The editorial, authored by Diego Ripamonti of Papa Giovanni XXIII Hospital in Bergamo, Maria Santoro and Francesca Ceccherini Silberstein of the University of Rome Tor Vergata, Joseph Fokam of CIRCB in Yaoundé, Cameroon, and Josep M. Llibre of CIBER Epidemiology and Public Health in Badalona, Spain, frames the collection around a central tension. The extensive roll-out of dolutegravir (DTG), a second-generation INSTI, across Africa has been followed by treatment-emergent resistance, largely because of the high prevalence of reverse transcriptase-associated mutations in those regions. Recent estimates place DTG-based antiretroviral therapy resistance rates in Sub-Saharan Africa between 3.9 and 19.6 percent, a range that threatens the durability of the region’s most important therapeutic advance.

Several studies in the collection deploy molecular epidemiology to map how HIV moves through populations. Gan and colleagues used molecular network technology based on HIV pol gene sequences to reveal transmission links among 1,162 men who have sex with men in Northeast China. By combining degree centrality and betweenness centrality, network measures that identify individuals with many connections or positions bridging transmission clusters, the team pinpointed people at high risk of onward transmission. Such targeting matters because undiagnosed people with HIV are the primary drivers of sustained transmission, and network analysis can direct interventions toward the individuals most likely to spread the virus.

Molecular phylogenetics also illuminated the history of epidemics in Eastern Europe and Central Europe. Kirpich and colleagues conducted the first systematic molecular epidemiology study of the HIV epidemic in Belarus, revealing two distinct epidemic waves spanning 1997 to 2005 and 2009 to 2018, each driven by different dominant modes of transmission. Reconstruction of HIV introduction routes confirmed linkages with neighboring Russia and Ukraine. In Hungary, Zsichla and colleagues analyzed partial pol sequences from 1,120 subjects collected between 2008 and 2024, finding that recent infections originate mainly from domestic transmission among men who have sex with men, with increasing introductions of non-B subtypes arriving from Eastern Europe.

Transmission risk is not determined by viral genetics alone but by virological status. He and colleagues surveyed 35,513 people with HIV in Zhejiang province, China, in 2022, categorizing sexual transmission risk across four plasma HIV RNA levels, from minimal risk among those below 50 copies per milliliter on antiretroviral therapy to high risk among those viremic off treatment. The vast majority, 88.6 percent, showed effective virological control on therapy with no transmission risk. However, people aged 16 to 24 years, men, heterosexuals and those with shorter follow-up had increased odds of being at risk, highlighting the need for more focused prevention education. Shi and colleagues tested contact tracing among 1,612 newly diagnosed people with HIV in Yunnan Province, identifying 2,226 close contacts of whom 17.8 percent tested positive for HIV, mostly newly diagnosed. Detection rates were higher among contacts identified by recently infected index cases, suggesting how tracing programs can be refined for efficiency.

Community viral load, the mean of individual plasma HIV RNA levels in a geographical area, serves as a measure of both the effectiveness of the HIV care cascade and the population’s transmission potential. Arsuffi and colleagues reported a retrospective longitudinal single-cohort study in northern Italy confirming improved virological control in the INSTI era, along with shifts in the composition of the top 10 percent of viral loads over time, increasingly including women and non-Italian individuals. Identifying subgroups with greater transmission potential allows more intensive monitoring where it is most needed. Meanwhile, Mayanja and colleagues examined peer education for oral pre-exposure prophylaxis in Uganda, implementing a randomized clinical trial with a qualitative component comparing health worker counselling alone against counselling plus monthly group peer education sessions for four months. They confirmed the negative impact of community perceptions on PrEP use as major social and cultural barriers among adolescent girls and young women, who remain major drivers of incident infections in Africa despite persistently low PrEP uptake, adherence and persistence.

