Selaginellaceae: uso tradicional, fitoquímica y farmacología

After two decades of meta-analyses on plant traits, we can now look for global emergent patterns in plant evolutionary ecology. Hundreds of meta-analyses have focused on the effects of specific selection pressures on plant fitness, and the buildup of such results allows us to ask general questions regarding selection pressures and plant responses, a major focus of evolutionary ecology. Plant traits are affected by both abiotic and biotic factors. For example, biotic pressures like herbivory may affect physiological (i.e. secondary defences) and reproductive (i.e. seed predation) traits. Similarly, abiotic pressures such as increased CO2 may affect both plant physiology and reproduction. We tested whether biotic or abiotic selective pressures are more important for plant traits, and if the strength of the response to those pressures depends on the plant trait studied by meta-analyzing published meta-analyses on plant responses. We classify meta-analyses according to the type of response variable studied (fitness and non-fitness traits) and the type of selective pressure examined (biotic or abiotic). Our database showed biases in the meta-analysis literature, for example that the majority of studies are focused on non-fitness traits, i.e. on traits that are not directly related to reproduction or survival, and furthermore, on non-fitness traits under abiotic selection pressures. The meta-meta-analysis showed that the strength of responses to selection depends on the nature of selection (stronger for biotic than for abiotic factors) but, unexpectedly, not on the type of trait under study as previously found. The stronger responses to biotic factors can be explained if biotic selection is more variable in space and time, driven by interactions with other organisms. The relative importance of biotic versus abiotic factors on plant traits has been little studied in the past, and would benefit from more studies and reviews that fill the under-represented combinations of selective pressures and plant traits (i.e. abiotic factors on fitness traits).

Eco-restoration initiative work in the high altitude Dayara pastureland (3501 m) from the Indian Himalayan Region has been considered to be one of the successful field demonstration against both natural and anthropogenic degradation. The present study therefore attempts to assess the implications of entire eco-restoration model as practiced by Department of Forest, Government of Uttarakhand in 2019. Its assessment was done by calculating restoration success index by way of considering three categories, viz., direct management measure (M), environmental desirability (E) and socio-economic feasibility (SE) considering 22 individual variables. ‘M’ comprised both biotic and abiotic pressures. Grazing and tourism were biotic, while abiotic pressure was considered mainly soil erosion in alpine area due to topographic fragility. Above ground vegetation profile and below ground soil nutrient profile (N, P, K, pH and water holding capacity) were analyzed in ‘E’ component. In the last but not least, ‘SE’ was analyzed to assess the social acceptability of the local communities and stakeholders who are supposed to be ultimate beneficiary of alike interventions. Direct management measure was found with the variable index score of 0.8 indicating the higher score as compared to environmental desirability (0.56). Under direct management measure, grazing and tourists’ carrying capacity of the area was analyzed with high management needs to call the region sustainable in terms of availability of bio-resources. The ecosystem index score was evaluated for the reference (81.94), treated (64.5) and untreated zones (52.03), wherein increasing profile of these values were found. The outcomes like improved vegetation profile in terms of total herb density, soil nutrient profile of the restored area along with soil pH (4.96) and water holding capacity (49.85%) were found to be restored significantly along with controlling 169.64 tonne year-1 soil erosion from draining. The assessment of grazing pattern of 118 migratory Cow Unit (CU) (76 horse/mule and 18 sheep/goat, already controlled), 318 local CU (30 horse/mule and 187 sheep/goat) were calculated and recommended to be controlled. Tourists’ carrying capacity of 274 tourists per day and manual removal of Rumex nepalensis at the shepherd camping site were found to be worth to apply in the area. Use of biodegradable but locally sourced material and engaging local villagers in this endeavor were also found to be in harmony with SDG Goal 1 (no poverty). Therefore, the restoration and its evaluation model could have its future prospects to prove as a successful restoration practice. This restoration practice could not only be worth in high altitude degraded alpine pastures of the Indian Himalayan Region but also to other mountain alpine and sub-alpine ecosystems.

Adaptive divergence in response to shared environmental pressures: examining gastropod shell exploitation by intertidal hermit crabs.

