Sigma Gamma Epsilon in Recent Years

Patricia L. Daniel covered the first 50 years of Sigma Gamma Epsilon’s existence in The History of Sigma Gamma Epsilon, The First Twenty-Five Years, 1915-1940 and The History of Sigma Gamma Epsilon, The Second Twenty-Five Years, 1941-1965 (Daniel, 1966a, b). Richard L. Ford’s Major Milestones in the Development of Sigma Gamma Epsilon\u27s Core Traditions (Ford, 2012) noted the significant highlights of the Society up until recent times. This article updates the recent noteworthy events of the organization to complete the 100 year history of Sigma Gamma Epsilon. New chapters, recent conventions, the development of two new chapter awards in addition to the loss of two past officers dedicated to Sigma Gamma Epsilon are addressed

43rd Biennial Convention and Centennial Celebration The University of Kansas: March 27-29, 2015

Sigma Gamma Epsilon, the national honor society in the Earth Sciences, held its 43rd Biennial Convention on the campus of the University of Kansas March 27-29, 2015 in conjunction with its centennial celebration. Alpha Chapter, Sigma Gamma Epsilon’s first chapter, hosted the events. During the convention, Dr. Anthony Walton of the Department of Geology at KU led a half-day field excursion on the Pennsylvanian Stratigraphy of Douglas County, Kansas: Glacioeustatically Modulated Cyclic Deposition on a Remarkably Smooth Shelf. This report provides a summary of the deliberations and actions of the participants at the convention and highlights of the field trip and centennial celebration

A global phylogeny of butterflies reveals their evolutionary history, ancestral hosts and biogeographic origins

Butterflies are a diverse and charismatic insect group that are thought to have evolved with plants and dispersed throughout the world in response to key geological events. However, these hypotheses have not been extensively tested because a comprehensive phylogenetic framework and datasets for butterfly larval hosts and global distributions are lacking. We sequenced 391 genes from nearly 2,300 butterfly species, sampled from 90 countries and 28 specimen collections, to reconstruct a new phylogenomic tree of butterflies representing 92% of all genera. Our phylogeny has strong support for nearly all nodes and demonstrates that at least 36 butterfly tribes require reclassification. Divergence time analyses imply an origin similar to 100 million years ago for butterflies and indicate that all but one family were present before the K/Pg extinction event. We aggregated larval host datasets and global distribution records and found that butterflies are likely to have first fed on Fabaceae and originated in what is now the Americas. Soon after the Cretaceous Thermal Maximum, butterflies crossed Beringia and diversified in the Palaeotropics. Our results also reveal that most butterfly species are specialists that feed on only one larval host plant family. However, generalist butterflies that consume two or more plant families usually feed on closely related plants

The James Webb Space Telescope Mission

Twenty-six years ago a small committee report, building on earlier studies, expounded a compelling and poetic vision for the future of astronomy, calling for an infrared-optimized space telescope with an aperture of at least $4m$. With the support of their governments in the US, Europe, and Canada, 20,000 people realized that vision as the $6.5m$ James Webb Space Telescope. A generation of astronomers will celebrate their accomplishments for the life of the mission, potentially as long as 20 years, and beyond. This report and the scientific discoveries that follow are extended thank-you notes to the 20,000 team members. The telescope is working perfectly, with much better image quality than expected. In this and accompanying papers, we give a brief history, describe the observatory, outline its objectives and current observing program, and discuss the inventions and people who made it possible. We cite detailed reports on the design and the measured performance on orbit.Comment: Accepted by PASP for the special issue on The James Webb Space Telescope Overview, 29 pages, 4 figure

Fig. 1 in A global phylogeny of butterflies reveals their evolutionary history, ancestral hosts and biogeographic origins

