Background Microhabitat changes are thought to be among the main drivers of diversification. However, this conclusion is mostly based on studies on vertebrates. Here, we investigate the influence of ...

Background A median, segmented, annelid nerve cord has repeatedly been compared to the arthropod and vertebrate nerve cords and became the most used textbook representation of the annelid nervous system. ...

Despite the similar function of all sperm cells – to fertilise the egg – there is extraordinary diversity in sperm shape and length across taxa. This thesis aims to improve our understanding of how this diversity has ...

Cryptic species could represent a substantial fraction of biodiversity. However, inconsistent definitions and taxonomic treatment of cryptic species prevent informed estimates of their contribution to biodiversity and ...

Introduction Herbal medicines play an important role globally in the health care sector and in industrialised countries they are often considered as an alternative to mono-substance medicines. Current quality and ...

Background The economic value of ginseng in the global medicinal plant trade is estimated to be in excess of US$2.1 billion. At the same time, the evolutionary placement of ginseng (Panax ginseng) and the ...

Purpose Treelines and forest lines (TFLs) have received growing interest in recent decades, due to their potential role as indicators of climate change. However, the understanding of TFL dynamics is challenged by the complex ...

Both molecular and morphologic characters support the reinstatement of Leuctra biellensis Festa, 1942 as a valid species distinct from Leuctra nigra (Olivier, 1811). Genetic distances between L. biellensis and the different ...

1. Species composition is a vital attribute of any ecosystem. Accordingly, ecological restoration often has the original, or “natural,” species composition as its target. However, we still lack adequate methods for predicting ...

Natural history museum collections represent a vast source of ancient and historical DNA samples from extinct taxa that can be utilized by high-throughput sequencing tools to reveal novel genetic and phylogenetic information ...

The PhytoAuthent project was structured to gather, test, develop and apply, in real life case scenarios, molecular techniques, such as biochemical fingerprinting and DNA sequence-based methods, for plant identification of ...

The Eggvin Bank, located between the Jan Mayen Island and Greenland, is an unusually shallow area containing several submarine volcanic peaks, confined by two transforms on the Northern Kolbeinsey Ridge (NKR). We represent ...

Studying herbal products derived from local and traditional knowledge and their value chains is one of the main challenges in ethnopharmacology. The majority of these products have a long history of use, but non-harmonized ...

The Eichigt granite is one of two apical intrusions forming the concealed massif of Eichigt−Schönbrunn in the Erzgebirge−Vogtland metallogenic province of Germany. It represents a peraluminuous, medium-grained, Si-rich ...

Many herbal products have a long history of use, but there are increasing concerns over product efficacy, safety and quality in the wake of recent cases exposing discrepancies between labeling and constituents. When it ...

Local markets provide a rapid insight into the medicinal plants growing in a region as well as local traditional health concerns. Identification of market plant material can be challenging as plants are often sold in dried ...

The assessment of evolutionary divergences within subspecies complexes provide an effective short-cut for estimating intraspecific genetic diversity, which is relevant for conservation actions. We explore new evidence ...

Bohseite is an orthorhombic calcium beryllium aluminosilicate with variable Al content and an endmember formula Ca4Be4Si9O24(OH4), that was discovered in the Piława Górna quarry in the eastern part of the Góry Sowie Block, ...

Capsule: Providing peanuts on bird feeders was shown to attract more individuals and more species than providing cheese or bread. Aims: To investigate how the provision of different human-derived foods affected visit rates ...

The Oslo area has a rich geodiversity, a long history of scientific investigations, and several protected geosites. Many of the protected geosites were protected some 30 years ago and have until recently not been followed ...

The Late-Proterozoic Sveconorwegian pegmatite province in southern Norway and southwest Sweden hosts seven rare-element pegmatite districts with more than 5000 rare-element pegmatites. Most of these pegmatites with ...

Natural selection in domestic dogs is of great interest in evolutionary biology since dogs have migrated to every inhabited continent of the world alongside humans, and adapted to diverse environments. Here, we explored ...

The new mineral hansesmarkite (IMA2015-067), Ca2Mn2Nb6O19·20H2O, was discovered at the AS Granit larvikite quarry in Tvedalen, Larvik, Vestfold, Norway. Hansesmarkite forms faintly yellow crystals up to 0.3 mm or thin ...

Eutectic melting curves in the system MgO–SiO2 have been experimentally determined at lower mantle pressures using laser-heated diamond anvil cell (LH-DAC) techniques. We investigated eutectic melting of bridgmanite plus ...

