Washington State University biologist Mechthild Tegeder has developed a way to dramatically increase the yield and quality of soybeans.
Her greenhouse-grown soybean plants fix twice as much nitrogen from the atmosphere as their natural counterparts, grow larger and produce up to 36 percent more seeds.
Tegeder designed a novel way to increase the flow of nitrogen, an essential nutrient, from specialized bacteria in soybean root nodules to the seed-producing organs.
The additional transport proteins sped up the overall export of nitrogen from the root nodules.
Large amounts of synthetic nitrogen fertilizer are applied around the world to ensure high plant productivity.
One major benefit of growing legumes such as chickpeas, common beans, peas and soybeans is that they not only can use atmospheric nitrogen for their own growth but also leave residual nitrogen in the soil for subsequent crops.
Hence, increasing nitrogen fixation could improve overall plant productivity for farmers who grow legumes in both industrial and developing countries while diminishing or eliminating the need for nitrogen fertilizers.
"Our research also has the potential to be transferred to other crop plants that don’t fix nitrogen from the atmosphere but would benefit from being able to uptake nitrogen more efficiently from the soil."
"Soybean nitrogen breakthrough could help feed the world: Greenhouse-grown soybean plants produce up to 36 percent more seeds."
"Soybean nitrogen breakthrough could help feed the world: Greenhouse-grown soybean plants produce up to 36 percent more seeds."

Drought-tolerant species thrive despite returning rains in the Sahel.
Following the devastating droughts in the 70s and 80s in the Sahel region south of the Sahara desert, vegetation has now recovered.
What surprise the researchers is that although it is now raining more and has become greener, it is particularly the more drought resistant species that thrive instead of the tree and shrub vegetation that has long been characteristic of the area.
This shows that the recent regreening of the Sahel region can not only be explained by the fact that it rains more, which until now has been the dominant explanation.
By, for example, examining what people in the area use different trees and shrubs for and look at how the landscape changes, we can better understand how land use, social change, climate and ecosystems interact, even in ways that can be unexpected," says Lowe Börjeson, Associate Professor at the Department of Human Geography, Stockholm University.
The study suggests that an understanding of how human use of the landscape interact with climate and ecosystem processes is important for organizations that want to develop strategies for climate change adaptation, biodiversity conservation and local development in one of the world’s poorest regions.
The Sahel extends east from the Atlantic Ocean through northern Senegal, southern Mauritania, Mali, Burkina Faso, southern Niger, northeastern Nigeria, Chad and the Sudan.
The recurrent droughts in the 1970s and 1980s had disastrous consequences for agriculture, livestock and the environment in the area, with widespread ​​famine as a result.
The drought in the region also gave rise to a global discussion and concern for desertification as an emerging environmental problem.
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Wildfire management vs. fire suppression benefits forest and watershed.
An unprecedented 40-year experiment in a 40,000-acre valley of Yosemite National Park strongly supports the idea that managing fire, rather than suppressing it, makes wilderness areas more resilient to fire, with the added benefit of increased water availability and resistance to drought.
After a three-year, on-the-ground assessment of the park’s Illilouette Creek basin, University of California, Berkeley researchers concluded that a strategy dating to 1973 of managing wildfires with minimal suppression and almost no preemptive, so-called prescribed burns has created a landscape more resistant to catastrophic fire, with more diverse vegetation and forest structure and increased water storage, mostly in the form of meadows in areas cleared by fires.
"When fire is not suppressed, you get all these benefits: increased stream flow, increased downstream water availability, increased soil moisture, which improves habitat for the plants within the watershed.
The value of forest clearings Wildfire management, as opposed to suppression, comes with major changes in the way the forest looks, Stephens and Thompson said.
Only four areas in the western U.S., including two in California — the Illilouette Creek basin and the Sugarloaf Creek basin — have allowed lightning fires to burn in large areas for decades.
And in recent drought years, when surrounding basins saw more trees die, there was almost no tree mortality in the Illilouette basin.
"Wildfire management vs. fire suppression benefits forest and watershed: Long-term experiment in Yosemite shows managing fires can help make forest more resilient to fire."
Wildfire management vs. fire suppression benefits forest and watershed: Long-term experiment in Yosemite shows managing fires can help make forest more resilient to fire.
"Wildfire management vs. fire suppression benefits forest and watershed: Long-term experiment in Yosemite shows managing fires can help make forest more resilient to fire."

