Occurrence and abundance of fungus-dwelling beetles (Ciidae) in boreal forests and clearcuts: habitat associations at two spatial scales

Insect material (> 30,000 individuals) reared from the fruiting bodies of wood-decaying Trametes fungi was compared between old-growth boreal forests and adjacent clearcuts in Finland. Sulcacis affinis and Cis hispidus occurred more frequently and were, on average, more abundant in the clearcuts. Interestingly, Octotemnus glabriculus and Cis boleti had a slightly higher frequency of occurrence in the forests, despite lower resource availability. The former also showed a higher average abundance. On average, the cluster size of Trametes fruiting bodies occurring on woody debris was higher in the clearcuts than in the forests and had a positive effect on species occurrence and abundance in these clusters. The independent effect of the macrohabitat (forest or clearcut) underscores the importance of the macrohabitat where specific resources occur, and this may override the positive effects of resource availability

Artist popularity: do web and social music services agree?

Recommendations based on the most popular products in a catalogue is a common technique when information about users is scarce or absent. In this paper we explore different ways to measure popularity in the music domain; more specifically, we define four indices based on three social music services and on web clicks. Our study shows, first, that for most of the indices the popularity is a rather stable signal, since it barely changes over time; and second, that the ranking of popular artists is heavily dependent on the actual index used to measure the artist's popularity

Darkness visible: reflections on underground ecology

1 Soil science and ecology have developed independently, making it difficult for ecologists to contribute to urgent current debates on the destruction of the global soil resource and its key role in the global carbon cycle. Soils are believed to be exceptionally biodiverse parts of ecosystems, a view confirmed by recent data from the UK Soil Biodiversity Programme at Sourhope, Scotland, where high diversity was a characteristic of small organisms, but not of larger ones. Explaining this difference requires knowledge that we currently lack about the basic biology and biogeography of micro-organisms. 2 It seems inherently plausible that the high levels of biological diversity in soil play some part in determining the ability of soils to undertake ecosystem-level processes, such as carbon and mineral cycling. However, we lack conceptual models to address this issue, and debate about the role of biodiversity in ecosystem processes has centred around the concept of functional redundancy, and has consequently been largely semantic. More precise construction of our experimental questions is needed to advance understanding. 3 These issues are well illustrated by the fungi that form arbuscular mycorrhizas, the Glomeromycota. This ancient symbiosis of plants and fungi is responsible for phosphate uptake in most land plants, and the phylum is generally held to be species-poor and non-specific, with most members readily colonizing any plant species. Molecular techniques have shown both those assumptions to be unsafe, raising questions about what factors have promoted diversification in these fungi. One source of this genetic diversity may be functional diversity. 4 Specificity of the mycorrhizal interaction between plants and fungi would have important ecosystem consequences. One example would be in the control of invasiveness in introduced plant species: surprisingly, naturalized plant species in Britain are disproportionately from mycorrhizal families, suggesting that these fungi may play a role in assisting invasion. 5 What emerges from an attempt to relate biodiversity and ecosystem processes in soil is our extraordinary ignorance about the organisms involved. There are fundamental questions that are now answerable with new techniques and sufficient will, such as how biodiverse are natural soils? Do microbes have biogeography? Are there rare or even endangered microbes

Bacterial adhesion of Streptococcus suis to host cells and its inhibition by carbohydrate ligands

Peer reviewe

CWI and TU Delft at TREC 2013: Contextual Suggestion, Federated Web Search, KBA, and Web Tracks

This paper provides an overview of the work done at the Centrum Wiskunde & Informatica (CWI) and Delft University of Technology (TU Delft) for different tracks of TREC 2013. We participated in the Contextual Suggestion Track, the Federated Web Search Track, the Knowledge Base Acceleration (KBA) Track, and the Web Ad-hoc Track. In the Contextual Suggestion track, we focused on filtering the entire ClueWeb12 collection to generate recommendations according to the provided user profiles and contexts. For the Federated Web Search track, we exploited both categories from ODP and document relevance to merge result lists. In the KBA track, we focused on the Cumulative Citation Recommendation task where we exploited different features to two classification algorithms. For the Web track, we extended an ad-hoc baseline with a proximity model that promotes documents in which the query terms are positioned closer together