The extensive spatial and temporal coverage of many citizen science datasets (CSD) makes them appealing for use in species distribution modeling and forecasting. However, a frequent limitation is the inability to validate ...

Chikanda is a traditional dish made with wild-harvested ground orchid tubers belonging to three orchidioid genera, Disa, Satyrium and Habenaria, all of which are CITES appendix II-listed. Identification of collected orchid ...

Gene expression changes potentially play an important role in adaptive evolution under human‐induced selection pressures, but this has been challenging to demonstrate in natural populations. Fishing exhibits strong selection ...

High tropical mountains harbour remarkable and fragmented biodiversity thought to a large degree to have been shaped by multiple dispersals of cold-adapted lineages from remote areas. Few dated phylogenetic/phylogeographic ...

Previous studies based on single mitochondrial markers have shown that the common raven (Corvus corax) consists of two highly diverged lineages that are hypothesised to have undergone speciation reversal upon secondary ...

One hundred and seventy-three years ago, the last two Great Auks, Pinguinus impennis, ever reliably seen were killed. Their internal organs can be found in the collections of the Natural History Museum of Denmark, but the ...

Telomere length is related to aging in many eukaryotes and the rate of telomere attrition has been suggested to reflect individual genetic quality. Telomere length could thus have implications for mate choice. We investigated ...

© 2017 South African National Biodiversity Institute Pretoria

The mainly Mediterranean genus Rhodalsine (Caryophyllaceae) is revised and a single species, R. geniculata, is recognized, distributed from the Canary Islands in the west to Somalia in the east. The history of the taxon, ...

Background To date, mitochondrial genomes of more than one hundred flatworms (Platyhelminthes) have been sequenced. They show a high degree of similarity and a strong taxonomic bias towards parasitic lineages. ...

Tubers of terrestrial orchids are harvested and traded from the eastern Mediterranean to the Caspian Sea for the traditional product Salep. Overexploitation of wild populations and increased middle-class prosperity have ...

Background and AimsNepenthes attracts wide attention with its spectacularly shaped carnivorous pitchers, cultural value and horticultural curiosity. Despite the plant’s iconic fascination, surprisingly little anatomical ...

Orchids are one of the largest plant families and are commercially traded for a variety of purposes, including as ornamental plants, medicinal products and food. These markets involve thousands of species, which may be ...

The scattered eastern African high mountains harbor a renowned and highly endemic flora, but the taxonomy and phylogeographic history of many plant groups are still insufficiently known. The high-alpine populations of the ...

Pockmarks are seafloor craters usually formed during methane release on continental margins. However, the mechanisms behind their formation and dynamics remain elusive. Here we report detailed investigations on one of the ...

Herein we describe the new species, Psora taurensis, from two localities in the Taurus Mountains in Turkey at ca. 1000 m altitude. Investigations of anatomy, secondary chemistry and DNA sequences (ITS and mtSSU) of P. ...

In eastern Mediterranean countries orchids continue to be collected from the wild for the production of salep, a beverage made of dried orchid tubers. In this study we used nrITS1 and nrITS2 DNA metabarcoding to identify ...

Colymbosaurus is a genus of long-necked plesiosaurian represented by two valid species: C. megadeirus from the Upper Kimmeridge Clay Formation (Kimmeridgian–Tithonian) of the United Kingdom and C. svalbardensis from the ...

With nearly 300 species, the infraorder Meliphagides represents one of the largest and most conspicuous Australasian bird radiations. Although the group has been the focus of a number of recent phylogenetic studies, a ...

A male specimen of Dryadaula heindeli Gaedike & Scholz, 1998 (Lepidoptera, Dryadaulidae) was found in western Norway in Møre og Romsdal at Averøy: Rokset in August 2017. The circumstances of the record, the species’ biology ...

Ethnopharmacological relevance What are the minimum methodological and conceptual requirements for an ethnopharmacological field study? How can the results of ethnopharmacological field studies be reported so that researchers ...

The Lepidoptera species recorded in Iceland, Norway, Sweden, Denmark, Finland, Estonia, Latvia and Lithuania are listed. The history of lepidopterology in the Nordic-Baltic area and in each country is outlined. The current ...

The distributions of species are not only determined by where they can survive – they must also be able to reproduce. Although immigrant inviability is a well‐established concept, the fact that immigrants also need to be ...

Southeast (SE) Asia is 1 of the most biodiverse regions in the world, and it holds approximately 20% of all mammal species. Despite this, the majority of SE Asia's genetic diversity is still poorly characterized. The growing ...

