Local and Regional Drivers of Biodiversity: From Life-History Traits to System-Level Properties

Biodiversity research aims to understand and predict the occurrence, abundance, and distribution of species and the diversity of species traits, body sizes, and functional roles in a community. Ecologists lack a comprehensive understanding of the interplay between processes driving biodiversity at differing spatiotemporal scales, hindering the ability to predict response to change. A crucial challenge facing ecologists is to incorporate knowledge of the regional dynamics and temporal stability of communities in biodiversity research. This dissertation investigates the role that species traits and system-level properties play in determining biodiversity at local sites and evaluates biodiversity response to change. Local and regional processes may regulate biodiversity via their different influences on core (common, temporally persistent) and transient (rare, temporally intermittent) species. In Chapter 2, we tested the hypothesis that core vs. transient species have fundamentally different life-history traits that are associated with survival strategies targeted at local vs. regional habitat use. Using long-term mark-recapture data from a rodent community, we found that core species generally had high ecological specialization, high survival, low dispersal rates, and low reproductive effort compared to transient species. Life-history trade-offs may correspond to differing roles in maintaining species richness and responses to environmental change. Macroecology describes patterns of biodiversity in communities without respect to species identities or traits. Diversity patterns (i.e., species-abundance distribution-SAD, species-area relationship-SAR, species-time relationship-STR) are well-studied, but drivers of these patterns are poorly understood. In Chapter 3, we tested the hypothesis that local-scale interactions influence the form of SADs, SARs, and STRs using long-term data from annual plant communities. Our results suggest that patterns are directly influenced by system-level properties (species richness, total abundance) and respond indirectly to local-scale processes. In Chapter 4, we analyzed data from a global-span database and found the SAD and species richness generally resilient to environmental change. This work suggests that local processes are important determinants of species composition and abundance and may set an upper limit to species richness, but that regional processes are responsible for maintaining richness and community structure. This insight may partially explain why many biodiversity metrics are often invariant under environmental change scenarios

Enhanced Vascularization of Cultured Skin Substitutes Genetically Modified to Overexpress Vascular Endothelial Growth Factor11The authors declared in writing to have no conflict of interest.

Cultured skin substitutes have been used as adjunctive therapies in the treatment of burns and chronic wounds, but they are limited by lack of a vascular plexus. This deficiency leads to greater time for vascularization compared with native skin autografts and contributes to graft failure. Genetic modification of cultured skin substitutes to enhance vascularization could hypothetically lead to improved wound healing. To address this hypothesis, human keratinocytes were genetically modified by transduction with a replication incompetent retrovirus to overexpress vascular endothelial growth factor, a specific and potent mitogen for endothelial cells. Cultured skin substitutes consisting of collagen-glycosaminoglycan substrates inoculated with human fibroblasts and either vascular endothelial growth factor-modified or control keratinocytes were prepared, and were cultured in vitro for 21 d. Northern blot analysis demonstrated enhanced expression of vascular endothelial growth factor mRNA in genetically modified keratinocytes and in cultured skin substitutes prepared with modified cells. Furthermore, the vascular endothelial growth factor-modified cultured skin substitutes secreted greatly elevated levels of vascular endothelial growth factor protein throughout the entire culture period. The bioactivity of vascular endothelial growth factor protein secreted by the genetically modified cultured skin substitutes was demonstrated using a microvascular endothelial cell growth assay. Vascular endothelial growth factor-modified and control cultured skin substitutes were grafted to full-thickness wounds on athymic mice, and elevated vascular endothelial growth factor mRNA expression was detected in the modified grafts for at least 2 wk after surgery. Vascular endothelial growth factor-modified grafts exhibited increased numbers of dermal blood vessels and decreased time to vascularization compared with controls. These results indicate that genetic modification of keratinocytes in cultured skin substitutes can lead to increased vascular endothelial growth factor expression, which could prospectively improve vascularization of cultured skin substitutes for wound healing applications

Chinese traditional Leadership Philosophy as cultural re-source for Chinese Business Leadership

