Search results for " Systematics."
showing 10 items of 4820 documents
Toward Comprehensive Plant Microbiome Research
2020
Microbes have driven eco-evolutionary adaptations organizing biodiversity from the origin of life. They are ubiquitous and abundant, facilitating the biochemical processes that make Earth habitable and shape ecosystem structures, functions, and services. Recent studies reveal that commensalistic and beneficial microbes associated with wild and domesticated plants may aid in establishing sustainable agriculture for a changing climate. However, developing microbe-based biotechnologies and ecosystem services requires a thorough understanding of the diversity and complexity of microbial interactions with each other and with higher organisms. We discuss the hot and blind spots in contemporary re…
Assessment of the Sabellaria alveolata reefs’ structural features along the Southern coast of Sicily (Strait of Sicily, Mediterranean Sea)
2022
The honeycomb worm Sabellaria alveolata is a gregarious tube-dwelling polychaete that builds remarkable biogenic reefs in marine coastal waters. Sabellaria alveolata reefs are considered valuable marine habitats requiring protection measures for their conservation, as they play a key role in the functioning of coastal ecosystems. Sabellarid reefs are extensively developed along the Atlantic coasts of Europe and reported for the Mediterranean Sea and the Italian coasts, where large reefs have been recorded in several localities. Fragmentary information is available on their health status, Sabellaria reefs thus being listed as “Data Deficient” in the Red List of Marine Habitats. To fill this …
Distance decay 2.0. A global synthesis of taxonomic and functional turnover in ecological communities
2022
Caio Graco-Roza was funded by the Coordination for the Improvement of Higher Education Personnel (CAPES), the Carlos Chagas Filho Research Support Foundation (FAPERJ) and the Ella and Georg Erhnrooth Foundation; Jan Altman by research grants INTER-EXCELLENCE LTAUSA19137 provided by Czech Ministry of Education, Youth and Sports, 20-05840Y of the Czech Science Foundation, and long-term research development project no. RVO 67985939 of the Czech Academy of Sciences; Otso Ovaskainen was funded by Academy of Finland (grant no. 309581), Jane and Aatos Erkko Foundation, Research Council of Norway through its Centres of Excellence Funding Scheme (223257), and the European Research Council (ERC) unde…
High‐resolution 3D forest structure explains ecomorphological trait variation in assemblages of saproxylic beetles
2022
1. Climate, topography and the 3D structure of forests are major drivers affecting local species communities. However, little is known about how the specific functional traits of saproxylic (wood-living) beetles, involved in the recycling of wood, might be affected by those environmental characteristics. 2. Here, we combine ecological and morphological traits available for saproxylic beetles and airborne laser scanning (ALS) data in Bayesian trait-based joint species distribution models to study how traits drive the distributions of more than 230 species in temperate forests of Europe. 3. We found that elevation (as a proxy for temperature and precipitation) and the proportion of conifers p…
Item Response Trees: a recommended method for analyzing categorical data in behavioral studies
2015
Behavioral data are notable for presenting challenges to their statistical analysis, often due to the difficulties in measuring behavior on a quantitative scale. Instead, a range of qualitative alternative responses is recorded. These can often be understood as the outcome of a sequence of binary decisions. For example, faced by a predator, an individual may decide to flee or stay. If it stays, it may decide to freeze or display a threat and if it displays a threat, it may choose from several alternative forms of display. Here we argue that instead of being analyzed using traditional nonparametric statistics or a series of separate analyses split by response categories, this kind of data ca…
Chemical characterization of Anthemis parlatoreana fresh and dried aerial parts by GC and LC chromatographic techniques and evaluation of the antioxi…
2022
Anthemis parlatoreana was collected in the north west coast of Sicily. Fresh and dried aerial parts were subjected to distillation procedure for the extraction and isolation of essential oils. In both fresh and dried samples, the most abundant chemical classes were ketones and esters, represented to a greater extent by β-thujone and β-artemisia acetate, respectively. In dried vegetable material, a high content of α-pinene and δ3-carene was also registered. Aqueous, methanol and ethyl acetate extracts of aerial parts were also investigated in terms of polyphenolic content and antioxidant potential. All the extracts tested showed a quite different quali-quantitative profile and in terms of ch…
Transcriptional Rewiring, Adaptation, and the Role of Gene Duplication in the Metabolism of Ethanol of Saccharomyces cerevisiae
2020
Ethanol is the main by-product of yeast sugar fermentation that affects microbial growth parameters, being considered a dual molecule, a nutrient and a stressor. Previous works demonstrated that the budding yeast arose after an ancient hybridization process resulted in a tier of duplicated genes within its genome, many of them with implications in this ethanol “produce-accumulate-consume” strategy. The evolutionary link between ethanol production, consumption, and tolerance versus ploidy and stability of the hybrids is an ongoing debatable issue. The implication of ancestral duplicates in this metabolic rewiring, and how these duplicates differ transcriptionally, remains unsolved. Here, we …
Sesquiterpene lactones from Anthemis wiedemanniana
2005
Asteraceae; Anthemis wiedemanniana; sesquiterpene lactones; germacranolides; eudesmanolide
A Synopsis of the Genus Stipa (Poaceae) in Middle Asia, Including a Key to Species Identification, an Annotated Checklist, and Phytogeographic Analys…
2020
The genus Stipa L. comprises over 150 species, all native to the Old World, where they grow in warm temperate regions throughout Europe, Asia, and North Africa. It is one of the largest genera in the family Poaceae in Middle Asia, where one of its diversity hotspots is located. However, identification of Middle Asian Stipa species is difficult because of the lack of new, comprehensive taxonomic studies including all of the species recorded in the region. We present a critical review of the Mid-Asian representatives of Stipa, together with an identification key and taxonomic listing. We relied on both published and unpublished information for the taxa involved, many of which are poorly known…
Pre- and Postnatal Predator Cues Shape Offspring Anti-predatory Behavior Similarly in the Bank Vole
2021
Prey animals can assess the risks predators present in different ways. For example, direct cues produced by predators can be used, but also signals produced by prey conspecifics that have engaged in non-lethal predator-prey interactions. These non-lethal interactions can thereby affect the physiology, behavior, and survival of prey individuals, and may affect offspring performance through maternal effects. We investigated how timing of exposure to predation-related cues during early development affects offspring behavior after weaning. Females in the laboratory were exposed during pregnancy or lactation to one of three odor treatments: (1) predator odor (PO) originating from their most comm…