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Societal Impact Statement Modern food systems push agriculture to focus on a small number of commercial crops, while there is a very large diversity of untapped edible plants that could be used to address food security and nutrition. Poor and monotonous diets are closely linked to the complex burden of multiple forms of malnutrition and dietary risk. In some contexts, such as West Africa, micronutrient deficiency risks are particularly pronounced. Hence, there is an urgent need to provide people with healthy diets supported by sustainable food systems. Within this context, using nutrition‐sensitive forest landscape restoration to combat environmental degradation could contribute towards ensuring the year‐round availability of nutritious tree‐based food. Summary Diverse diets are important to deliver adequate amounts of the nutrients essential to human health. The consumption of a diversity of food groups is challenging in sub‐Saharan Africa. Trees play an important role in the direct provision of nutritious food items. Forest landscape restoration presents an opportunity to reverse the loss of useful trees, due to degradation, and increase representation of food tree species in the landscape. Here we focused on characterizing the contributions that different food products from trees can make to improving diet diversity in Burkina Faso. A scoring system was developed, based on seasonal availability of edible products and food groups covered, and was integrated into a freely available decision‐making tool that enables carrying out context‐specific, optimal choices of tree species to be considered in forest landscape restoration. Our inventory included 56 food tree species, largely Fabaceae (18 species), providing 81 edible products, mainly fruits (supplied by 79% of tree species), followed by seeds (52%) and leaves (41%). The main food groups represented are ‘Other fruits’ (other than vitamin A‐rich fruits) (covering 52% of the edible products) and dark‐green leafy vegetables (29%). About two thirds of the species listed produce more than a single edible product, a few up to four. A total of 11 species supplied edible products throughout the year. Our results clearly show that seasonal scarcity of food and nutrients in Burkina Faso can be partly mitigated by consuming edible tree products. The methodology can be easily scaled to other geographies.
Societal Impact Statement Modern food systems push agriculture to focus on a small number of commercial crops, while there is a very large diversity of untapped edible plants that could be used to address food security and nutrition. Poor and monotonous diets are closely linked to the complex burden of multiple forms of malnutrition and dietary risk. In some contexts, such as West Africa, micronutrient deficiency risks are particularly pronounced. Hence, there is an urgent need to provide people with healthy diets supported by sustainable food systems. Within this context, using nutrition‐sensitive forest landscape restoration to combat environmental degradation could contribute towards ensuring the year‐round availability of nutritious tree‐based food. Summary Diverse diets are important to deliver adequate amounts of the nutrients essential to human health. The consumption of a diversity of food groups is challenging in sub‐Saharan Africa. Trees play an important role in the direct provision of nutritious food items. Forest landscape restoration presents an opportunity to reverse the loss of useful trees, due to degradation, and increase representation of food tree species in the landscape. Here we focused on characterizing the contributions that different food products from trees can make to improving diet diversity in Burkina Faso. A scoring system was developed, based on seasonal availability of edible products and food groups covered, and was integrated into a freely available decision‐making tool that enables carrying out context‐specific, optimal choices of tree species to be considered in forest landscape restoration. Our inventory included 56 food tree species, largely Fabaceae (18 species), providing 81 edible products, mainly fruits (supplied by 79% of tree species), followed by seeds (52%) and leaves (41%). The main food groups represented are ‘Other fruits’ (other than vitamin A‐rich fruits) (covering 52% of the edible products) and dark‐green leafy vegetables (29%). About two thirds of the species listed produce more than a single edible product, a few up to four. A total of 11 species supplied edible products throughout the year. Our results clearly show that seasonal scarcity of food and nutrients in Burkina Faso can be partly mitigated by consuming edible tree products. The methodology can be easily scaled to other geographies.
Several specimens belonging to a new species of Apodopsyllus were collected during a study on the diversity of meiobenthic communities in the Gulf of Gabès, a Mediterranean shallow-water bay at the south-eastern coast of Tunisia in July 2005. The new species Apodopsyllus gabesensis n. sp. shares the characteristics of the genus such as the lack of endopods from P2 to P4 and the soft and slightly cuticularized body. Apodopsyllus gabesensis n. sp. belongs to the few known species of Apodopsyllus that are described to have comparably distinct patterns of dorsal and lateral cuticular plates and pores. Besides a typical combination of characters that clearly distinguishes the new species from its congeners, the new species shows the following unique single characters: female P5 with a hitherto unknown combination of shape of the exopodal part and shape and setation of the baseoendopodal lobe with two small stout spines; male P6 with a particular shape, and a distinct armature of the exopodal spines in P2-P4 in the male that are pinnate with very short spinules contrary to the female where spines are smooth. The genus Apodopsyllus contains 26 species with the inclusion of the new species.
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