作为文化资源的中国传统哲学以现代中国商业领导力 研究人员、教育人员和实践人员都了解目前缺乏同有效的中国商业领导力开发相关的针对性文化项目，中国的现代管理教育仍然是“原样照搬”西方的项目。由此所导致的新一代中国管理人员的低效发展在人力资源发展和企业战略发展领域产生了大量的问题，并影响了中国企业的效率。 本论文《作为文化资源的中国传统哲学以现代中国商业领导力》揭示了中国传统哲学作为文化源是如何推动有效商业领导力的发展的。由于中国人对于传统价值观的坚守，中国传统领导哲学可以成为一个有效的商务领导力概念。此外，本论文还具体介绍了如何在不同类型的中国商业机构中应用孔子、老子、孙子和韩非子等不...Chinese traditional Leadership Philosophy as cultural resource for Chinese Business Leadership Although researchers, educators and practitioners alike are aware of the lack of cultural suita-ble programs for the development of effective Chinese business leadership, the modern man-agement education in China is still “importing” Western programs. The thereby caused inef-fective development of the...学位：哲学硕士院系专业：人文学院_中国哲学学号：1012014115460

MAKING A WORLD FOR AMERICA: ELECTRIC COMMUNICATION, EXPANSIVE PROTESTANTISM, AND GLOBALIZATION IN THE NINETEENTH CENTURY

On August 12, 1858, the Atlantic Telegraph Cable was laid across the ocean from the west coast of Ireland to Newfoundland, Canada. Claims that distance had been annihilated, peace was imminent, and the world would unite through this new medium for intercontinental communication took America by storm. These promises of unity were particularly strange because the cable failed after only twenty-three days, colonial conflict rocked the world, and the Civil War loomed. This study explores this early form of globalization in America at the advent of the first opportunity for Americans to communicate with Europe in a matter of hours rather than weeks. The world is not a given or natural entity. Americans in the mid-nineteenth century produced a modern global imaginary: a constellation of symbols, meanings, practices, and material objects that was structured and sustained in dynamic form by practices of variable affective investment that shaped how Americans conceived of and lived in the world. This study demonstrates how global imaginaries come into being through processes of declaration and deferral, how affective investment structured and sustained this imaginary in a particular formation organized around failure, and how expansive Protestantism contributed to the forms of globalization that now dominate American culture. The cultural practices and products of the imaginary of a world united by communication technology made use of expansive American Protestantism in the storehouse of images, symbols, and vocabularies they drew on, in the eschatological logics that produced a perfected world that was both already arriving and yet to come, and in the ways that religion marshaled social investment to sustain these impossible dreams for total global unity. This dissertation makes use of archival research of nineteenth century religious and political writing from the Oneida Community (a utopian community in New York), the American Board of Commissioners of Foreign Missions (then the primary engine of American international mission), and public texts on the telegraph in the burgeoning national discourse of the time.Doctor of Philosoph

Controle de qualidade de comprimidos efervescentes de vitamina c disponíveis em farmácias do sul de Santa Catarina

Trabalho de Conclusão de Curso apresentado como requisito parcial para obtenção do Grau de Bacharel, no Curso de Farmácia da Universidade do Extremo Sul Catarinense, UNESC

Using Life History Trade-Offs to Understand Core-Transient Structuring of a Small Mammal Community

An emerging conceptual framework suggests that communities are composed of two main groups of species through time: core species that are temporally persistent, and transient species that are temporally intermittent. Core and transient species have been shown to differ in spatiotemporal turnover, diversity patterns, and importantly, survival strategies targeted at local versus regional habitat use. While the core-transient framework has typically been a site-specific designation for species, we suggest that if core and transient species have local versus regional survival strategies across sites, and consistently differ in population-level spatial structure and gene flow, they may also typically exhibit different life-history strategies. Specifically, core species should display relatively low movement rates, low reproductive effort, high ecological specialization and high survival rates compared to transient species, which may display a wider range of traits given that transience may result from source-sink dynamics or from the ability to emigrate readily in a nomadic fashion. We present results from 21 years of capture-mark-recapture data in a diverse rodent community, evaluating the linkages between temporal persistence, local abundance, and trade-offs among life-history traits. Core species at our site conservatively supported our hypotheses, differing in ecological specialization, survival and movement probabilities, and reproductive effort relative to transient species. Transient species exhibited a wider range of characteristics, which likely stems from the multiple processes generating transience in local communities, such as source-sink dynamics at larger regional scales or nomadic life history strategies. We suggest that trait associations among core-transient species may be similar in other systems and warrants further study