Fernando Jaramillo

TL;DR: This paper explored the role of agriculture in destabilizing the Earth system at the planetary scale, through examining nine planetary boundaries, or safe limits: land-system change, freshwater use, biogeoc...

TL;DR: Shifts in evapotranspiration are investigated for non-irrigated agriculture and hydropower, and compared to irrigation agriculture and deforestation, as used predominantly in previous studies as discussed by the authors.

Abstract: Flow regulation and irrigation alter local freshwater conditions, but their global effects are highly uncertain. We investigated these global effects from 1901 to 2008, using hydroclimatic observations in 100 large hydrological basins. Globally, we find consistent and dominant effects of increasing relative evapotranspiration from both activities, and decreasing temporal runoff variability from flow regulation. The evapotranspiration effect increases the long-term average human consumption of fresh water by 3563 ± 979 km3/year from 1901–1954 to 1955–2008. This increase raises a recent estimate of the current global water footprint of humanity by around 18%, to 10,688 ± 979 km3/year. The results highlight the global impact of local water-use activities and call for their relevant account in Earth system modeling.

TL;DR: Wetlands are often considered as nature-based solutions that can provide a multitude of services of great social, economic and environmental value to humankind as discussed by the authors, and they can provide great social and economic benefits to humans.

TL;DR: A Catheter Based Heart Valve (CBHV) is described in this paper, which replaces a non functional, natural heart valve by a stent and two or more polymer leaflets sewn to the stent, which reduces the invasiveness of the implantation procedure by being inserted with a catheter as opposed to open heart surgery.