Background A robust molecular phylogeny is fundamental for developing a stable classification and providing a solid framework to understand patterns of diversification, historical biogeography, and character ...

Extant Canis lupus genetic diversity can be grouped into three phylogenetically distinct clades: Eurasian and American wolves and domestic dogs.1 Genetic studies have suggested these groups trace their origins to a wolf ...

We present a new phylogeny of the spider family Araneidae based on five genes (28S, 18S, COI, H3 and 16S) for 158 taxa, identified and mainly sequenced by us. This includes 25 outgroups and 133 araneid ingroups representing ...

Eudialyte-group minerals (EGM) attract global interest as potential resources for high-field-strength elements (e.g. Zr, Nb, Ta, and rare-earth elements), i.e. critical materials for modern technologies. They are particularly ...

Biodiversity on Earth has seen many increases and decreases throughout its history. Unrevealing these changes is crucial for understanding mechanisms and dissecting principles behind diversification and extinction events. One ...

As the Arctic warms, vegetation is responding, and satellite measures indicate widespread greening at high latitudes. This ‘greening of the Arctic’ is among the world’s most important large-scale ecological responses to ...

Abstract The great gerbil (Rhombomys opimus) is a social rodent living in permanent, complex burrow systems distributed throughout Central Asia, where it serves as the main host of several important vector-borne ...

Ethnopharmalogical relevance In Africa, traditional medicine is important for local healthcare and plants used for these purposes are commonly traded. Identifying medicinal plants sold on markets is challenging, as leaves, ...

This thesis focuses on the fungus gnat genus Allodia in the dipteran family Mycetophilidae. Allodia has historically gone through several systematic changes, with additions and exclusions of taxa, and the diversity and ...

Aim: Distribution modelling is a useful approach to obtain knowledge about the spatial distribution of biodiversity, required for, for example, red-list assessments. While distribution modelling methods have been applied ...

Biologists typically distinguish species by how they look. However, with the development of DNA-based techniques to identify species, they found that genetically-different species may look remarkably similar. Biologists ...

Morphological stasis or the absence of morphological change is a well-known phenomenon in the paleontological record, yet it is poorly integrated with neontological evidence. Recent evidence suggests that cryptic species ...

All organisms need to fight pathogens to avoid infectious diseases. In vertebrates, two classes of polymorphic genes from the major histocompatibility complex (MHC) are crucial for triggering immune responses against ...

1. Due to globalisation, trade and transport, the spread of alien species is increasing dramatically. Some alien species become ecologically harmful by threatening native biota. This can lead to irreversible changes in ...

The use of stormwater ponds along the highways is shown to be an effective alternative to conventional systems, which are usually sewers. These ponds have the potential to combine their primary function of pollution and ...

The highly diverse goatfish genus Upeneus (Mullidae) requires enhanced attention regarding the possible occurrence of undescribed species in insufficiently explored regions. This study focuses on the South-Western Indian ...

Denne rapporten beskriver kortfattet hvordan to naturtypekart ved Finse ble lagd. Resultatene er lagt fram i form av kart og tabeller, samt tekst som beskriver naturtypenes økologi. Arealdekkende naturtypekart etter NiN ...

Functional traits are linked to ecosystem processes and services and therefore relevant in recovery assessment. However, traits of bryophytes and lichens, important components of many ecosystems, have received less attention ...

Distantly related lineages of the enigmatic giant rosette plants of tropical alpine environments provide classical examples of convergent adaptation. For the giant senecios (Dendrosenecio), the endemic landmarks of the ...

Grey wolves (Canis lupus ) are one of the few large terrestrial carnivores that have maintained a wide geographical distribution across the Northern Hemisphere throughout the Pleistocene and Holocene. Recent genetic studies ...

The general structural formula for the walentaite group is [((A), A], based on heteropolyhedral layers of configuration [M], with surface-coordinated species at the B, As2 and As3 sites, and with interlayer hydrated cation ...

1. Restoration of degraded ecosystems may take decades or even centuries. Accordingly, information about the current direction and speed of recovery provided by methods for predicting time to recovery may give important ...

The boron isotopic composition of tourmaline and hambergite (Be2BO3[OH,F]) from peraluminous (n = 12), peralkaline (n = 1), and peralkaline nepheline syenite (n = 16) pegmatites has been measured by secondary ion mass ...

1. Evidence‐based management of natural populations under strong human influence frequently requires not only estimates of survival but also knowledge about how much mortality is due to anthropogenic vs. natural causes. ...