Extraesophageal reflux and reflux aspiration in dogs with respiratory diseases and in healthy dogs

Peer reviewe

A major shift to the retention approach for forestry can help resolve some global forest sustainability issues

Approximately 85% of the global forest estate is neither formally protected nor in areas dedicated to intensive wood production (e.g., plantations). Given the spatial extent of unprotected forests, finding management approaches that will sustain their multiple environmental, economic, and cultural values and prevent their conversion to other uses is imperative. The major global challenge of native forest management is further demonstrated by ongoing steep declines in forest biodiversity and carbon stocks. Here, we suggest that an essential part of such management—supplementing the protection of large reserves and sensitive areas within forest landscapes (e.g., aquatic features)—is the adoption of the retention approach in forests where logging occurs. This ecological approach to harvesting provides for permanent retention of important selected structures (e.g., trees and decayed logs) to provide for continuity of ecosystem structure, function, and species composition in the postharvest forest. The retention approach supports the integration of environmental, economic, and cultural values and is broadly applicable to tropical, temperate, and boreal forests, adaptable to different management objectives, and appropriate in different societal settings. The widespread adoption of the retention approach would be one of the most significant changes in management practice since the onset of modern high-yield forestry.Fil: Lindenmayer, D.B.. The Australian National University,; AustraliaFil: Franklin, J.F.. University of Washington; Estados UnidosFil: Lõhmus, A.. University of Tartu; EstoniaFil: Baker, S.C.. University of Tasmania; AustraliaFil: Bauhus, J.. Albert Ludwigs University of Freiburg; AlemaniaFil: Beese, W.. University of Vancouver; CanadáFil: Brodie, A.. No especifíca;Fil: Kiehl, B.. Swedish University of Agricultural Sciences; SueciaFil: Kouki, J.. University of Eastern Finland; FinlandiaFil: Martínez Pastur, Guillermo José. Consejo Nacional de Investigaciones Científicas y Técnicas. Centro Austral de Investigaciones Científicas; ArgentinaFil: Messier, C.. Université du Québec a Montreal; CanadáFil: Neyland, M.. University of Tasmania; AustraliaFil: Palik, B.. No especifíca;Fil: Sverdrup Thygeson, A.. Norwegian University of Life Sciences; NoruegaFil: Volney, J.. Canadian Forest Service; CanadáFil: Wayne, A.. No especifíca;Fil: Gustafsson, L.. Swedish University of Agricultural Sciences; Sueci

Macroecology of ground beetles : Species richness, range size and body size show different geographical patterns across a climatically heterogeneous area

Aim Ecogeographical patterns have been widely studied in endothermic vertebrates, but relatively few studies have simultaneously examined patterns and causes of gradients in species richness, range size and body size in ectothermic insects. We examined patterns in species richness, mean range size and mean body size of ground beetle assemblages across the biogeographical provinces of Northern Europe, a region that was mostly covered by ice sheets during the latest Ice Age and that presents strong contemporary climatic gradients. Location Northern Europe. Methods We used literature information on the occurrence of ground beetles, and analysed patterns in species richness, mean range size and mean body size across the provinces using generalized linear models and boosted regression tree (BRT) analysis. Results We found a strongly decreasing gradient in species richness with increasing latitude, a strongly unimodal range size-latitude relationship, and a weak unimodal body size-latitude relationship in entire ground beetle assemblages. These gradients also varied among four major genera, suggesting that the overall patterns result from the nuances of smaller clades of ground beetles. The relative importance of contemporary environmental drivers also varied between species richness, mean range size and mean body size in BRT analysis. While species richness increased with mean annual temperature, mean range size showed an opposite relationship. Mean body size was most clearly associated with the precipitation of the driest month. Main Conclusions Our findings showed that the latitudinal species richness gradient was strong, and it was closely related to concomitant variation in temperature, whereas variations in mean range size and mean body size were more complex. These findings suggest that the causes for range size and body size variation in insects may be complex, requiring additional insights from studies conducted at local, regional and continental scales