Pollinator-flower interactions in gardens during the COVID-19 pandemic lockdown of 2020

During the main COVID-19 global pandemic lockdown period of 2020 an impromptu set of pollination ecologists came together via social media and personal contacts to carry out standardised surveys of the flower visits and plants in gardens. The surveys involved 67 rural, suburban and urban gardens, of various sizes, ranging from 61.18° North in Norway to 37.96° South in Australia, resulting in a data set of 25,174 rows, with each row being a unique interaction record for that date/site/plant species, and comprising almost 47,000 visits to flowers, as well as records of flowers that were not visited by pollinators, for over 1,000 species and varieties belonging to more than 460 genera and 96 plant families. The more than 650 species of flower visitors belong to 12 orders of invertebrates and four of vertebrates. In this first publication from the project, we present a brief description of the data and make it freely available for any researchers to use in the future, the only restriction being that they cite this paper in the first instance. The data generated from these global surveys will provide scientific evidence to help us understand the role that private gardens (in urban, rural and suburban areas) can play in conserving insect pollinators and identify management actions to enhance their potential

Contributions of Bayesian Phylogenetics to Exploring Patterns of Macroevolution in Archaeological Data

Archaeology is often defined by our interest in how cultural traditions change over time and generate patterns of material culture diversity. As acknowledged throughout the history of archaeological research, evolutionary biology broadly parallels these interests by also examining patterns of inheritance and diversity. Today, one of the most common frameworks used in evolutionary biology to infer patterns of macroevolution is Bayesian phylogenetic inference. Despite the popularity of this approach across the sciences, few worked examples can be found in the archaeological literature. This chapter closes this gap by providing a step-by-step application of a Bayesian phylogenetic approach to archaeological data from the Great Plains. We conclude that Bayesian methods are not only able to reconstruct evolutionary relationships in a more robust manner but also ask a new generation of questions about the pace of cultural change, periods of cultural divergence, and rates of cultural diversification