Background Satellite telemetry studies provide information that is critical to the conservation and management of species affected by ecological change. Here we report on the performance and retention of ...

This contribution focuses on the family Encyrtidae from Oslo Municipality, one of the richer areas in Norway as biodiversity concerns. The following four species are reported for the first time from Norway: Metaphycus ...

The following five species of the family Pteromalidae are reported for the first time from Norway: Gastrancistrus autumnalis (Walker, 1834), Gastrancistrus picipes (Nees, 1834), Glyphognathus laevis (Delucchi, 1953), ...

Background Thousands of flowering plant species attract pollinators without offering rewards, but the evolution of this deceit is poorly understood. Rewardless flowers of the orchid Erycina pusilla have an ...

Climate change is expected to result in range shifts and habitat fragmentation for many species. In the Arctic, loss of sea ice will reduce barriers to dispersal or eliminate movement corridors, resulting in increased ...

Pegmatites are extremely coarse-grained and heterogeneous rocks in which quantitative measurements of mineral proportions and chemical compositions of the whole rock are virtually impossible to acquire. Thus, conventional ...

The tropical alpine ecosystem in eastern Africa is highly fragmented among biological ‘sky islands’, where populations of frost-tolerant organisms are isolated from each other by a ‘sea’ of tropical lowlands. One-third of ...

Much adaptive evolutionary change is underlain by mutational variation in regions of the genome that regulate gene expression rather than in the coding regions of the genes themselves. An understanding of the role of gene ...

Plant genetic resources for food and agriculture include an estimated 7.4 million ex situ accessions conserved in genebank collections. An estimated 40% of these accessions are both electronically documented and freely ...

Norwegian universities have trained students and other scholars from the South within fields related to African plant diversity through the last decades. The activities were funded by NUFU, the Norwegian Council of ...

Changes in growth forms frequently accompany plant adaptive radiations, including páramo–a high‐elevation treeless habitat type of the northern Andes. We tested whether diverse group of Senecio inhabiting montane forests ...

Polar bears have experienced a rapid loss of sea-ice habitat in the Barents Sea. Monitoring this subpopulation focuses on the effects on polar bear demography. In August 2015, we conducted a survey in the Norwegian Arctic ...

Animals can be important in modulating ecosystem-level nutrient cycling, although their importance varies greatly among species and ecosystems. Nutrient cycling rates of individual animals represent valuable data for testing ...

Nordland is Norway’s second largest county, with an areal extent of 38,482 km2 . In general, Nordland is reasonably well covered in terms of botanical exploration, with few blank areas. No flora covering the entire area ...

The Atlantic coast of South America is characterized by a great diversity and endemism of fishes. Past eustatic changes that promoted cycles of isolation, expansion, and connection of coastal catchments are considered ...

In spite of a fossil record spanning over 150 million years, pelvic girdle evolution in Ichthyopterygia is poorly known. Here, we examine pelvic girdle size relationships using quantitative methods and new ophthalmosaurid ...

Glaciers cover ∼10% of the Earth’s land surface, but they are shrinking rapidly across most parts of the world, leading to cascading impacts on downstream systems. Glaciers impart unique footprints on river flow at times ...

In-situ weathered bedrock, saprolite, is locally found in Scandinavia, where it is commonly thought to represent pre-Pleistocene weathering possibly associated with landscape formation. The age of weathering, however, ...

The Tres Arroyos granite–pegmatite system is located in the SW margin of the Nisa-Alburquerque Variscan batholith. Two granitic facies (monzogranite and marginal leucogranite) and three types of aplite–pegmatite dykes ...

Quartz samples of different origin from 10 localities in the Southern Ural region, Russia have been investigated to characterize their trace element compositions and defect structures. The analytical combination of ...

Ancient DNA research has been revolutionized following development of next-generation sequencing platforms. Although a number of such platforms have been applied to ancient DNA samples, the Illumina series are the dominant ...

Background: Georeferenced tree- and forest line data has a wide range of applications and are increasingly used for e.g. monitoring of climate change impacts and range shift modelling. As part of a research project, ...

Background: An increasing number of studies are addressing the evolutionary genomics of dog domestication, principally through resequencing dog, wolf and related canid genomes. There is, however, only one de novo assembled ...

Shrub expansion in high latitudes is a widely observed response to climate change. Extensive evidence has shown that shrub expansion can lead to positive feedbacks to the regional climate. In this study we evaluate the ...

As the title of the correspondence by Fossen et al.1 suggests, determining the age of landscape elements of the Earth surface is difficult. We thus welcome the opportunity to clarify our arguments on the contentious themes ...

