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Topic Review
Glyphosate-Based Herbicide
To meet the demands of farmers and combat weed problems, woodlands and farmlands are sprayed with agrochemicals, primarily glyphosate-based herbicides. Farmers increasingly embrace these herbicides containing glyphosate. Glyphosate and aminomethylphosphonic acid (AMPA), a key metabolite of glyphosate, have been reported as toxicological concerns when they become more prevalent in the food chain.
  • 542
  • 13 Sep 2022
Topic Review
Glyphosate(N-(phosphonomethyl)glycine)
Glyphosate (N-(phosphonomethyl)glycine) was developed in the early 1970s and at present is used as a herbicide to kill broadleaf weeds and grass. The widely occurring degradation product aminomethylphosphonic acid (AMPA) is a result of glyphosate and amino-polyphosphonate degradation. The massive use of the parent compound leads to the ubiquity of AMPA in the environment, and particularly in water. 
  • 1.3K
  • 26 Oct 2021
Topic Review
Goat Breeding for Xerophytic Thickets Management in Madagascar
Spiny thickets or xerophytic thickets (XTs) are a type of shrubby vegetation found in the far south and southwest of Madagascar, the driest parts of the island. This type of vegetation, which is rich in endemic animal and plant species, is endangered. Extensive local goat breeding (Capra hircus, for meat and milk production) based on XT browsing is an important source of household income. Improved goat breeding is an alternative to wood charcoal (WC) production and slash-and-burn agriculture (SBA), which are unsustainable activities.
  • 906
  • 16 Mar 2022
Topic Review
Golan Heights
The Golan Heights (Arabic: هَضْبَةُ الْجَوْلَانِ or Arabic: مُرْتَفَعَاتُ الْجَوْلَانِ, Hebrew: רמת הגולן‎, romanized: Ramat HaGolan), or simply the Golan, is a region in the Levant spanning about 1,800 square kilometres (690 sq mi). The region defined as the Golan Heights differs between disciplines: as a geological and biogeographical region, the term refers to a basaltic plateau bordered by the Yarmouk River in the south, the Sea of Galilee and Hula Valley in the west, the Anti-Lebanon with Mount Hermon in the north and Wadi Raqqad in the east. As a geopolitical region, it refers to the border region captured from Syria by Israel during the Six-Day War of 1967; the territory has been occupied by the latter since then and was subject to a de facto Israeli annexation in 1981. This region includes the western two-thirds of the geological Golan Heights and the Israeli-occupied part of Mount Hermon. The earliest evidence of human habitation on the Golan dates to the Upper Paleolithic period. According to the Bible, an Amorite kingdom in Bashan was conquered by the Israelites during the reign of King Og. Throughout the Biblical period, the Golan was "the focus of a power struggle between the kings of Israel and the Aramaeans who were based near modern-day Damascus." After Assyrian and Babylonian rule, the region came under the domination of Persia, following which Jews were freed from Babylonian captivity and allowed to return and resettle in the land. The Itureans, an Arab or Aramaic people, settled in the area in the 2nd century BCE. In the 16th century, the Golan was conquered by the Ottoman Empire. Within Ottoman Syria, the Golan was part of the Syria Vilayet. The area later became part of the French Mandate in Syria and the State of Damascus. When the mandate terminated in 1946, it became part of the newly independent Syrian Arab Republic. By the late-19th century, the Golan Heights was inhabited mostly by colonized peasants (fellaḥîn), Bedouin Arabs, Druze, Turkmen, and Circassians. Since the Six-Day War of 1967, the western two-thirds of the Golan Heights has been occupied and administered by Israel, whereas the eastern third remains under the control of Syria. Following the war, Syria dismissed any negotiations with Israel as part of the Khartoum Resolution at the 1967 Arab League summit. Construction of Israeli settlements began in the remainder of the territory held by Israel, which was under a military administration until the Knesset passed the Golan Heights Law in 1981, which applied Israeli law to the territory; the move has been described as an annexation. The Golan Heights Law was condemned by the United Nations Security Council in Resolution 497, which stated that "the Israeli decision to impose its laws, jurisdiction, and administration in the occupied Syrian Golan Heights is null and void and without international legal effect", and Resolution 242, which emphasizes the "inadmissibility