Beijing Forestry University

Plant traits-the morphological, anatomical, physiological, biochemical and phenological characteristics of plants-determine how plants respond to environmental factors, affect other trophic levels, and influence ecosystem properties and their benefits and detriments to people. Plant trait data thus represent the basis for a vast area of research spanning from evolutionary biology, community and functional ecology, to biodiversity conservation, ecosystem and landscape management, restoration, biogeography and earth system modelling. Since its foundation in 2007, the TRY database of plant traits has grown continuously. It now provides unprecedented data coverage under an open access data policy and is the main plant trait database used by the research community worldwide. Increasingly, the TRY database also supports new frontiers of trait-based plant research, including the identification of data gaps and the subsequent mobilization or measurement of new data. To support this development, in this article we evaluate the extent of the trait data compiled in TRY and analyse emerging patterns of data coverage and representativeness. Best species coverage is achieved for categorical traits-almost complete coverage for 'plant growth form'. However, most traits relevant for ecology and vegetation modelling are characterized by continuous intraspecific variation and trait-environmental relationships. These traits have to be measured on individual plants in their respective environment. Despite unprecedented data coverage, we observe a humbling lack of completeness and representativeness of these continuous traits in many aspects. We, therefore, conclude that reducing data gaps and biases in the TRY database remains a key challenge and requires a coordinated approach to data mobilization and trait measurements. This can only be achieved in collaboration with other initiatives.

capture as well as utilization were systematically discussed and compared. With our great effort, this review would be of significant importance for academic researchers for obtaining an overall understanding of the current developments and future trends of CCU. This work is bound to benefit researchers in fields relating to CCU and facilitate the progress of significant breakthroughs in both fundamental research and commercial applications to deliver perspective views for future scientific and industrial advances in CCU.

With the growing popularity of electrical communication equipment, high-performance electromagnetic interference (EMI) shielding materials are widely used to deal with radiation pollution. However, the large thickness and poor mechanical properties of many EMI shielding materials usually limit their applications. In this study, ultrathin and highly flexible Ti3C2Tx (d-Ti3C2Tx, MXene)/cellulose nanofiber (CNF) composite paper with a nacre-like lamellar structure is fabricated via a vacuum-filtration-induced self-assembly process. By the interaction between one-dimensional (1D) CNFs and two-dimensional (2D) d-Ti3C2Tx MXene, the binary strengthening and toughening of the nacre-like d-Ti3C2Tx/CNF composite paper has been successfully achieved, leading to high tensile strength (up to 135.4 MPa) and fracture strain (up to 16.7%), as well as excellent folding endurance (up to 14 260 times). Moreover, the d-Ti3C2Tx/CNF composite paper exhibits high electrical conductivity (up to 739.4 S m–1) and excellent specific EMI shielding efficiency (up to 2647 dB cm2 g–1) at an ultrathin thickness (minimum thickness 47 μm). The nacre-inspired strategy in this study offers a promising approach for the design and preparation of the strong integrated and flexible MXene/CNF composite paper, which may be applied in various fields such as flexible wearable devices, weapon equipment, and robot joints.

Carbon dioxide (CO₂) capture using solid sorbents has been recognized as a very promising technology that has attracted intense attention from both academic and industrial fields in the last decade.

Water scarcity has become a major constraint to socio-economic development and a threat to livelihood in increasing parts of the world. Since the late 1980s, water scarcity research has attracted much political and public attention. We here review a variety of indicators that have been developed to capture different characteristics of water scarcity. Population, water availability and water use are the key elements of these indicators. Most of the progress made in the last few decades has been on the quantification of water availability and use by applying spatially explicit models. However, challenges remain on appropriate incorporation of green water (soil moisture), water quality, environmental flow requirements, globalization and virtual water trade in water scarcity assessment. Meanwhile, inter- and intra- annual variability of water availability and use also calls for assessing the temporal dimension of water scarcity. It requires concerted efforts of hydrologists, economists, social scientists, and environmental scientists to develop integrated approaches to capture the multi-faceted nature of water scarcity.

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Biodiesel is a promising alternative, and renewable, fuel. As its production increases, so does production of the principle co-product, crude glycerol. The effective utilization of crude glycerol will contribute to the viability of biodiesel. In this review, composition and quality factors of crude glycerol are discussed. The value-added utilization opportunities of crude glycerol are reviewed. The majority of crude glycerol is used as feedstock for production of other value-added chemicals, followed by animal feeds.

