Kelmscott Manor, the country home of William Morris, houses a remarkable collection of ceramics bearing a singular relationship to one of the most influential figures in Victorian cultural history. This study of Kelmscott’s collection of German stoneware reveals new interpretations of its production history and fascinating insights into its significance for the cultural context of Morris’s work. Based on a complete catalogue, the paper examines the ensemble of approximately thirty pieces of eighteenth- to nineteenth-century Westerwald stoneware, or grès de Flandres, as it was known to Morris and his contemporaries. The Kelmscott group is the largest collection of this material known from an English historic house and has a composite and well-documented provenance. Supplementary material provided as an online appendix contains a fully illustrated, descriptive catalogue.

Westerwald pottery of the seventeenth century and earlier has been extensively studied, but its ceramics of the late eighteenth to nineteenth centuries have received little attention. Most accounts stress the simplification of vessel forms and ‘degeneration’ of decorative designs during this period, leading towards mass-production c 1900. This paper re-assesses later Westerwald output, drawing attention to a vernacular pottery tradition of significant interest in its own right. This paper suggests that it was this continuing tradition of vernacular production and its naturalistic, decorative schemes that attracted the interest of Morris throughout his adult life, from the Red House experiment to the heyday of Morris & Co. Examining his writing on creativity, the minor arts and labour, the paper interprets grès de Flandres as an expression of Morris’s idealisation of the relationship between labour and craft production.

Two field experiments were conducted during 2018 at Paskeville and Arthurton, South Australia, to identify effective herbicide options for the control of thiocarbamate-resistant rigid ryegrass in wheat. Dose–response experiments confirmed resistance in both field populations (T1 and A18) of rigid ryegrass to triallate, prosulfocarb, trifluralin, and pyroxasulfone. T1 and A18 were 17.9- and 20-fold more resistant to triallate than susceptible SLR4. The level of resistance detected in T1 to prosulfocarb (5.9-fold) and pyroxasulfone (4-fold) was lower compared to A18, which displayed 12.1- and 7.8-fold resistance to both herbicides, respectively. Despite resistance, the mixture of two different preplant-incorporated (PPI) site-of-action herbicides improved rigid ryegrass control and wheat yield compared to a single PPI herbicide only. Prosulfocarb + triallate and prosulfocarb + S-metolachlor + triallate did not reduce rigid ryegrass seed set when compared to prosulfocarb applied alone at the higher rate (2,400 g ai ha–1). Pyroxasulfone + triallate PPI followed by glyphosate (1,880 g ai ha-1) as a weed seed set control treatment reduced rigid ryegrass seed production by 93% and 95% at both sites, respectively. These herbicides also significantly improved grain yield of wheat at Paskeville (22%) and Arthurton (38%) compared to the untreated.

Five populations of rigid ryegrass (Lolium rigidum Gaudin) from fields across cropping regions in southern Australia were suspected of having resistance to thiocarbamates, chloroacetamides, and sulfonylisoxazoline herbicides. Resistant (R) populations 375-14, 198-15, 16.2, EP162, RAC1, and A18 and two susceptible (S) populations (SLR4 and VLR1) were included in a dose–response study. All suspected R populations expressed resistance to one or all herbicides (thiocarbamates, chloroacetamides, and pyroxasulfone). Population 198-15 exhibited the highest LD50 to triallate (44.7-fold), prosulfocarb (45.7-fold), S-metolachlor (31.5-fold), and metazachlor (27.2-fold) compared with the S populations. Populations 198-15 and 375-14 were also resistant to pyroxasulfone (13.5- and 14.9-fold) compared with the S populations, as was population EP162. This study documents the first case of field-evolved resistance to thiocarbamate, chloroacetamide, and sulfonylisoxazoline herbicides in L. rigidum.

The Fluvial Archives Group (FLAG) was founded in 1996 to bring together researchers looking at the development of fluvial systems over multiple timescales and global spatial scales. Fluvial archives of various types are important not just because they provide insights into past landscape dynamics, e.g., driven by climate or crustal processes, but also because they frequently contain fossil or archaeological material for which they provide stratigraphic control. Since 1996, FLAG has evolved from a research group of the British Quaternary Research Association into an organisation with around 500 members in over 20 countries. The research group held 12 biennial meetings, comprising both presentations and field excursions, as well as multiple themed sessions at international conferences. These had resulted by 2017 in 19 journal special issues, all fully detailed by Cordier et al. (2017). The goals of FLAG are: provision of a community for discussion of key issues concerning fluvial archives, including organising the aforementioned biennial discussion/field meetings, sessions at relevant international conferences, and special issues of journals; continued promotion of the value of fluvial archives by means of readily accessible published information; and coordination of activity with other research groupings with overlapping interests, e.g., by co-convening sessions and collaborating on publications.

