Publications by authors named "D Johan Kotze"

Soil bacterial and fungal communities play fundamental roles in biogeochemical cycles and ecosystem stability. Urbanization alters soil properties and microbial habitats, driving shifts in community composition, yet the divergent responses of bacteria and fungi and their ecological consequences remain inadequately understood. To elucidate these differential responses, we investigated soil bacterial and fungal communities along an urbanization gradient, ranging from undisturbed reference forests to urban parks, across three distinct climatic regions.

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Although resistance genes are a global concern in ecosystems, the underlying factors responsible for their worldwide dissemination, especially in urban greenspaces, are poorly known. To investigate metal and metal resistance genes (MRGs) accumulation in urban parks, we used ICP-MS to analyze metal concentrations and GeoChip functional gene arrays to analyze MRGs abundances in vegetation types with labile and recalcitrant litter across urban parks and non-urban reference sites in three distinct climatic regions: Boreal (Finland), Temperate (Baltimore, USA), and Tropical (Singapore). Our results indicate that metal concentrations and MRGs abundances in park soils increase with park age across climatic zones, especially so for the dominant metals - Fe and Al - accounting for more than 90% of the total metal content, and others, e.

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Article Synopsis
  • Age-at-death estimation is crucial in forensic medicine, and the pulp/tooth area ratio (PAR) method is a popular technique for estimating the age of adult decedents by analyzing the size of the pulp cavity.
  • This study evaluated the PAR method using maxillary canines from South African adults, focusing on reliability, sex bias, and the impact of different types of images (radiographs vs. tooth section images) and whether to include enamel area in calculations.
  • Results showed that the PAR method is reliable and accurate, with tooth section images yielding the best estimates, and excluding the enamel area improved the model's performance across all image types, contributing valuable insights for age estimation in forensic dentistry.
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This study combines clinical and anthropological analyses to investigate the complex cranial pathology of a South African individual from the 19th century. The cranium was examined macroscopically and radiographically. Conducting a standard differential diagnosis was challenging given the complexity and uncommon nature of the pathology and required drawing on relatively sparse paleopathological and clinical case reports.

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