Search results for "RESOURCE"

Green areas in coastal cities – conflict of interests or stakeholders’ perspectives?

2017

Using long-term ecosystem service and biodiversity data to study the impacts and adaptation options in response to climate change: insights from the …

2013

The International Long Term Ecological Research (ILTER) network can coordinate ecological research to provide observations of the ecosystem changes, and their socio-economic impacts on human societies at different scales. In this paper we demonstrate the importance of the ILTER network in the study and monitoring of environmental changes at a global level. We give examples of how biodiversity and ecosystem service data can be used to study impacts and adaptation options in response to climate change. Analysis of the 107 recent publications from LTER networks representing 21 countries show that LTER studies are often local and heterogeneous. There are some ecosystem types, such as agricultur…

Do small protected habitat patches within boreal production forests provide value for biodiversity conservation? : A systematic review protocol

2019

Background Forest harvesting is the main driver of habitat degradation and biodiversity loss in forests of the boreal zone. To mitigate harmful effects, small-scale habitats with high biodiversity values have been protected within production forests. These include woodland key habitats, and other small-scale habitat patches protected by voluntary conservation action. This article describes a protocol for a systematic review to synthesize the value of small habitat patches left within production landscapes for biodiversity. The topic for this systematic review arose from a discussion with the Finnish forestry sector and was further defined in a stakeholder workshop. Research question: Do sma…

Biodiversity is not (and never has been) a bed of roses!

2011

9 pages; International audience; Over the last decades, the critical study of fossil diversity has led to significant advances in the knowledge of global macroevolutionary patterns of biodiversity. The deep-time history of life on Earth results from background originations and extinctions defining a steady-state, nonstationary equilibrium occasionally perturbed by biotic crises and "explosive" diversifications. More recently, a macroecological approach to the large-scale distribution of extant biodiversity offered new, stimulating perspectives on old theoretical questions and current practical problems in conservation biology. However, time and space are practically distinct, but functional…

Olive Growing in a Time of Change: From Empiricism to Genomics

2016

Since its beginning, the olive crop has been a long-lived agricultural system in the Mediterranean Basin being well adapted to this area. Traditional olive growing, still prevalent in most producing areas, is characterized by low tree density and rainfed orchards with low yield and manually harvested. The traditional olive growing technology is local, diverse, and empirically based. New high density, irrigated, and mechanically harvested orchards has been progressively planted since the end of World War II. These plantations produce high crops at low costs, but they reduce the diversity of cultivars, increase the demand of inputs and the risk of environment unbalances. The expansion and int…

Sex-allocation conflict and sexual selection throughout the lifespan of eusocial colonies.

2018

AbstractModels of sex allocation conflict are central to evolutionary biology but have mostly assumed static decisions, where resource allocation strategies are constant over colony lifespan. Here, we develop a model to study how the evolution of dynamic resource allocation strategies is affected by the queen-worker conflict in annual eusocial insects. We demonstrate that the time of dispersal of sexuals affects the sex allocation ratio through sexual selection on males. Furthermore, our model provides three predictions that depart from established results of classic static allocation models. First, we find that the queen wins the sex allocation conflict, while the workers determine the max…

Spatio-temporal dynamics of genetic variation in the Iberian lynx along its path to extinction reconstructed with ancient DNA

2017

here is the tendency to assume that endangered species have been both genetically and demographically healthier in the past, so that any genetic erosion observed today was caused by their recent decline. The Iberian lynx (Lynx pardinus) suffered a dramatic and continuous decline during the 20th century, and now shows extremely low genome- and species-wide genetic diversity among other signs of genomic erosion. We analyze ancient (N = 10), historical (N = 245), and contemporary (N = 172) samples with microsatellite and mitogenome data to reconstruct the species' demography and investigate patterns of genetic variation across space and time. Iberian lynx populations transitioned from low but …

Morphological, chemical, and genetic diversity of wild myrtle(Myrtus communis L.) populations in Sicily

2016

Myrtus communis L. İs a shrub widespread in the Mediterranean area. The interest in this species is growing, mainly due to its pharmacological and aromatic properties. The overexploitation of wild populations induced increasing degradation of plant cover with serious risk of loss of genetic diversity. This research explored the morphological, chemical, and genetic diversity of wild myrtle populations in Sicily, with the aim to provide a first characterization of a core collection of 36 accessions from 7 localities for future domestication programs. Amplified fragment length polymorphism fingerprinting generated 152 polymorphic fragments. STRUCTURE analysis identified three genetic clusters …

On Effective Biodiversity Conservation, Sustainability of Bioeconomy, and Honesty of the Finnish Forest Policy

2017

Assessment of genetic diversity and relatedness in the Latvian potato genetic resources collection by DArT genotyping

2015

Potato (Solanum tuberosumL.) has been cultivated in Latvia since the 17th century, and formal breeding programmes have been established since the start of the 20th century. The Latvian potato genetic resource collection consists of 83 accessions of Latvian origin, including landraces, old cultivars released starting from the 1930's, modern cultivars and breeding material. These are maintained in field andin vitrocollections. Pedigree information about the potato cultivars is often limited, and the use of hybrids of local cultivars as parents is common in the Latvian potato breeding programme. Ninety-four Latvian potato varieties and breeding lines and some commonly used foreign accessions w…