Search results for "suu"
showing 10 items of 8913 documents
Pathways towards a sustainable future envisioned by early-career conservation researchers
2021
Scientists have warned decision-makers about the severe consequences of the global environmental crisis since the 1970s. Yet ecological degradation continues and little has been done to address climate change. We investigated early-career conservation researchers' (ECR) perspectives on, and prioritization of, actions furthering sustainability. We conducted a survey (n = 67) and an interactive workshop (n = 35) for ECR attendees of the 5th European Congress of Conservation Biology (2018). Building on these data and discussions, we identified ongoing and forthcoming advances in conservation science. These include increased transdisciplinarity, science communication, advocacy in conservati…
Viability selection creates negative heterozygosity–fitness correlations in female Black Grouse Lyrurus tetrix
2017
There is widespread interest in the relationship between individual genetic diversity and fitness–related traits (heterozygosity–fitness correlations, HFC). Most studies found weak continuous increases of fitness with increasing heterozygosity while negative HFC have rarely been reported. Negative HFC are expected in cases of outbreeding depression and outbreeding is rare in natural populations; but negative HFC may also arise through viability selection acting on low heterozygosity individuals at an early stage producing a skew in the heterozygosity distribution leading to negative HFCs. We tested this idea using survival and clutch parameters (egg mass, egg volume, chick mass, clutch size…
Genetic Basis of Body Color and Spotting Pattern in Redheaded Pine Sawfly Larvae (Neodiprion lecontei)
2018
Abstract Pigmentation has emerged as a premier model for understanding the genetic basis of phenotypic evolution, and a growing catalog of color loci is starting to reveal biases in the mutations, genes, and genetic architectures underlying color variation in the wild. However, existing studies have sampled a limited subset of taxa, color traits, and developmental stages. To expand the existing sample of color loci, we performed QTL mapping analyses on two types of larval pigmentation traits that vary among populations of the redheaded pine sawfly (Neodiprion lecontei): carotenoid-based yellow body color and melanin-based spotting pattern. For both traits, our QTL models explained a substan…
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…
Biased predation could promote convergence yet maintain diversity within Müllerian mimicry rings of Oreina leaf beetles.
2019
Mullerian mimicry is a classic example of adaptation, yet Muller's original theory does not account for the diversity often observed in mimicry rings. Here, we aimed to assess how well classical Mullerian mimicry can account for the colour polymorphism found in chemically defended Oreina leaf beetles by using field data and laboratory assays of predator behaviour. We also evaluated the hypothesis that thermoregulation can explain diversity between Oreina mimicry rings. We found that frequencies of each colour morph were positively correlated among species, a critical prediction of Mullerian mimicry. Predators learned to associate colour with chemical defences. Learned avoidance of the green…
Epigenetic and Genetic Contributions to Adaptation in Chlamydomonas
2017
Epigenetic modifications, such as DNA methylation or histone modifications, can be transmitted between cellular or organismal generations. However, there are no experiments measuring their role in adaptation, so here we use experimental evolution to investigate how epigenetic variation can contribute to adaptation. We manipulated DNA methylation and histone acetylation in the unicellular green alga Chlamydomonas reinhardtii both genetically and chemically to change the amount of epigenetic variation generated or transmitted in adapting populations in three different environments (salt stress, phosphate starvation, and high CO2) for two hundred asexual generations. We find that reducing the …
Inbreeding reveals mode of past selection on male reproductive characters in Drosophila melanogaster
2013
Directional dominance is a prerequisite of inbreeding depression. Directionality arises when selection drives alleles that increase fitness to fixation and eliminates dominant deleterious alleles, while deleterious recessives are hidden from it and maintained at low frequencies. Traits under directional selection (i.e., fitness traits) are expected to show directional dominance and therefore an increased susceptibility to inbreeding depression. In contrast, traits under stabilizing selection or weakly linked to fitness are predicted to exhibit little-to-no inbreeding depression. Here, we quantify the extent of inbreeding depression in a range of male reproductive characters and then infer t…
Trade-offs between ecosystem service provision and the predisposition to disturbances: a NFI-based scenario analysis
2020
Abstract Background Scenario analyses that evaluate management effects on the long-term provision and sustainability of forest ecosystem services and biodiversity (ESB) also need to account for disturbances. The objectives of this study were to reveal potential trade-offs and synergies between ESB provision and disturbance predisposition at the scale of a whole country. Methods The empirical scenario model MASSIMO was used to simulate forest development and management from years 2016 to 2106 on 5086 sample plots of the Swiss National Forest Inventory (NFI). We included a business-as-usual (BAU) scenario and four scenarios of increased timber harvesting. Model output was evaluated with indic…
Do the ecological drivers of lake littoral communities match and lead to congruence between organism groups?
2020
AbstractLake littoral environments are heterogeneous, and different organisms typically show specific responses to this environmental variation. We examined local environmental and spatial factors affecting lake littoral biodiversity and the structuring of assemblages of phytoplankton, zooplankton and macroinvertebrates within and among three basins of a large lake system. We explored congruence of species composition and species richness among the studied organism groups to evaluate their general indicator potential to represent spatial variation in other groups. We expected that effects of water chemistry on plankton assemblages were stronger than effects of habitat characteristics. In co…
Airborne-laser-scanning-derived auxiliary information discriminating between broadleaf and conifer trees improves the accuracy of models for predicti…
2020
Managing forests for ecosystem services and biodiversity requires accurate and spatially explicit forest inventory data. A major objective of forest management inventories is to estimate the standing timber volume for certain forest areas. In order to improve the efficiency of an inventory, field based sample-plots can be statistically combined with remote sensing data. Such models usually incorporate auxiliary variables derived from canopy height models. The inclusion of forest type variables, which quantify broadleaf and conifer volume proportions, has been shown to further improve model performance. Currently, the most common way of quantifying broadleaf and conifer forest types is by ca…