0000000000583680
AUTHOR
Tiffany Scholier
Urban forest soils harbour distinct and more diverse communities of bacteria and fungi compared to less disturbed forest soils.
Anthropogenic changes to land use drive concomitant changes in biodiversity, including that of the soil microbiota. However, it is not clear how increasing intensity of human disturbance is reflected in the soil microbial communities. To address this issue, we used amplicon sequencing to quantify the microbiota (bacteria and fungi) in the soil of forests (n=312) experiencing four different land uses, national parks (set aside for nature conservation), managed (for forestry purposes), suburban (on the border of an urban area) and urban (fully within a town or city), which broadly represent a gradient of anthropogenic disturbance. Alpha diversity of bacteria and fungi increased with increasin…
Chimpanzees surviving in a fragmented high‐altitude forest landscape of the Congolese Albertine Rift
This paper documents a community of eastern chimpanzees (Pan troglodytes schweinfurthii Giglioli, 1872) inhabiting three relict forest fragments situated on the Lake Albert escarpment, down the Ituri highlands, of eastern Democratic Republic of the Congo (DRC). The area explored had a combined forested surface of ±18.15 km2 in 2017, shrinking by 1.2% per year between 2010 and 2015. Between 2015 and 2017, we found 160 chimpanzee nests along 37.6 km of pilot walks, some up to 2,000 m altitude. Another 123 nests logged along 6.7 km transects led to an estimate of chimpanzee density of 4.62 weaned individuals per square kilometer of forest habitat. Camera‐trap images and direct observations rev…
Global urban environmental change drives adaptation in white clover
Made available in DSpace on 2022-04-28T19:52:06Z (GMT). No. of bitstreams: 0 Previous issue date: 2022-03-18 Urbanization transforms environments in ways that alter biological evolution. We examined whether urban environmental change drives parallel evolution by sampling 110,019 white clover plants from 6169 populations in 160 cities globally. Plants were assayed for a Mendelian antiherbivore defense that also affects tolerance to abiotic stressors. Urban-rural gradients were associated with the evolution of clines in defense in 47% of cities throughout the world. Variation in the strength of clines was explained by environmental changes in drought stress and vegetation cover that varied am…
Ecosystem health and planetary well-being
Healthy ecosystems support the well-being of all organisms on Earth. Yet, the overexploitation of natural resources for human needs and profit has resulted in widespread ecosystem degradation, loss of biodiversity, and climate emergency, which pose fundamental threats to planetary well-being. Impoverished ecosystems may become dysfunctional and fail to provide for the needs of many organisms, including humans and wildlife. Changes in ecosystem functioning and wildlife distributions affect the prevalence and spread of pathogens, with consequences for the health and well-being of human and wildlife communities alike. Increasing contact between humans and domestic and wild animals enable patho…
Defining gut mycobiota for wild animals: a need for caution in assigning authentic resident fungal taxa
Animal gut mycobiota, the community of fungi that reside within the gastrointestinal tract, make an important contribution to host health. Accordingly, there is an emerging interest to quantify the gut mycobiota of wild animals. However, many studies of wild animal gut mycobiota do not distinguish between the fungi that likely can reside within animal gastrointestinal tracts from the fungal taxa that are non-residents, such as macrofungi, lichens or plant symbionts/pathogens that can be ingested as part of the host’s diet. Confounding the non-resident and resident gut fungi may obscure attempts to identify processes associated with the authentic, resident gut mycobiota per se. To redress th…
Cities and their effects on free-living and host-associated microbes
Mikrobit ovat oleellisen tärkeitä elämälle maapallolla, ja niitä esiintyy vapaina ympäristössä tai isäntäorganismeissa tukien ekosysteemien ja/tai isäntien normaalia toimintaa. Ihminen vaikuttaa lähes kaikkiin planeettamme elinympäristöihin aiheuttaen niiden häviämistä ja huonontumista (mukaan lukien kaupunkien rakentaminen) sekä ympäristöjen saastumista ja ilmastonmuutosta. Mikrobiyhteisöjen (kutsutaan myös mikrobiotaksi, mukaan lukien bakteerit ja sienet) odotetaan reagoivan näihin ihmisen aiheuttamiin valintapaineisiin sopeutumalla muuttuvaan ympäristöön. Siten ihmisen aiheuttamat muutokset ympäristössä voivat muovata mikrobiyhteisöjä (sekä vapaasti eläviä että isäntiin liittyviä) muutta…