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Sharks at night, a feeding vampire bat and California’s wildflower super bloom are among this week’s pick of images from the natural world

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High court judge has agreed to limit RSPB, ClientEarth and FoE’s costs liabilities to £10,000 in their action against the Ministry of Justice’s changes to costs cap

Three environmental charities have been given permission to challenge court regulations which they say make it too financially risky to bring cases over air pollution standards or the expansion of Heathrow airport.

A high court judge has agreed to limit costs liabilities of the RSPB, ClientEarth and Friends of the Earth to £10,000 in their action against the Ministry of Justice (MoJ) which introduced the new rules earlier this year.

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National Grid expects the UK to reach coal energy ‘watershed’ on Friday in what will also be the country’s first 24-hour coal-free period

The UK is set to have its first ever working day without coal power generation since the Industrial Revolution, according to the National Grid.

The control room tweeted the predicted milestone on Friday, adding that it is also set to be the first 24-hour coal-free period in Britain.

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Conservationist denounced Sukau project as a threat to pygmy elephants and orangutans

Officials in Borneo have cancelled plans to build a bridge across the Kinabatangan river, after warnings from Sir David Attenborough and other conservationists that it would gravely endanger pygmy elephants, orangutans and many other jungle species. The news comes just weeks after the Guardian revealed Attenborough’s opposition to the project.

Attenborough originally sent a private letter to the chief minister of the state of Sabah, Musa Aman, in September 2016. Last month, with signs pointing to the bridge still going ahead, the Guardian published excerpts from the letter. The authorities in Borneo have described Attenborough’s now-public opposition as the final blow to the project.

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The Amur leopards are to be kept off-show in the hope they raise cubs that can be released into the wild.

Stanage, Derbyshire Listening to moorland might illustrate its health just as well as looking at it does

The eastern horizon was a pale streak capped with pink, but it was still dark at Hollin Bank car park and I could barely make out Bill Gordon’s face as he waited. Bill is a volunteer for the Eastern Moors Partnership, monitoring ring ouzels, the mountain blackbird. To record their calls, he was carrying an impressive-looking microphone on a pole with a “dead-cat” windshield, rather cosy on a frosty April morning.

We had barely walked a few yards when, without a word, he pushed his headphones over my ears. It was a moment of complete transformation. From peering at the tenebrous moors, I was plunged suddenly into a soundscape at its zenith, its high noon, a matrix of rich, vital noise. To my right, I could hear a pair of snipe chipping away and, from all around, with a measure of distance between each, the looping voices of curlew. Just ahead of me, on steep scrubby ground, the wren that had sounded so thin and distant became gigantic, all lungs.

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Powerlink has commenced work to expand its Clare South substation to help deliver one of Australia’s largest solar farms.

Australia's Macquarie Group wins bid to buy Britain’s Green Investment Bank, handing it more than $A6.8bn of green infrastructure assets and projects.

Application for assessment under the EPBC Act – call for public comments open 26 April 2017 to 31 May 2017.

A bulk-buy tender by big industrial users – fed up with soaring cost of electricity in South Australia, and the power of retailers – could open door to wind and solar and kick-start the corporate market for large-scale renewables in Australia.

In an embarrassing rebuff to the JBIC, an Indonesian administrative court has ruled a key environmental permit for a huge coal plant expansion was issued illegally.

Impact Investment Group has entered the Sydney property market, securing options to buy into the iconic project, Central Park.

The Trump administration, through the Department of Energy, has started withholding money for grants already approved by the agency.

Tasmania's grand plans to spend $3 billion on pumped hydro and new links to become the "renewable battery" of Australia may be undone by the plunging cost of battery storage.

The world just passed another round-numbered climate milestone. Scientists predicted it would happen this year and lo and behold, it has.

Tesla mobile app update allows Powerwall owners to monitor and manage their solar and battery storage “power flow”.

New paper looks at the barriers to deploying multiple terawatts of solar PV and what can be done to overcome them.

Farmers are turning to natural bacteria to improve crops like cane – but they might be getting rubbish. Gavin Fordham/Flickr

Australian farmers are at risk of missing out on a global boom in “crop probiotics”, because lax regulations make it less likely the supplements they buy to boost their crops will actually work.

Similar to the probiotics that offer health benefits for humans, certain natural bacteria can make crops healthier, hardier and more productive, by increasing their resilience to pests, pathogens and environmental stresses and improving access to soil nutrients.

But our research has found that the quality of products sold as “biostimulants” in Australia (which includes crop probiotics) varies wildly, with many available that do not deliver the promised benefits.

This potentially deprives our farmers of genuine products developed and tested with scientific principles. It muddies the waters, as companies selling effective products compete with those peddling “snake oil”. It also raises concerns about biosafety: importers can simply tick a few boxes and claim there aren’t pathogens in the bottle, without hard proof.

How do crop probiotics work?

Bacterial biostimulants naturally form a mutually beneficial bond with plants. One of the better known examples involves legumes, like clover and soybeans, which have rhizobia bacteria living in their roots. Rhizobia absorb nitrogen from air and deliver it as a natural fertiliser to their plant host in a symbiotic exchange.