When first colonized from the sea, shores must have represented an inhospitable, although unexploited, resource. Nevertheless, many species are now clearly able to cope with the physical problems of living in an environment characterized by sharp environmental gradients and fluctuating conditions. As well as the essentially physical problems, there are a host of biological pressures facing intertidal organisms, particularly towards lower shore levels. In this chapter we consider some of the features of shore plants and animals that allow them to survive these abiotic and biotic pressures at different points along the major vertical and horizontal gradients. These features include many of the classic adaptations of shore organisms to the rigours of the physical environment as well as the coevolutionary interactions between consumers and resources which make up so much of the detailed natural history of the seashore. First: we consider how the dispersal stages of shore organisms actually find a suitable place to live. Then we go on to describe how, once settled on the shore, these organisms deal morphologically, behaviourally and, to a limited extent, physiologically with the main abiotic pressures. For more on physiological adaptations see Newell (1979), Rankin and Davenport (1981) and Dring (1982).

Globally, agriculture is under a lot of pressure due to rising population and corresponding increases in food demand. However, several variables, including improper mechanization, limited arable land, and the presence of several biotic and abiotic pressures, continually impact agricultural productivity. Drought is a notable destructive abiotic stress and may be the most serious challenge confronting sustainable agriculture, resulting in a significant crop output deficiency. Numerous morphological and physiological changes occur in plants as a result of drought stress. Hence, there is a need to create mitigation techniques since these changes might permanently harm the plant. Current methods used to reduce the effects of drought stress include the use of film farming, super-absorbent hydrogels, nanoparticles, biochar, and drought-resistant plant cultivars. However, most of these activities are money and labor-intensive, which offer limited plant improvement. The use of plant-growth-promoting bacteria (PGPB) has proven to be a preferred method that offers several indirect and direct advantages in drought mitigation. PGPB are critical biological elements which have favorable impacts on plants’ biochemical and physiological features, leading to improved sugar production, relative water content, leaf number, ascorbic acid levels, and photosynthetic pigment quantities. This present review revisited the impacts of PGPB in ameliorating the detrimental effects of drought stress on plants, explored the mechanism of action employed, as well as the major challenges encountered in their application for plant growth and development.

The miraculous but endangered plant, Nardostachys Jatamansi DC is a highly medicinal value, primitive, and therapeutic herbal plant used in both daily self-care and professionally managed health care. It is an endangered species due to overexploitation of its rhizomes for medicinal, aromatic uses, folk medicine, overgrazing, loss of habitats, and forest degradation. All the parts of the plants are used for various therapeutic activities like Alzheimer’s, anti-convulsion, antioxidants, hair growth, hepatoprotective, Parkinson’s, etc. Phytosterols, terpenoids, flavonoids, and phenolic compounds present in Nardostachys Jatamansi have strong pharmacological properties because they are bioactive molecules. The review focuses on describing the biological activities of these natural products; therefore, there is potential for their application in disease prevention and treatment. Phytosterols, consisting of beta-sterols, are cardioprotective, anti-inflammatory, antimicrobial, and anticancer agents, especially with regard to apoptosis in cancerous breast cells. Triterpenoids, including lupeol and ursolic acid, confer neuroprotection, anxiolysis, antioxidation, and anti-inflammation. Saponins are a subclass of triterpene glycosides that increase the immune response and protect against lipidemia. Furthermore, n-hexacosanol has been identified as an agent with antimicrobial, antioxidant, and hepatoprotective activities. Flavonoids and phenolic compounds are renowned for their significant antioxidant and anti-inflammatory activities. Anti-cancer and free radical scavenging capabilities make flavones, flavonols, and flavonones effective. Through antimicrobial activity and neuroprotection, gallic acid and protocatechic acid of the phenolic acids showed chemoprevention. Chlorogenic and ferulic acids have potential applications in seizure management, cardiovascular health, and protection of skin. On the other hand, syringic acid is a phenolic derivative with great antioxidant potential. These compounds are of significant interest in drug development and nutraceutical applications because of their diversified bioactivity. Their natural origin and multifaceted pharmacological properties offer a safer alternative to synthetic drugs. Further research into their mechanisms of action, bioavailability, and synergistic effects may open the doors to novel therapeutic strategies in the management of chronic diseases. This review compiles existing scientific findings, offering insight into the potential health benefits and applications of phytosterols, terpenoids, flavonoids, and phenolic compounds.

