nutrient management advice: Experimental evidence from Nigeria

Miet Maertens Oyakhilomen Oyinbo Tahirou Abdoulaye Jordan Chamberlin (2023, [Artículo])

There is growing evidence on the impacts of site-specific nutrient management (SSNM) from Asia. The evidence for Sub-Saharan Africa (SSA), where SSNM developments are more recent and where conditions concerning soil fertility and fertilizer use differ importantly from those in Asia, is extremely scarce. We evaluate a SSNM advisory tool that allows extension agents to generate fertilizer recommendations tailored to the specific situation of an individual farmer’s field, using a three-year randomized controlled trial with 792 smallholder farmers in the maize belt of northern Nigeria. Two treatment arms were implemented: T1 and T2 both provide SSNM information on nutrient use and management, but T2 provides additional information on maize price distributions and the associated variability of expected returns to fertilizer use. We estimate average and heterogenous intent-to-treat effects on agronomic, economic and environmental plot-level outcomes. We find that T1 and T2 lead to substantial increases (up to 116%) in the adoption of good fertilizer management practices and T2 leads to incremental increases (up to 18%) in nutrient application rates, yields and revenues. Both treatments improve low levels of nutrient use efficiency and reduce high levels of greenhouse gas emission intensity, after two years of treatment. Our findings underscore the possibility of a more gradual and sustainable intensification of smallholder agriculture in SSA, as compared with the Asian Green Revolution, through increased fertilizer use accompanied by improved fertilizer management.

Randomized Controlled Trial CIENCIAS AGROPECUARIAS Y BIOTECNOLOGÍA TECHNOLOGY ADOPTION AGRICULTURAL EXTENSION GREEN REVOLUTION FERTILIZERS GREENHOUSE GAS EMISSIONS

What the world eats: wheat

sridhar bhavani (2023, [Objeto de congreso])

CIENCIAS AGROPECUARIAS Y BIOTECNOLOGÍA WHEAT VARIETY TRIALS PRODUCTION DATA

REMATTOOL-R: a smart tool for identifying superior maize genotypes from multi-environment yield trials

Lewis Machida Dan Makumbi (2023, [Artículo])

Maize Variety Testing Multienvironment Trial Analysis Relative Maturity REMATTOOL-R Superior Varieties Identification CIENCIAS AGROPECUARIAS Y BIOTECNOLOGÍA MAIZE VARIETIES MATURITY IDENTIFICATION YIELDS

Innovative approaches to integrating gender into conventional maize breeding: lessons from the Seed Production Technology for Africa project

Rachel Voss Jill Cairns Michael Olsen Esnath Tatenda Hamadziripi (2023, [Artículo])

The integration of gender concerns in crop breeding programs aims to improve the suitability and appeal of new varieties to both women and men, in response to concerns about unequal adoption of improved seed. However, few conventional breeding programs have sought to center social inclusion concerns. This community case study documents efforts to integrate gender into the maize-focused Seed Production Technology for Africa (SPTA) project using innovation history analysis drawing on project documents and the authors’ experiences. These efforts included deliberate exploration of potential gendered impacts of project technologies and innovations in the project’s approach to variety evaluation, culminating in the use of decentralized on-farm trials using the tricot approach. Through this case study, we illustrate the power of active and respectful collaborations between breeders and social scientists, spurred by donor mandates to address gender and social inclusion. Gender integration in this case was further facilitated by open-minded project leaders and allocation of funding for gender research. SPTA proved to be fertile ground for experimentation and interdisciplinary collaboration around gender and maize breeding, and has provided proof of concept for larger breeding projects seeking to integrate gender considerations.