Drug resistance surveillance emerged as a technical cornerstone of the collection. Monitoring transmitted drug resistance is necessary to select appropriate regimens in different settings. Lv and colleagues reported a high prevalence of the V179D/E mutation, 14.8 percent, a polymorphic NNRTI-associated mutation conferring potential low-level resistance, among antiretroviral therapy-naive people with HIV in Guangzhou. Comparing people with pretreatment NNRTI resistance, unique presence of V179D/E and a no-resistance group, the team found this mutation may impair early virological response within the first year of therapy. Ouro-Medeli and colleagues used next-generation sequencing to assess transmitted resistance in 316 treatment-naive subjects in Togo in 2023. Although resistance to first-generation INSTIs was found in 17.2 percent of samples, no resistance mutations to dolutegravir or to protease inhibitors were detected, and mutations were found in only 0.6 percent and 6.3 percent for NRTIs and NNRTIs respectively. These findings confirm low levels of DTG resistance and support the ongoing systematic switch in the region.

The picture darkens in real-world treatment settings. Mac Asaga and colleagues reported a cross-sectional multicenter cohort of 412 subjects in tertiary care in Nigeria, mostly on NNRTI-based regimens. Alongside a high burden of advanced HIV disease, 38 percent with CD4 counts below 200 cells per milliliter, only 26.9 percent had viral loads below 1,000 copies per milliliter and just 10.4 percent below 40 copies per milliliter, with 86 percent of viremic subjects harboring drug-resistant HIV-1. Although tertiary care concentrates individuals with resistant virus and adherence issues, the findings confirm the need for genotyping at failure and for newer drugs in real life. Zewdu and colleagues studied 359 young children and adolescents in Ethiopia since the 2019 introduction of DTG-based regimens, finding that children below 10 years of age, particularly those without parents and with opportunistic infections, were at higher risk of virological failure. Zheng and colleagues analyzed persistent low-level viremia in 9,649 people with HIV on INSTI-sparing regimens in Guizhou Province from 2016 to 2022, finding virological failure rates ranging from 6.1 to 13.7 percent depending on the low-level viremia threshold, and highlighting the need for intensified detection and monitoring among middle-aged and older adults.

Simplification to single tablet regimens has expanded rapidly, reducing drug interactions and toxicity while enhancing adherence. Mengato and colleagues reported the multicenter retrospective observational MOSAICO study in 490 people with HIV on stable therapy across 20 Italian centers who switched to single tablet versus multi-tablet regimens between 2017 and 2019. At week 48, real-world effectiveness confirmed the durability of single tablet regimens, with INSTI-based regimens predominant among dual therapies. Yet Appiedu-Addo and colleagues reviewed persistent gaps that prevent developing regions from managing HIV as a chronic disease as western countries do, pointing to a double standard in virological suppression thresholds, with the World Health Organization accepting below 1,000 copies per milliliter versus below 50 copies per milliliter in western countries, and in access to newer antiviral classes including long-acting options for both treatment and prophylaxis.

Beyond virological control, the collection addresses comorbidities reshaping the lives of people with HIV. Hu and colleagues explored predictors of metabolic dysfunction-associated steatotic liver disease in 814 people with HIV on stable therapy at a Chinese tertiary care center between 2018 and 2025, finding the condition in 14 percent over a median follow-up of 2.8 years, driven largely by the lymphocyte-to-HDL cholesterol ratio rather than systemic inflammation markers. Huang and colleagues analyzed the global burden of syphilis among women of childbearing age from 1990 to 2021 using the Global Burden of Disease 2021 database, with the burden remaining significant in low- and middle-income countries where syphilis in pregnancy is associated with preventable maternal and child adverse events. The editorial concludes that stopping the HIV epidemic where the disease burden is highest will require more intensive virological monitoring in key subgroups, early genotyping at failure, and extended availability of modern antiretroviral classes and long-acting options for both therapy and prophylaxis. As long as these gaps persist, the editors warn, the 95-95-95 UNAIDS targets for 2030 will remain out of reach.

