Search results for "Ekologi"
showing 10 items of 383 documents
The effect of a temperature-sensitive prophage on the evolution of virulence in an opportunistic bacterial pathogen.
2022
https://doi.org/10.1111/mec.16638 Abstract Viruses are key actors of ecosystems and have major impacts on global biogeochemical cycles. Prophages deserve particular attention as they are ubiquitous in bacterial genomes and can enter a lytic cycle when triggered by environmental conditions. We explored how temperature affects the interactions between prophages and other biological levels by using an opportunistic pathogen, the bacterium Serratia marcescens, that harbours several prophages and that had undergone an evolution experiment under several temperature regimes. We found that the release of one of the prophages was temperature-sensitive and malleable to evolutionary changes. We furthe…
Balancing food, activity and the dangers of sunlit nights
2019
Living in northern latitudes poses challenges to the animals that live in those habitats. The harsh environment provides a short breeding season where the sunlit summer nights provide little reprieve from visibility to predators and increased risk. In this paper, we tested the activity and food choice patterns of bank voles Myodes glareolus in early spring season, categorized by 18 h of daylight and 6 h of dusk in every day cycle. We found that territorial females showed a less predictable pattern of activity than males that were most active during the hours of dusk. The voles also showed preference to forage on high carbohydrate foods at sunset, while switching over to a more protein and f…
Measuring, comparing and interpreting phenotypic selection on floral scent
2022
Natural selection on floral scent composition is a key element of the hypothesis that pollinators and other floral visitors drive scent evolution. The measure of such selection is complicated by the high-dimensional nature of floral scent data and uncertainty about the cognitive processes involved in scent-mediated communication. We use dimension reduction through reduced-rank regression to jointly estimate a scent composite trait under selection and the strength of selection acting on this trait. To assess and compare variation in selection on scent across species, time and space, we reanalyse 22 datasets on six species from four previous studies. The results agreed qualitatively with prev…
Eco-epidemiology of tick- and rodent-borne pathogens in boreal forests
2017
Infectious diseases are amongst the ten major causes of human mortality worldwide, 60% of them being animal-borne. Variations of abiotic and biotic conditions are likely to modify the transmission of parasites and pathogens within reservoir species, and, as a consequence, alter the zoonotic risk for human. My thesis aims at elucidating the dynamics and mechanisms of the maintenance of ticks, tick-borne pathogens (TBPs) and the Puumala hantavirus (PUUV) in the reservoir host, the bank vole (Myodes glareolus, BV). In Northern Europe, tick-borne diseases are growing in importance to human because of the latitudinal expansion of the tick Ixodes ricinus. Field monitoring revealed that I. ricinus…
Transitions through the dynamics of adaptive cycles : Evolution of the Finnish agrifood system
2023
CONTEXT The escalating sustainability problems of the current agrifood regime call for a radical, systemic transformation. Such a transformation implies a move into a new stability domain, defined by a new set of systemic attractors. These transformations can be conceptualised as regime shifts. OBJECTIVE In this study, we explored the history of the Finnish agrifood system in order to learn from the past transformations of the system and to inform the current attempts to steer its development in a more sustainable direction. METHODS We conducted a qualitative analysis on literature discussing the history of the Finnish agrifood system by utilising the concept of the adaptive cycle, which ca…
Kytkeytyneisyyttä edistävät politiikkakeinot ja vihreä infrastruktuuri : miten luonnon monimuotoisuus saadaan säilytettyä?
2013
Luonnon monimuotoisuuden vähenemistä ei ole saatu pysäytettyä kansainvälisistä sopimuksista huolimatta. Ekologinen kytkeytyneisyys on välttämätöntä, jotta monimuotoisuus voisi säilyä pitkällä aikavälillä. Tämä pro gradu tutkii luonnon monimuotoisuuden ja ekosysteemien prosessien säilyttämistä edistäviä politiikkakeinoja kolmen tutkimuskysymyksen avulla: 1) Kuinka hyvin nykyiset luonnonsuojelupolitiikan keinot edistävät ekologista kytkeytyneisyyttä? 2) Miten luonnonsuojelupolitiikan keinot voisivat edistää ekologista kytkeytyneisyyttä paremmin? 3) Voiko vihreä infrastruktuuri -lähestymistapa auttaa luonnon monimuotoisuuden suojelussa? Ekologinen kytkeytyneisyys vaikuttaa erityisesti lajien l…
The variable position of Arctic charr (Salvelinus alpinus (L.)) in subarctic lake food webs
2013
Lotic life stages of the European river lamprey (Lampetra fluviatilis) : anthropogenic detriment and rehabilitation
2015
The impact of weather and the phase of the rodent cycle on breeding populations of waterbirds in Finnish Lapland
2016
Climate change may affect bird populations both directly by changing the weather conditions, and indirectly through changes in the food chain. While both theoretical and empirical studies have shown climate change having drastic impacts on polar areas, its consequences on Arctic bird species are still poorly known. Here we investigated how weather and changes in predator–prey interactions affected the annual growth rates of sub-Arctic birds by monitoring the breeding numbers of three duck and seven wader species in the alpine tundra of Finnish Lapland during 2005–2015 (except for 2006). We hypothesized that growth rates of waterbirds would be positively associated with warm and dry weather …