Unresolved Legacies: Aboriginal Food Production Landscapes, Ecosystem Recovery Strategies & Land Use Planning for Conservation of the Garry Oak Ecosystems in South-Western British Columbia

In Canada, aboriginal legacies in landscapes and their implications for land use planning for biodiversity conservation remain poorly acknowledged. Similarly, inter-cultural conversations on values about and priorities for biological resources and habitat protection remain under-developed. This essay begins with a rhetorical question. Will it be possible to forge successful ecosystem recovery strategies, to maintain all elements of local biological diversity through land use planning, without far deeper cognizance of the aboriginal legacies in Canadian landscapes? I do not think so. This discussion, from the drier enclaves on the south coast of British Columbia, centres on a federally funded ecosystem recovery team in the first four years of its operation from 1999 to 2003 and the near total lack of outreach to, and engagement with, aboriginal people and First Nations. These were the same years as the final phase of development of Canada’s relatively weak Species At Risk Act (SARA).2

Lost Landscapes and the Spatial Contextualization of Queerness

Lesbian, gay, and bisexual1 habitation of outdoor and indoor environments has become a major topic in queer2 theory and spatial issues3 have come to represent new frontiers in the politics of our various communities. Homophobia, violence, and isolation in outdoor spaces arc coming to be framed as environmental problems. A host of possibilities for new alliances around queer space is emerging. But it is first necessary to ask a number of questions before specific interventions in the condition of outdoor areas can better define and strengthen our communities and improve our lives

Part 1: From Queer/Natures to Queer Ecologies

This is a portion of a roundtable discussion on queer ecologies held on 11 September 2014. The roundtable is also available as a podcast and was produced in collaboration with CoHearence, an initiative of graduate students in the Faculty of Environmental Studies suppored by NiCHE (Network in Canadian History and Environment)

Part 3: Politics, Resistance, Alliances, and Imbroglios

This is a portion of a roundtable discussion on queer ecologies held on 11 September 2014. The roundtable is also available as a podcast and was produced in collaboration with CoHearence, an initiative of graduate students in the Faculty of Environmental Studies suppored by NiCHE (Network in Canadian History and Environment)

Part 2: Examining Heteronormativity, Reprocentricity, and Ecology

This is a portion of a roundtable discussion on queer ecologies held on 11 September 2014. The roundtable is also available as a podcast and was produced in collaboration with CoHearence, an initiative of graduate students in the Faculty of Environmental Studies suppored by NiCHE (Network in Canadian History and Environment)

Part 4: Queer Ecologies at the Limits

This is a portion of a roundtable discussion on queer ecologies held on 11 September 2014. The roundtable is also available as a podcast and was produced in collaboration with CoHearence, an initiative of graduate students in the Faculty of Environmental Studies suppored by NiCHE (Network in Canadian History and Environment)

Prevalence and architecture of de novo mutations in developmental disorders.

The genomes of individuals with severe, undiagnosed developmental disorders are enriched in damaging de novo mutations (DNMs) in developmentally important genes. Here we have sequenced the exomes of 4,293 families containing individuals with developmental disorders, and meta-analysed these data with data from another 3,287 individuals with similar disorders. We show that the most important factors influencing the diagnostic yield of DNMs are the sex of the affected individual, the relatedness of their parents, whether close relatives are affected and the parental ages. We identified 94 genes enriched in damaging DNMs, including 14 that previously lacked compelling evidence of involvement in developmental disorders. We have also characterized the phenotypic diversity among these disorders. We estimate that 42% of our cohort carry pathogenic DNMs in coding sequences; approximately half of these DNMs disrupt gene function and the remainder result in altered protein function. We estimate that developmental disorders caused by DNMs have an average prevalence of 1 in 213 to 1 in 448 births, depending on parental age. Given current global demographics, this equates to almost 400,000 children born per year

Finishing the euchromatic sequence of the human genome

The sequence of the human genome encodes the genetic instructions for human physiology, as well as rich information about human evolution. In 2001, the International Human Genome Sequencing Consortium reported a draft sequence of the euchromatic portion of the human genome. Since then, the international collaboration has worked to convert this draft into a genome sequence with high accuracy and nearly complete coverage. Here, we report the result of this finishing process. The current genome sequence (Build 35) contains 2.85 billion nucleotides interrupted by only 341 gaps. It covers ∼99% of the euchromatic genome and is accurate to an error rate of ∼1 event per 100,000 bases. Many of the remaining euchromatic gaps are associated with segmental duplications and will require focused work with new methods. The near-complete sequence, the first for a vertebrate, greatly improves the precision of biological analyses of the human genome including studies of gene number, birth and death. Notably, the human enome seems to encode only 20,000-25,000 protein-coding genes. The genome sequence reported here should serve as a firm foundation for biomedical research in the decades ahead