Important Bird and Biodiversity Areas (IBAs) are sites identified as being globally important for the conservation of bird populations on the basis of an internationally agreed set of criteria. We present the first review of the development and spread of the IBA concept since it was launched by BirdLife International (then ICBP) in 1979 and examine some of the characteristics of the resulting inventory. Over 13,000 global and regional IBAs have so far been identified and documented in terrestrial, freshwater and marine ecosystems in almost all of the world’s countries and territories, making this the largest global network of sites of significance for biodiversity. IBAs have been identified using standardised, data-driven criteria that have been developed and applied at global and regional levels. These criteria capture multiple dimensions of a site’s significance for avian biodiversity and relate to populations of globally threatened species (68.6% of the 10,746 IBAs that meet global criteria), restricted-range species (25.4%), biome-restricted species (27.5%) and congregatory species (50.3%); many global IBAs (52.7%) trigger two or more of these criteria. IBAs range in size from < 1 km2 to over 300,000 km2 and have an approximately log-normal size distribution (median = 125.0 km2, mean = 1,202.6 km2). They cover approximately 6.7% of the terrestrial, 1.6% of the marine and 3.1% of the total surface area of the Earth. The launch in 2016 of the KBA Global Standard, which aims to identify, document and conserve sites that contribute to the global persistence of wider biodiversity, and whose criteria for site identification build on those developed for IBAs, is a logical evolution of the IBA concept. The role of IBAs in conservation planning, policy and practice is reviewed elsewhere. Future technical priorities for the IBA initiative include completion of the global inventory, particularly in the marine environment, keeping the dataset up to date, and improving the systematic monitoring of these sites.

It has been more than 20 years since the raids on the premises at the Geneva Freeport were linked to Giacomo Medici. The seizure of photographic records led to a major investigation of acquisitions by museums and private collectors. This was expanded following the confiscation of archives from Robin Symes and Gianfranco Becchina. Over 350 items have been returned to Italy from North American public and private collections as well as auction houses and galleries. This article reviews the returns and identifies some of the major themes. It also notes some of the unresolved cases both in North America and in Europe and Japan.

Hill (Twin Research and Human Genetics, Vol. 21, 2018, 84–88) presented a critique of our recently published paper in Cell Reports entitled ‘Large-Scale Cognitive GWAS Meta-Analysis Reveals Tissue-Specific Neural Expression and Potential Nootropic Drug Targets’ (Lam et al., Cell Reports, Vol. 21, 2017, 2597–2613). Specifically, Hill offered several interrelated comments suggesting potential problems with our use of a new analytic method called Multi-Trait Analysis of GWAS (MTAG) (Turley et al., Nature Genetics, Vol. 50, 2018, 229–237). In this brief article, we respond to each of these concerns. Using empirical data, we conclude that our MTAG results do not suffer from ‘inflation in the FDR [false discovery rate]’, as suggested by Hill (Twin Research and Human Genetics, Vol. 21, 2018, 84–88), and are not ‘more relevant to the genetic contributions to education than they are to the genetic contributions to intelligence’.

A population of rigid ryegrass (Lolium rigidum Gaudin) from a field on the Eyre Peninsula, South Australia, was suspected of resistance to thiocarbamate herbicides. Dose–response studies were conducted on this population (EP162) and two susceptible populations (SLR4 and VLR1). The resistant population exhibited cross-resistance to triallate, prosulfocarb, EPTC, and thiobencarb with higher LD50 to triallate (14.9-fold), prosulfocarb (9.4-fold), EPTC (9.7-fold), and thiobencarb (13.6-fold) compared with the susceptible populations SLR4 and VLR1. The resistant population also displayed resistance to trifluralin, pyroxasulfone, and propyzamide. The LD50 of the resistant population was higher for trifluralin (13.8-fold), pyroxasulfone (8.1-fold), and propyzamide (2.7-fold) compared with the susceptible populations. This study documents the first case of field-evolved resistance to thiocarbamate herbicides in L. rigidum.

