Radiation-constrained boundaries cause nonuniform responses of the carbon uptake phenology to climatic warming in the Northern Hemisphere

Climatic warming has lengthened the photosynthetically active season in recent decades, thus affecting the functioning and biogeochemistry of ecosystems, the global carbon cycle and climate. Temperature response of carbon uptake phenology varies spatially and temporally, even within species, and daily total intensity of radiation may play a role. We empirically modelled the thresholds of temperature and radiation under which daily carbon uptake is constrained in the temperate and cold regions of the Northern Hemisphere, which include temperate forests, boreal forests, alpine and tundra biomes. The two-dimensionality of the temperature-radiation constraint was reduced to one single variable, θ, which represents the angle in a polar coordinate system for the temperature-radiation observations during the start and end of the growing season. We found that radiation will constrain the trend towards longer growing seasons with future warming but differently during the start and end of season and depending on the biome type and region. We revealed that radiation is a major factor limiting photosynthetic activity that constrains the phenology response to temperature during the end-of-season. In contrast, the start of the carbon uptake is overall highly sensitive to temperature but not constrained by radiation at the hemispheric scale. This study thus revealed that while at the end-of-season the phenology response to warming is constrained at the hemispheric scale, at the start-of-season the advance of spring onset may continue, even if it is at a slower pace.     

Performance and molecular evaluation of an anaerobic system with suspended biomass for treating wastewater with high fat content after enzymatic hydrolysis

The effect of a lipase-rich fungal enzymatic preparation, produced by a Penicillium sp. during solid-state fermentation, was evaluated in an anaerobic digester treating dairy wastewater with 1200 mg of oil and grease/L. The oil and grease hydrolysis step was carried out with 0.1% (w/v) of solid enzymatic preparation at 30 °C for 24 h, and resulted in a final free acid concentration eight times higher than the initial value. The digester operated in sequential batches of 48 h at 30 °C for 245 days, and had high chemical oxygen demand (COD) removal efficiencies (around 90%) when fed with pre-hydrolyzed wastewater. However, when the pre-hydrolysis step was removed, the anaerobic digester performed poorly (with an average COD removal of 32%), as the oil and grease accumulated in the biomass and effluent oil and grease concentration increased throughout the operational period. PCR-DGGE analysis of the Bacteria and Archaea domains revealed remarkable differences in the microbial profiles in trials conducted with and without the pre-hydrolysis step, indicating that differences observed in overall parameters were intrinsically related to the microbial diversity of the anaerobic sludge.