Two large areas of anomalously low seismic velocities are visible in all tomographic models of the lowermost mantle. Depending on the density structure of these Large Low Shear Velocity Provinces (LLSVPs), the core-mantle ...

Long-term data from marked animals provide a wealth of opportunities for studies with high relevance to both basic ecological understanding and successful management in a changing world. The key strength of such data is ...

All multicellular organisms host microbial communities in and on their bodies, and these microbiomes can have major influences on host biology. Most research has focussed on the oral, skin, and gut microbiomes, whereas ...

The European Astronaut Centre (EAC) is currently constructing the European Lunar Exploration Laboratory (LUNA), a large training and operations facility to be located adjacent to EAC at the DLR (German Aerospace Centre) ...

In terrestrial mammals, the respiratory turbinate bones within the nasal cavity are employed to conserve heat and water. In order to investigate whether environmental temperature affects respiratory turbinate structure in ...

Aim Biodiversity hotspots are widely used as conservation priorities to preserve the tree of life. However, many conservation practices identify biodiversity hotspots without considering phylogenetic diversity (PD), ...

A new species, Hygrophorus betulae, associated with Betula pubescens is described from the subalpine zone of northern Finland. The molecular phylogenetic analysis shows that it is closely related to H. mesotephrus, a species ...

1. Freshwater chemistry across the circumpolar region was characterised using a pan-Arctic data set from 1,032 lake and 482 river stations. Temporal trends were estimated for Early (1970–1985), Middle (1986–2000), and Late ...

Temperature is a key environmental parameter affecting both the phenotypes and distributions of organisms, particularly ectotherms. Rapid organismal responses to thermal environmental changes have been described for several ...

Research on the Permian-Triassic boundary (PTB) along the northern margins of Pangaea (exposed today in the Arctic region) has been heavily reliant on field observations, where data resolution was consequently determined ...

The increasing availability of 3D-imaging technology provides new opportunities for measuring morphology. Photogrammetry enables easy 3D-data acquisition compared to conventional methods and here we assess its accuracy for ...

Abstract We report a small hawk-like diurnal bird from the early Oligocene (30–31 million years ago) of Poland. Aviraptor longicrus , n. gen. et sp. is of a size comparable with the smallest extant Accipitridae. The new ...

Tropical ecosystems are undergoing unprecedented rates of degradation from deforestation, fire, and drought disturbances. The collective effects of these disturbances threaten to shift large portions of tropical ecosystems ...

Microporella Hincks, 1877 is one of the most diverse genera of cheilostome bryozoans, containing more than 150 named species. Distributed globally since the early Miocene, the majority of species of Microporella have ...

Sperm cells vary tremendously in size and shape across the animal kingdom. In songbirds (Aves: Passeri), sperm have a characteristic helical form but vary considerably in size. Most of our knowledge about sperm morphology ...

The abstract classification system Nature in Norway (NiN) has detailed ecological definitions of a high number of ecosystem units, but its applicability in practical vegetation mapping is unknown because it was not designed ...

Amazonian forests are extraordinarily diverse, but the estimated species richness is very much debated. Here, we apply an ensemble of parametric estimators and a novel technique that includes conspecific spatial aggregation ...

The flood pulse of black water rivers in the Amazon basin determines the composition of species along the flood gradient in igapó forests. The Balbina dam, built on the Uatumã River, has altered the flood pulse and caused ...

The granitic pegmatites of Tørdal belong to the Late-Proterozoic Sveconorwegian pegmatite province of south Scandinavia. They form a cluster of about 300 bodies 20 km NW of the town Drangedal in southern Norway and have ...

Investigation of bryozoan faunas collected in two submarine caves in Lesvos Island, Aegean Sea revealed a great number of colonies of three species currently assigned to the cheilostome family Onychocellidae: Onychocella ...

Cribrilinid bryozoans originating from Pleistocene deep-water sediments from two localities near Messina (Sicily, Italy)—Capo Milazzo (Gelasian) and Scoppo (Calabrian)—were examined. Five cribrilinid species were found, ...

High-MgO (>12 wt%) magmas represent some of the most primary and high temperature melts from mantle plumes. The compositional diversity of high-MgO magmas gained by fractional melting within inhomogeneous mantle sources, ...

Cryptoclidids are a major clade of plesiosauromorph plesiosaurians best known from the Middle—Late Jurassic, but little is known regarding their turnover into the Early Cretaceous. Of the known cryptoclidid genera, most ...

Bryozoans offer one of the few systems in which competitive interactions for living space can be studied in the fossil record. Here, we describe the outcome of competitive overgrowths in a 3‐million‐year‐old bryozoan ...

