Arsenic (As) contamination from abandoned gold mines threatens adjacent ecosystems through leaching and erosion. This study investigated how soil physicochemical properties regulate As binding forms upon initial contamination and associated ecotoxicological effects on soil invertebrates. Forest soils (0-10 cm depth) were collected from four mountainous sites across Korea with varying physicochemical properties. Four forest soils were spiked with 20, 50, or 100 mg kg⁻¹ of As. Sequential extraction revealed that newly introduced As primarily bound to nonspecifically and specifically sorbed fractions (F1 and F2) and amorphous iron and aluminum oxide fractions (F3). F1 and F2 showed strong correlations with cation exchange capacity, available phosphorus, and dithionite-citrate-bicarbonate-extractable aluminum. Toxicity tests using Allonychiurus kimi (Collembola) demonstrated distinct life stage-specific differences in As uptake pathways. Correlation analysis and partial least squares path modeling (PLS-PM) revealed that juvenile reduction showed high correlations with highly mobile fractions (F1, F2) and As effects varied according to soil physicochemical properties. In contrast, adult survival and As accumulation showed the strongest responses to the F3 fraction in correlation analysis and were influenced by total As concentration rather than soil physicochemical properties in PLS-PM. These findings enhance understanding of As-organism toxicity relationships in forest soils and contribute to improved ecotoxicological assessment. By linking soil properties, As fractionation, and life stage-specific sensitivity, this study provides foundation for effective remediation strategies.

Invasion by nonindigenous species is a major threat to marine ecosystems. In this study, the distribution and occupied area (as a percentage) of four invasive barnacles (Amphibalanus amphitrite, Amphibalanus eburneus, Amphibalanus improvisus, Perforatus perforatus), and one indigenous (Balanus trigonus) barnacle in 13 ports in three Korean seas (East sea, Korea Strait, and Yellow Sea) were investigated. The average ratio for all five species was 11.17% in summer and 7.59% in winter, indicating a higher occupancy in summer. B. trigonus, which is an indigenous species, was found on all ports, except for one (IC). Of the invasive species, A. amphitrite was found mainly in the Yellow Sea, A. improvisus in the Korea Strait, and A. eburneus along with P. perforatus were found in the East Sea. From nonmetric multidimensional scaling (NMDS) analysis, six parameters related to water temperature and salinity were found to be significantly correlated with the distribution and occupancy status of these five barnacles. Using the six parameters as independent variables, random forest (RF) models were developed. Based on these models, the predicted future dominant invasive species were A. improvisus and A. amphitrite in the Yellow Sea and P. perforatus in the East Sea and Korea Strait. This study suggests that long-term monitoring of invasive species is crucial, and that determining the relationship between the results of monitoring and environmental variables can be helpful in predicting the damage caused by invasive species resulting from environmental changes.

Glyphosate is the most used herbicide worldwide, but enormous use of glyphosate has raised concerned about its environmental loadings. Although glyphosate is considered non-toxic, toxicity data for soil non-target organisms according to temperature and aging are scarce. This study examined the toxicity of glyphosate with the temperature (20 °C and 25 °C) and aging times (0 day and 7 days) in soil using a collembolan species, Allonychiurus kimi (Lee). The degradation of glyphosate was investigated. Fatty acid composition of A. kimi was also investigated. The half-life of glyphosate was 2.38 days at 20 °C and 1.69 days at 25 °C. At 20 °C with 0 day of aging, the EC₅₀ was estimated to be 93.5 mg kg⁻¹. However, as the temperature and aging time increased, the glyphosate degradation increased, so no significant toxicity was observed on juvenile production. The proportions of the arachidonic acid and stearic acid decreased and increased with the glyphosate treatment, respectively, even at 37.1 mg kg⁻¹, at which no significant effects on juvenile production were observed. Our results showed that the changes in the glyphosate toxicity with temperature and aging time were mostly dependent on the soil residual concentration. Furthermore, the changes in the fatty acid compositions suggest that glyphosate could have a chronic effect on soil organisms.

The complete mitochondrial genome of Allonychiurus kimi (Lee, 1973 ) was sequenced, assembled, and annotated. The mitochondrial genome of A. kimi is 14,386 bp in length and contains 13 protein-coding, 22 transfer RNA, and 2 ribosomal RNA genes. A. kimi was closely clustered with the following species of the family Onychiuridae: Onychiurus orientalis, Orthonychiurus forlsomi, and Tetrodontophora bielanensis.

Depth-image based rendering is a popular technique for rendering virtual views for the multi-view video plus depth (MVD) 3DTV format. Instead of transmitting a high number of views to the receiver, only a few views are transmitted along with their corresponding depth maps and the missing views are interpolated from these transmitted views. This process is called view synthesis and has been the focus of a lot of research in recent times. In addition to the obvious quality constraints of view synthesis, focus needs to be laid on the efficiency and speed of the view synthesis process. In this paper, we propose a simple, highly efficient view synthesis process that utilizes a separable look-up table based technique to speed up the 3D warping process. We also develop a reliability-based weighting scheme for blending the candidate views into the final synthesized view. Simulation results show that the proposed method is approximately 6 times faster than VSRS 3.5 and has comparable objective quality. The proposed method is inherently parallel thus making it suitable to act as a framework for implementing high-speed view synthesis on a GP-GPU.