An endemic plant and the plant-insect visitor network of a dune ecosystem

Network theory increasingly is used to quantify and evaluate mutualistic interactions, such as those among plants and their flower-visiting insects or pollinators. Some plant species have been shown to be important in community structure using network metrics; however, the roles of plant taxa, particularly rare species, are not well understood. Pitcher's thistle (Cirsium pitcheri), a threatened endemic of Great Lakes shorelines, flowers late-June to early-August, when other floral resources may be less abundant or unavailable. We performed 10 min insect visitor observations on all insect pollinated plants in 44–10 m by 10 m plots at Sturgeon Bay, northern lower MI, USA, during C. pitcheri flowering and recorded plant species, number of open flowers, species of insect visiting, and number of visits by insects. Pitcher's thistle received 18.2% of all 600 recorded visits, 61.1% more than the next most visited plant. Pitcher's thistle also received visits from 22 of the 59 different insect species in the network, twice as many as the next most visited plant species. Species-level network analysis metrics showed that Pitcher's thistle was most generalized, with greatest species strength, betweenness, and connectance scores of any other plant taxon, demonstrating network topological importance. Pitcher's thistle received significantly more insect visits relative to its abundance that did any other plant species. Therefore, conservation of C. pitcheri and of other rare taxa, particularly in xeric and low diversity systems, can be significant beyond species-level management and may extend to conservation of the plant-insect community.Joyner Open Access Publishing Support Fun

Dynamics and Adaptive Benefits of Protein Domain Emergence and Arrangements during Plant Genome Evolution

Plant genomes are generally very large, mostly paleopolyploid, and have numerous gene duplicates and complex genomic features such as repeats and transposable elements. Many of these features have been hypothesized to enable plants, which cannot easily escape environmental challenges, to rapidly adapt. Another mechanism, which has recently been well described as a major facilitator of rapid adaptation in bacteria, animals, and fungi but not yet for plants, is modular rearrangement of protein-coding genes. Due to the high precision of profile-based methods, rearrangements can be well captured at the protein level by characterizing the emergence, loss, and rearrangements of protein domains, their structural, functional, and evolutionary building blocks. Here, we study the dynamics of domain rearrangements and explore their adaptive benefit in 27 plant and 3 algal genomes. We use a phylogenomic approach by which we can explain the formation of 88% of all arrangements by single-step events, such as fusion, fission, and terminal loss of domains. We find many domains are lost along every lineage, but at least 500 domains are novel, that is, they are unique to green plants and emerged more or less recently. These novel domains duplicate and rearrange more readily within their genomes than ancient domains and are overproportionally involved in stress response and developmental innovations. Novel domains more often affect regulatory proteins and show a higher degree of structural disorder than ancient domains. Whereas a relatively large and well-conserved core set of single-domain proteins exists, long multi-domain arrangements tend to be species-specific. We find that duplicated genes are more often involved in rearrangements. Although fission events typically impact metabolic proteins, fusion events often create new signaling proteins essential for environmental sensing. Taken together, the high volatility of single domains and complex arrangements in plant genomes demonstrate the importance of modularity for environmental adaptability of plants

Risks to pollinators and pollination from invasive alien species

Invasive alien species modify pollinator biodiversity and the services they provide that underpin ecosystem function and human well-being. Building on the Intergovernmental Science-Policy Platform for Biodiversity and Ecosystem Services (IPBES) global assessment of pollinators and pollination, we synthesize current understanding of invasive alien impacts on pollinators and pollination. Invasive alien species create risks and opportunities for pollinator nutrition, re-organize species interactions to affect native pollination and community stability, and spread and select for virulent diseases. Risks are complex but substantial, and depend greatly on the ecological function and evolutionary history of both the invader and the recipient ecosystem. We highlight evolutionary implications for pollination from invasive alien species, and identify future research directions, key messages and options for decision-making

Floral resource diversity drives bee community diversity in prairie restorations along an agricultural landscape gradient

There are four files for this analysis. The Species Data includes information on what bees were collected at which sites. The site by round file contains the site information in a site by round interaction format for recreating the local diversity analysis and contains floral resource richness values for each unique site by round combination. The site data sheet is simply the site information with floral resource richness pooled over the entire sampling season.These data are for recreating the analysis conducted for "Floral resource diversity drives bee community diversity in prairie restorations along an agricultural landscape gradient" in Journal of Applied EcologyMinnesota Environment and Natural Resources Trust Fund (M.L. 2016, Chp. 186, Sec. 2, Subd. 03a

Identity, memory and cosmopolitanism:The otherness of the past and a right to memory?

Implicated within the relationship between memory and identities at the local, national and international levels is the question of whether there is ‘right to memory’: the human right to have the otherness of the past acknowledged through the creation of symbolic and cultural acts, utterances and expressions. This article outlines the rationale for a right to memory and why the debate is of importance to memory and cultural studies. It outlines some of the relationships understood between memory and identity within memory studies, suggesting that a right to memory requires an understanding of the complex dynamics of memory and identities not only within, but internationally across, borders. It extends the concept of political cosmopolitanism to use as an analytical framework to enable an analysis of current international protocols, showing how they formulate the discursive relationship between identity and memory in four ways that involve a number of contradictions and unresolved tensions