Fig. 1 | Evolutionaryrelationshipsanddiversificationpatternsofbutterflies. Time-calibratedtreeof 2,244 butterflyspeciesbasedon 391 loci and 150 amino acidpartitions.Branchesshowdistinctchangesindiversification (circles) asestimatedbyclade-specificmodels.Lettersatnodesrefertocladeswith significantrateshifts (seesection 6 of Supplementary Results).Colouredlines intheouterringbesidetipsindicateassociationwithoneof the 13 hostmodules (seesection 17 of Extended Online Methods).Blacklinesinthehostassociation ringindicatespecieswithoutdata,andasterisksdenotenon-monophyletic subfamilies.Supplementary Fig. 1 showsthistreewithvisiblespeciesnamesand agesforallnodes.Published as part of <i>Kawahara, Akito Y., Storer, Caroline, Carvalho, Ana Paula S., Plotkin, David M., Condamine, Fabien L., Braga, Mariana P., Ellis, Emily A., St Laurent, Ryan A., Li, Xuankun, Barve, Vijay, Cai, Liming, Earl, Chandra, Frandsen, Paul B., Owens, Hannah L., Valencia-Montoya, Wendy A., Aduse-Poku, Kwaku, Toussaint, Emmanuel F. A., Dexter, Kelly M., Doleck, Tenzing, Markee, Amanda, Messcher, Rebeccah, Nguyen, Y-Lan, Badon, Jade Aster T., Benítez, Hugo A., Braby, Michael F., Buenavente, Perry A. C., Chan, Wei-Ping, Collins, Steve C., Rabideau Childers, Richard A., Dankowicz, Even, Eastwood, Rod, Fric, Zdenek F., Gott, Riley J., Hall, Jason P. W., Hallwachs, Winnie, Hardy, Nate B., Sipe, Rachel L. Hawkins, Heath, Alan, Hinolan, Jomar D., Homziak, Nicholas T., Hsu, Yu-Feng, Inayoshi, Yutaka, Itliong, Micael G. A., Janzen, Daniel H., Kitching, Ian J., Kunte, Krushnamegh, Lamas, Gerardo, Landis, Michael J., Larsen, Elise A., Larsen, Torben B., Leong, Jing V., Lukhtanov, Vladimir, Maier, Crystal A., Martinez, Jose I., Martins, Dino J., Maruyama, Kiyoshi, Maunsell, Sarah C., Mega, Nicolás Oliveira, Monastyrskii, Alexander, Morais, Ana B. B., Müller, Chris J., Naive, Mark Arcebal K., Nielsen, Gregory, Padrón, Pablo Sebastián, Peggie, Djunijanti, Romanowski, Helena Piccoli, Sáfián, Szabolcs, Saito, Motoki, Schröder, Stefan, Shirey, Vaughn, Soltis, Doug, Soltis, Pamela, Sourakov, Andrei, Talavera, Gerard, Vila, Roger, Vlasanek, Petr, Wang, Houshuai, Warren, Andrew D., Willmott, Keith R., Yago, Masaya, Jetz, Walter, Jarzyna, Marta A., Breinholt, Jesse W., Espeland, Marianne, Ries, Leslie, Guralnick, Robert P., Pierce, Naomi E. & Lohman, David J., 2023, A global phylogeny of butterflies reveals their evolutionary history, ancestral hosts and biogeographic origins, pp. 903-913 in Nature Ecology & Evolution 7 (6)</i> on page 904, DOI: 10.1038/s41559-023-02041-9, <a href="http://zenodo.org/record/7963518">http://zenodo.org/record/7963518</a&gt

BioTIME:a database of biodiversity time series for the Anthropocene

Abstract Motivation: The BioTIME database contains raw data on species identities and abundances in ecological assemblages through time. These data enable users to calculate temporal trends in biodiversity within and amongst assemblages using a broad range of metrics. BioTIME is being developed as a community‐led open‐source database of biodiversity time series. Our goal is to accelerate and facilitate quantitative analysis of temporal patterns of biodiversity in the Anthropocene. Main types of variables included: The database contains 8,777,413 species abundance records, from assemblages consistently sampled for a minimum of 2 years, which need not necessarily be consecutive. In addition, the database contains metadata relating to sampling methodology and contextual information about each record. Spatial location and grain: BioTIME is a global database of 547,161 unique sampling locations spanning the marine, freshwater and terrestrial realms. Grain size varies across datasets from 0.0000000158 km² (158 cm²) to 100 km² (1,000,000,000,000 cm²). Time period and grain: BioTIME records span from 1874 to 2016. The minimal temporal grain across all datasets in BioTIME is a year. Major taxa and level of measurement: BioTIME includes data from 44,440 species across the plant and animal kingdoms, ranging from plants, plankton and terrestrial invertebrates to small and large vertebrates. Software format: .csv and .SQL