Socio-eco-evolutionary dynamics in cities

Cities are uniquely complex systems regulated by interactions and feedbacks between nature and human society. Characteristics of human society-including culture, economics, technology and politics-underlie social patterns and activity, creating a heterogeneous environment that can influence and be influenced by both ecological and evolutionary processes. Increasing research on urban ecology and evolutionary biology has coincided with growing interest in eco-evolutionary dynamics, which encompasses the interactions and reciprocal feedbacks between evolution and ecology. Research on both urban evolutionary biology and eco-evolutionary dynamics frequently focuses on contemporary evolution of species that have potentially substantial ecological-and even social-significance. Still, little work fully integrates urban evolutionary biology and eco-evolutionary dynamics, and rarely do researchers in either of these fields fully consider the role of human social patterns and processes. Because cities are fundamentally regulated by human activities, are inherently interconnected and are frequently undergoing social and economic transformation, they represent an opportunity for ecologists and evolutionary biologists to study urban "socio-eco-evolutionary dynamics." Through this new framework, we encourage researchers of urban ecology and evolution to fully integrate human social drivers and feedbacks to increase understanding and conservation of ecosystems, their functions and their contributions to people within and outside cities

Data from: Frequency-dependent fitness in gynodioecious Lobelia siphilitica

Selection is frequency dependent when an individual's fitness depends on the frequency of its phenotype. Frequency-dependent selection should be common in gynodioecious plants, where individuals are female or hermaphroditic; if the fitness of females is limited by the availability of pollen to fertilize their ovules, then they should have higher fitness when rare than when common. To test whether the fitness of females is frequency dependent, we manipulated the sex ratio in arrays of gynodioecious Lobelia siphilitica. To test whether fitness was frequency dependent because of variation in pollen availability, we compared open-pollinated and supplemental hand-pollinated plants. Open-pollinated females produced more seeds when they were rare than when they were common, as expected if fitness is negatively frequency dependent. However, hand-pollinated females also produced more seeds when they were rare, indicating that variation in pollen availability was not the cause of frequency-dependent fitness. Instead, fitness was frequency dependent because both hand- and open-pollinated females opened more flowers when they were rare than when they were common. This plasticity in the rate of anthesis could cause fitness to be frequency dependent even when reproduction is not pollen limited, and thus expand the conditions under which frequency-dependent selection operates in gynodioecious species

Damping ring designs for a TeV Linear Collider

In this paper we present a damping ring design for the TLC (TeV Linear Collider). The ring operates at 1.8 GeV. It has normalized emittances of elepsilon/sub x/ = 2.8 mrad and elepsilon/sub y/ = 25.4 nmrad. The damping times are /tau//sub x/ = 2.5 ms and /tau//sub y/ = 4.0 ms. To achieve these extremely low emittances and fast damping times, the ring contains 22 m of wigglers. 30 refs., 7 figs., 7 tabs

Diagnostic for dynamic aperture

In large accelerators and low beta colliding beam storage rings, the strong sextupoles, which are required to correct the chromatic effects, produce strong nonlinear forces which act on particles in the beam. In addition in large hadron storage rings the superconducting magnets have significant nonlinear fields. To understand the effects of these nonlinearities on the particle motion there is currently a large theoretical effort using both analytic techniques and computer tracking. This effort is focused on the determination of the 'dynamic aperture' (the stable acceptance) of both present and future accelerators and storage rings. A great deal of progress has been made in understanding nonlinear particle motion, but very little experimental verification of the theoretical results is available. In this paper we describe 'dynamic tracking', a method being studied at the SPEAR storage ring, which can be used to obtain experimental results which are in a convenient form to be compared with the theoretical predictions

A damping ring design for future linear colliders

In this paper we present a preliminary design of a damping ring for the TeV Linear Collider (TLC), a future linear collider with an energy of 1/2 to 1 TeV in the center of mass. Because of limits on the emittance, repetition rate and longitudinal impedance, we use combined function FODO cells with wigglers in insertion regions; there are approximately 22 meters of wigglers in the 155 meter ring. The ring has a normalized horizontal emittance, including the effect of intrabeam scattering, which is less than 3 /times/ 10/sup /minus/6/ and an emittance ratio of epsilon/sub x/ approx. 100epsilon/sub y/. It is designed to damp bunches for 7 vertical damping times while operating at a repetition rate of 360 Hz. Because of these requirements on the emittance and the damping per bunch, the ring operates at 1.8 GeV and is relatively large, allowing more bunches to be damped at once. 10 refs., 5 figs., 2 tabs

Moving past the challenges and misconceptions in urban adaptation research

Although the field of urban evolutionary ecology has recently expanded, much progress has been made in identifying adaptations that arise as a result of sele