ABSTRACT Little is known about the complex power and governance dynamics within e‐waste hubs in the Global South. Taking the example of Sodom‐Agbogbloshie, Mortuary‐road, Ashaiman and Ashaiman New Town in Ghana's capital Accra, we explore their role as catalysts for sustainable rurbanity—a concept that blends urban and rural characteristics within an informal economy. Ghana, home to some of Africa's largest informal e‐waste dumpsites, presents a typical case where e‐waste processing, traditional herding and related economic activities converge, creating a vibrant yet challenging landscape for urban informal actors. Our research utilises the assemblage theory to analyse the interconnectedness and interdependencies of various economic practices, social networks and environmental factors. Employing a mixed methods approach, data were collected through stratified random sampling, resulting in a total of 420 respondents across the four locations. Non‐parametric statistical tests, including Kruskal–Wallis, Dunn's post hoc tests, Wilcoxon signed‐rank tests and chi‐squared tests, were used to assess the economic, social and environmental dynamics of the four e‐waste hubs. Key findings highlight diverse demographics, the adaptability of economic activities, site‐specific resilience to economic outcomes and the motivations driving engagement in the informal sector. We also identify major challenges, including health risks, environmental footprints, and socio‐economic instability, and outline pathways to sustainable rurbanity. The pathways comprise integrating local endowments, improving connectivity, promoting diverse livelihoods, and establishing supportive institutions. Leveraging the unique rurban characteristics, this study provides a blueprint for transforming informal economies into more resilient and thriving communities, capable of withstanding urbanisation pressures while preserving their local identity and socio‐economic fabric.

Improved ability to assess and categorize the spatial characteristics of settlement patterns is required for a deeper understanding of how urbanization is driving land use and land cover transformation and its effects. Two approaches to the globally available settlement maps of the World Settlement Footprint 3D support a detailed assessment of spatial characteristics of settlement patterns in rural to urban landscapes and across scales: graph-based spatial network analysis and elements of fractal theory. Based on first comprehensive tests for the Punjab (India), the Nile Delta (Egypt) and the North China Plain, the results of our study suggest that the presented methods allow a quantitative and qualitative characterization and comparison of settlement patterns between different regions of the world. The approache allows to generate standardized baseline data for arbitrary regions in the world to analyze structuring principles of settlement hierarchies (e.g., self-organized fractal geometries) and their dependence on - or interaction with - cultural, political, socioeconomic, or environmental conditions.

Little is known about the effects of intensification of cropping systems on the short-distance variability of total dry matter (TDM) yield of field crops in tropical cropping systems. To fill this knowledge gap, we used a factorial on-station experiment on a heavily weathered, tropical Nitisol in S-India consisting of a rainfed and an irrigated trial with low (N1), medium (N2), and high (N3) levels of mineral nitrogen (N) application. These fertiliser treatments were combined with a rotation of maize, finger millet, and lablab to investigate the development of TDM in two cropping cycles of three years each. Across six consecutive experimental years and for all crops our data show that at a total annual rainfall varying from 366 to 998 mm TDM yields in the irrigated field were higher than under rainfed conditions. Irrespective of the water regime, crop type, and N level, yields of maize (P < 0.0001) and millet (P < 0.0001) but not lablab significantly declined over time. The decline was stronger in irrigated than in rainfed crops and followed the sequence maize = finger millet > lablab. Log-transformed sample variance in grids of 1.2 × 1.2 m was higher in irrigated than in rainfed crops and variance declined stronger over time for both rainfed cereals in N1 plots without N followed by N2 and N3 plots. No N effects were noted in the legume lablab. When variances were standardised for TDM levels, we observed strongest growth of coefficients of variation over time in N1 plots of rainfed maize. Most differences in point estimates of trends were not significant at the 5% level due to relatively large standard errors. The results provide important insights for small-scale farmers and scientists in designing more efficient field experiments whose precision depends on plot size and number of replications.

