EBP-Colombia and the bioeconomy: Genomics in the service of biodiversity conservation and sustainable development

A decision support procedure for the bioeconomy transition: A Colombian case study

An increasing number of countries and regions consider the bioeconomy transition a strategic policy priority. When approached through the lens of a circular economy perspective, investments in bioeconomy have the potential to enhance resource utilisation efficiency, preserve biodiversity and ecosystems, and foster sustainable development with low emissions. At the same time, if requirements and contextual factors of bioeconomy strategies are not formally analysed, bioeconomic investments might lead to unintended negative consequences. This paper proposes a decision support procedure to design, assess, prioritise, and monitor bioeconomy investments and policies. The flexibility and scalability of our decision support procedure is tested in Colombia to foster a regional and local transition to bioeconomy initiatives that consider the local capital assets and the stakeholders' views. The heterogeneous character of the Colombian environment, economy, society and culture represents an ideal condition to test the strength of the decision support procedure to promote bioeconomy in low and middle-income countries. Our empirical results highlight the benefit of adopting a formal assessment framework that includes strategic national indicators, regional features and stakeholders' views. In terms of the Colombian regional bioeconomy ambitions, we highlight the need for expanding knowledge hubs and participatory stakeholder networks and buttressing appropriate financial mechanisms.

Research in tourism sustainability: A comprehensive bibliometric analysis from 1990 to 2022

Although multiple bibliometric studies have been conducted to analyze publications on various topics within tourism, little attention has been dedicated to systematically analyzing scholarly production on the topic of tourism sustainability. Consequently, this paper aims to conduct a comprehensive bibliometric and systematic review of tourism sustainability. The collected data include 6326 publications retrieved from the Scopus database. The bibliometric technique consists of two major analyses: one on the domain (levels of analysis) and one on knowledge structures. The results indicated a remarkable evolution of tourism sustainability research involving authors, sources, and publications on this subject. Several associations and nations made significant contributions to this theme. Moreover, science mapping approaches were used to thoroughly grasp tourism sustainability-related research's social, intellectual, and conceptual structure. By giving in-depth overviews and insights connected to tourism sustainability and its knowledge structures, this review article has various implications for scientific study and practice.

Taxonomic Delineation of the Old World Species Stomphastis thraustica (Lepidoptera: Gracillariidae) Feeding on Jatropha gossypiifolia (Euphorbiaceae) that Was Collected in the New World and Imported as a Biocontrol Agent to Australia

We provide the identification and species delineation of this biocontrol agent as Stomphastis thraustica (Meyrick in Trans Ent Soc Lond 80(1):107-120, 1908) belonging to the family Gracillariidae. We clarify the distribution pattern of S. thraustica, its host plant preferences, and present taxonomic and molecular diagnoses based on original morphological and genetic data as well as data retrieved from historic literature and genetic databases. Following our own collecting efforts in three continents Africa, South America, and Australia as well as our study of historic museum collection material, we present many new distribution records of S. thraustica for countries and territories in the world including the new discovery of this species in the Neotropical region and we report its introduction in Australia as a biocontrol agent. Using mitogenomic and COI gene data, we clarified that the closest relative of S. thraustica is Stomphastis sp. that occurs in Madagascar and Australia and feeds on the same host plant as S. thraustica - Jatropha gossypiifolia L. (Euphorbiaceae). The molecular sequence divergence in the mitochondrial DNA barcode fragment between these two closely related species S. thraustica and Stomphastis sp. is over 5.7% supporting that they are different species.

Green plant genomes: What we know in an era of rapidly expanding opportunities

Green plants play a fundamental role in ecosystems, human health, and agriculture. As de novo genomes are being generated for all known eukaryotic species as advocated by the Earth BioGenome Project, increasing genomic information on green land plants is essential. However, setting standards for the generation and storage of the complex set of genomes that characterize the green lineage of life is a major challenge for plant scientists. Such standards will need to accommodate the immense variation in green plant genome size, transposable element content, and structural complexity while enabling research into the molecular and evolutionary processes that have resulted in this enormous genomic variation. Here we provide an overview and assessment of the current state of knowledge of green plant genomes. To date fewer than 300 complete chromosome-scale genome assemblies representing fewer than 900 species have been generated across the estimated 450,000 to 500,000 species in the green plant clade. These genomes range in size from 12 Mb to 27.6 Gb and are biased toward agricultural crops with large branches of the green tree of life untouched by genomic-scale sequencing. Locating suitable tissue samples of most species of plants, especially those taxa from extreme environments, remains one of the biggest hurdles to increasing our genomic inventory. Furthermore, the annotation of plant genomes is at present undergoing intensive improvement. It is our hope that this fresh overview will help in the development of genomic quality standards for a cohesive and meaningful synthesis of green plant genomes as we scale up for the future.