Our knowledge of the diversity and distribution of many groups of lichens remains poor due to unclear species boundaries and challenging species identification. We have studied the medium sized to large foliose lichen ...

Three species of Pleuranthodium were encountered and collected during a survey of gingers at Mount Wilhelm, Chimbu Province, Papua New Guinea. Based on new material, the only previously known Pleuranthodium from this area, ...

Although sled dogs are one of the most specialized groups of dogs, their origin and evolution has received much less attention than many other dog groups. We applied a genomic approach to investigate their spatiotemporal ...

Abstract Full mitochondrial genomes were assembled for 12 recently sampled animals from the Svalbard bowhead whale (Balaena mysticetus) stock via high-throughput sequencing data, facilitating analysis of the ...

The recognition of cryptic species concealed in traditionally established species may reveal new biogeographical patterns and alter the understanding of how biodiversity is geographically distributed. This is particularly ...

The Larvik Plutonic Complex (LPC) contains pegmatites with a wide array of mineral assemblages and morphological features. The pegmatites have traditionally been described as nepheline syenite and syenite pegmatites which ...

Aim: Although the effects of climate on species richness are known, regional pro‐ cesses may lead to different species richness–climate relationships across continents resulting in species richness anomalies, especially ...

The two species Parmelia ernstiae and P. serrana are reported as new to Norway from two collections each, identified by the DNA barcode marker (nrITS). A chemical analysis of selected specimens of P. saxatilis s. lat. ...

Earth’s surface and mantle sulphur reservoirs are connected via subduction, crustal recycling and volcanism. Although oceanic hotspot lavas currently provide the best constraints on the deep sulphur cycle, their restricted ...

BioDATA is an international project on developing skills in biodiversity data management and data publishing. Between 2018 and 2021, undergraduate and postgraduate students from Armenia, Belarus, Tajikistan, and Ukraine, ...

The Generic Ecological Impact Assessment of Alien Species (GEIAA) is described. It comprises a set of criteria and an assessment procedure. The set of criteria consists of three criteria that quantify invasion potential, ...

The early Palaeozoic Era records the initial biodiversification of the Phanerozoic. The increase in biodiversity involved drastic changes in taxon longevity, and in rates of origination and extinction. Here, we calculate ...

Members of the class Mamiellophyceae comprise species that can dominate picophytoplankton diversity in polar waters. Yet, polar species are often morphologically indistinguishable from temperate species, although clearly ...

Background DNA barcodes are increasingly being used for species identification amongst the lichenised fungi. This paper presents a dataset aiming to provide an authoritative DNA barcode sequence library for a wide array ...

Domestic dogs have been central to life in the North American Arctic for millennia. The ancestors of the Inuit were the first to introduce the widespread usage of dog sledge transportation technology to the Americas, but ...

Constructed stormwater ponds mitigate runoff volumes and pollution, and provide other ecosystem services, such as supporting biodiversity, but these services attracted relatively less attention. The impacts of the pollution ...

The new minerals cuatrocapaite-(NH4) (IMA2018-083) and cuatrocapaite-(K) (IMA2018-084) are the NH4- and K-dominant members of a series with the general formula (NH4,K)3(NaMg□)(As2O3)6Cl6·16H2O. Both minerals were found at ...

Peculiar rocks consisting of large and rare minerals are known as nepheline syenite pegmatites and can be found in larvikite (national rock of Norway!) around the Larvik area. Detailed chemical analyses of a mineral called ...

Phyllopsora is a crustose to squamulose lichen genus inhabiting the bark of trees in moist tropical forests and rainforests. Species identification is generally challenging and is mainly based on ascospore morphology, ...

A hitherto unrecognized Paleogene outcrop has been discovered at Sylfjellet, a mountain located at the northern side of Isfjorden, Svalbard. The strata, which cover an area of 0.8 km2, have until now been assigned to the ...

Standardized tools are needed to identify and prioritize the most harmful non-native species (NNS). A plethora of assessment protocols have been developed to evaluate the current and potential impacts of non-native species, ...

The Paraná deposit, located at Southwestern Rio Grande do Norte state, in Brazil, is one of the few emerald deposits found at Borborema Province. The mineralization occurs in phlogopite schists and actinolite-phlogopite ...

Genes of the major histocompatibility complex (MHC) are essential in vertebrate adaptive immunity, and they are highly diverse and duplicated in many lineages. While it is widely established that pathogen‐mediated selection ...

Background: The genus Aloe has long been known for its use in healthcare and cosmetics. In Tanzania, overexploitation is threatening some Aloe species with extinction and yet, little has been documented on the abundance ...