Understanding and governing human settlement patterns is a major challenge of the urban age. While rural settlements emerge as parts of agricultural landscapes, cities typically evolve in economically strategic locations, and over time form hierarchical systems of cities. Purposeful planning and the collective, self-organized behavior of the inhabitants interact in the development of regional settlement patterns. Since self-organizing systems often produce fractal patterns in nature, this study combines approaches of land use science, city ranking, and urban planning under a fractal theory framework, to analyze the settlement system of the Indian Punjab. Scaling levels were defined by discontinuities in the size distribution of built-up areas (Global Urban Footprint), which correlated to population-based classifications (r = 0.9591). Self-similarity across scales was supported by geo-statistical similarity (p < 0.05) of distances and angles between settlements of successive classes, and the overall fractal dimension of D-B = 1.95. When compared to a modeled Sierpinski Carpet, more than 50% of the settlements met the fractal geometry rules at larger scales. The spatial distribution of small villages, however, deviated, indicating a scale-related shift in organizing principles. Explicitly acknowledging cross-scale relations and self-organisation in regional planning policies may lead to more sustainable settlement structures that are in harmony with natural system properties.

Field margins are areas of natural or semi-natural vegetation located adjacent to agricultural fields. They form the interface between different crops and to other land use and land cover types. In most analyses of cropping patterns field margin vegetation (FMV) is neither accounted for nor is it a part of so-called natural ecosystems. Nevertheless, FMV provides important ecosystem services, is integrated in the farming practices of traditional smallholder agriculture, and contributes to farmers’ income. The area, composition and functions of FMV change as agroecosystems are transformed under progressing urbanisation, as encountered in the periphery of Bengaluru, India. This study is a first attempt to systematically assess FMV in such a context. It focuses on different characteristics of FMV along a spatial rural–urban gradient, and its interrelation with changes in crop and farm management.

This editorial concludes the volume by reviewing the key findings of the contributions and putting them in context to each other. It highlights the challenges and merits of interdisciplinary approaches and sketches an outlook for future research.

Urbanisation is a global trend and a major challenge to human societies as well as to the planetary environment and resource pools, and the research landscape related to these issues is accordingly large and diverse. The collaborative Indo-German research project FOR2432 tackles urbanisation-related transformations by an interdisciplinary approach focused on the South Indian metropolitan area of Bengaluru. This editorial sketches the overarching research design, to which most of the book chapters refer, and describes some baseline characteristics of the research space. It thus illustrates the common background for the specific topics and targets of the subsequent studies collated in this volume.

To capture the overall dynamics of urbanisation in the research space of FOR2432, this study tracks the land cover changes within the two transects across the rural–urban interface of Bengaluru. It covers a retrospective period of almost three decades, with observations in 1992, 2000, 2011, and 2016, based on Landsat and Sentinel satellite images, and aims at unravelling the dynamics of land use change as a prelude to deeper explorations of its drives. The spatio-temporal analysis of broad land cover classes relates it to the agricultural activities described in subsequent chapters of this volume, while for built-up land cover the focus lies on urban sprawl and the evolution of the Survey Stratification Index (SSI). The results underpin that the loss of vegetated and agricultural area increases both, along a spatial gradient towards the city, and over time. The spatial urbanisation pattern described by the SSI remains rather stable if data are aggregated over rural, transitional, and urban regions, or over six predefined strata, while individual villages show pronounced shifts in the SSI, that characterise them as nuclei of urbanisation. Characteristics of the “urban fringe” are highly variable between successive land cover classifications and have high dynamics of change.

