Asur Plant Breeding (France)

Understanding how disasters impact communities and how humanitarian organisations respond is essential for improving disaster preparedness, response, and policy. However, humanitarian organizations, government agencies and scientific institutions often report on disaster impacts and response in unstructured narrative reports, limiting its accessibility for systematic analysis. In this study, we developed a data-driven pipeline to extract and classify impact and response information from the International Federation of Red Cross and Red Crescent Societies (IFRC) disaster appeals and operational reports. We processed the text into clean sentences and manually annotated a stratified set of reports, covering different climate hazard types. Sentences were labelled as reporting impacts, reporting response measures, or neither, and those describing impacts or responses were further categorised into a taxonomy of 24 impact subclasses and 26 response subclasses. Annotations were used to train four text classification models for detecting and classifying impact- and response-related sentences. Our approach demonstrates the feasibility of automatically extracting structured disaster impact and response data from humanitarian narrative reports, enabling large-scale analytics and supporting evidence-based disaster management.

We sought to test whether a 2-week Total Worker Health (TWH) training mapped to TWH education competencies could be administered to a Mexican audience of occupational safety and health professionals and could lead to positive changes to knowledge and behaviors. This study used robust program evaluation methods collected before and after each of the nine training days and at the end of the course. Overall course quality received a mean score of 4.6 (SD = 0.6) and 98.8% of participants agreed that their TWH knowledge increased. All participants intended to make at least one change to their professional practice, most frequently helping companies assess their organizational culture to support health, safety, and well-being. This TWH training was well received and led to positive self-reported increase in knowledge and abilities to influence workers' health, safety, and well-being.

Abstract Hybrid breeding of wheat (Triticum aestivum L.) is limited by its self‐pollinating nature. Past cross‐pollination improvements mostly focused on optimizing male traits. We tested the hybrid seed yield of 100 diverse elite lines treated with a chemical hybridization agent (CHA) and pollinated by non‐sterilized male plants in multi‐environmental field trials. Plant height and phenological traits of female plants were also assessed. In parallel, control experiments without CHA sterilization were conducted to measure per se yield of the tested material. Hybrid seed yield variation is of quantitative genetic nature, and, despite the large environmental influence, this trait has a strong genotypic component and is highly heritable (h2 = .77). The lack of correlation between hybrid seed yield and per se yield suggests a non‐shared genetic control. Phenological traits and their interactions are important factors explaining together ~1/3 of hybrid seed yield variation. In contrast to plant height and flowering traits, which are influenced by major genetic factors, no significant marker–trait associations were found for the hybrid seed yield, thus suggesting a highly polygenic genetic architecture and the need of larger populations to investigate female hybrid seed yield.

Hoverflies are among the most important insect pollinators and there is documented evidence of a recent decline in their populations. To trace the past distributions of hoverfly species, verified records of historical collections are essential. Here we provide data on 1071 specimens of hoverflies collected or received by Jean Timon-David and hosted at the Marseille Natural History Museum, France. Most of the specimens were collected by Timon-David himself and come from south-eastern France, mainly from the departments of Bouches-du-Rhône, Var and Hautes-Alpes. Most of these specimens were checked for the accuracy of their identification according to the latest identification keys. This resulted in 85 additions to the known fauna of the French departments, mostly for Var and Bouches-du-Rhône. The taxonomy of all specimens was checked against the latest available checklists, and updated names added whenever necessary. Specimens received from entomologists working in other continents may also be valuable, as these are historic testimonies of the fauna of their own respective regions of origin, and may therefore also be used as reference material. One paratype specimen from Australia is present in the collection. The holotype of Cheilosia vangaveri Timon-David, 1937 is absent from the collection and should be considered as lost. All but two of the specimens with locality labels had their geographical coordinates of origin added in the data set.

Wheat occupies a special role in global food security since, in addition to providing 20% of our carbohydrates and protein, almost 25% of the global production is traded internationally. The importance of wheat for food security was recognised by the Chief Agricultural Scientists of the G20 group of countries when they endorsed the establishment of the Wheat Initiative in 2011. The Wheat Initiative was tasked with supporting the wheat research community by facilitating collaboration, information and resource sharing and helping to build the capacity to address challenges facing production in an increasingly variable environment. Many countries invest in wheat research. Innovations in wheat breeding and agronomy have delivered enormous gains over the past few decades, with the average global yield increasing from just over 1 tonne per hectare in the early 1960s to around 3.5 tonnes in the past decade. These gains are threatened by climate change, the rapidly rising financial and environmental costs of fertilizer, and pesticides, combined with declines in water availability for irrigation in many regions. The international wheat research community has worked to identify major opportunities to help ensure that global wheat production can meet demand. The outcomes of these discussions are presented in this paper.

