Mapping the information landscape of the United Nations Decade on Ecosystem Restoration Strategy

The strategy of the United Nations Decade on Ecosystem Restoration identifies three pathways for action for overcoming six global barriers thought to hamper upscaling. We evaluated 6,023 peer-reviewed and gray literature papers published over the last two decades to map the information landscape underlying the barriers and associated pathways for action across world regions, terrestrial ecosystem types, restorative interventions and their outcomes. Overall, the literature addressed more the financial and legislative barriers than the technical and research-related ones, supporting the view that social, economic and political factors hamper scaling up ecosystem restoration. Latin America, Africa, and North America were the most prominent regions in the literature, yet differed in the number of publications addressing each barrier. An overwhelming number of publications focused on forests (78%), while grasslands (6%), drylands (3%), and mangroves (2%) received less attention. Across the three pathways for action, the action lines on (1) promoting long-term ecosystem restoration actions and monitoring and (2) education on restoration were the most underrepresented in the literature. In general, restorative interventions assessed rendered positive outcomes except those of a political, legislative or financial nature which reported negative or inconclusive outcomes. Our indicative assessment reveals critical information gaps on barriers, pathways, and types of restorative interventions across world regions, particularly related to specific social issues such as education for ecosystem restoration. Finally, we call for refining “strength of evidence” assessment frameworks that can systematically appraise, synthesize and integrate information on traditional and practitioner knowledge as two essential components for improving decision-making in ecosystem restoration.     

Catabolic metabolism in Trypanosoma cruzi

Culture, blood and intracellular forms of Trypanosoma cruzi have a high rate of endogenous oxygen uptake and probably utilize amino acids and carbohydrates as their exogenous energy sources. It is likely that triglyceride is the main energy reserve. Oxidation of carbohydrate by all forms is probably via a glycolytic sequence and a complete tricarboxylic acid cycle. These data suggest that the substrates utilized and catabolic pathways present in mammalian forms of T. cruzi are similar to those of culture forms of the organism and are quite distinct from those of the bloodstream forms of African trypanosomes.