The global climate 2011-2015: Hottest five-year period on record.
The Global Climate 2011-2015 also examines whether human-induced climate change was directly linked to individual extreme events.
"The effects of climate change have been consistently visible on the global scale since the 1980s: rising global temperature, both over land and in the ocean; sea-level rise; and the widespread melting of ice.
It has increased the risks of extreme events such as heatwaves, drought, record rainfall and damaging floods," said Mr Taalas.
Temperatures for the period were 0.57 °C (1.03 °F) above the average for the standard 1961-1990 reference period.
The year 2015 was also the first year in which global temperatures were more than 1 °C above the pre-industrial era.
Global ocean temperatures were also at unprecedented levels.
Averaged over 2011-2015, the mean Arctic sea-ice extent in September was 4.70 million km2, 28% below the 1981-2010 average.
Climate change and extreme weather Many individual extreme weather and climate events recorded during 2011-2015 were made more likely as a result of human-induced (anthropogenic) climate change.
However, in the case of the extreme rainfall in the United Kingdom in December 2015, it was found that climate change had made such an event about 40% more likely.

Adapting to climate change a major challenge for forests.
In Switzerland, temperatures have already risen by around 1.9°C since the beginning of industrialization.
Even keeping global warming down to the 1.5-2°C target set by the Paris Agreement on climate change will yield a further increase of 1-2°C.
For the Swiss forests, this warming trend will involve vegetation zones shifting 500‑700 metres higher in altitude.
Foresters and forest owners should already tailor the management of their forests to these future conditions.
Safeguarding forest functions against the backdrop of climate change The research results show that while forests can adapt to climate change to a certain extent, they are unlikely to be capable of continuing to perform their functions — so natural-hazard protection, the increasingly vital production of timber as a renewable raw material and energy source or their recreational function — everywhere to the extent we have become used to.
To avert the loss of such functions, the research programme devised various management strategies adapted to changing climatic conditions.
In particular, they result in a greater increase in the diversity of the tree species.
These conditions are changing from site to site and must be viewed in the context of the management of the forest.
In this way, for example, areas in high-resolution site maps can be shown where the climate-sensitive Norway spruce can continue to thrive (box 2).

Molecular conductors help plants respond to drought.
The results, which are detailed in the November 4 issue of Science, may help in developing new technologies to optimize water use in plants.
"A plant’s response to a stressor is a highly complex process at the molecular level, with hundreds of genes involved," says senior author Joseph Ecker, a Howard Hughes Medical Institute Investigator, professor and director of Salk’s Genomic Analysis Laboratory and holder of the Salk International Council Chair in Genetics.
Just as humans have hormones such as adrenaline that help us cope with threats, plants have a few key hormones that allow them to respond to stressors in their environment.
One of these is abscisic acid (ABA), a plant hormone involved in seed development and water optimization.
Using a technique that maps where these regulatory proteins bind to DNA, the team defined key factors that coordinate gene expression, allowing for an efficient cellular response to changing conditions.
"With this network view, we can see that some of these components are targeted by the same master regulator proteins, which suggests precise and coordinated genetic control," says Song.
"Molecular conductors help plants respond to drought: Scientists find key players in complex plant response to stress, offering clues to coping with drier conditions."
ScienceDaily, 3 November 2016.
Retrieved June 8, 2017 from www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2016/11/161103142510.htm Salk Institute.

Nanobionic spinach plants can detect explosives.
Spinach is no longer just a superfood: By embedding leaves with carbon nanotubes, MIT engineers have transformed spinach plants into sensors that can detect explosives and wirelessly relay that information to a handheld device similar to a smartphone.
When one of these chemicals is present in the groundwater sampled naturally by the plant, carbon nanotubes embedded in the plant leaves emit a fluorescent signal that can be read with an infrared camera.
The paper’s lead author is Min Hao Wong, an MIT graduate student who has started a company called Plantea to further develop this technology.
Environmental monitoring Two years ago, in the first demonstration of plant nanobionics, Strano and former MIT postdoc Juan Pablo Giraldo used nanoparticles to enhance plants’ photosynthesis ability and to turn them into sensors for nitric oxide, a pollutant produced by combustion.
In the new study, the researchers embedded sensors for nitroaromatic compounds into the leaves of spinach plants.
The signal could also be detected with a smartphone by removing the infrared filter that most camera phones have, the researchers say.
"These sensors give real-time information from the plant.
Nitroaromatic detection and infrared communication from wild-type plants using plant nanobionics.
ScienceDaily, 1 November 2016.

