In their natural environment, leaves are exposed to rapid fluctuations of irradiance. Research on CO2 assimilation under fluctuating irradiance often relies on measurements of gas exchange during transients where irradiance is rapidly increased or decreased, after the leaf has adapted to a particular set of environmental conditions. In the field, s...
Urmia Lake, in north-western Iran, is an important internationally recognized natural area designated as a RAMSAR site and UNESCO Biosphere Reserve. Over the last 20 years, the surface area of Urmia Lake has declined by 80%. As a result, the salinity of the lake has sharply increased which is disturbing the ecosystems, local agriculture and livelih...
Given the high levels of food insecurity and the loss of vital ecosystem services associated with deforestation, countries in sub-Saharan Africa (SSA) face a major dilemma. How can they produce enough food in a changing climate to feed an increasing population while protecting natural forests and woodlands that provide a wide array of ecosystem ser...
Unhealthy diets contribute substantially to the worldwide burden of non-communicable diseases, such as cardiovascular diseases, cancers, and diabetes. Globally, non-communicable diseases are the leading cause of death, and numbers are still rising, which makes healthy diets a global priority. In Nutrition Research, two fields are particularly relev...
Flavonoids, abundantly present in fruits and vegetables, have been reported to exert various positive health effects based on in vitro bioassays. However, effects detected in in vitro models cannot be directly correlated to human health as most in vitro studies have been performed using flavonoid aglycones at high concentration ignoring extensive m...
Modern biological research is accumulating an ever-increasing amount of information on genes and their functions. It is apparent that biological functions can very rarely be attributed to a single genes, but rather arise from complex interaction within networks that comprise many genes. A fundamentally important challenge in contemporary biology is...
In flooded rice systems that are broadcast with urea, significant amounts of nitrogen (N) may be lost to the atmosphere in the form of ammonia (NH3). Many models with different complexities with regards to describing the process of NH3 volatilisation and the overall N dynamics in the systems are available. However, given the differences in local co...
This multidisciplinary study focuses on projecting and adapting to future hydrological changes in the Mekong – an international river of global significance in terms of rapidly increasing human pressures and climate-change vulnerability. A modelling framework was developed to project future changes in both the river flow regime and hydrological ext...
Planet Earth hosts an incredible biological diversity. Estimated numbers of species occurring on Earth range from 5 to 11 million eukaryotic species including 400,000-450,000 species of plants. Much of this biodiversity remains poorly known and many species have not yet been named or even been discovered. This is not surprising, as the majority of ...
Yield gap analysis is useful to understand the relative contribution of growth-defining, -limiting and -reducing factors to actual yields. This is traditionally performed at the field level using mechanistic crop growth simulation models, and directly up-scaled to the regional and global levels without considering a range of factors intersecting at...
