Growing impact of wildfire on western US water supply.

Streamflow often increases after fire, but the persistence of this effect and its importance to present and future regional water resources are unclear. This paper addresses these knowledge gaps for the western United States (WUS), where annual forest fire area increased by more than 1,100% during 1984 to 2020. Among 72 forested basins across the WUS that burned between 1984 and 2019, the multibasin mean streamflow was significantly elevated by 0.19 SDs (P < 0.01) for an average of 6 water years postfire, compared to the range of results expected from climate alone. Significance is assessed by comparing prefire and postfire streamflow responses to climate and also to streamflow among 107 control basins that experienced little to no wildfire during the study period. The streamflow response scales with fire extent: among the 29 basins where >20% of forest area burned in a year, streamflow over the first 6 water years postfire increased by a multibasin average of 0.38 SDs, or 30%. Postfire streamflow increases were significant in all four seasons. Historical fire-climate relationships combined with climate model projections suggest that 2021 to 2050 will see repeated years when climate is more fire-conducive than in 2020, the year currently holding the modern record for WUS forest area burned. These findings center on relatively small, minimally managed basins, but our results suggest that burned areas will grow enough over the next 3 decades to enhance streamflow at regional scales. Wildfire is an emerging driver of runoff change that will increasingly alter climate impacts on water supplies and runoff-related risks.

Using citizen science to expand the global map of landslides: Introducing the Cooperative Open Online Landslide Repository (COOLR).

Robust inventories are vital for improving assessment of and response to deadly and costly landslide hazards. However, collecting landslide events in inventories is difficult at the global scale due to inconsistencies in or the absence of landslide reporting. Citizen science is a valuable opportunity for addressing some of these challenges. The new Cooperative Open Online Landslide Repository (COOLR) supplements data in a NASA-developed Global Landslide Catalog (GLC) with citizen science reports to build a more robust, publicly available global inventory. This manuscript introduces the COOLR project and its methods, evaluates the initial citizen science results from the first 13 months, and discusses future improvements to increase the global engagement with the project. The COOLR project (https://landslides.nasa.gov) contains Landslide Reporter, the first global citizen science project for landslides, and Landslide Viewer, a portal to visualize data from COOLR and other satellite and model products. From March 2018 to April 2019, 49 citizen scientists contributed 162 new landslide events to COOLR. These events spanned 37 countries in five continents. The initial results demonstrated that both expert and novice participants are contributing via Landslide Reporter. Citizen scientists are filling in data gaps through news sources in 11 different languages, in-person observations, and new landslide events occurring hundreds and thousands of kilometers away from any existing GLC data. The data is of sufficient accuracy to use in NASA susceptibility and hazard models. COOLR continues to expand as an open platform of landslide inventories with new data from citizen scientists, NASA scientists, and other landslide groups. Future work on the COOLR project will seek to increase participation and functionality of the platform as well as move towards collective post-disaster mapping.

Mutant allele specific imbalance in oncogenes with copy number alterations: Occurrence, mechanisms, and potential clinical implications.

Mutant allele specific imbalance (MASI) was initially coined to describe copy number alterations associated with the mutant allele of an oncogene. The copy number gain (CNG) specific to the mutant allele can be readily observed in electropherograms. With the development of genome-wide analyses at base-pair resolution with copy number counts, we can now further differentiate MASI into those with CNG, with copy neutral alteration (also termed acquired uniparental disomy; UPD), or with loss of heterozygosity (LOH) due to the loss of the wild-type (WT) allele. Here we summarize the occurrence of MASI with CNG, aUPD, or MASI with LOH in some major oncogenes (such as EGFR, KRAS, PIK3CA, and BRAF). We also discuss how these various classifications of MASI have been demonstrated to impact tumorigenesis, progression, metastasis, prognosis, and potentially therapeutic responses in cancer, notably in lung, colorectal, and pancreatic cancers.