Molecular, morphological and acoustic identification of Eumops maurus and Eumops hansae (Chiroptera: Molossidae) with new reports from Central Amazonia

Eumops maurus and Eumops hansae are rarely captured Neotropical molossid bats for which information on taxonomy, natural history, and spatial distribution are scarce. This translates into a poor understanding of their ecology and limits the delimitation of useful characters for their identification. Here, we describe records of these two molossids from the Central Brazilian Amazon, providing data on their external and craniodental morphology, DNA barcode (COI) sequences complemented by acoustic data for the species. Morphological characters, DNA sequence data and phylogenetic relationships within the genus Eumops were consistent with those previously described for both species. Echolocation call characteristics did not differ significantly so as to be useful for separating E. maurus and E. hansae from other congeners. Our records are, respectively the first and the second for Central Amazonia as one individual previously attributed to Eumops amazonicus from Manaus may be considered a junior synonym for E. hansae. These new records increase the extent of the species’ known ranges, partially filling in previous existing gaps in their distribution in central South America. Our data further suggest that these molossid bats forage in a wider range of habitats than previously thought

U.S. Natural Resources and Climate Change: Concepts and Approaches for Management Adaptation

Public lands and waters in the United States traditionally have been managed using frameworks and objectives that were established under an implicit assumption of stable climatic conditions. However, projected climatic changes render this assumption invalid. Here, we summarize general principles for management adaptations that have emerged from a major literature review. These general principles cover many topics including: (1) how to assess climate impacts to ecosystem processes that are key to management goals; (2) using management practices to support ecosystem resilience; (3) converting barriers that may inhibit management responses into opportunities for successful implementation; and (4) promoting flexible decision making that takes into account challenges of scale and thresholds. To date, the literature on management adaptations to climate change has mostly focused on strategies for bolstering the resilience of ecosystems to persist in their current states. Yet in the longer term, it is anticipated that climate change will push certain ecosystems and species beyond their capacity to recover. When managing to support resilience becomes infeasible, adaptation may require more than simply changing management practices—it may require changing management goals and managing transitions to new ecosystem states. After transitions have occurred, management will again support resilience—this time for a new ecosystem state. Thus, successful management of natural resources in the context of climate change will require recognition on the part of managers and decisions makers of the need to cycle between “managing for resilience” and “managing for change.

Drivers and Socioeconomic Impacts of Tourism Participation in Protected Areas

Nature-based tourism has the potential to enhance global biodiversity conservation by providing alternative livelihood strategies for local people, which may alleviate poverty in and around protected areas. Despite the popularity of the concept of nature-based tourism as an integrated conservation and development tool, empirical research on its actual socioeconomic benefits, on the distributional pattern of these benefits, and on its direct driving factors is lacking, because relevant long-term data are rarely available. In a multi-year study in Wolong Nature Reserve, China, we followed a representative sample of 220 local households from 1999 to 2007 to investigate the diverse benefits that these households received from recent development of nature-based tourism in the area. Within eight years, the number of households directly participating in tourism activities increased from nine to sixty. In addition, about two-thirds of the other households received indirect financial benefits from tourism. We constructed an empirical household economic model to identify the factors that led to household-level participation in tourism. The results reveal the effects of local households' livelihood assets (i.e., financial, human, natural, physical, and social capitals) on the likelihood to participate directly in tourism. In general, households with greater financial (e.g., income), physical (e.g., access to key tourism sites), human (e.g., education), and social (e.g., kinship with local government officials) capitals and less natural capital (e.g., cropland) were more likely to participate in tourism activities. We found that residents in households participating in tourism tended to perceive more non-financial benefits in addition to more negative environmental impacts of tourism compared with households not participating in tourism. These findings suggest that socioeconomic impact analysis and change monitoring should be included in nature-based tourism management systems for long-term sustainability of protected areas

The Marine Microbial Eukaryote Transcriptome Sequencing Project (MMETSP): illuminating the functional diversity of eukaryotic life in the oceans through transcriptome sequencing.