Crop Breeding On-Farm Trials Tricot CIENCIAS AGROPECUARIAS Y BIOTECNOLOGÍA GENDER CROPS BREEDING ON-FARM RESEARCH SOCIAL INCLUSION CITIZEN SCIENCE MAIZE

Genome-wide association study of common resistance to rust species in tetraploid wheat

Daniela Marone Anna Maria Mastrangelo Karim Ammar Filippo Maria Bassi Meinan Wang Xianming Chen Diego Rubiales Oadi Matny Brian Steffenson (2024, [Artículo])

Wheat Rusts Tetraploid Wheat Multi-Location Trials CIENCIAS AGROPECUARIAS Y BIOTECNOLOGÍA QUANTITATIVE TRAIT LOCI TETRAPLOIDY WHEAT RUSTS GENOME-WIDE ASSOCIATION STUDIES

A simple extension to the CMASA method for the prediction of catalytic residues in the presence of single point mutations

David Israel Flores Granados (2014, [Artículo])

The automatic identification of catalytic residues still remains an important challenge in structural bioinformatics. Sequence-based methods are good alternatives when the query shares a high percentage of identity with a well-annotated enzyme. However, when the homology is not apparent, which occurs with many structures from the structural genome initiative, structural information should be exploited. A local structural comparison is preferred to a global structural comparison when predicting functional residues. CMASA is a recently proposed method for predicting catalytic residues based on a local structure comparison. The method achieves high accuracy and a high value for the Matthews correlation coefficient. However, point substitutions or a lack of relevant data strongly affect the performance of the method. In the present study, we propose a simple extension to the CMASA method to overcome this difficulty. Extensive computational experiments are shown as proof of concept instances, as well as for a few real cases. The results show that the extension performs well when the catalytic site contains mutated residues or when some residues are missing. The proposed modification could correctly predict the catalytic residues of a mutant thymidylate synthase, 1EVF. It also successfully predicted the catalytic residues for 3HRC despite the lack of information for a relevant side chain atom in the PDB file. © 2014 Flores et al.

1UU9 protein, 3HRC protein, protein, thymidylate synthase, unclassified drug, protein kinase, thymidylate synthase, accuracy, algorithm, Article, CMASA, CMASA Substitution Matrix, Contact Matrix Average Deviation, controlled study, correlation coeffi CIENCIAS FÍSICO MATEMÁTICAS Y CIENCIAS DE LA TIERRA MATEMÁTICAS ANÁLISIS NUMÉRICO ANÁLISIS NUMÉRICO

Assessing the Response of Nematode Communities to Climate Change-Driven Warming: A Microcosm Experiment

RUTH GINGOLD WERMUTH (2013, [Artículo])

Biodiversity has diminished over the past decades with climate change being among the main responsible factors. One consequence of climate change is the increase in sea surface temperature, which, together with long exposure periods in intertidal areas, may exceed the tolerance level of benthic organisms. Benthic communities may suffer structural changes due to the loss of species or functional groups, putting ecological services at risk. In sandy beaches, free-living marine nematodes usually are the most abundant and diverse group of intertidal meiofauna, playing an important role in the benthic food web. While apparently many functionally similar nematode species co-exist temporally and spatially, experimental results on selected bacterivore species suggest no functional overlap, but rather an idiosyncratic contribution to ecosystem functioning. However, we hypothesize that functional redundancy is more likely to observe when taking into account the entire diversity of natural assemblages. We conducted a microcosm experiment with two natural communities to assess their stress response to elevated temperature. The two communities differed in diversity (high [HD] vs. low [LD]) and environmental origin (harsh vs. moderate conditions). We assessed their stress resistance to the experimental treatment in terms of species and diversity changes, and their function in terms of abundance, biomass, and trophic diversity. According to the Insurance Hypothesis, we hypothesized that the HD community would cope better with the stressful treatment due to species functional overlap, whereas the LD community functioning would benefit from species better adapted to harsh conditions. Our results indicate no evidence of functional redundancy in the studied nematofaunal communities. The species loss was more prominent and size specific in the HD; large predators and omnivores were lost, which may have important consequences for the benthic food web. Yet, we found evidence for alternative diversity-ecosystem functioning relationships, such as the Rivets and the Idiosyncrasy Model. © 2013 Gingold et al.

aquaculture, article, bacterivore, benthos, biodiversity, biomass, climate, community dynamics, controlled study, ecosystem, environmental temperature, microcosm, nematode, nonhuman, population abundance, species diversity, species richness, taxonomy CIENCIAS FÍSICO MATEMÁTICAS Y CIENCIAS DE LA TIERRA CIENCIAS DE LA TIERRA Y DEL ESPACIO OCEANOGRAFÍA OCEANOGRAFÍA

Whole-genome comparison between reference sequences and oyster Vibrio vulnificus C-genotype strains