Más allá de su cotidianidad, la presentación es una actividad denostada. Su producción suele ser contingente en el ámbito de la comunicación y es habitual que sea dejada en manos de diseñadores gráficos. A pesar de haberse publicado gran cantidad de trabajos que la mencionan, no llega a ser considerada disciplinarmente. El objetivo de este trabajo es encontrar cuáles son los aspectos de la presentación, en este caso circunscripta a lo profesional, que permitan que se pueda considerar como una nueva categoría dentro del campo del Diseño Gráfico. A través del análisis del material publicado, se detectan cuatro aspectos comunes entre ambas actividades que permiten establecer intersecciones: el elemento retórico/persuasivo, la audiovisualidad, las interfaces presentes y la performatividad.

“Stelele şi lalelele”: Essay of Micromonography of a Romanian Inflectional Class (I). This article is the first of a three-part study aimed at reconstructing the origin and the history of a sub-class of nouns that, from a Romance perspective, has been considered a distinctive feature of Romanian, as well as at bringing into discussion its current status. The object of the study is the sub-class of f nouns ending in the sg NA in stressed vowel, and with pl in -le. In this first part, the author lays out the matter, illustrating the distinctiveness of the morpheme f pl ‑le with respect to Romance pl endings and describing the morphological traits of this class in contemporary Romanian as “radical theme” nouns, i.e. f nouns lacking a specific morpheme for sg NA (f√‑ø). In preparation to the following two parts of the study, the author discusses here the Latin origin of f√‑ø in Common Romanian, identifying the members of the sub-class directly inherited from Latin. REZUMAT. „Stelele şi lalelele”: încercare de micromonografie a unei clase flexionare a limbii române (I). Prezentul articol constituie prima parte a unui studiu în trei părți ce vizează reconstituirea originii și dezvoltării istorice, precum și discutarea stării actuale a ceea ce, din perspectivă romanică, a fost considerată o specificitate a limbii române: existența unei clase flexionare de substantive f care se termină la NA sg în vocală tonică și cu pl în -le. În acest prim articol autorul expune problema, ilustrând particularitatea morfemului f pl ‑le în contextul morfemelor de pl romanice și descriind caracteristicile morfologice ale acestei clase în limba română actuală, aderând la ipoteza care consideră substantivele aparținătoare acestei clase ca „teme radicale”, adică lipsite de un morfem specific pentru NA sg: pe scurt, f√‑ø. În pregătirea părților următoare ale studiului, acestă prima parte se încheie cu discutarea originii clasei f√‑ø în evoluția de la latină la româna comună și cu circumscrierea grupului originar de cuvinte moștenite din latină ce aparțin acestei clase. Cuvinte-cheie: morfologie nominală, plural romanic, limba română, morfologie flexionară, morfologie romanică.

Hybrid wheat breeding programs need to use chemical hybridizing agents for seed production due to its simplicity. Alternative methods such as cytoplasmic systems or hand pollinations restrict genetic combinations or seed production which limits testing experimental hybrids in large-scale multi-environment trials (METs). Using F2 seed instead of F1 can allow programs to test hybrid cross combinations in METs and the data can be used to supplement selection decisions at early stages of breeding cycle. To test this hypothesis, two METs consisting of 40 entries were conducted in 2017 and 2018 in six locations across Texas and Nebraska. The entries included hybrids at the F2 stage and their respective parents, selected from a previous preliminary F1 evaluation experiment. In six out of 10 test environments, a F2 hybrid had statistically significant higher yield than highest yielding parent. The F2 mid-parent heterosis ranged from − 20.97 to 27.52% in 2017 and − 9.90 to 9.17% in 2018. The F2 high-parent heterosis ranged from − 21.07 to 17.85% in 2017 and − 16.57 to 6.68% in 2018. The heterosis estimates of these cross combinations at F1 stage were extracted from previous large scale METs conducted on nine environments across Nebraska and Texas in 2016–2017. A comparison of F2 heterosis from this study and F1 heterosis from the previous study revealed that F2 heterosis was highly indicative of superior F1 performance. The results provide strong evidence for utility of F2 yield data in selecting superior F1 hybrids. In addition, a practical framework for using F2 performance to aid selecting F1’s in a hybrid wheat-breeding pipeline is provided.