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AbstractDespite escalating expenditures in firefighting, extreme fire events continue to pose a major threat to ecosystem services and human communities in Mediterranean areas. Developing a safe and effective fire response is paramount to efficiently restrict fire spread, reduce negative effects to natural values, prevent residential housing losses, and avoid causalties. Though current fire policies in most countries demand full suppression, few studies have attempted to identify the strategic locations where firefighting efforts would likely contain catastrophic fire events. The success in containing those fires that escape initial attack is determined by diverse structural factors such as ground accessibility, airborne support, barriers to surface fire spread, and vegetation impedance. In this study, we predicted the success in fire containment across Catalonia (northeastern Spain) using a model generated with random forest from detailed geospatial data and a set of 73 fire perimeters for the period 2008–2016. The model attained a high predictive performance (AUC = 0.88), and the results were provided at fine resolution (25 m) for the entire study area (32,108 km2). The highest success rates were found in agricultural plains along the nonburnable barriers such as major road corridors and largest rivers. Low levels of containment likelihood were predicted for dense forest lands and steep‐relief mountainous areas. The results can assist in suppression resource pre‐positioning and extended attack decision making, but also in strategic fuels management oriented at creating defensive locations and fragmenting the landscape in operational firefighting areas. Our modeling workflow and methods may serve as a baseline to generate locally adapted models in fire‐prone areas elsewhere.

Malaria was present in most of Europe until the second half of the 20th century, when it was eradicated through a combination of increased surveillance and mosquito control strategies, together with cross-border and political collaboration. Despite the severe burden of malaria on human populations, it remains contentious how the disease arrived and spread in Europe. Here, we report a partial Plasmodium falciparum nuclear genome derived from a set of antique medical slides stained with the blood of malaria-infected patients from Spain's Ebro Delta, dating to the 1940s. Our analyses of the genome of this now eradicated European P. falciparum strain confirms stronger phylogeographical affinity to present-day strains in circulation in central south Asia, rather than to those in Africa. This points to a longitudinal, rather than a latitudinal, spread of malaria into Europe. In addition, this genome displays two derived alleles in the pfmrp1 gene that have been associated with drug resistance. Whilst this could represent standing variation in the ancestral P. falciparum population, these mutations may also have arisen due to the selective pressure of quinine treatment, which was an anti-malarial drug already in use by the time the sample we sequenced was mounted on a slide. ; publishedVersion ; © 2019 The AuthorsThis is an open-access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License, which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited.

Changes in potential regulatory elements are thought to be key drivers of phenotypic divergence. However, identifying changes to regulatory elements that underlie human-specific traits has proven very challenging. Here, we use 63 reconstructed and experimentally measured DNA methylation maps of ancient and present-day humans, as well as of six chimpanzees, to detect differentially methylated regions that likely emerged in modern humans after the split from Neanderthals and Denisovans. We show that genes associated with face and vocal tract anatomy went through particularly extensive methylation changes. Specifically, we identify widespread hypermethylation in a network of face- and voice-associated genes (SOX9, ACAN, COL2A1, NFIX and XYLT1). We propose that these repression patterns appeared after the split from Neanderthals and Denisovans, and that they might have played a key role in shaping the modern human face and vocal tract. ; D.G. is supported by the Clore Israel Foundation. TMB is supported by BFU2017-86471-P (MINECO/FEDER, UE), U01 MH106874 grant, Howard Hughes International Early Career, Obra Social "La Caixa" and Secretaria d'Universitats i Recerca and CERCA Program del Departament d'Economia i Coneixement de la Generalitat de Catalunya. D.R. is an Investigator of the Howard Hughes Medical Institute and is also supported by an Allen Discovery Center for the Study of Human Brain Evolution funded the Paul G. Allen Family Foundation. C.L.-F. is supported by FEDER and BFU2015-64699-P grant from the Spanish government. R.P. was supported by ERC starting grant ADNABIOARC (263441). R.M.G. and J.M.O. are supported by NYSTEM contract C030133. Funding for the collection and processing of the 850K chimpanzee data was provided by the Leakey Foundation Research Grant for Doctoral Students, Wenner-Gren Foundation Dissertation Fieldwork Grant (Gr. 9310), James F. Nacey Fellowship from the Nacey Maggioncalda Foundation, International Primatological Society Research Grant, Sigma Xi Grant-in-Aid of Research, Center for Evolution and Medicine Venture Fund (ASU), Graduate Research and Support Program Grant (GPSA, ASU), and Graduate Student Research Grant (SHESC, ASU) to G.H. Collection of the chimpanzee bone from Tanzania was funded by the Jane Goodall Institute, and grants from the US National Institutes of Health (AI 058715) and National Science Foundation (IOS-1052693), and facilitated by Elizabeth Lonsdorf and Beatrice Hahn. ; Peer reviewed