Biodiversity is essential to human well-being, but people have been reducing biodiversity throughout human history. Loss of species and degradation of ecosystems are likely to further accelerate in the coming years. Our understanding of this crisis is now clear, and world leaders have pledged to avert it. Nonetheless, global goals to reduce the rate of biodiversity loss have mostly not been achieved. However, many examples of conservation success show that losses can be halted and even reversed. Building on these lessons to turn the tide of biodiversity loss will require bold and innovative action to transform historical relationships between human populations and nature.

Layered double hydroxides (LDHs) with their highly flexible and tunable chemical composition and physical properties have attracted tremendous attention in recent years. LDHs have found widespread application as catalysts, anion exchange materials, fire retardants, and nano-fillers in polymer nanocomposites. The ability to exfoliate LDHs into ultrathin nanosheets enables a range of new opportunities for multifunctional materials. In this review we summarize the current available LDH exfoliation methods. In particular, we highlight recent developments for the direct synthesis of single-layer LDH nanosheets, as well as the emerging applications of LDH nanosheets in catalyzing oxygen evolution reactions and preparing light emitting devices, supercapacitors, and flame retardant nanocomposites.

Microplastics (MPs) are emerging pollutants that act as a carrier of toxic pollutants, release toxic substances, and aggregate in biota. The adsorption behavior of MPs has recently become a research hot spot. The objective of this study was to summarize the main mechanisms by which MPs adsorb organic pollutants, introduce some mathematical models commonly used to study the adsorption behavior of MPs, and discuss the factors affecting the adsorption capacity from three perspectives, i.e., the properties of MPs and organic pollutants, and environmental factors. Adsorption kinetics and isothermal adsorption models are commonly used to study the adsorption of organic pollutants on MPs. We observed that hydrophobic interaction is the most common mechanism by which MPs adsorb organic pollutants, and also reportedly controls the portion of organic pollutants. Additionally, electrostatic interaction and other non-covalent forces, such as hydrogen bonds, halogen bonds, and π-π interactions, are also mechanisms of organic pollutant adsorption on MPs. The particle size, specific surface area, aging degree, crystallinity, and polarity of MPs, and organic pollutant properties (hydrophobicity and dissociated forms) are key factors affecting adsorption capacity. Changes in the pH, temperature, and ionic strength also affect the adsorption capacity. Current research on the adsorption behavior of MPs has mainly been conducted in laboratories, and in-depth studies on the adsorption mechanism and influencing factors are limited. Therefore, studies on the adsorption behavior of MPs in the environment are required, and this study will contribute to a better understanding of this topic.

Boakes et al. compile and analyze a historical dataset of 170,000 bird sightings over two centuries and show how changing trends in data gathering may confound a true picture of biodiversity change.

The remarkable progress in efforts to prepare conductive self-healing hydrogels mimicking human skin’s functions has been witnessed in recent years. However, it remains a great challenge to develop an integrated conductive gel combining excellent self-healing and mechanical properties, which is derived from their inherent compromise between the dynamic cross-links for healing and steady cross-links for mechanical strength. In this work, we design a tough, self-healing, and self-adhesive ionic gel by constructing synergistic multiple coordination bonds among tannic acid-coated cellulose nanocrystals (TA@CNCs), poly(acrylic acid) chains, and metal ions in a covalent polymer network. The incorporated TA@CNC acts as a dynamic connected bridge in the hierarchically porous network mediated by multiple coordination bonds, endowing the ionic gels the superior mechanical performance. Reversible nature of dynamic coordination interactions leads to excellent recovery property as well as reliable mechanical and electrical self-healing property without any assistance of external stimuli. Intriguingly, the ionic gels display durable and repeatable adhesiveness ascribed to the presence of catechol groups from the incorporated tannic acid, which can be adhered directly on human skin without inflammatory response and residual. Additionally, the ionic gels with a great strain sensitivity can be employed as flexible strain sensors to monitor and distinguish both large motions (e.g., joints bending) and subtle motions (e.g., pulse and breath), which enable us to analyze the data on the user interface of smart phone via programmable wireless transmission. This work provides a new prospect for the design of the biocompatible cellulose-based hydrogels with stretchable, self-adhesive, self-healing, and strain-sensitive properties for potential applications in wearable electronic sensors and healthcare monitoring.

