Premise of research. The lianoid habit is found in 125 extant plant families and is most diverse and abundant in structurally complex forests, such as tropical forests. A stem with lianoid anatomy is described from Cretaceous sediments of Hornby Island, British Columbia.
Methodology. The stem segment, 2.5 cm in diameter...
Nuclear waste is going nowhere, and neither is the debate over its disposal. The problem, growing every day, has proven intractable, with policymakers on one side, armed with daunting technical data, and the public on the other, declaring: not in my backyard. This timely volume offers a look past our...
Early-successional stages have been truncated and altered in many western U.S. forest landscapes by planting conifers, controlling competing vegetation, suppressing fire, and focusing on maintaining late-seral species and undisturbed riparian zones. Declining area of early-successional stages may be reducing resilience and sustainability on landscapes that experience elevated disturbance related to...
During the discovery and description of seven New Zealand methane seep sites, an infaunal assemblage dominated by ampharetid polychaetes was found in association with high seabed methane emission. This ampharetid-bed assemblage had a mean density of 57,000 ± 7800 macrofaunal individuals m⁻² and a maximum wet biomass of 274 g...
The bivalve Pacific geoduck (Panopea generosa) has been used in the eastern North Pacific Ocean to create proxies for environmental factors such as temperature and oceanographic conditions. This type of research depends upon accurate age determination of Pacific geoducks, which historically was based on shell growth-increment counts. A recent study...
Ammonia oxidation is the first and rate-limiting step in nitrification and is dominated by two distinct groups of microorganisms in soil: ammonia-oxidizing archaea (AOA) and ammonia-oxidizing bacteria (AOB). AOA are often more abundant than AOB and dominate activity in acid soils. The mechanism of ammonia oxidation under acidic conditions has...
Premise of the study: Bio-ontologies are essential tools for accessing and analyzing the rapidly growing pool of plant genomic and phenomic data. Ontologies provide structured vocabularies to support consistent aggregation of data and a semantic framework for automated analyses and reasoning. They are a key component of the semantic web....
This study presents a methods evaluation and intercalibration of active fluorescence-based measurements of the quantum yield (ϕ'ₚₛᵢᵢ) and absorption coefficient (aₚₛᵢᵢ) of photosystem II (PSII) photochemistry. Measurements of ϕ'ₚₛᵢᵢ, aₚₛᵢᵢ, and irradiance (E) can be scaled to derive photosynthetic electron transport rates (Pₑ), the process that fuels phytoplankton carbon fixation...
The Plant Ontology (PO;http://www.plantontology.org/" is a publicly available, collaborative effort to develop and maintain a controlled, structured vocabulary ('ontology') of terms to describe plant anatomy, morphology and the stages of plant development. The goals of the PO are to link (annotate) gene expression and phenotype data to plant structures and...
Despite a large and multifaceted effort to understand the vast landscape of phenotypic data, their current form inhibits productive data analysis. The lack of a community-wide, consensus-based, human- and machine-interpretable language for describing phenotypes and their genomic and environmental contexts is perhaps the most pressing scientific bottleneck to integration across...