Subject of Research: Editorial: Towards control of the HIV epidemic: trends in epidemiology and emerging drug resistance in the integrase inhibitor era

Article Title: Editorial: Towards control of the HIV epidemic: trends in epidemiology and emerging drug resistance in the integrase inhibitor era

Article References: Ripamonti, D., Santoro, M., Fokam, J., Ceccherini Silberstein, F., & Llibre, J. M. (2026). Editorial: Towards control of the HIV epidemic: trends in epidemiology and emerging drug resistance in the integrase inhibitor era. Frontiers in Epidemiology, 6, Article 1991472. https://doi.org/10.3389/fepid.2026.1991472

Image Credits: AI Generated

DOI: 10.3389/fepid.2026.1991472

Keywords: Editorial, Towards, control, epidemic, trends, epidemiology, emerging, drug, resistance, integrase, inhibitor, scientific research

The adoption figures reveal how far temperate agroforestry still has to go. An analysis of the 2015 European Land Use and Land Cover Survey found that agroforestry was practised on only 1.6 percent of Germany’s agricultural land, despite decades of scientific enthusiasm. The barriers are consistently technical and agronomic: a lack of suitable machinery, limited mechanization options, insufficient knowledge and the absence of established best practices. Management complexity and missing technologies significantly hinder adoption, and mechanization and labour challenges recur across European studies. High initial investments, bureaucratic hurdles and labour-intensive pest and disease control compound the perceived risk, particularly in regions dominated by monocultures and short-term production thinking. Although the European Union and its Member States have expanded funding for agroforestry, and German law has offered greater legal certainty for such systems since 2023 through the regulation governing direct payments, the day-to-day difficulty of running a mixed tree-crop system remains a formidable obstacle.

Within an alley cropping system, the understory vegetation strip is a semi-natural habitat typically dominated by perennial species. It can be sown deliberately during establishment, using flowering or grass mixtures, or it can develop spontaneously from the seed bank and surrounding vegetation. Its management matters enormously because the strip engages in diverse competitive and complementary interactions above and below ground with every other component of the system: the trees, the field margin that extends a few metres into the crop area, the field core beyond it, and the fauna that moves among them. Vegetation in the strip is usually controlled by cutting, mowing or herbicides, with frequencies ranging from several times a year to limit competition with young trees, to once every few years in older systems. Farmers typically pay more attention to the vegetation immediately around trees than to the plants between them within a row.

Ecological succession is one of the central drivers of management demand. When an alley cropping system is established on a former monocropped arable field, post-agricultural vegetation development begins within the strip, following the dynamics of natural ecosystems. If succession proceeds without active management, spontaneous woody vegetation can establish itself, which then reduces the efficiency of subsequent operations such as mowing. Biodiversity adds a second layer of complexity. Agroforestry and its vegetation strips increase the abundance and diversity of several taxonomic groups, largely because greater habitat complexity creates a wider range of food resources, living spaces and microclimatic conditions. But without management, strips can degrade into uniform grass areas with declining flowering species richness and lower abundance of wild bees, honeybees and hoverflies. Plant diversity itself can cut both ways: some pests and pathogens have broad host ranges, so a richer plant community can maintain them as reservoirs and make their control harder.

Farmers also worry, with some justification, that their perennial grass strips may be a source of weed infestations that disperse into the crop area and depress yields. Weeds from the strips can indeed colonise the field margin and field core through plant spillover via different dispersal strategies. However, research shows that this spillover is largely restricted by dominant and competitive perennial and annual species to the field margin, the first ten metres from the grass strips, where the effect on weed assemblages is significant. Compared with conventional arable systems, alley cropping tends to suppress annual disturbance-tolerant weeds while favouring perennial species with creeping growth habits and late, short flowering periods, which can become problematic in no-tillage or reduced-tillage systems.

The strips are simultaneously habitat for pests and for the natural enemies of pests, which makes their ecological role genuinely ambivalent. Increasing habitat complexity can raise herbivore abundance and plant damage in alley cropping. The structural elements of these systems form optimal habitats with rich dietary composition for rodent pests such as the common vole, whose feeding on plants and tree roots, network of runs and girdling of trees can cause damage on a large scale. At the same time, the strips promote predatory birds and predatory arthropods including spiders and carabid beetles, and predation rates in the strips exceed those of simplified arable systems. The lifespan and fecundity of many beneficial insects, especially pollinators, increase within nectar- and pollen-rich plant communities, and the strips provide overwintering habitats that raise spider diversity and pest control potential.

