0000000000482476
AUTHOR
Panu Somervuo
A molecular-based identification resource for the arthropods of Finland
Publisher Copyright: © 2021 The Authors. Molecular Ecology Resources published by John Wiley & Sons Ltd. To associate specimens identified by molecular characters to other biological knowledge, we need reference sequences annotated by Linnaean taxonomy. In this study, we (1) report the creation of a comprehensive reference library of DNA barcodes for the arthropods of an entire country (Finland), (2) publish this library, and (3) deliver a new identification tool for insects and spiders, as based on this resource. The reference library contains mtDNA COI barcodes for 11,275 (43%) of 26,437 arthropod species known from Finland, including 10,811 (45%) of 23,956 insect species. To quantify the…
Domain‐specific neural networks improve automated bird sound recognition already with small amount of local data
1. An automatic bird sound recognition system is a useful tool for collecting data of different bird species for ecological analysis. Together with autonomous recording units (ARUs), such a system provides a possibility to collect bird observations on a scale that no human observer could ever match. During the last decades, progress has been made in the field of automatic bird sound recognition, but recognizing bird species from untargeted soundscape recordings remains a challenge. 2. In this article, we demonstrate the workflow for building a global identification model and adjusting it to perform well on the data of autonomous recorders from a specific region. We show how data augmentatio…
Fungal communities decline with urbanization : more in air than in soil
Increasing evidence suggests that degradation of biodiversity in human populated areas is a threat for the ecosystem processes that are relevant for human well-being. Fungi are a megadiverse kingdom that plays a key role in ecosystem processes and affects human well-being. How urbanization influences fungi has remained poorly understood, partially due to the methodological difficulties in comprehensively surveying fungi. Here we show that both aerial and soil fungal communities are greatly poorer in urban than in natural areas. Strikingly, a fivefold reduction in fungal DNA abundance took place in both air and soil samples already at 1 km scale when crossing the edge from natural to urban h…
Spatial cumulant models enable spatially informed treatment strategies and analysis of local interactions in cancer systems
AbstractTheoretical and applied cancer studies that use individual-based models (IBMs) have been limited by the lack of a mathematical formulation that enables rigorous analysis of these models. However, spatial cumulant models (SCMs), which have arisen from theoretical ecology, describe population dynamics generated by a specific family of IBMs, namely spatio-temporal point processes (STPPs). SCMs are spatially resolved population models formulated by a system of differential equations that approximate the dynamics of two STPP-generated summary statistics: first-order spatial cumulants (densities), and second-order spatial cumulants (spatial covariances).We exemplify how SCMs can be used i…
A Successful Crowdsourcing Approach for Bird Sound Classification
Automated recorders are increasingly used in remote sensing of wildlife, yet automated methods of processing the audio remains challenging. Identifying animal sounds with machine learning provides a solution, but optimizing the models requires annotated training data. Producing such data can require much manual effort, which could be alleviated by engaging masses to contribute to research and share the workload. Birdwatchers are experts on identifying bird vocalizations and form an ideal focal audience for a citizen science project aiming for the required multitudes of annotated avian audio data. For this purpose, we launched a web portal that was targeted and advertised to Finnish birdwatc…
Give me a sample of air and I will tell which species are found from your region : Molecular identification of fungi from airborne spore samples
Fungi are a megadiverse group of organisms, they play major roles in ecosystem functioning and are important for human health, food production and nature conservation. Our knowledge on fungal diversity and fungal ecology is however still very limited, in part because surveying and identifying fungi is time demanding and requires expert knowledge. We present a method that allows anyone to generate a list of fungal species likely to occur in a region of interest, with minimal effort and without requiring taxonomical expertise. The method consists of using a cyclone sampler to acquire fungal spores directly from the air to an Eppendorf tube, and applying DNA barcoding with probabilistic specie…
Data from: Give me a sample of air and I will tell which species are found from your region – molecular identification of fungi from airborne spore samples
Fungi are a megadiverse group of organisms, they play major roles in ecosystem functioning, and are important for human health, food production, and nature conservation. Our knowledge on fungal diversity and fungal ecology is however still very limited, in part because surveying and identifying fungi is time demanding and requires expert knowledge. We present a method that allows anyone to generate a list of fungal species likely to occur in a region of interest, with minimal effort and without requiring taxonomical expertise. The method consists of using a cyclone sampler to acquire fungal spores directly from the air to an Eppendorf tube, and applying DNA barcoding with probabilistic spec…