Compounding Impacts of Human-Induced Water Stress and Climate Change on Water Availability

The terrestrial phase of the water cycle can be seriously impacted by water management and human water use behavior (e.g., reservoir operation, and irrigation withdrawals). Here we outline a method for assessing water availability in a changing climate, while explicitly considering anthropogenic water demand scenarios and water supply infrastructure designed to cope with climatic extremes. The framework brings a top-down and bottom-up approach to provide localized water assessment based on local water supply infrastructure and projected water demands. When our framework is applied to southeastern Australia we find that, for some combinations of climatic change and water demand, the region could experience water stress similar or worse than the epic Millennium Drought. We show considering only the influence of future climate on water supply, and neglecting future changes in water demand and water storage augmentation might lead to opposing perspectives on future water availability. While human water use can significantly exacerbate climate change impacts on water availability, if managed well, it allows societies to react and adapt to a changing climate. The methodology we present offers a unique avenue for linking climatic and hydrologic processes to water resource supply and demand management and other human interactions

Massive migration from the steppe is a source for Indo-European languages in Europe

We generated genome-wide data from 69 Europeans who lived between 8,000-3,000 years ago by enriching ancient DNA libraries for a target set of almost four hundred thousand polymorphisms. Enrichment of these positions decreases the sequencing required for genome-wide ancient DNA analysis by a median of around 250-fold, allowing us to study an order of magnitude more individuals than previous studies and to obtain new insights about the past. We show that the populations of western and far eastern Europe followed opposite trajectories between 8,000-5,000 years ago. At the beginning of the Neolithic period in Europe, ~8,000-7,000 years ago, closely related groups of early farmers appeared in Germany, Hungary, and Spain, different from indigenous hunter-gatherers, whereas Russia was inhabited by a distinctive population of hunter-gatherers with high affinity to a ~24,000 year old Siberian6 . By ~6,000-5,000 years ago, a resurgence of hunter-gatherer ancestry had occurred throughout much of Europe, but in Russia, the Yamnaya steppe herders of this time were descended not only from the preceding eastern European hunter-gatherers, but from a population of Near Eastern ancestry. Western and Eastern Europe came into contact ~4,500 years ago, as the Late Neolithic Corded Ware people from Germany traced ~3/4 of their ancestry to the Yamnaya, documenting a massive migration into the heartland of Europe from its eastern periphery. This steppe ancestry persisted in all sampled central Europeans until at least ~3,000 years ago, and is ubiquitous in present-day Europeans. These results provide support for the theory of a steppe origin of at least some of the Indo-European languages of Europe

Modelling Impacts of Environmental Water on Vegetation of a Semi-Arid Floodplain–Lakes System Using 30-Year Landsat Data

River floodplains are among the most dynamic and diverse ecosystems on the planet. They are at risk of degradation due to river regulation and climate change. Environmental water has been delivered to floodplains to maintain environmental health by mimicking natural floods. It is important to understand the long-term effects of environmental water to floodplain vegetation to support its management. This study used Normalized Differences Vegetation index (NDVI) from the 30-year Landsat datasets of the Hattah Lakes floodplain in Australia to investigate the drivers of vegetation dynamics. We developed generalized additive mixed models (GAMM) to model responses of vegetation to environmental water, natural floods, precipitation, temperature, and distance to water across multiple spatial and temporal scales. We found the effect of environmental water on floodplain vegetation to be quite different from that of natural floods in both space and time. Vegetation in most areas of Hattah Lakes will respond to natural floods within one month of flooding, while positive responses to environmental water occur 1 to 3 months after inundation and are more restricted spatially. For environmental water planning, managers need to be aware of these differences. The implementation of new infrastructure to transport or retain environmental water on floodplains needs to be planned carefully, with continuous monitoring of rainfall and natural floods. Whilst environmental floods do not mimic the effect of natural floods, they do provide some positive benefits that can partially offset effects of reduced natural floods

Evaluating the Utah Agriculture in the Classroom Preservice Teacher Seminar

Utah Agriculture in the Classroom hosts preservice teacher seminars in partnership with five universities across the state. From 2017-2021, approximately 600 college students participated in these seminars. The preservice seminars provided agriculture-themed lessons aligned to state educational standards for future teachers to use as they build resources for their classrooms

Public Health Response to Imported Case of Poliomyelitis, Australia, 2007

Inactivated polio vaccine was offered, and the index case-patient and household contacts were quarantined

Genomic insights into the origin of farming in the ancient Near East

We report genome-wide ancient DNA from 44 ancient Near Easterners ranging in time between ~12,000 and 1,400 BC, from Natufian hunter–gatherers to Bronze Age farmers. We show that the earliest populations of the Near East derived around half their ancestry from a ‘Basal Eurasian’ lineage that had little if any Neanderthal admixture and that separated from other non-African lineages before their separation from each other. The first farmers of the southern Levant (Israel and Jordan) and Zagros Mountains (Iran) were strongly genetically differentiated, and each descended from local hunter–gatherers. By the time of the Bronze Age, these two populations and Anatolian-related farmers had mixed with each other and with the hunter–gatherers of Europe to greatly reduce genetic differentiation. The impact of the Near Eastern farmers extended beyond the Near East: farmers related to those of Anatolia spread westward into Europe; farmers related to those of the Levant spread southward into East Africa; farmers related to those of Iran spread northward into the Eurasian steppe; and people related to both the early farmers of Iran and to the pastoralists of the Eurasian steppe spread eastward into South Asia

Imported Case of Poliomyelitis, Melbourne, Australia, 2007

Wild poliovirus–associated paralytic poliomyelitis has not been reported in Australia since 1977. We report type 1 wild poliovirus infection in a man who had traveled from Pakistan to Australia in 2007. Poliomyelitis should be considered for patients with acute flaccid paralysis or unexplained fever who have been to poliomyelitis-endemic countries