As well as helping the plants thrive, farmers can use legumes to replenish nitrogen in soil, reducing the use of man-made nitrogen fertiliser. This symbiosis has been researched for over a century, and is well understood.

While we know less about other crop-beneficial bacteria, our understanding is growing. Microbes have been found that make crops more resistant to heat, waterlogging, drought and certain diseases.

But although the effects have been studied extensively in laboratories, it’s a big step to translate fundamental science to farm-relevant application.

Many factors, including the particular crop, soil and climate, influence the effectiveness of crop probiotics. The bacteria must survive transport and storage, and have to associate effectively with crops in the presence of many potentially competing microbes.

The communication between beneficial bacteria and crops is finicky as both partners have to produce mutually understandable chemical signals. We listened in on the conversation between beneficial Burkholderia bacteria and sugarcane, confirming that both undergo complex change to accommodate the partnership.

Finding the right microbes and making them work with crops in field settings remains difficult. Each group of useful microbes has many species and subtypes, and only few generally convey benefits, and often only in certain situations. Scientists are working to address these constraints.

Bold claims, inconsistent results

While crop probiotics offer an ecologically friendly option for farmers looking to improve and protect their harvests, the Australian market is far from reliable.

Our research group was asked to evaluate commercial crop probiotics. Over a year of experimentation on a sugarcane farm, we tracked the supposedly beneficial bacteria and fungi of two Australian probiotics products from soil to crop.

DNA analysis didn’t detect changes in root-associated bacteria, but the composition of root-associated fungi changed. Whether these changes are meaningful is unclear, as the manufacturers didn’t specify how the products work and which changes are to be expected. Clearly, studies over multiple years and sites are needed to confirm if and when products are beneficial.

The problem isn’t that biostimulants don’t work in principle. Many laboratory experiments have shown bacteria can help plants grow faster, stronger and bigger. But the real world is messy, with plenty of variables. Manufacturers who aren’t pushed by legislation can take shortcuts, and nebulous marketing is common.

Soybean root nodules, containing billions of nitrogen-fixing rhizobia. via Wikimedia commons

Our second investigation involved a commercial seedling nursery. The international manufacturer of the probiotic didn’t provide instructions for dosage, leaving us to guess at the correct application rate. In the first round of experimentation, the seedlings died. Feedback from the manufacturer was quick: we had used the wrong dose.

The next round of research used a lower dosage, per the manufacturer’s advice, that did not improve seedling growth. In its absurdity, this example highlights the need for tighter market regulation.

Since the benefits of currently available biostimulants are imprecise, many people are divided on their use. Better regulations would promote certainty, and prevent farmers wasting money on unreliable products.

The future of crop probiotics

Currently Australian regulations emphasise flexibility, offering multiple options for manufacturers to prove their crop probiotics work. But this leaves the door open for ineffective products.

Crop probiotics are currently regulated under the umbrella of pesticides (although they’re often marketed as providing other benefits). The Australian Pesticides and Veterinary Medicines Authority guidelines say “up to 10 field trials may be required depending on the crop’s economic importance”, making it difficult to tell how many trials are expected. One industry partner we spoke to said that, while he has chosen to do field trials, he didn’t have to supply that data to the APVMA to get his product registered.

Companies have to prove their products are “effective as per the label claims”. But as we found in our research, this doesn’t help when manufacturers exclude crucial information from their labels.

Manufacturers can sell probiotics that have been tested overseas, although studies “should be done under conditions that are typical of Australian climatic conditions”. However, because they’re not automatically required to retest in Australia, different soils, climates and crop types can render them essentially useless.

Consequently, many products exist on the Australian market which don’t have clear label instructions for effective use, claim to work on an outlandish number of crops and don’t even touch on the topic of which soils they work effectively in.

Australia contrasts with the European Union, which demands multi-step scientific testing of products. For a product to be permitted for use in agriculture, EU legislation requires 10 or more field trials, conducted over two growing seasons in different climates and soil types. Delivery methods and dosage must be evaluated and effects confirmed. Crop trials have to ensure statistical validity. The EU has created an online database of detailed reports and standards that can be easily searched by the public.

These regulations have an impact on which biostimulants reach the market. European products often contain only one type of active microbe, as it’s otherwise difficult to meet the strict criteria. On the other hand, many biostimulants sold in Australia contain multiple microbes that are not clearly classified on labels.

This makes it more difficult to tell what’s actually in a product, how useful it will be under different conditions, or if it contains bacteria that are beneficial for certain crops but harmful for others.

We recommend that Australia adopts the EU model of a regulated biostimulant market to encourage investment. Scientifically rigorous, multi-year studies are also needed, to test and develop effective products.

There is much research expertise in Australia, but currently farmers must rely on marketing rather than science.

Susanne Schmidt receives funding from industry and government including Sugar Research Australia and Queensland Department of Agriculture and Fisheries.

Shelby Berg receives funding from Sugar Research Australia.

Paul G. Dennis and Richard Brackin do not work for, consult, own shares in or receive funding from any company or organisation that would benefit from this article, and has disclosed no relevant affiliations beyond the academic appointment above.

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