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- Kuschmierz, Paul, et al.
(författare)
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European first-year university students accept evolution but lack substantial knowledge about it : A standardized European cross-country assessment
- 2021
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Ingår i: Evolution. - : BioMed Central (BMC). - 1936-6426 .- 1936-6434. ; 14:1, s. 1-22
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Tidskriftsartikel (refereegranskat)abstract
- Background: Investigations of evolution knowledge and acceptance and their relation are central to evolution education research. Ambiguous results in this field of study demonstrate a variety of measuring issues, for instance differently theorized constructs, or a lack of standardized methods, especially for cross-country comparisons. In particular, meaningful comparisons across European countries, with their varying cultural backgrounds and education systems, are rare, often include only few countries, and lack standardization. To address these deficits, we conducted a standardized European survey, on 9200 first-year university students in 26 European countries utilizing a validated, comprehensive questionnaire, the “Evolution Education Questionnaire”, to assess evolution acceptance and knowledge, as well as influencing factors on evolution acceptance. Results: We found that, despite European countries’ different cultural backgrounds and education systems, European first-year university students generally accept evolution. At the same time, they lack substantial knowledge about it, even if they are enrolled in a biology-related study program. Additionally, we developed a multilevel-model that determines religious faith as the main influencing factor in accepting evolution. According to our model, knowledge about evolution and interest in biological topics also increase acceptance of evolution, but to a much lesser extent than religious faith. The effect of age and sex, as well as the country’s affiliation, students’ denomination, and whether or not a student is enrolled in a biology-related university program, is negligible. Conclusions: Our findings indicate that, despite all their differences, most of the European education systems for upper secondary education lead to acceptance of evolution at least in university students. It appears that, at least in this sample, the differences in knowledge between countries reflect neither the extent to which school curricula cover evolutionary biology nor the percentage of biology-related students in the country samples. Future studies should investigate the role of different European school curricula, identify particularly problematic or underrepresented evolutionary concepts in biology education, and analyze the role of religious faith when teaching evolution.
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- Nobrega, M. S., et al.
(författare)
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Mangrove microbiome reveals importance of sulfur metabolism in tropical coastal waters
- 2022
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Ingår i: Science of the Total Environment. - : Elsevier BV. - 0048-9697. ; 813
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Tidskriftsartikel (refereegranskat)abstract
- Mangroves under macro-tidal regimes are global carbon sequestration hotspots but the microbial drivers of biogeochemical cycles remain poorly understood. Here, we investigate the drivers of mangrove microbial community composition across a porewater-creek-estuary-ocean continuum. Observations were performed on the Amazon region in one of the largest mangrove systems worldwide with effective sequestration of organic carbon buried in soils and dissolved carbon via outwelling to the ocean. The potential export to the adjacent oceanic region ranged from 57 to 380 kg of dissolved and particulate organic carbon per second (up to 33 thousand tons C per day). Macro tides modulated microbial communities and their metabolic processes, e.g., anoxygenic phototrophy, sulfur, and nitrogen cycling. Respiration, sulfur metabolism and dissolved organic carbon (DOC) levels were linked to functional groups and microbial cell counts. Total microbial counts decreased and cyanobacteria counts peaked in the spring tide. The microbial groups driving carbon, nitrogen, sulfur and methane cycles were consistent across all spatial scales. Taxonomic groups engaged in sulfur cycling (Allochromatium, Desulfovibrio, and Thibacillus) within mangroves were abundant at all scales. Tidally-driven porewater exchange within mangroves drove a progressive increase of sulfur cycle taxonomic groups and their functional genes both temporally (tidal cycles) and spatially (from mangrove porewater to continental shelf). Overall, we revealed a unified and consistent response of microbiomes at different spatial and temporal scales to tidally-driven mangrove porewater exchange.
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- Hawkes, Jeffrey A., et al.
(författare)
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An international laboratory comparison of dissolved organic matter composition by high resolution mass spectrometry : Are we getting the same answer?
- 2020
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Ingår i: Limnology and Oceanography. - : Wiley. - 1541-5856. ; 18:6, s. 235-258
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Tidskriftsartikel (refereegranskat)abstract
- High-resolution mass spectrometry (HRMS) has become a vital tool for dissolved organic matter (DOM) characterization. The upward trend in HRMS analysis of DOM presents challenges in data comparison and interpretation among laboratories operating instruments with differing performance and user operating conditions. It is therefore essential that the community establishes metric ranges and compositional trends for data comparison with reference samples so that data can be robustly compared among research groups. To this end, four identically prepared DOM samples were each measured by 16 laboratories, using 17 commercially purchased instruments, using positive-ion and negative-ion mode electrospray ionization (ESI) HRMS analyses. The instruments identified similar to 1000 common ions in both negative- and positive-ion modes over a wide range of m/z values and chemical space, as determined by van Krevelen diagrams. Calculated metrics of abundance-weighted average indices (H/C, O/C, aromaticity and m/z) of the commonly detected ions showed that hydrogen saturation and aromaticity were consistent for each reference sample across the instruments, while average mass and oxygenation were more affected by differences in instrument type and settings. In this paper we present 32 metric values for future benchmarking. The metric values were obtained for the four different parameters from four samples in two ionization modes and can be used in future work to evaluate the performance of HRMS instruments.
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