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Moisture-electric generators (MEGs), harvesting ubiquitous moisture from the environment for electricity generation, have attracted great interest as power supply devices. However, there are great challenges associated with material availability, fabrication accessibility and operation environment, which are key factors to achieve high output with low cost for practical applications, and a deeper understanding of the underlying mechanism of interactions between MEGs and water is urgently required. Here, a whey protein available in supermarkets is used to fabricate low-cost MEGs with controllable performance through tuning surface charges and hydrophilicity, which provides new insights into the electricity generation mechanism and large-scale application. The MEGs exhibit the highest voltage output of 1.45 V at a room humidity level of 40% relative humidity. The whey protein films possess the merits of low cost (70 times cheaper than commonly used polymers), being flexible and semi-transparent, and having self-healing ability, presenting excellent comprehensive device performance. Besides, MEGs can operate well at extreme temperatures (-20 °C or 50 °C) and power a location tracker in a desert with 26% relative humidity. The modified functional layers with selective ion absorption and controllable outputs provided a deeper understanding of electricity generation in MEGs and demonstrated great potential in powering a wide range of electronic devices in various dynamic environments with high sustainability and reliability. Peer Reviewed

Abstract Soil invertebrates contribute significantly to vital ecosystem functions such as the breakdown of organic matter and cycling of essential nutrients, but our knowledge of their large-scale distribution in agricultural systems is limited, which hinders our ability to robustly predict how they will respond to future global change scenarios. Here, we employed metabarcoding analysis of eukaryotic 18S rRNA genes to examine the diversity and community composition of invertebrates in 528 sorghum rhizosphere and bulk soils, collected from 53 experimental field sites across China. Our results revealed that Nematoda, Arthropoda and Annelida were the dominant soil invertebrate groups in agroecosystems. Among all the climatic and soil parameters we examined, precipitation seasonality (i.e. the irregular distribution of precipitation during a normal year) had the strongest relationship with the richness of soil invertebrates, with an increase in soil invertebrate richness predicted with increasing precipitation seasonality. Mean annual precipitation and soil pH were the most important predictors of soil invertebrate community structure, with numerous invertebrate phylotypes showing either significantly positive or negative relationships with these two variables. Our findings suggest that shifts in precipitation patterns and soil pH, induced by future climate change and agricultural practices, will have important consequences for the distribution of soil invertebrate communities, with implications for agricultural ecosystem sustainability.

Restoring and protecting "blue carbon" ecosystems - mangrove forests, tidal marshes, and seagrass meadows - are actions considered for increasing global carbon sequestration. To improve understanding of which management actions produce the greatest gains in sequestration, we used a spatially explicit model to compare carbon sequestration and its economic value over a broad spatial scale (2500 km of coastline in southeastern Australia) for four management scenarios: (1) Managed Retreat, (2) Managed Retreat Plus Levee Removal, (3) Erosion of High Risk Areas, (4) Erosion of Moderate to High Risk Areas. We found that carbon sequestration from avoiding erosion-related emissions (abatement) would far exceed sequestration from coastal restoration. If erosion were limited only to the areas with highest erosion risk, sequestration in the non-eroded area exceeded emissions by 4.2 million Mg CO₂ by 2100. However, losing blue carbon ecosystems in both moderate and high erosion risk areas would result in net emissions of 23.0 million Mg CO₂ by 2100. The removal of levees combined with managed retreat was the strategy that sequestered the most carbon. Across all time points, removal of levees increased sequestration by only an additional 1 to 3% compared to managed retreat alone. Compared to the baseline erosion scenario, the managed retreat scenario increased sequestration by 7.40 million Mg CO₂ by 2030, 8.69 million Mg CO₂ by 2050, and 16.6 million Mg CO₂ by 2100. Associated economic value followed the same patterns, with large potential value loss from erosion greater than potential gains from conserving or restoring ecosystems. This study quantifies the potential benefits of managed retreat and preventing erosion in existing blue carbon ecosystems to help meet climate change mitigation goals by reducing carbon emissions.