of the acquisition of territory by war". Israel maintains it has a right to retain the Golan, also citing the text of Resolution 242, which calls for "secure and recognized boundaries free from threats or acts of force". After the onset of the Syrian Civil War in 2011, control of the Syrian-administered part of the Golan Heights was split between the state government and Syrian opposition forces, with the United Nations Disengagement Observer Force (UNDOF) maintaining a 266 km2 (103 sq mi) buffer zone in between to help implement the Israeli–Syrian ceasefire across the Purple Line. From 2012 to 2018, the eastern half of the Golan Heights became a scene of repeated battles between the Syrian Army, rebel factions of the Syrian opposition (including the United States -backed Southern Front) as well as various jihadist organizations such as al-Nusra Front and the Islamic State of Iraq and the Levant-affiliated Khalid ibn al-Walid Army. In July 2018, the Syrian government regained full control over the eastern Golan Heights. On 25 March 2019, then-President of the United States Donald Trump proclaimed US recognition of the Golan Heights as a part of the State of Israel, making it the first country to do so. The 28 member states of the European Union declared in turn that they do not recognize Israeli sovereignty, and several experts on international law reiterated that the principle remains that land gained by either defensive or offensive wars cannot be legally annexed under international law.
  • 3.4K
  • 18 Nov 2022
Topic Review
Google Earth Application
Released in 2005 by Google, Google Earth (GE) has become the most popular and successful virtual globe tool. GE has demonstrated its capacity for 3D global representation and visualization of geospatial data from local to global scales.
  • 909
  • 11 Oct 2021
Topic Review
Google Earth Engine and Artificial Intelligence
Remote sensing (RS) plays an important role gathering data in many critical domains (e.g., global climate change, risk assessment and vulnerability reduction of natural hazards, resilience of ecosystems, and urban planning). Retrieving, managing, and analyzing large amounts of RS imagery poses substantial challenges. Google Earth Engine (GEE) provides a scalable, cloud-based, geospatial retrieval and processing platform. GEE also provides access to the vast majority of freely available, public, multi-temporal RS data and offers free cloud-based computational power for geospatial data analysis. Artificial intelligence (AI) methods are a critical enabling technology to automating the interpretation of RS imagery, particularly on object-based domains, so the integration of AI methods into GEE represents a promising path towards operationalizing automated RS-based monitoring programs. 
  • 1.3K
  • 15 Aug 2022
Topic Review
Gorgonopsia
Gorgonopsia (from the Greek Gorgon, a mythological beast, and óps 'aspect') is an extinct clade of sabre-toothed therapsids from the Middle to Upper Permian roughly 265 to 252 million years ago. They are characterised by a long and narrow skull, as well as elongated upper and sometimes lower canine teeth and incisors which were likely used as slashing and stabbing weapons. Postcanine teeth are generally reduced or absent. For hunting large prey, they possibly used a bite-and-retreat tactic, ambushing and taking a debilitating bite out of the target, and following it at a safe distance before its injuries exhausted it, whereupon the gorgonopsian would grapple the animal and deliver a killing bite. They would have had an exorbitant gape, possibly in excess of 90°, without having to unhinge the jaw. They markedly increased in size as time went on, growing from small skull lengths of 10–15 cm (4–6 in) in the Middle Permian to bear-like proportions of up to 60 cm (2 ft) in the Upper Permian. The latest gorgonopsians, Rubidgeinae, were the most robust of the group and could produce especially powerful bites. Gorgonopsians are thought to have been completely terrestrial and could walk with a semi-erect gait, with a similar terrestrial locomotory range as modern crocodilians. They may have been more agile than their prey items, but were probably inertial homeotherms rather than endotherms unlike contemporary therocephalians and cynodonts, and thus were probably comparatively less active. Though gorgonopsians were able to maintain a rather high body temperature, it is unclear if they would have also had sweat glands or fur (and by extension whiskers and related structures). Their brains were reminiscent of modern reptilian brains, rather than