Chapter 13 - The role of artificial intelligence strategies to mitigate abiotic stress and climate change in crop production

In response to their environment, plants produce upwards of 30 000 phytochemicals that serve to facilitate communication and resistance to abiotic and biotic pressures. With over 3000 plants in commerce and the Nutrition Business Journal reporting 2017 North American sales of 8.35 billion dollars for herbs and botanicals, there is a multitude of products available to consumers. The pace of product innovation far exceeds that of analytical methods development and validation, with new ingredients, matrixes, and combinations resulting in an analytical community that has been unable to keep up. This has led to a lack of validated analytical methods for plant-based health products and to inappropriate method selection where methods do exist. Only after rigorous validation procedures to ensure that methods are fit for purpose should they be used in a routine setting to verify product authenticity and quality. By following systematic procedures and establishing performance requirements for analytical methods before method development and validation, methods can be developed that are both valid and fit for purpose. This chapter summarizes advances in method selection, development, and validation regarding plant-based supplement analysis and provides guidance on best practices for characterization when undertaking pre-clinical and clinical studies.

Although animals fine-tune their activity to avoid excess heat, we still lack a mechanistic understanding of such behaviors. As the global climate changes, such understanding is particularly important for projecting shifts in the activity patterns of populations and communities. We studied how foraging decisions vary with biotic and abiotic pressures. By tracking the foraging behavior of diurnal desert spiny mice in their natural habitat and estimating the energy and water costs and benefits of foraging, we asked how risk management and thermoregulatory requirements affect foraging decisions. We found that water requirements had the strongest effect on the observed foraging decisions. In their arid environment, mice often lose water while foraging for seeds and cease foraging even at high energetic returns when water loss is high. Mice also foraged more often when energy expenditure was high and for longer times under high seed densities and low predation risks. Gaining insight into both energy and water balance will be crucial to understanding the forces exerted by changing climatic conditions on animal energetics, behavior, and ecology.

Diatoms, a key group of polar marine microbes, support highly productive ocean ecosystems. Like all life on earth, diatoms do not live in isolation, and they are therefore under constant biotic and abiotic pressures which directly influence their evolution through natural selection. Despite their importance in polar ecosystems, polar diatoms are understudied compared to temperate species. The observed rapid change in the polar climate, especially warming, has created increased research interest to discover the underlying causes and potential consequences on single species to entire ecosystems. Next-Generation Sequencing (NGS) technologies have greatly expanded our knowledge by revealing the molecular underpinnings of physiological adaptations to polar environmental conditions. Their genomes, transcriptomes, and proteomes together with the first eukaryotic meta-omics data of surface ocean polar microbiomes reflect the environmental pressures through adaptive responses such as the expansion of protein families over time as a consequence of selection. Polar regions and their microbiomes are inherently connected to climate cycles and their feedback loops. An integrated understanding built on “omics” resources centered around diatoms as key primary producers will enable us to reveal unifying concepts of microbial co-evolution and adaptation in polar oceans. This knowledge, which aims to relate past environmental changes to specific adaptations, will be required to improve climate prediction models for polar ecosystems because it provides a unifying framework of how interacting and co-evolving biological communities might respond to future environmental change.

Soybean take importance role as source of legumes protein for Indonesian people’s because has lower price compared with other source of protein. Soybean demand contiunously increase because population growth and development of foodindustry’s, while production growth is slowly declining (leveling off) campared to it’s demand. Soybean production’s in 2013 only 0,78 million ton, while it’s demand is 2,9 millions ton, so need import about 2.12 million tons to meet the demand. This study aims to establish a model for predicting soybean production in relationship with constraint and it’s problem as a factor of its boundary. This study used the technique of forecasting with using time series data. Best model selected will be used to estimate soybeanproduction’s. Selection of the best model using criteria Mean Absolute Percent Error (MAPE), Root Mean Square Error (RMSE), and Akaike Information Criteria (AIC). Best model selected is ARIMA (1,1,1). Based on result of forcasting, number of soybean production’s on 2022 is 0,994 million tons. Though has productivity with increasing trend, but it’s not significant, so the production still low compared to it’s demand. Generally, decline of production caused by reduction of harvest area as one of less competitive crop compared with other secondary crops (palawija), and high biotic and abiotic pressure.

Terrestrial locomotor behaviors in fishes allow fishes to escape biotic and abiotic pressures in aquatic habitats. Emerging to spawn once a year, California grunion beach themselves during Spring high tides. We described two coordinated behaviors that adult grunion consistently perform during short, but regular, bouts of movement on land: the tail-flip jump and "sidestepping" behavior. While tail-flip jumping covered more ground per event, repeated sidestepping allowed grunion to cover comparable ground per unit time. This is the first published kinematic description of grunion locomotor behaviors in terrestrial habitats based on video recordings.