CARLOS ABRAHAM GUERRERO RUIZ (2019, [Artículo])

Whole-genome sequences of Vibrio vulnificus clinical genotype (C-genotype) from the CICESE Culture Collection, isolated from oysters, were compared with reference sequences of CMCP6 and YJ016 V. vulnificus C-genotype strains of clinical origin. The RAST web server estimated the whole genome to be ~4.8 Mb in CICESE strain 316 and ~4.7 Mb in CICESE strain 325. No plasmids were detected in the CICESE strains. Based on a phylogenetic tree that was constructed with the whole-genome results, we observed high similarity between the reference sequences and oyster C-genotype isolates and a sharp contrast with environmental genotype (E-genotype) reference sequences, indicating that the differences between the C- and E-genotypes do not necessarily correspond to their isolation origin. The CICESE strains share 3488 genes (63.2%) with the YJ016 strain and 3500 genes (63.9%) with the CMCP6 strain. A total of 237 pathogenicity associated genes were selected from reference clinical strains, where—92 genes were from CMCP6, 126 genes from YJ016, and 19 from MO6-24/ O; the presence or absence of these genes was recorded for the CICESE strains. Of the 92 genes that were selected for CMCP6, 67 were present in both CICESE strains, as were as 86 of the 126 YJ016 genes and 13 of the 19 MO6-24/O genes. The detection of elements that are related to virulence in CICESE strains—such as the RTX gene cluster, vvhA and vvpE, the type IV pili cluster, the XII genomic island, and the viuB genes, suggests that environmental isolates with the C-genotype, have significant potential for infection. © 2019 Guerrero et al. This is an open access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License, which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original author and source are credited.

Article, bacterial gene, bacterial strain, bacterial virulence, comparative study, controlled study, gene cluster, gene identification, genomic island, genotype, nonhuman, phylogenetic tree, sequence analysis, strain identification, Vibrio vulnificus BIOLOGÍA Y QUÍMICA CIENCIAS DE LA VIDA GENÉTICA GENÉTICA

Maintenance of Coastal Surface Blooms by Surface Temperature Stratification and Wind Drift

MARY CARMEN RUIZ DE LA TORRE (2013, [Artículo])

Algae blooms are an increasingly recurrent phenomenon of potentially socio-economic impact in coastal waters globally and in the coastal upwelling region off northern Baja California, Mexico. In coastal upwelling areas the diurnal wind pattern is directed towards the coast during the day. We regularly found positive Near Surface Temperature Stratification (NSTS), the resulting density stratification is expected to reduce the frictional coupling of the surface layer from deeper waters and allow for its more efficient wind transport. We propose that the net transport of the top layer of approximately 2.7 kilometers per day towards the coast helps maintain surface blooms of slow growing dinoflagellate such as Lingulodinium polyedrum. We measured: near surface stratification with a free-rising CTD profiler, trajectories of drifter buoys with attached thermographs, wind speed and direction, velocity profiles via an Acoustic Doppler Current Profiler, Chlorophyll and cell concentration from water samples and vertical migration using sediment traps. The ADCP and drifter data agree and show noticeable current shear within the first meters of the surface where temperature stratification and high cell densities of L. polyedrum were found during the day. Drifters with 1m depth drogue moved towards the shore, whereas drifters at 3 and 5 m depth showed trajectories parallel or away from shore. A small part of the surface population migrated down to the sea floor during night thus reducing horizontal dispersion. The persistent transport of the surface bloom population towards shore should help maintain the bloom in favorable environmental conditions with high nutrients, but also increasing the potential socioeconomic impact of the blooms. The coast wise transport is not limited to blooms but includes all dissolved and particulate constituents in surface waters. © 2013 Ruiz-de la Torre et al.

chlorophyll, algal bloom, article, cell count, cell density, coastal waters, controlled study, dinoflagellate, Lingulodinium polyedrum, meteorological phenomena, Mexico, near surface temperature stratification, nonhuman, nutrient concentration, popul CIENCIAS FÍSICO MATEMÁTICAS Y CIENCIAS DE LA TIERRA CIENCIAS DE LA TIERRA Y DEL ESPACIO OCEANOGRAFÍA OCEANOGRAFÍA