Is there anybody out there? Occupancy of the carnivore guild in a temperate archipelago

Carnivores are important components of ecological communities with wide-ranging effects that vary with carnivore size, natural history, and hunting tactics. Researchers and managers should strive to understand both the presence and distribution of carnivores within their local environment. We studied the carnivore guild in the Apostle Islands, where the distribution and occupancy of carnivores was largely unknown. We monitored 19 islands with 160 functioning camera traps from 2014-2017, from which we collected 203,385 photographs across 49,280 trap nights. We documented 7,291 total wildlife events with 1,970 carnivore events, and detected 10 of the 12 terrestrial carnivores found in Wisconsin. Detection rates for species were generally higher in summer than winter, except for coyotes (Canis latrans) and red foxes (Vulpes vulpes). Finitesample occupancy estimates for carnivores varied across islands, with mean estimated occupancy across islands varying from a high of 0.73 for black bears to a low of 0.21 for gray wolves. Of the potential island biogeography explanatory variables for carnivore occupancy we considered, island size was the most important, followed by distance to the mainland, and then interisland distance. We estimated that terrestrial carnivore species varied in the number of islands they were detected on from 1 island for gray wolves to 13 islands for black bears. Estimated carnivore richness across islands (i.e., the number of carnivores occupying an island) also varied substantively from 1 species on Michigan Island to 10 species on Stockton Island. Island size and connectivity between islands appear important for the persistence of the carnivore community in the Apostle Islands

High-Throughput Sequencing of Six Bamboo Chloroplast Genomes: Phylogenetic Implications for Temperate Woody Bamboos (Poaceae: Bambusoideae)

BACKGROUND: Bambusoideae is the only subfamily that contains woody members in the grass family, Poaceae. In phylogenetic analyses, Bambusoideae, Pooideae and Ehrhartoideae formed the BEP clade, yet the internal relationships of this clade are controversial. The distinctive life history (infrequent flowering and predominance of asexual reproduction) of woody bamboos makes them an interesting but taxonomically difficult group. Phylogenetic analyses based on large DNA fragments could only provide a moderate resolution of woody bamboo relationships, although a robust phylogenetic tree is needed to elucidate their evolutionary history. Phylogenomics is an alternative choice for resolving difficult phylogenies. METHODOLOGY/PRINCIPAL FINDINGS: Here we present the complete nucleotide sequences of six woody bamboo chloroplast (cp) genomes using Illumina sequencing. These genomes are similar to those of other grasses and rather conservative in evolution. We constructed a phylogeny of Poaceae from 24 complete cp genomes including 21 grass species. Within the BEP clade, we found strong support for a sister relationship between Bambusoideae and Pooideae. In a substantial improvement over prior studies, all six nodes within Bambusoideae were supported with ≥0.95 posterior probability from Bayesian inference and 5/6 nodes resolved with 100% bootstrap support in maximum parsimony and maximum likelihood analyses. We found that repeats in the cp genome could provide phylogenetic information, while caution is needed when using indels in phylogenetic analyses based on few selected genes. We also identified relatively rapidly evolving cp genome regions that have the potential to be used for further phylogenetic study in Bambusoideae. CONCLUSIONS/SIGNIFICANCE: The cp genome of Bambusoideae evolved slowly, and phylogenomics based on whole cp genome could be used to resolve major relationships within the subfamily. The difficulty in resolving the diversification among three clades of temperate woody bamboos, even with complete cp genome sequences, suggests that these lineages may have diverged very rapidly

Six new bamboos (Poaceae: Bambusoideae) from the Venezuelan Guayana

Volume: 1Start Page: 76End Page: 8

Agnesia, a new genus of Amazonian herbaceous bamboos (Poaceae: Bambusoideae: Olyreae)

Volume: 3Start Page: 306End Page: 30

A new species of Guadua, G. calderoniana (Poaceae: Bambuseae), with notes on the genus in Bahia, Brazil

Volume: 1Start Page: 27End Page: 3