We propose the Breathing Earth System Simulator (BESS), an upscaling approach to quantify global gross primary productivity and evapotranspiration using MODIS with a spatial resolution of 1-5 km and a temporal resolution of 8 days. This effort is novel because it is the first system that harmonizes and utilizes MODIS...
A small number of cetaceans have adapted to an entirely freshwater environment, having colonized rivers in Asia and South America from an ancestral origin in the marine environment. This includes the 'river dolphins', early divergence from the odontocete lineage, and two species of true dolphins (Family Delphinidae). Successful adaptation to...
The cycloundecapeptide cyclosporin A (CsA) was first isolated from the insect-pathogenic fungus Tolypocladium inflatum for its antifungal activity and later developed as an immunosuppressant drug. However, the full biosynthetic mechanism of CsA remains unknown and has puzzled researchers for decades. In this study, the biosynthetic gene cluster is suggested to...
In the 1990s, Bartlett and Youd introduced empirical equations for predicting
horizontal displacement from liquefaction-induced lateral spreading; these equations have
become popular in engineering practice. The equations were developed by multilinear
regression (MLR) of lateral spreading case history data compiled by these researchers. In 2002,
these equations were revised and...
Biodiesel has gained a significant amount of attention over the past decade as an environmentally friendly fuel that is capable of being utilized by a conventional diesel engine. However, the biodiesel production process generates glycerol-containing waste streams which have become a disposal issue for biodiesel plants and generated a surplus...
Background: Through next-generation sequencing, the amount of sequence data potentially available for phylogenetic analyses has increased exponentially in recent years. Simultaneously, the risk of incorporating ‘noisy’ data with misleading phylogenetic signal has also increased, and may disproportionately influence the topology of weakly supported nodes and lineages featuring rapid radiations and/or...
The Antarctic blue whale (Balaenoptera musculus intermedia) was hunted to near extinction between 1904 and 1972, declining from an estimated initial abundance of more than 250,000 to fewer than 400. Here, we describe mtDNA control region diversity and geographic differentiation in the surviving population of the Antarctic blue whale, using...
Juvenile survival and recruitment can be more sensitive to environmental, ecological and anthropogenic factors than adult survival, influencing population-level processes like recruitment and growth rate in long-lived, iteroparous species such as southern right whales. Conventionally, Southern right whales are individually identified using callosity patterns, which do not stabilise until 6–12...
MOTIVATION: The automatic identification of over-represented motifs present in a collection of sequences continues to be a challenging problem in computational biology. Many existing approaches to motif identification do not always find the relevant biological motifs, or find only a subset of the occurrences of a motif. In this paper,...
The New Zealand endemic Maui’s dolphin Cephalorhynchus hectori maui is characterized by several life history traits thought to be important predictors of extinction risk in marine mammals, including a slow rate of reproduction, small geographic range, small group size, and coastal distribution. We continued the genetic monitoring of the remnant...