Looking forward through the past: identification of 50 priority research questions in palaeoecology

1. Priority question exercises are becoming an increasingly common tool to frame future agendas in conservation and ecological science. They are an effective way to identify research foci that advance the field and that also have high policy and conservation relevance. 2. To date, there has been no coherent synthesis of key questions and priority research areas for palaeoecology, which combines biological, geochemical and molecular techniques in order to reconstruct past ecological and environmental systems on time-scales from decades to millions of years. 3. We adapted a well-established methodology to identify 50 priority research questions in palaeoecology. Using a set of criteria designed to identify realistic and achievable research goals, we selected questions from a pool submitted by the international palaeoecology research community and relevant policy practitioners. 4. The integration of online participation, both before and during the workshop, increased international engagement in question selection. 5. The questions selected are structured around six themes: human–environment interactions in the Anthropocene; biodiversity, conservation and novel ecosystems; biodiversity over long time-scales; ecosystem processes and biogeochemical cycling; comparing, combining and synthesizing information from multiple records; and new developments in palaeoecology. 6. Future opportunities in palaeoecology are related to improved incorporation of uncertainty into reconstructions, an enhanced understanding of ecological and evolutionary dynamics and processes and the continued application of long-term data for better-informed landscape management

Improving conservation biology research in Southeast Asia

10.1046/j.1523-1739.2000.99416.xConservation Biology1441211-1212CBIO

The development of bilingual children's early spelling in English

10.1037/0022-0663.98.4.868Journal of Educational Psychology984868-87

New records of butterfly species for Pulau Tioman, Peninsular Malaysia

Raffles Bulletin of Zoology476 SUPPL.271-27

Teasing Apart Mountain Uplift, Climate Change and Biotic Drivers of Species Diversification

International audienceIdentifying the causes of species diversification and extinction remains a major challenge. Such biodiversity dynamics can be influenced by two major classes of factors: (i) biotic (intrinsic to the species, such as biological traits or species interactions), as in the Red Queen scenario; and (ii) abiotic (extrinsic to the species, such as climatic and geological events), as in the Court Jester scenario. Both classes are likely at play in most montane systems, where the interaction between mountain building and climate change may generate species diversity in a variety of ways; for example, via increased environmental heterogeneity, the generation of local habitats, the immigration of species or the formation of island-like ecological opportunities. Teasing apart the relative contributions of abiotic and biotic processes is challenging, because both may occur simultaneously and interact with each other, and a statistical framework that enables the separation of their relative contributions is still lacking. Here, we review the origin and evolution of biodiversity within a unified phylogenetic framework that explicitly disentangles the influences of mountain orogeny, climate change and ecological interactions. Relying on recently developed birth-death models, we build a model-testing approach that compares various diversification scenarios. Our approach includes a series of biologically realistic models to estimate speciation and extinction rates using a phylogeny, while assessing the relationship between diversification in the focal clade with an environmental variable, with growing species diversity within the focal clade or with the diversity of interacting clades. We illustrate the usefulness of this approach on two clades of Andean hummingbirds. We find that hummingbird speciation is positively correlated with temperature throughout their history. In contrast, speciation is negatively correlated with paleo-elevation, indicating that hummingbirds diversified faster in the early stages of the Andean orogeny. The analytical framework and empirical examples presented here demonstrate the power of combining phylogenetic and Earth-science models to untangle the complex interplay of geology, climate and ecology in generating biodiversity

Age-dependent extinction and the neutral theory of biodiversity

Red Queen (RQ) theory states that adaptation does not protect species from extinction because their competitors are continually adapting alongside them. RQ was founded on the apparent independence of extinction risk and fossil taxon age, but analytical developments have since demonstrated that age-dependent extinction is widespread, usually most intense among young species. Here, we develop ecological neutral theory as a general framework for modeling fossil species survivorship under incomplete sampling. We show that it provides an excellent fit to a high-resolution dataset of species durations for Paleozoic zooplankton and more broadly can account for age-dependent extinction seen throughout the fossil record. Unlike widely used alternative models, the neutral model has parameters with biological meaning, thereby generating testable hypotheses on changes in ancient ecosystems. The success of this approach suggests reinterpretations of mass extinctions and of scaling in eco-evolutionary systems. Intense extinction among young species does not necessarily refute RQ or require a special explanation but can instead be parsimoniously explained by neutral dynamics operating across species regardless of age. Copyright © 2023 the Author(s). Published by PNAS.Open access articleThis item from the UA Faculty Publications collection is made available by the University of Arizona with support from the University of Arizona Libraries. If you have questions, please contact us at [email protected]

Nickel salicided source/drain extensions for performance improvement in ultrascaled (Sub 10 nm) Si-nanowire transistors

10.1109/LED.2009.2010532IEEE Electron Device Letters302195-197EDLE

Nanowire FETs for Low Power CMOS Applications Featuring Novel Gate-All-Around Single Metal FUSI Gates with Dual φ m and v T Tune-ability

10.1109/IEDM.2008.4796836Technical Digest - International Electron Devices Meeting, IEDM-TDIM