Wiping out an entire forest can have significant effects on global climate patterns and alter vegetation on the other side of the world, according to a study led by the University of Washington and published Nov. 16 in PLOS ONE.
"When trees die in one place, it can be good or bad for plants elsewhere, because it causes changes in one place that can ricochet to shift climate in another place," said lead author Elizabeth Garcia, a UW postdoctoral researcher in atmospheric sciences.
These local effects of deforestation are well known.
But the new study shows major forest losses can alter global climate by shifting the path of large-scale atmospheric waves or altering precipitation paths.
"People have thought about how forest loss matters for an ecosystem, and maybe for local temperatures, but they haven’t thought about how that interacts with the global climate," said co-author Abigail Swann, a UW assistant professor of atmospheric sciences and of biology.
Results show that removing trees in western North America causes cooling in Siberia, which slows forest growth there.
Losing Amazon forest had a significant positive impact on the neighboring forests in eastern South America, mostly by increasing the precipitation there during the Southern Hemisphere summer.
The study shows that when it comes to forests, one plus one does not always equal two.
"The broader idea is that we must understand and include the effects of forest loss when modeling global climate and trying to predict how climate will change in the future," said Swann.
Swann’s previous research looked at how a hypothetical massive tree planting in the Northern Hemisphere to slow global warming could have the unintended effect of changing tropical rainfall.

This can happen because water vapor in the atmosphere condenses on certain types and sizes of aerosols called cloud condensation nuclei to form clouds; when enough water vapor accumulates, rain droplets are formed.
A study published in the journal Environmental Research Letters, led by Charles Ichoku, a senior scientist at NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center in Greenbelt, Maryland, seeks to shed light on the connection.
"There is a tendency for the net influence of fire to suppress precipitation in northern sub-Saharan Africa," he said.
Even within dry seasons, the amount of water decreased in areas with more humid climates as the burning became more severe.
The results so far show only a correlation between fires and water cycle indicators, but the data gathered from the study is allowing scientists to improve climate models to be able to establish a more direct relationship between biomass burning and its impacts on drought.
Future modeling may explain some of the study’s seemingly paradoxical findings, including the fact that, even as fires decreased by 2 to 7 percent each year from 2006 to 2013, precipitation during those years did not increase proportionately.
Ichoku thinks one possible reason a decrease in fires didn’t result in more precipitation has to do with the change in the types of lands that are being burned.
He notes that recent droughts have drawn people to farm areas that have more water.
"The removal of vegetal cover through burning would likely increase water runoff when it rains, potentially reducing their water retention capacity and invariably the soil moisture," Ichoku said.
Biomass burning, land-cover change, and the hydrological cycle in Northern sub-Saharan Africa.

The key result of the study is that with longer dry seasons and more intense seasonal drought, there is an overall negative effect on bird populations.
With climate change, there may be longer dry seasons.
"You can’t study the effect of changing environmental conditions and its relationship to bird populations without a long-term study and long-term data," Brawn says.
Brawn’s team looked at the relationship between population growth rates and the length of the dry season during those 33 years, then simulated another 50 years with an average of a 10 percent change in the rainfall pattern in Panama’s dry season.
The simulation suggests that, in time, the bird community will be very different under dryer conditions.
Seasonality in Panama is rain/no rain, says Brawn.
"We worked in a good forest — that is, relatively intact.
The study shows that even in a protected park, the large, global effect of climate change could make a lot of habitat unsuitable for a lot of species.
Brawn had a post-doctorate position with Karr at STRI.
Decades later, tropical forest ecologists began reporting that some tree species are sensitive to more intense seasonal drought.