those of living mammals. Most species may have been predominantly diurnal (active during the day) though some could have been crepuscular (active at dawn or dusk) or nocturnal (active at night). They are thought to have had binocular vision, a parietal eye (which detects sunlight and maintains circadian rhythm), a keen sense of smell, a functional vomeronasal organ ("Jacobson's organ"), and possibly a rudimentary eardrum. The major therapsid groups had all evolved by 275 million years ago from a "pelycosaur" ancestor (a poorly defined group including all synapsids which are not therapsids). The therapsid takeover from pelycosaurs took place by the Middle Permian as the world progressively became drier. Gorgonopsians rose to become apex predators of their environments following the Capitanian mass extinction event which killed off the dinocephalians and some large therocephalians after the Middle Permian. Despite the existence of a single continent during the Permian, Pangaea, gorgonopsians have only been found in the Karoo Supergroup (primarily in South Africa, but also in Tanzania, Zambia, and Malawi), the Moradi Formation of Niger, and western Russia, with probable remains known from the Kundaram Formation of India. These places were semi-arid areas with highly seasonal rainfall. Gorgonopsian genera vary very little, and consequently, many species have been named based on flimsy and likely age-related differences since their discovery in the late 19th century, and the group has been subject to several taxonomic revisions. They became extinct during a phase of the Permian–Triassic extinction event taking place at the very end of the Permian, in which major volcanic activity (which would produce the Siberian Traps) and resultant massive spike in greenhouse gases caused rapid aridification due to temperature spike, acid rain, frequent wildfires, and potential breakdown of the ozone layer. The large predatory niches would be taken over by the archosaurs (namely crocodilians and dinosaurs) in the Mesozoic.
  • 993
  • 17 Oct 2022
Topic Review
Governance Framework for the Sea
The United Nations, in the context of its founding principles and in order to contribute to the preservation of peace and justice in all the countries, confirmed at the Geneva Conferences in 1958 and 1960 that there should be an acceptable convention for the law of the sea. The complete version of the United Nations Convention on the Law of the Sea (UNCLOS) was presented in 1982 in Montego Bay, Jamaica (https://treaties.un.org/Pages/Treaties.aspx?id=21&subid=0&lang=en&clang=_en (accessed on 8 May 2022)), entered into force in 1994, and is today the world’s most recognized maritime law regime. The central idea of the UNCLOS convention is that maritime problems are interconnected and should be tackled as a whole. The provisions of the UN convention apply to all areas of marine affairs, including the organization and development of productive activities and the emergence of marine entrepreneurship.
  • 611
  • 27 May 2022
Topic Review
Governance on Carbon Dioxide Emissions in Africa
The connection linking economic growth (ECG), tourism, and environmental pollution problems has been extensively argued. Extant research has investigated the environmental Kuznets curve (EKC) assumptions from empirical and theoretical perspectives to measure the connection between the environment’s quality and economic growth. Environmental issues are quantified by factors such as ECG, tourism (TOUR), governance (GOV), urbanization, energy consumption, and financial development. Furthermore, most studies employed the environmental EKC theory to reveal the significance of the connection of variables foreign direct investment (FDI), TOUR, and ECG to an economy.
  • 533
  • 12 Jul 2022
Topic Review
Graffiti, Paintings and Other Modifications of Tree Bark
By the word ‘graffiti’ one usually indicates messages, scribbles, patterns, or drawings written, carved, or painted on different types of surfaces including walls, monuments, and tree bark. Consequently, a ‘graffitist’ is a person who creates graffiti. Graffiti has existed as long as human society but has become a public issue in recent decades, being often considered as a recurrent and unacceptable form of vandalism especially when the victims are trees. The entry reports the problem of graffiti on tree barks and reviews some methodologies proposed by urban forestry specialists to remove graffiti and other paintings from the trees without damaging the plant itself.
  • 488
  • 02 Mar 2023
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