Rural–urban transformation has major implications on agricultural land use. This is also the case in the southern Indian city of Bengaluru, where farmers shift from low intensity subsistence agriculture under rainfed conditions to irrigated, market-oriented production of crops and vegetables. As little is known about the effects of this intensification on water use, nutrient leaching, losses of carbon and nitrogen, and soil quality, a long-term experiment was established under well-defined on-station conditions to generate a typical intensity gradient in an in situ laboratory of change. Measurements of key agronomic, soil-related, and meteorological parameters at high temporal and spatial resolution allow to assess externalities and efficiencies of resource use and to predict long-term consequences of intensification on agricultural sustainability. The two long-term rotation experiments established under rainfed and irrigated conditions also allow to collect and calibrate ground-based multi- and hyperspectral crop reflectance data needed for upscaling to high resolution satellite images that cover a North–South research transect across the rural–urban interface of Bengaluru.

Asian megacities have attracted much scientific attention in the context of global urbanization, but few quantitative studies analyze wetland transformation in the rural–urban interface. With its rampant growth and transformation from a tree-lined “Garden City” to a busy megalopolis with often-blocked highways and large built-up areas, Bengaluru (Karnataka, S-India) is a good example for assessing how urbanization has led to the acute degradation of wetlands. We therefore investigated long-term land cover and wetland changes from 1965 to 2018 based on an object-based classification of multi-temporal Corona and Landsat images. To quantify and compare the dynamics of open water surfaces and vegetation, we defined the potential wetland areas (PWA) along the rural–urban gradient and linked our analyses to an index describing the degree of urbanization (survey stratification index (SSI)). During the five decades studied, built-up areas in the Bengaluru Urban district increased ten-fold, with the highest growth rate from 2014 to 2018 (+ 8% annual change). Patches of lake wetlands were highly dynamic in space and time, partly reflecting highly variable annual rainfall patterns ranging from 501 mm in 1965 to 1374 mm in 2005 and monsoon-driven alterations in the hydrologic regime. While water bodies and flooded areas shrunk from 64 km2 in 1965 to 55 km2 in 2018, in 1965, the total rural wetland area with an SSI > 0.5 was twice as high as in 2018. The rural–urban land cover pattern within potential wetland areas changed drastically during this period. This is reflected, for example, by a four-fold increase in the wetland area with an SSI of 0.3, as compared to a decline by 43% in wetland area with an SSI of 0.8. While, in urban areas, wetlands were mostly lost to construction, in areas with a rural character, open water bodies were mainly transformed into green space. The detected changes in urban wetlands were likely accompanied by ecological regime changes, triggering deteriorations in ecosystem services (ESS) which merit further research.

In recent decades global population growth and rural-urban migration have led to rapidly increasing transformation of landuse systems with concomitant changes in agricultural intensities and enhanced reliance on the multiple services that agro-ecosystems are expected to provide. This is particularly visible in the dynamic interface of megacities in Asia and Africa. By 2050 the global share of urban population has been estimated to reach 68 % compared with 55 % today, the majority of which is accounted for in Asia while Africa shows the highest urban growth rate. The corresponding loss of agricultural areas around cities, which are of particularly high productivity, has been estimated at 2 % globally, with 60 % of it occurring in Asia. Serious threats to agricultural production, urban food security, natural habitats, biodiversity, and air and water resources are the consequence. Based on a comparative analysis of the status quo in the rural-urban interface of Bengaluru in South India and of Ouagadougou and Tamale in West Africa we use a social-ecological systems framework to quantify spatial changes in landuse patterns, wetland structure and flows of resources that affect the sustainability of the three cities. Key bottlenecks of future development are water cycling and use, strategic planning in the use of rural and urban spaces in a multi-functional landscape and maintenance of soil productivity.