Wheat plants encounter both biotic and abiotic pressure in their surroundings. Among the biotic stress factors, the Russian wheat aphid (RWA: Diuraphis noxia Kurdjumov) decreases grain yield and quality. The current RWA control strategies, including resistance breeding and the application of aphicides, are outpaced and potentially environmentally harmful. Alternatively, priming can stimulate defence responses to RWA infestation. This study investigated the priming potential of two priming agents, avirulent Puccinia triticina (Pt) isolates and salicylic acid (SA), against RWA infestation. The priming effect of Pt isolates and SA in reducing RWA-induced leaf damage and increased antioxidant activities is an indication of defence responses. Selected South African wheat cultivars and Lesotho landraces, grown under greenhouse conditions, were inoculated with Pt isolates (UVPt13: avirulent, UVPt26: virulent) and treated with SA at the seedling or booting stages. The leaf damage rating score was used for phenotyping. The antioxidant-mediated defence responses were evaluated in three selected cultivars for further priming investigation. Our results revealed that the priming agents significantly reduced the leaf damage in most cultivars at both growth stages, and UVPt13 and SA priming significantly (p ≤ 0.05) increased superoxide dismutase, peroxidase, and ascorbate peroxidase activities. However, catalase activity exhibited a more pronounced decline in plants treated with the UVPt13 isolate. The Pt isolate priming was more efficient than the SA application. However, it is crucial to investigate the potential of effectors from the avirulent Pt isolate to prime wheat plants for resistance against RWA infestation. This could contribute to developing strategies to enhance crop protection and relieve pest pressure in wheat production.

The people of Bangladesh, a densely populated country, depend heavily on forests for fuel wood, timber and other subsistence. Due to huge biotic and abiotic pressure, forest resources of the country have been depleted greatly. Participatory social forestry was introduced in Bangladesh in early 1980s to reduce the rampant rate of deforestation. Few studies are available on social forestry in Bangladesh. This research was done in degraded Sal (Shorea robusta) forests under the Dhaka Forest Division. Due to its location in the central part of the country, this forest is subjected to tremendous illicit cutting and land encroachment. It was focused on the role of participatory social forestry in the enhancement of the socio—economic condition of the poor. All three types of plantation (viz. woodlots, agroforestry plantings and strip plantations) raised under social forestry were financially profitable. Net Present Values to the poor (NPV) were highest in the strip plantations (US$ 7,857) followed by woodlot plantations (US $ 4,350) and lowest in agroforestry plantings (US$ 4,222). On an average, each participant received, US$ 3,338, US$ 3,092 and US$ 1,786 from the, woodlot plantations, agroforestry plantings and strip plantations respectively. This additional forest based income was a significant contribution to improve socio-economic conditions of the poor. It is found that individuals recognized as encroachers in the past, have now become vital stakeholders of forests and recognized member in community. Negative findings of the programmes are that after 25 years of social forestry practice in Bangladesh, poor people still remain skeptical towards the programme due to various administrative blocks and shortcomings and a lack of policy instruments such as the granting of usufruct rights that affect the sustainability of the programme. Nevertheless compared with the failures of traditional forest management, participatory social forestry is a far better option. Keywords: social forestry, Sal forests, financial return.

The three-dimensional architecture of natural habitats is a key determinant of species biodiversity, harvestable biomass and resilience to disturbance1,2. Indeed, some species, including trees, corals and oysters, alter resource availability and modify biotic and abiotic pressures through their own three-dimensional structures-thereby enhancing their own survival3,4. However, which aspects of the three-dimensional architecture of these ecosystem engineers shape ecosystem dynamics and species survival are rarely examined by empirical studies, leaving much of the broader ecological and conservation impact of ecosystem engineering underexplored4-6. Here we show that oyster reefs have combinations of geometric variables that maximize recruit survival, which is a key factor influencing oyster reef growth and persistence. Using three-dimensional habitat designs that capture the full spectrum of natural oyster reef architectures, as well as a geometric theory7 that links habitat surface area, fractal dimension and height, we show that oyster settlement and survival are greatest at particular combinations of fractal dimension and height that minimize predation. Our study provides a template for understanding optimal three-dimensional habitat configurations for habitat restoration projects that are proliferating globally, without targeting key architectural features of habitat space that maximize restoration success8,9.