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Preventive control of desert locusts is based on monitoring recession areas to detect outbreaks. Remote sensing has been increasingly used in the preventive control strategy. Soil moisture is a major ecological driver of desert locust populations but is still missing in the current imagery toolkit for preventive management. By means of statistical analyses, combining field observations of locust presence/absence and soil moisture estimates at 1 km resolution from a disaggregation algorithm, we assess the potential of soil moisture to help preventive management of desert locust. We observe that a soil moisture dynamics increase of above 0.09 cm3/cm3 for 20 days followed by a decrease of soil moisture may increase the chance to observe locusts 70 days later. We estimate the gains in early warning timing compared to using imagery from vegetation to be 3 weeks. We demonstrate that forecasting errors may be reduced by the combination of several types of indicators such as soil moisture and vegetation index in a common statistical model forecasting locust presence. Policy implications. Soil moisture estimates at 1 km resolution should be used to plan desert locust surveys in preventive management. When soil moisture increases in a dry area of potential habitat for the desert locust, field surveys should be conducted two months later to evaluate the need of further preventive actions. Remote sensing estimates of soil moisture could also be used for other applications of integrated pest management. Foreign Language Résumé La lutte préventive contre le criquet pèlerin consiste à détecter le plus tôt possible tout début de pullulation. La télédétection est de plus en plus utilisée dans la stratégie de lutte préventive. Bien que l'humidité du sol soit une variable écologique majeure dans la dynamique des populations de criquet pèlerin, elle manque à l'arsenal d'outils de télédétection pour cette stratégie préventive. A travers des analyses statistiques qui relient les observations de présence/absence des criquets aux estimations d'humidité du sol à une résolution d'un kilomètre issues d'un algorithme de désagrégation, nous évaluons le potentiel de cet indicateur dans la gestion préventive du criquet pèlerin. Nous observons qu'une augmentation de l'humidité du sol au‐dessus de 0.09 cm3/cm3 pendant 20 jours suivie d'une diminution augmente les chances d'observer des criquets pèlerins 70 jours plus tard. Nous estimons que cet indicateur permet de gagner trois semaines dans l'alerte précoce par rapport à l'utilisation d'indicateurs de végétation. Nous démontrons que les erreurs de prévision de présence des criquets peuvent être réduites en combinant dans des modèles statistiques plusieurs types d'indicateurs tels que l'humidité du sol et des indices de végétation. Implications pour les politiques publiques. Nous recommandons l'utilisation opérationnelle des estimations d'humidité du sol à 1 km de résolution dans la lutte préventive contre le criquet pèlerin. Quand l'humidité du sol augmente dans une zone aride d'habitat potentiel du criquet pèlerin, des prospections acridiennes devraient être conduites dans les deux mois suivants afin d’évaluer le besoin d'effectuer d'autres mesures préventives. L'humidité du sol estimée par télédétection pourrait aussi être utile dans la gestion intégrée d'autres ravageurs des cultures.

The current study was intended to examine the customer relationship management practices in two different cultures; Türkiye and Morocco. The objective of the study was to determine the fundamental components that have an impact on trust among consumers, satisfaction, commitment and buying behavior of customers. Data was gathered from 280 participants using a well-organized questionnaire. The findings revealed noteworthy favorable connections between CRM practices and customer satisfaction and buying behavior. Descriptive statistics, reliability analysis, and factor analysis were used to verify the CRM scale and assure the strength and accuracy of the results. T-tests were conducted to examine the mean differences in trust, satisfaction, engagement and buying behavior across two nationalities. The research emphasizes the significance of tailored customer service, engagement with customers, equitable pricing, and superior goods in improving customer experiences. Although the study takes a thorough approach, its scope is restricted by its concentration on a certain geographic area and its dependence on data given by the participants themselves.

Crisis events put crisis response organizations in a unique and complex situation that requires critical real-time distributed decision-making so that lives and properties are saved and protected. With the growing development of collaborative technologies, citizen participation to the crisis management process has shifted from the passive one-way contribution of social networking data to a more active participation by performing specific tasks related to crisis data processing. This article presents a comprehensive approach for integrating the crowdsourcing process to the collaborative decisional process in crisis situations. Within the approach three aspects are highlighted: the coordination work that exists between the relevant stakeholders in making collective decisions, the modeling of case dependent activities within the decisional process, and the detailed modeling of decision-related tasks. The authors investigate the applicability of the proposal with a real-world case study of the Desert Locust Plague carried out in the Algerian National Institute of Plant Protection.

