Institution
Wageningen University and Research Centre
Education•Wageningen, Netherlands•
About: Wageningen University and Research Centre is a education organization based out in Wageningen, Netherlands. It is known for research contribution in the topics: Population & Sustainability. The organization has 23474 authors who have published 54833 publications receiving 2608897 citations.
Topics: Population, Sustainability, Agriculture, Climate change, Gene
Papers published on a yearly basis
Papers
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TL;DR: ARG from all classes of antibiotics tested have significantly increased since 1940, but especially within the tetracyclines, with some individual ARG being >15 times more abundant now than in the 1970s.
Abstract: Mass production and use of antibiotics and antimicrobials in medicine and agriculture have existed for over 60 years, and has substantially benefited public health and agricultural productivity throughout the world. However, there is growing evidence that resistance to antibiotics (AR) is increasing both in benign and pathogenic bacteria, posing an emerging threat to public and environmental health in the future. Although evidence has existed for years from clinical data of increasing AR, almost no quantitative environmental data exist that span increased industrial antibiotic production in the 1950s to the present; i.e., data that might delineate trends in AR potentially valuable for epidemiological studies. To address this critical knowledge gap, we speculated that AR levels might be apparent in historic soil archives as evidenced by antibiotic resistance gene (ARG) abundances over time. Accordingly, DNA was extracted from five long-term soil-series from different locations in The Netherlands that spanned 1940 to 2008, and 16S rRNA gene and 18 ARG abundances from different major antibiotic classes were quantified. Results show that ARG from all classes of antibiotics tested have significantly increased since 1940, but especially within the tetracyclines, with some individual ARG being >15 times more abundant now than in the 1970s. This is noteworthy because waste management procedures have broadly improved and stricter rules on nontherapeutic antibiotic use in agriculture are being promulgated. Although these data are local to The Netherlands, they suggest basal environmental levels of ARG still might be increasing, which has implications to similar locations around the world.
697 citations
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TL;DR: Water productivity is defined as the net return for a unit of water used as mentioned in this paper, and it is the amount of water that can be used to produce more food, income, better livelihoods and ecosystem services with less water.
694 citations
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TL;DR: Management agreements were not effective in protecting the species richness of the investigated species groups: no positive effects on plant and bird species diversity were found and there is a pressing need for a scientifically sound evaluation of agri-environment schemes.
Abstract: Roughly 20% of the European Union's farmland is under some form of agri-environment scheme to counteract the negative impacts of modern agriculture on the environment. The associated costs represent about 4% (1.7 billion euros) of the European Union's total expenditure on the Common Agricultural Policy and are expected to rise to 10% in the near future. Although agri-environment schemes have been implemented in various countries for well over a decade, to date no reliable, sufficiently replicated studies have been performed to test whether such measures have the presumed positive effects on biodiversity. Here we present the results of a study evaluating the contribution of agri-environment schemes to the protection of biodiversity in intensively used Dutch agricultural landscapes. We surveyed plants, birds, hover flies and bees on 78 paired fields that either had agri-environment schemes in the form of management agreements or were managed conventionally. Management agreements were not effective in protecting the species richness of the investigated species groups: no positive effects on plant and bird species diversity were found. The four most common wader species were observed even less frequently on fields with management agreements. By contrast, hover flies and bees showed modest increases in species richness on fields with management agreements. Our results indicate that there is a pressing need for a scientifically sound evaluation of agri-environment schemes.
692 citations
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TL;DR: In this paper, the authors developed a methodology for identifying that natural capital, called critical natural capital (CNC), the maintenance of which is essential for environmental sustainability, by considering the characteristics of natural capital and the environmental functions that these characteristics enable natural capital to perform and the importance of these functions to humans and the biosphere.
691 citations
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TL;DR: A conceptual framework for environmental indicator selection is proposed that puts the indicator set at the heart of the selection process and not the individual indicators.
691 citations
Authors
Showing all 23851 results
Name | H-index | Papers | Citations |
---|---|---|---|
Walter C. Willett | 334 | 2399 | 413322 |
Albert Hofman | 267 | 2530 | 321405 |
Frank B. Hu | 250 | 1675 | 253464 |
Willem M. de Vos | 148 | 670 | 88146 |
Willy Verstraete | 139 | 920 | 76659 |
Jonathan D. G. Jones | 129 | 417 | 80908 |
Bert Brunekreef | 124 | 806 | 81938 |
Pedro W. Crous | 115 | 809 | 51925 |
Marten Scheffer | 111 | 350 | 73789 |
Wim E. Hennink | 110 | 600 | 49940 |
Daan Kromhout | 108 | 453 | 55551 |
Peter H. Verburg | 107 | 464 | 34254 |
Marcel Dicke | 107 | 613 | 42959 |
Vincent W. V. Jaddoe | 106 | 1008 | 44269 |
Hao Wu | 105 | 669 | 42607 |