Intensified human land use continues to increase habitat loss and fragmentation, and leads to a homogenization of biodiversity. Specialized species with narrow niches seem to be declining more rapidly than generalist ...

Most people in the Swat valley of northwest Pakistan practice subsistence farming, supplementing their income by collecting and selling wild harvested plants for use in herbal medicine. Previous work showed that the ...

A range of published arguments against formalizing the Anthropocene as a geological time unit have variously suggested that it is a misleading term of non-stratigraphic origin and usage, is based on insignificant temporal ...

Complete mitochondrial genomes of five syllids (Streptosyllis sp., Eusyllis blomstrandi, Myrianida brachycephala, Typosyllis antoni and Typosyllis sp.) have been obtained using Illumina sequencing. Together with two previous ...

Abstract.—Phylogenomic studies have improved understanding of deep metazoan phylogeny and show promise for resolving incongruences among analyses based on limited numbers of loci. One region of the animal tree that has ...

Sperm morphological traits are highly variable among species and are commonly thought to evolve by post-copulatory sexual selection. However, little is known about the evolutionary dynamics of sperm morphology, and whether ...

Background Postzygotic isolation in the form of reduced viability and/or fertility of hybrids may help maintain species boundaries in the face of interspecific gene flow. Past hybridization events between ...

Background The population size of Atlantic walruses (Odobenus rosmarus rosmarus) is depleted relative to historical abundance levels. In Svalbard, centuries of over-exploitation brought the walrus herds to ...

Human wellbeing and food security in a changing climate depend on productive and sustainable agriculture. For this, policies based on analyses and research results are vital to establish conservation priorities of natural ...

The easier access to increasingly powerful computational approaches and tools in the field of distribution modelling, has contributed to a proliferation of data, applications, practitioners, guidelines, and novel theoretical ...

Background One of the biggest challenges in avian taxonomy is the delimitation of allopatric species because their reproductive incompatibility cannot be directly studied in the wild. Instead, reproductive ...

Birds show considerable variation in sperm morphology. Closely related species and subspecies can show diagnostic differences in sperm size. There is also variation in sperm size among males within a population, and recent ...

Sperm morphology is highly diversified across the animal kingdom and recent comparative evidence from passerine birds suggests that postcopulatory sexual selection is a significant driver of sperm evolution. In the present ...

Sperm morphology is highly diversified among species and at higher taxonomic levels. In birds, there is also increasing evidence of geographical differentiation in sperm traits within species, especially in those with ...

A recent comparative analysis of passerine birds found that the frequency of extra-pair paternity was positively associated with neutral genetic diversity. It has been hypothesised that migratory species have more extra-pair ...

Divergent sexual selection within allopatric populations may result in divergent sexual phenotypes, which can act as reproductive barriers between populations upon secondary contact. This hypothesis has been most tested ...

Background The rather species-poor oviparous gyrodactylids are restricted to South America. It was suggested that they have a basal position within the otherwise viviparous Gyrodactylidae. Accordingly, it ...

In the present study, we describe the new species, Psora altotibetica, from nine localities in China (Tibetan area) and Nepal. The study includes analyses of anatomy, secondary chemistry, and DNA sequence data of P. ...

The cumulative effects of climate warming on herbivore vital rates and population dynamics are hard to predict, given that the expected effects differ between seasons. In the Arctic, warmer summers enhance plant growth ...

The layered agpaitic nepheline syenites (kakortokites) of the Ilímaussaq complex, South Greenland, host voluminous accumulations of eudialyte-group minerals (EGM). These complex Na-Ca-zirconosilicates contain economically ...

The main aim of this paper is to address consequences of climate warming on loss of habitat and genetic diversity in the enigmatic tropical alpine giant rosette plants using the Ethiopian endemic Lobelia rhynchopetalum as ...

The luminescence spectra of a suite of natural sodium framework silicates including four different sodalite variants and tugtupite have been collected during X-ray irradiation as a function of temperature between 20 and ...

Human population expansion and associated degradation of the habitat of many wildlife species cause loss of biodiversity and species extinctions. The small Simen Mountains National Park in Ethiopia is one of the last ...

Hybridization is frequent in the large and ecologically significant genus Carex (Cyperaceae). In four important sections of the northern regions (Ceratocystis, Glareosae, Phacocystis and Vesicariae), the frequent occurrence ...

Changing climate is expected to alter precipitation patterns in the Arctic, with consequences for subsurface temperature and moisture conditions, community structure, and nutrient mobilization through microbial belowground ...