Weed control is a challenging aspect of pumpkin production. Winter rye mulches may offer growers a means to manage weeds in pumpkin; however, rye degradation leads to an immobilization of soil nitrogen. Combining winter rye with a nitrogen fixing legume such as hairy vetch is an interesting option that may solve this problem. Twelve combinations including three hairy vetch seeding rates, two termination dates and the use or not of glyphosate before rolling cover crops were studied during the 2013 and 2014 growing seasons at the Laval University Agronomic Station in Saint-Augustin-de-Desmaures, Quebec, Canada to evaluate weed control and effects on pumpkin production. Adding hairy vetch to winter rye provided no benefits because of severe winterkill of the legume. Using glyphosate was necessary to prevent rye regrowth. Pumpkin growth was better and yields were higher than in the plots were no glyphosate was used. Mulches established at flowering (Zadoks 69) provided about 2,000 kg ha−1 more aboveground dry biomass than at early heading (Zadoks 51). This high biomass was essential in glyphosate treated plots in order to maintain excellent weed control throughout the growing season. When compared with the no-mulch weed-free control, yield in Zadoks 69+glyphosate treatment was lower in 2013 but comparable in 2014.

Disclosure mandates are pervasive. Though designed to inform consumers, such mandates may lead consumers to draw false inferences – for example, that a product is harmful when it is not. When deciding to require disclosure of an ingredient in or characteristic of a product, regulators may be motivated by evidence that the ingredient or characteristic is harmful to consumers. But they may also be motivated by a belief that consumers have a right to know what they are buying or by interest-group pressure. Consumers who misperceive the regulator's true motive, or mix of motives, will draw false inferences from the mandated disclosure. If consumers think that the disclosure is motivated by evidence of harm, when in fact it is motivated by a belief in a right to know or by interest-group pressure, then they will be inefficiently deterred from purchasing the product. We analyze this general concern about disclosure mandates. We also offer survey evidence demonstrating that the risk of false inferences is serious and real.

Since the discovery of the first pulsar in 1967, over 2500 pulsars have been discovered. Pulsars enable a broad range of studies: from the study of the properties of the interstellar medium and of pulsar magnetospheres to tests of gravity in the strong-field regime and the characterisation of the cosmological gravitation wave background. These reasons are the main drive for searching for more pulsars. A blind pulsar survey, named SPAN512, was initiated with the Nançay Radio Telescope in 2012. Conducted at 1.4 GHz with a sampling time of 64μs and 500-kHz frequency channels, SPAN512 was designed to search for fast and distant pulsars in the Galactic plane. Here we describe the current status of the survey and present the latest discovery, PSR J2055+3829, a 2.08-ms pulsar in a black widow system.

The Numeniini is a tribe of 13 wader species (Scolopacidae, Charadriiformes) of which seven are Near Threatened or globally threatened, including two Critically Endangered. To help inform conservation management and policy responses, we present the results of an expert assessment of the threats that members of this taxonomic group face across migratory flyways. Most threats are increasing in intensity, particularly in non-breeding areas, where habitat loss resulting from residential and commercial development, aquaculture, mining, transport, disturbance, problematic invasive species, pollution and climate change were regarded as having the greatest detrimental impact. Fewer threats (mining, disturbance, problematic native species and climate change) were identified as widely affecting breeding areas. Numeniini populations face the greatest number of non-breeding threats in the East Asian-Australasian Flyway, especially those associated with coastal reclamation; related threats were also identified across the Central and Atlantic Americas, and East Atlantic flyways. Threats on the breeding grounds were greatest in Central and Atlantic Americas, East Atlantic and West Asian flyways. Three priority actions were associated with monitoring and research: to monitor breeding population trends (which for species breeding in remote areas may best be achieved through surveys at key non-breeding sites), to deploy tracking technologies to identify migratory connectivity, and to monitor land-cover change across breeding and non-breeding areas. Two priority actions were focused on conservation and policy responses: to identify and effectively protect key non-breeding sites across all flyways (particularly in the East Asian- Australasian Flyway), and to implement successful conservation interventions at a sufficient scale across human-dominated landscapes for species’ recovery to be achieved. If implemented urgently, these measures in combination have the potential to alter the current population declines of many Numeniini species and provide a template for the conservation of other groups of threatened species.