Microbial ecology is plagued by problems of an abstract nature. Cell sizes are so small and population sizes so large that both are virtually incomprehensible. Niches are so far from our everyday experience as to make their very definition elusive. Organisms that may be abundant and critical to our survival are little understood, seldom described and/or cultured, and sometimes yet to be even seen. One way to confront these problems is to use data of an even more abstract nature: molecular sequence data. Massive environmental nucleic acid sequencing, such as metagenomics or metatranscriptomics, promises functional analysis of microbial communities as a whole, without prior knowledge of which organisms are in the environment or exactly how they are interacting. But sequence-based ecological studies nearly always use a comparative approach, and that requires relevant reference sequences, which are an extremely limited resource when it comes to microbial eukaryotes. In practice, this means sequence databases need to be populated with enormous quantities of data for which we have some certainties about the source. Most important is the taxonomic identity of the organism from which a sequence is derived and as much functional identification of the encoded proteins as possible. In an ideal world, such information would be available as a large set of complete, well curated, and annotated genomes for all the major organisms from the environment in question. Reality substantially diverges from this ideal, but at least for bacterial molecular ecology, there is a database consisting of thousands of complete genomes from a wide range of taxa, supplemented by a phylogeny-driven approach to diversifying genomics [2]. For eukaryotes, the number of available genomes is far, far fewer, and we have relied much more heavily on random growth of sequence databases, raising the question as to whether this is fit for purpose

Habitat Fragmentation, Variable Edge Effects, and the Landscape-Divergence Hypothesis

Edge effects are major drivers of change in many fragmented landscapes, but are often highly variable in space and time. Here we assess variability in edge effects altering Amazon forest dynamics, plant community composition, invading species, and carbon storage, in the world's largest and longest-running experimental study of habitat fragmentation. Despite detailed knowledge of local landscape conditions, spatial variability in edge effects was only partially foreseeable: relatively predictable effects were caused by the differing proximity of plots to forest edge and varying matrix vegetation, but windstorms generated much random variability. Temporal variability in edge phenomena was also only partially predictable: forest dynamics varied somewhat with fragment age, but also fluctuated markedly over time, evidently because of sporadic droughts and windstorms. Given the acute sensitivity of habitat fragments to local landscape and weather dynamics, we predict that fragments within the same landscape will tend to converge in species composition, whereas those in different landscapes will diverge in composition. This ‘landscape-divergence hypothesis’, if generally valid, will have key implications for biodiversity-conservation strategies and for understanding the dynamics of fragmented ecosystems

Iron Behaving Badly: Inappropriate Iron Chelation as a Major Contributor to the Aetiology of Vascular and Other Progressive Inflammatory and Degenerative Diseases

The production of peroxide and superoxide is an inevitable consequence of aerobic metabolism, and while these particular "reactive oxygen species" (ROSs) can exhibit a number of biological effects, they are not of themselves excessively reactive and thus they are not especially damaging at physiological concentrations. However, their reactions with poorly liganded iron species can lead to the catalytic production of the very reactive and dangerous hydroxyl radical, which is exceptionally damaging, and a major cause of chronic inflammation. We review the considerable and wide-ranging evidence for the involvement of this combination of (su)peroxide and poorly liganded iron in a large number of physiological and indeed pathological processes and inflammatory disorders, especially those involving the progressive degradation of cellular and organismal performance. These diseases share a great many similarities and thus might be considered to have a common cause (i.e. iron-catalysed free radical and especially hydroxyl radical generation). The studies reviewed include those focused on a series of cardiovascular, metabolic and neurological diseases, where iron can be found at the sites of plaques and lesions, as well as studies showing the significance of iron to aging and longevity. The effective chelation of iron by natural or synthetic ligands is thus of major physiological (and potentially therapeutic) importance. As systems properties, we need to recognise that physiological observables have multiple molecular causes, and studying them in isolation leads to inconsistent patterns of apparent causality when it is the simultaneous combination of multiple factors that is responsible. This explains, for instance, the decidedly mixed effects of antioxidants that have been observed, etc...Comment: 159 pages, including 9 Figs and 2184 reference