Emerging mega cities with their rapidly growing urban population exert increasing pressure on the available arable land to satisfy burgeoning food demand. Meeting these demands requires intensified input use in multiple cropping systems as can be studied along the rural-urban interface in Bengaluru, South India. Under deeply weathered soil and tropical monsoon conditions, high rates of inorganic inputs into the soil improve the soil nutrient stock temporally, but may also cause high leaching losses which so far are poorly quantified. This study therefore aimed to measure seasonal leaching losses of nitrogen (N), phosphorus (P), potassium (K) and sulphur (S) at two crop specific inorganic N-fertiliser intensities (low and high), and two different water regimes (rainfed with life-saving supplementary irrigation and drip irrigated) in a factorial on-station experiment with a rotation of cabbage, eggplant, tomato in the dry (rabi) season followed by maize, finger millet, lablab in the wet (kharif ) season. Leaching of soil water was determined at weekly intervals throughout the growing using micro-lysimeters. Analysis of collected data showed cumulative water losses by leaching to be 35 % higher in the dry season than in the wet season 2017. As an example, for the variation of nutrient losses among different crops, the concentration of N (as NO3 and NH4) in the leachate were higher in tomato than in eggplant and cabbage in the dry season, while in the wet season, lablab showed the lowest concentrations compared to finger millet and maize. In addition to those initial results, ongoing data analysis in a multi-annual study should give an even deeper understanding of the effects of interand intra-seasonal variations on nutrient leaching in intensive high inputs cropping systems under the influence of the monsoon climate condition in India.

Tannins are secondary plant compounds frequently encountered in tropical feeds. They are known to complex with proteins, thus reducing the availability of protein to ruminants. Tannin determination is thus a crucial factor when estimating the feed quality of tropical plants. Bovine serum albumin (BSA), which is commonly used in tannin binding assays has the drawbacks of being a non-plant protein and requires a rather low pH (4.9, iso-electric point of BSA) for complex formation with tannins. Papain is a commercially available pure protein from Carica papaya that may be a suitable alternative. This study evaluates papain as a test protein in a tannin binding assay in comparison to BSA by determining the specific protein precipitation capacity (sPPC) of the tannin rich plants, Salix alba (salix) and Rhus typhina (sumach). Salix and sumach leaves contain exclusively condensed tannins and hydrolysable tannins respectively.

Isolation and nucleotide sequence of the cDNA encoding human ventricular myosin light chain 2 Get access L.Dalla Libera, L.Dalla Libera * 1CNR Unit for Muscle Biology and Physiopathology, Institute of General Pathology, University of PadovaVia Loredan 16, Padova, Italy * To whom correspondence should be addressed Search for other works by this author on: Oxford Academic PubMed Google Scholar E. Hoffmann, E. Hoffmann Search for other works by this author on: Oxford Academic PubMed Google Scholar M. Floroff, M. Floroff Search for other works by this author on: Oxford Academic PubMed Google Scholar G. Jackowski G. Jackowski Search for other works by this author on: Oxford Academic PubMed Google Scholar Nucleic Acids Research, Volume 17, Issue 6, 25 March 1989, Page 2360, https://doi.org/10.1093/nar/17.6.2360 Published: 25 March 1989 Article history Received: 06 January 1989 Published: 25 March 1989

Journal Article Molecular cloning and complete nucleotide sequence of a human ventricular myosin light chain 1 Get access E. Hoffmann, E. Hoffmann Search for other works by this author on: Oxford Academic PubMed Google Scholar Q.W. Shi, Q.W. Shi Search for other works by this author on: Oxford Academic PubMed Google Scholar M. Floroff, M. Floroff Search for other works by this author on: Oxford Academic PubMed Google Scholar D.A.G. Mickle, D.A.G. Mickle Search for other works by this author on: Oxford Academic PubMed Google Scholar T.-W. Wu, T.-W. Wu Search for other works by this author on: Oxford Academic PubMed Google Scholar P.M. Olley, P.M. Olley 2Department of Paediatrics, University of AlbertaEdmonton, Canada Search for other works by this author on: Oxford Academic PubMed Google Scholar G. Jackowski G. Jackowski * 1Research Institute, The Hospital for Sick ChildrenToronto, Canada * To whom correspondence should be addressed Search for other works by this author on: Oxford Academic PubMed Google Scholar Nucleic Acids Research, Volume 16, Issue 5, 11 March 1988, Page 2353, https://doi.org/10.1093/nar/16.5.2353 Published: 11 March 1988 Article history Received: 11 December 1987 Published: 11 March 1988