Below ground, the competition is just as intricate. Trees, strip plants and crops engage in complex inter- and intraspecific struggles for water and nutrients. In sandy soils and regions with low annual precipitation, such as parts of north-eastern Germany, cereal, potato and vegetable production is limited by competition for water. Zones of root competition between strip plants, trees and crops can extend several metres into the field margin, where root competition between trees and crops reduces yields, relative growth and soil moisture while increasing tree root dominance and producing high variation in crop root properties. Rooting systems vary along horizontal and vertical gradients depending on tree species, soil properties, sand content, soil layer, stand age, tillage frequency and distance from the tree row, with higher root densities in light soils.

The physical environment of the strips poses challenges that set them apart from ordinary flower strips or field edges. They are littered with stones, branch cuttings from pruning, molehills, dead vegetation that can exceed one metre in height, standing and fallen wooden poles for fastenings, holes created by field mice, plough furrows and tree guards such as plastic or organic mulching. Strip width compounds the difficulty: in narrow strips of only one to two metres, equipment must be compact enough to pass between the trees, while in ploughed systems a furrow at the boundary between strip and alley can create height differences of up to thirty centimetres. As biomass accumulates during the growing season, the vegetation overgrows these objects, further complicating any mechanical operation.

This is where the authors see the opening for smart management. They define smart field robotics as systems capable of autonomously navigating within and between the strips and performing physical management and monitoring tasks. Sensor systems are needed for environment perception, to detect trees and obstacles, and for localisation and positioning, so the robot can follow a specific path or achieve proper coverage of the strips. Processing sensor data with computer vision or object detection models allows detected trees to serve purposes beyond navigation: identifying areas around trees or zones with specific weed pressure would enable more intensive management of those areas within a precision agriculture framework. The same repeated traversal could support tree monitoring, early disease detection, determination of optimal harvest time for fruit trees, and optimal placement of pruning cuts for knot-free high-value timber, all well suited to decision support systems that optimise practices and flag problems early. Equipped with sensors capable of detecting target organisms, the robots could also enable terrestrial biodiversity monitoring, tracking species abundance and community composition over time.

Significant hurdles remain before such robots become routine. Alley cropping sites vary widely in tree species and varieties, age, spacing and management history, and conditions shift across space and time within a single system, so universal software and hardware solutions are unlikely to work without system-specific calibration and tailored training datasets. Reliable operation, such as hoeing around tree bases, demands high spatial precision to avoid mechanical damage to young trees, raising technical complexity and costs. Economic feasibility is a further question, since the strips typically occupy only two to forty percent of the arable field, so dedicated machines must prove their worth within whole-farm operations. Automated mowing has already scaled in predictable environments such as golf courses, sports fields and airfields, and automation of non-routine agricultural tasks can be achieved at economically viable costs, but alley cropping will demand more adaptable machines. If those machines materialise, the study concludes, smart vegetation management could optimise mowing regimes, improve tree health and pest monitoring, reduce labour requirements and strike the long-sought balance between biodiversity conservation and agricultural productivity, potentially transforming the feasibility and broader adoption of agroforestry across temperate landscapes.

Subject of Research: Agriculture

Article Title: Towards smart management of understory vegetation strips in temperate alley cropping systems

Article References: Donat, M., Bajalan, I., & Bloch, R. (2026). Towards smart management of understory vegetation strips in temperate alley cropping systems. One Ecosystem, 11, Article e186665. https://doi.org/10.3897/oneeco.11.e186665

Image Credits: AI Generated

DOI: 10.3897/oneeco.11.e186665

Keywords: agroforestry, alley cropping, understory vegetation strips, field robotics, biodiversity, weed management, precision agriculture, temperate agriculture, Towards, smart, management, understory