The European Butterfly Indicator for grassland species: 1990-2013

This report presents the fifth version of the European Grassland Butterfly Indicator, one of the EU biodiversity indicators of the European Environment Agency

Continuous suspension of lipids in oil by the selective removal of chloroform via microfluidic membrane separation

A continuous flow method for the suspension of 1,2-dioleoyl-sn-glycero-3-phosphocholine (DOPC) lipids in oil using a microfluidic platform is presented. The system consists of a microfluidic device housing a semipermeable membrane, a vacuum pump, and a syringe pump. Separation is achieved using a counter current flow of chloroform and a lipid containing oil stream, driven by the syringe pump and vacuum. Using such a system, a high efficiency extraction method was realized through the use of a semipermeable polydimethylsiloxane (PDMS) membrane on an anodized aluminum oxide (AAO) support. For a liquid flow rate of 5 μL/min, an air flow rate of ∼100 mL/min, and initial chloroform concentrations between 0.245 and 1.619 M, extraction rates of 93.5% to 97.9% and a retentate stream purity of between 99.79% and 99.29% were achieved.ISSN:1520-5045ISSN:0888-588

Declines in common, widespread butterflies in a landscape under intense human use.

Analyses of species' population losses typically show a dichotomy between strongly affected, rare, and localized species and apparently unaffected, common, and widespread species. We analyzed 16 years (1992-2007) of butterfly transect count data from The Netherlands in a reevaluation of the trends of common, widespread species. Fifty-five percent (11 of 20 species) of these species suffered severe declines in distribution and abundance. Overall, cumulative butterfly abundance declined by around 30%. Some of the species in decline used to be omnipresent in gardens and parks, and 2 of the species were previously considered agricultural pests. Based on their declines over the last 16 years, 2 of the 20 species (Lasiommata megera and Gonepteryx rhamni) reached endangered status in The Netherlands under the IUCN (International Union for Conservation of Nature) population-decline criterion, and 2 species (Inachis io and Thymelicus lineola) met vulnerable criterion. Butterflies in farmland, urban, and particularly woodland areas showed the largest decline in species abundance. The abundance of species associated with vegetation types found mainly in nature reserves (dunes, heathland, and, to a lesser extent, seminatural grassland) increased or remained stable. The decline of widespread species requires additional conservation strategies in the wider landscape

Can we predict the distribution of heathland butterflies with heathland bird data ?

National or regional conservation strategies are usually based on available species distribution maps. However, very few taxonomic groups achieve a full coverage of the focal region. Distribution data of well-mapped taxonomic groups could help predict the distribution of less well-mapped groups and thus fill gaps in distribution maps. Here, we predict the distribution of five heathland butterflies in Flanders (north Belgium) using typical heathland bird distribution data as predictor variables. We compare predictions with those using only biotope or a combination of both biotope and bird data as variables. In addition, we test the transferability of ‘bird’, biotope and combined models to the Netherlands, an ecologically similar region. Transferability was tested in three separate sandy regions in the Netherlands at different distances from the region in which the models were built. For each of the five heathland butterflies, we applied logistic regressions on ten random model sets and tested the models on ten random evaluation sets within Flanders. We used the area under the curve (AUC) of the receiver-operating characteristics (ROC) plots to estimate model accuracy. Overall, bird models performed significantly better than biotope models but were not significantly different from the combined models in Flanders. In the Netherlands, the transferred biotope and the combined models performed better than the transferred ‘bird models’. We conclude that on a local scale, birds can, to some extent, serve as proxies for biotope quality, but that biotope models are more robust when transferred to another region

In vitro gene expression within membrane-free coacervate protocells

Cell-free gene expression of a fluorescent protein (mCherry) is demon-strated within the molecularly crowded matrix of a polysaccharide/polypeptide coacervate.ISSN:1359-7345ISSN:1364-548