In recent years, the field of sexual selection has exploded, with advances in theoretical and empirical research complementing each other in exciting ways. This perspective piece is the product of a “stock-taking” workshop ...

The Ordovician was a time of drastic biological and geological change. Previous work has suggested that there was a dramatic increase in global diversity during this time, but also has indicated that regional dynamics and ...

We present the results of an inventory and status assessment of alien species in Norway. The inventory covered all known multicellular neobiota, 2496 in total, 1039 of which were classified as naturalised. The latter ...

The Norwegian river Suldalslågen, known for its population of large‐sized Atlantic salmon (Salmo salar ), has been regulated for hydropower in 1966–1967 and in 1980. The initial regulation increased winter flows and reduced ...

The island-like distribution of subalpine habitats across mountain ranges can trigger the parallel evolution of locally adapted ecotypes. Such naturally replicated scenarios allow testing hypotheses on how elevational ...

Traditional crop varieties are an important source of genetic diversity for crop adaptation and modern breeding. Landraces of Asian (Oryza sativa) and African (Oryza glaberrima) rice have been well studied on the continents ...

The endangered Spitsbergen stock of bowhead whales (Balaena mysticetus) has once been large with up to estimated 100,000 individuals. Genetic diversity of the extant Spitsbergen stock is unknown. We present 10 complete ...

Crop wild relatives (CWR) can provide one solution to future challenges on food security, sustainable agriculture and adaptation to climate change. Diversity found in CWR can be essential for adapting crops to these new ...

Cryptic species are detected at an ever‐increasing rate, mainly due to the application of molecular data. While the impact of this hidden diversity on macro‐ecology and conversation biology is widely recognized, its ...

Background Female promiscuity is highly variable among birds, and particularly among songbirds. Comparative work has identified several patterns of covariation with social, sexual, ecological and life history ...

The widely used “Maxent” software for modeling species distributions from presence‐only data (Phillips et al., Ecological Modelling, 190, 2006, 231) tends to produce models with high‐predictive performance but low‐ecological ...

Thermal melanism theory states that dark-colored ectotherm organisms are at an advantage at low temperature due to increased warming. This theory is generally supported for ectotherm animals, however, the function of colors ...

Phylogenetic relationships within the important ichthyosaur family Ophthalmosauridae are not well established, and more specimens and characters, especially from the postcranial skeleton, are needed. Three ophthalmosaurid ...

High concentrations of mercury, possibly connected with widespread volcanism of the Siberian Traps, have previously been associated with the Smithian/Spathian (Early Triassic) boundary (SSB) in the Sverdrup Basin, Tethyan ...

In a rapidly changing world, it is important to understand how urban environments impact wildlife. For example, supplementary feeding of birds, though well‐intended, might have unexpected negative effects on the health of ...

Sperm morphology varies enormously across the animal kingdom. Whilst knowledge of the factors that drive the evolution of interspecific variation in sperm morphology is accumulating, we currently have little understanding ...

Postcopulatory sexual selection may promote evolutionary diversification in sperm form, but the contribution of between‐species divergence in sperm morphology to the origin of reproductive isolation and speciation remains ...

Bryozoans are a moderately diverse, mostly marine phylum with a fossil record extending to the Early Ordovician. Compared to other phyla, little is known about their phylogenetic relationships at both lower and higher ...

The taxonomy of Protomerulius and Heterochaetella is revised based on DNA data and morphological evidence, and their type species, P. brasiliensis and H. dubia, are proved to be congeneric. As a consequence, H. dubia and ...

Background Understanding the phylogenetic relationships among species is one of the main goals of systematic biology. Simultaneously, credible phylogenetic hypotheses are often the first requirement for ...

Metodene for feltbasert kartlegging av naturtyper i Norge er i utvikling. Kartlegging baserer seg nå i hovedsak på bruk av digitale plattformer med tilrettelagt programvare. Siden lanseringen av Natur i Norge (NiN 2.0) i ...

Sets of presence records used to model species’ distributions typically consist of observations collected opportunistically rather than systematically. As a result, sampling probability is geographically uneven, which may ...

Cope's Rule describes increasing body size in evolutionary lineages through geological time. This pattern has been documented in unitary organisms but does it also apply to module size in colonial organisms? We address ...

Gastrotrichs—’hairy bellies’—are microscopic free-living animals inhabiting marine and freshwater habitats. Based on morphological and early molecular analyses, gastrotrichs were placed close to nematodes, but recent ...

This thesis focuses on the molecular systematics of the lichen family Ramalinaceae and is based on both freshly collected and archived specimens. Tropical members of the family remain particularly understudied, including ...