Locusts and other migratory grasshoppers are transboundary pests. Monitoring and control, therefore, involve a complex system made up of social, ecological, and technological factors. Researchers and those involved in active management are calling for more integration between these siloed but often interrelated sectors. In this paper, we bring together 38 coauthors from six continents and 34 unique organizations, representing much of the social -ecological -technological system (SETS) related to grasshopper and locust management and research around the globe, to introduce current topics of interest and review recent advancements. Together, the paper explores the relationships, strengths, and weaknesses of the organizations responsible for the management of major locust -affected regions. The authors cover topics spanning humanities, social science, and the history of locust biological research and offer insights and approaches for the future of collaborative sustainable locust management. These perspectives will help support sustainable locust management, which still faces immense challenges such as fluctuations in funding, focus, isolated agendas, trust, communication, transparency, pesticide use, and environmental and human health standards. Arizona State University launched the Global Locust Initiative (GLI) in 2018 as a response to some of these challenges. The GLI welcomes individuals with interests in locusts and grasshoppers, transboundary pests, integrated pest management, landscape -level processes, food security, and/or cross-sectoral initiatives.

Detecting and responding to threat engages several neural nodes including the amygdala, hippocampus, insular cortex, and medial prefrontal cortices. Recent propositions call for the integration of more distributed neural nodes that process sensory and cognitive facets related to threat. Integrative, sensitive, and reproducible distributed neural decoders for the detection and response to threat and safety have yet to be established. We combine functional MRI data across varying threat conditioning and negative affect paradigms from 1465 participants with multivariate pattern analysis to investigate distributed neural representations of threat and safety. The trained decoders sensitively and specifically distinguish between threat and safety cues across multiple datasets. We further show that many neural nodes dynamically shift representations between threat and safety. Our results establish reproducible decoders that integrate neural circuits, merging the well-characterized ‘threat circuit’ with sensory and cognitive nodes, discriminating threat from safety regardless of experimental designs or data acquisition parameters. Discriminating threat from safety is critical for humans to navigate their environment. Here, the authors show that neural representations of threat and safety are distributed across brain systems that are robustly decoded across threat paradigms.

Neural plasticity in subareas of the rodent amygdala is widely known to be essential for Pavlovian threat conditioning and safety learning. However, less consistent results have been observed in human neuroimaging studies. Here, we identify and test three important factors that may contribute to these discrepancies: the temporal profile of amygdala response in threat conditioning, the anatomical specificity of amygdala responses during threat conditioning and safety learning, and insufficient power to identify these responses. We combined data across multiple studies using a well-validated human threat conditioning paradigm to examine amygdala involvement during threat conditioning and safety learning. In 601 humans, we show that two amygdala subregions tracked the conditioned stimulus with aversive shock during early conditioning while only one demonstrated delayed responding to a stimulus not paired with shock. Our findings identify cross-species similarities in temporal- and anatomical-specific amygdala contributions to threat and safety learning, affirm human amygdala involvement in associative learning and highlight important factors for future associative learning research in humans.

An efficient and ecofriendly method for the synthesis of disubstituted 5-aminopyrimidines from vinyl azides and urea or thiourea was developed. This reaction proceeds under microwave irradiation conditions in the presence of water as a solvent. The remarkable features of this new protocol are high conversion, short reaction times, cleaner reaction profiles and straightforward procedure.

The ability to extinguish a maladaptive conditioned fear response is crucial for healthy emotional processing and resiliency to aversive experiences. Therefore, enhancing fear extinction learning has immense potential emotional and health benefits. Mindfulness training enhances both fear conditioning and recall of extinguished fear; however, its effects on fear extinction learning are unknown. Here we investigated the impact of mindfulness training on brain mechanisms associated with fear-extinction learning, compared to an exercise-based program. We investigated BOLD activations in response to a previously learned fear-inducing cue during an extinction paradigm, before and after an 8-week mindfulness-based stress reduction program (MBSR, = 49) or exercise-based stress management education program ( = 27). The groups exhibited similar reductions in stress, but the MBSR group was uniquely associated with enhanced activation of salience network nodes and increased hippocampal engagement. Our results suggest that mindfulness training increases attention to anticipatory aversive stimuli, which in turn facilitates decreased aversive subjective responses and enhanced reappraisal of the memory.

Microbial fuel cells (MFCs) have attracted a great deal of attention as a promising technology for recovering electricity from organic substances by harnessing the metabolic activities of microorganisms. The objective of this study is to assess the efficacy of a LiTa0.5Nb0.5O3/g-C3N4 (LTN/g-C3N4) heterojunction as a photocathode catalyst within a single-chamber microbial fuel cell operating under both light irradiation and dark conditions. X-Ray diffraction (XRD), Fourier transform infrared spectroscopy (FTIR), scanning electron microscopy (SEM), and Energy dispersive X-Ray spectroscopy (EDS) were used to conduct a comprehensive analysis of the composite catalyst, revealing its exceptional purity and unique properties. After 120 h of exposure to visible light, the maximal power density of the MFC containing LTN/g-C3N4-modified carbon cloth was determined to be 667.7 mW/m3. The power density achieved with the presence of light was approximately three times greater than the power density obtained without light in the MFC (235.64 mW/m3). In addition, the study determined that the removal efficiencies of chemical oxygen demand (COD) were 88.4% and 66.5% when exposed to light and in the absence of light, respectively. These findings highlight the potential of the non-precious LTN/g-C3N4 photocatalyst as a viable alternative for effective wastewater treatment and power generation in microbial fuel cells with a single chamber configuration.