ABSTRACT
During the main COVID-19 global pandemic lockdown period of 2020 an impromptu set of pollination ecologists came together via social media and personal contacts to carry out standardised surveys of the flower visits and plants in gardens. The surveys involved 67 rural, suburban and urban gardens, of various sizes, ranging from 61.18° North in Norway to 37.96° South in Australia, resulting in a data set of 25,174 rows, with each row being a unique interaction record for that date/site/plant species, and comprising almost 47,000 visits to flowers, as well as records of flowers that were not visited by pollinators, for over 1,000 species and varieties belonging to more than 460 genera and 96 plant families. The more than 650 species of flower visitors belong to 12 orders of invertebrates and four of vertebrates. In this first publication from the project, we present a brief description of the data and make it freely available for any researchers to use in the future, the only restriction being that they cite this paper in the first instance. The data generated from these global surveys will provide scientific evidence to help us understand the role that private gardens (in urban, rural and suburban areas) can play in conserving insect pollinators and identify management actions to enhance their potential. © 2022 The authors.
ABSTRACT
SARS-CoV-2 has created a global disaster by infecting millions of people and causing thousands of deaths across hundreds of countries. Currently, the infection is in its exponential phase in several countries and there is no sign of immediate relief from this deadly virus. At the same time, some “conspiracy theories” have arisen on the origin of this virus due to the lack of a “definite origin”. To understand if this controversy is also reflected in scientific publications, here, we reviewed the key articles published at initial stages of the COVID-19 pandemic (January 01, 2020 to April 30, 2020) related to the zoonotic origin of SARS-CoV-2 and the articles opposing the “conspiracy theories”. We also provide an overview on the current knowledge on SARS-CoV-2 Spike as well as the Coronavirus research domain. Furthermore, a few important points related to the “conspiracy theories” such as “laboratory engineering” or “bioweapon” aspects of SARS-CoV-2 are also reviewed. In this article, we have only considered the peer-reviewed publications that are indexed in PubMed and other official publications, and we have directly quoted the authors’ statements from their respective articles to avoid any controversy.