The demand for efficient utilization of biomass induces a detailed analysis of the fundamental chemical structures of biomass, especially the complex structures of lignin polymers, which have long been recognized for their negative impact on biorefinery. Traditionally, it has been attempted to reveal the complicated and heterogeneous structure of lignin by a series of chemical analyses, such as thioacidolysis (TA), nitrobenzene oxidation (NBO), and derivatization followed by reductive cleavage (DFRC). Recent advances in nuclear magnetic resonance (NMR) technology undoubtedly have made solution-state NMR become the most widely used technique in structural characterization of lignin due to its versatility in illustrating structural features and structural transformations of lignin polymers. As one of the most promising diagnostic tools, NMR provides unambiguous evidence for specific structures as well as quantitative structural information. The recent advances in two-dimensional solution-state NMR techniques for structural analysis of lignin in isolated and whole cell wall states (in situ), as well as their applications are reviewed.

International audience

Automatic and accurate estimation of disease severity is essential for food security, disease management, and yield loss prediction. Deep learning, the latest breakthrough in computer vision, is promising for fine-grained disease severity classification, as the method avoids the labor-intensive feature engineering and threshold-based segmentation. Using the apple black rot images in the PlantVillage dataset, which are further annotated by botanists with four severity stages as ground truth, a series of deep convolutional neural networks are trained to diagnose the severity of the disease. The performances of shallow networks trained from scratch and deep models fine-tuned by transfer learning are evaluated systemically in this paper. The best model is the deep VGG16 model trained with transfer learning, which yields an overall accuracy of 90.4% on the hold-out test set. The proposed deep learning model may have great potential in disease control for modern agriculture.

A recyclable and green biomass-derived deep eutectic solvent (DES) pretreatment was developed to deconstruct the recalcitrant structure of<italic>Eucalyptus</italic>for further cellulose enzymatic saccharification and lignin valorization.

Dothideomycetes comprise a highly diverse range of fungi characterized mainly by asci with two wall layers (bitunicate asci) and often with fissitunicate dehiscence. Many species are saprobes, with many asexual states comprising important plant pathogens. They are also endophytes, epiphytes, fungicolous, lichenized, or lichenicolous fungi. They occur in terrestrial, freshwater and marine habitats in almost every part of the world. We accept 105 families in Dothideomycetes with the new families Anteagloniaceae, Bambusicolaceae, Biatriosporaceae, Lichenoconiaceae, Muyocopronaceae, Paranectriellaceae, Roussoellaceae, Salsugineaceae, Seynesiopeltidaceae and Thyridariaceae introduced in this paper. Each family is provided with a description and notes, including asexual and asexual states, and if more than one genus is included, the type genus is also characterized. Each family is provided with at least one figure-plate, usually illustrating the type genus, a list of accepted genera, including asexual genera, and a key to these genera. A phylogenetic tree based on four gene combined analysis add support for 64 of the families and 22 orders, including the novel orders, Dyfrolomycetales, Lichenoconiales, Lichenotheliales, Monoblastiales, Natipusillales, Phaeotrichales and Strigulales. The paper is expected to provide a working document on Dothideomycetes which can be modified as new data comes to light. It is hoped that by illustrating types we provide stimulation and interest so that more work is carried out in this remarkable group of fungi.

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Ionic liquids have attracted a great deal of interest in recent years, illustrated by their applications in a variety of areas involved with chemistry, physics, biology, and engineering. Usually, the stabilities of ionic liquids are highlighted as one of their outstanding advantages. However, are ionic liquids really stable in all cases? This review covers the chemical stabilities of ionic liquids. It focuses on the reactivity of the most popular imidazolium ionic liquids at structural positions, including C2 position, N1 and N3 positions, and C4 and C5 positions, and decomposition on the imidazolium ring. Additionally, we discuss decomposition of quaternary ammonium and phosphonium ionic liquids and hydrolysis and nucleophilic reactions of anions of ionic liquids. The review aims to arouse caution on potential decomposition of ionic liquids and provides a guide for better utilization of ionic liquids.

To characterize the lignin structures and lignin-carbohydrate complex (LCC) linkages, milled wood lignin (MWL) and mild acidolysis lignin (MAL) with a high content of associated carbohydrates were sequentially isolated from ball-milled poplar wood. Quantification of their structural features has been achieved by using a combination of quantitative (13)C and 2D HSQC NMR techniques. The results showed that acetylated 4-O-methylgluconoxylan is the main carbohydrate associated with lignins, and acetyl groups frequently acylate the C2 and C3 positions. MWL and MAL exhibited similar structural features. The main substructures were β-O-4' aryl ether, resinol, and phenylcoumaran, and their abundances per 100 Ar units changed from 41.5 to 43.3, from 14.6 to 12.7, and from 3.7 to 4.0, respectively. The S/G ratios were estimated to be 1.57 and 1.62 for MWL and MAL, respectively. Phenyl glycoside and benzyl ether LCC linkages were clearly quantified, whereas the amount of γ-ester LCC linkages was ambiguous for quantification.