Multispectral analysis of Northern Hemisphere temperature records over the last five millennia

Aiming to describe spatio-temporal climate variability on decadal-to-centennial time scales and longer, we analyzed a data set of 26 proxy records extending back 1,000–5,000 years; all records chosen were calibrated to yield temperatures. The seven irregularly sampled series in the data set were interpolated to a regular grid by optimized methods and then two advanced spectral methods—namely singular-spectrum analysis (SSA) and the continuous wavelet transform—were applied to individual series to separate significant oscillations from the high noise background. This univariate analysis identified several common periods across many of the 26 proxy records: a millennial trend, as well as oscillations of about 100 and 200 years, and a broad peak in the 40–70-year band. To study common NH oscillations, we then applied Multichannel SSA. Temperature variations on time scales longer than 600 years appear in our analysis as a dominant trend component, which shows climate features consistent with the Medieval Warm Period and the Little Ice Age. Statistically significant NH-wide peaks appear at 330, 250 and 110 years, as well as in a broad 50–80-year band. Strong variability centers in several bands are located around the North Atlantic basin and are in phase opposition between Greenland and Western Europe

Modeling the possible role of iodine oxides in atmospheric new particle formation

We studied the possible role of iodine oxides in atmospheric new particle formation with the one-dimensional marine boundary layer model MISTRA, which includes chemistry in the gas and aerosol phase as well as aerosol microphysics. The chemical reaction set focuses on halogen (Cl-Br-I) chemistry. We included a two-step nucleation parameterization, where in the first step, the 'real' nucleation process is parameterized, i.e., the formation of cluster-sized nuclei via homogeneous condensation of gases. We considered both ternary sulfuric acid-ammonia-water nucleation and homomolecular homogeneous OIO nucleation. For the latter, we derived a parameterization based on combined laboratory-model studies. The second step of the nucleation parameterization treats the 'apparent' nucleation rate, i.e., the growth of clusters into the model's lowest size bin by condensable vapors such as OIO. We compared different scenarios for a clean marine versus a polluted continental background atmosphere. In every scenario, we assumed the air to move, independent of its origin, first over a coastal region (where it is exposed to surface fluxes of different reactive iodine precursors) and later over the open ocean. According to these sensitivity studies, in the clean marine background atmosphere OIO can be responsible for both homogeneous nuclei formation and the subsequent growth of the clusters to detectable sizes. In contrast to this, in the continental case with its higher levels of pollutants, gas phase OIO mixing ratios, and hence related nucleation rates, are significantly lower. Compared to ternary H₂SO₄-NH₃-H₂O nucleation, homogeneous OIO nucleation can be neglected for new particle formation in this case, but OIO can contribute to early particle growth, i.e., to apparent nucleation rates. In general, we found OIO to be more important for the growth of newly formed particles than for the formation of new nuclei. According to our studies, observations of particle 'bursts' can only be explained by hot spot-like, not by homogeneously distributed emissions

Relevance of ion-induced nucleation of sulfuric acid and water in the lower troposphere over the boreal forest at northern latitudes

The relevance of ion-induced nucleation of sulfuric acid and water (IINSW) in the troposphere over the boreal forest at northern latitudes is investigated by combining two existing and previously published models (MALTE - model to predict new aerosol formation in the lower troposphere; PARNUC - a parameterized steady-state model of neutral and ion-induced nucleation of sulfuric acid and water for atmospheric conditions). Simulations were performed for 4 days with observed new particle formation at ground level by using input data from the SMEAR II station in Hyytiälä, Finland. The selected days were chosen to cover a wide range of values of the parameters most relevant for IINSW. The results showed that ion-induced nucleation of sulfuric acid and water can contribute up to 15% to the total amount of newly formed particles in the size range of 3-10 nm inside the mixed layer at the Hyytiälä site. The importance of IINSW seemed to increase in the free troposphere above the boundary layer, however, lack of measurements in the vertical structure of the input parameters suggest that the model results are burdened with high uncertainties. © 2008 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved