Practitioner versus participant perspectives on conservation tenders

Extensive clearing of native vegetation on rural properties throughout Australia over the last century has generated significant damage to biodiversity. Conservation tenders have been broadly used to reduce the detrimental impact of such widespread clearance. To date, Australian conservation tender research has largely been limited to program evaluations and landholder surveys. This analysis differs by comparing and contrasting the views of non-landholders involved with these programs with those of participant landholders. The non-landholder group consists of individuals with involvement in conservation tenders across Australia. By contrast, the landholder group consists of individuals with participation experience in a series of Victorian tender initiatives. Each group is surveyed to investigate the drivers of cost-effectiveness within tender programs and landholder participation. This analysis explores these two perspectives, revealing important convergences and divergences in opinion. Both practitioners and landholders indicate that programs supported by close agency–landholder relationships and offering flexibility to landholders are most likely to succeed, particularly where landholders perceive the tender instrument to be fair. Whilst practitioners emphasise the role of transaction costs issues and program characteristics in achieving cost-effective biodiversity outcomes, landholders indicate that these factors are less important to participation rates. This research is important to guide future implementation of tender programs both in Australia and internationally.     

Expanded thermal niche for a diving vertebrate: A leatherback turtle diving into near-freezing water

The global distribution of extant reptiles is more limited than that of mammals or birds, with low reptilian species diversity at high latitudes. Central to this limited geographical distribution is the ectothermic nature of reptiles, which means that they generally become torpid at cold temperatures. However, here we report the first detailed telemetry from a leatherback turtle (Dermochelys coriacea) diving in cold water at high latitude. An individual equipped with a satellite tag that relayed temperature-depth profiles dived continuously for many weeks into sub-surface waters as cold as 0.4 °C. Global warming will likely increase the foraging range of leatherback turtles further into temperate and boreal waters.     

Diet changes in the carbon and nitrogen content of the copepod Metridia lucens

Diel changes in the near-surface (0–50 m) abundance, prosomelength, and carbon and nitrogen content of the copepod Metridialucens were measured in Deep Cove, Doubtful Sound, New Zealand(45°27'S, 167°9'E) between 3 and 6 September 1996. Metridialucens showed maximal abundance a night, suggesting a patternof normal diel vertical migration (DVM). The change in abundancesuggested that the descent of the population occurred –1h prior to dawn and the ascent –1 h after dusk. However,a proportion of the population remained near the surface duringthe day. Although there was no diel pattern in the prosome lengthof M.lucens collected near the surface, there was a marked dielcycle in the measured carbon and nitrogen contents, with maximalvalues being measured towards the end of the night prior tothe downward migration. We suggest that this diet cycle in themeasured elemental content was caused by DVM occurring morestrongly in those animals which had a better body condition,i.e. a higher elemental content per unit length.     

NUCLEAR DNA CONTENT IN POPULATIONS OF PINUS RIGIDA

Five populations of Pinus rigida growing in contrasting ecological situations ranging from North Carolina (35°53'N latitude) to Quebec (45°06'N latitude) showed no significant variation in amounts of nuclear DNA with respect to germinating seedlings. Nuclear volume of dormant nuclei also showed no significant variation between and within populations, a finding that is consistent with the concept that the basic 2C DNA value of Pinus rigida is uniform under all habitats. This finding is in contrast to numerous reports for other coniferous species.     

Reversible Control by Vitamin D of Granulocytes and Bacteria in the Lungs of Mice: An Ovalbumin-Induced Model of Allergic Airway Disease

Vitamin D may be essential for restricting the development and severity of allergic diseases and asthma, but a direct causal link between vitamin D deficiency and asthma has yet to be established. We have developed a ‘low dose’ model of allergic airway disease induced by intraperitoneal injection with ovalbumin (1 µg) and aluminium hydroxide (0.2 mg) in which characteristics of atopic asthma are recapitulated, including airway hyperresponsiveness, antigen-specific immunoglobulin type-E and lung inflammation. We assessed the effects of vitamin D deficiency throughout life (from conception until adulthood) on the severity of ovalbumin-induced allergic airway disease in vitamin D-replete and -deficient BALB/c mice using this model. Vitamin D had protective effects such that deficiency significantly enhanced eosinophil and neutrophil numbers in the bronchoalveolar lavage fluid of male but not female mice. Vitamin D also suppressed the proliferation and T helper cell type-2 cytokine-secreting capacity of airway-draining lymph node cells from both male and female mice. Supplementation of initially vitamin D-deficient mice with vitamin D for four weeks returned serum 25-hydroxyvitamin D to levels observed in initially vitamin D-replete mice, and also suppressed eosinophil and neutrophil numbers in the bronchoalveolar lavage fluid of male mice. Using generic 16 S rRNA primers, increased bacterial levels were detected in the lungs of initially vitamin D-deficient male mice, which were also reduced by vitamin D supplementation. These results indicate that vitamin D controls granulocyte levels in the bronchoalveolar lavage fluid in an allergen-sensitive manner, and may contribute towards the severity of asthma in a gender-specific fashion through regulation of respiratory bacteria.     

The Role of Habitat Complexity in Community Development Is Mediated by Resource Availability

Habitat complexity strongly affects the structure and dynamics of ecological communities, with increased complexity often leading to greater species diversity and abundance. However, habitat complexity changes as communities develop, and some species alter their environment to themselves provide habitat for other species. Most experimental studies manipulate basal substrate complexity, and while the importance of complexity likely changes during community development, few studies have examined the temporal dynamics of this variable. We used two experiments to quantify the importance of basal substrate complexity to sessile marine invertebrate community development through space and time. First, we compared effects of substrate complexity at 70 sites across ten estuaries. Sites differed in recruitment and community development rates, and after three months provided spatial variation in community development stage. Second, we tested for effects of substrate complexity at multiple times at a single site. In both experiments, complexity affected marine sessile invertebrate community composition in the early stages of community development when resource availability was high. Effects of complexity diminished through time as the amount of available space (the primary limiting resource) declined. Our work suggests the presence of a bare-space threshold, at which structural complexity of the basal substrate is overwhelmed by secondary biotic complexity. This threshold will be met at different times depending on local recruitment and growth rates and is likely to vary with productivity gradients.     

Frequency-dependent conspecific attraction to food patches

In many ecological situations, resources are difficult to find but become more apparent to nearby searchers after one of their numbers discovers and begins to exploit them. If the discoverer cannot monopolize the resources, then others may benefit from joining the discoverer and sharing their discovery. Existing theories for this type of conspecific attraction have often used very simple rules for how the decision to join a discovered resource patch should be influenced by the number of individuals already exploiting that patch. We use a mechanistic, spatially explicit model to demonstrate that individuals should not necessarily simply join patches more often as the number of individuals exploiting the patch increases, because those patches are likely to be exhausted soon or joining them will intensify future local competition. Furthermore, we show that this decision should be sensitive to the nature of the resource patches, with individuals being more responsive to discoveries in general and more tolerant of larger numbers of existing exploiters on a patch when patches are resource-rich and challenging to locate alone. As such, we argue that this greater focus on underlying joining mechanisms suggests that conspecific attraction is a more sophisticated and flexible tactic than currently appreciated.     

Validation of the first step of the heuristic refinement method for the derivation of solution structures of proteins from NMR data

A new method for the analysis of NMR data in terms of the solution structure of proteins has been developed. The method consists of two steps: first a systematic search of the conformational space to define the region allowed by the initial set of experimental constraints, and second, the narrowing of this region by the introduction of additional constraints and optional refinement procedures. The search of the conformational space is guided by heuristics to make it computationally feasible. The method is therefore called the heuristic refinement method and is coded in an expert system called PROTEAN. The paper describes the validation of the first step of the method using an artificial NMR data set generated from the known crystal structure of sperm whale carbon monoxymyoglobin. It is shown that the initial search procedure yields a low-resolution structure of the myoglobin molecule, accurately reproducing its main topological features, and that the precision of the structure depends on the quality of the initial data set.