Tradeoffs and thresholds in the effects of nitrogen addition on biodiversity and ecosystem functioning: evidence from inner Mongolia Grasslands

Nitrogen (N) deposition is widely considered an environmental problem that leads to biodiversity loss and reduced ecosystem resilience; but, N fertilization has also been used as a management tool for enhancing primary production and ground cover, thereby promoting the restoration of degraded lands. However, empirical evaluation of these contrasting impacts is lacking. We tested the dual effects of N enrichment on biodiversity and ecosystem functioning at different organizational levels (i.e., plant species, functional groups, and community) by adding N at 0, 1.75, 5.25, 10.5, 17.5, and 28.0 g N m^?2 yr^?1 for four years in two contrasting field sites in Inner Mongolia: an undisturbed mature grassland and a nearby degraded grassland of the same type. N addition had both quantitatively and qualitatively different effects on the two communities. In the mature community, N addition led to a large reduction in species richness, accompanied by increased dominance of early successional annuals and loss of perennial grasses and forbs at all N input rates. In the degraded community, however, N addition increased the productivity and dominance of perennial rhizomatous grasses, with only a slight reduction in species richness and no significant change in annual abundance. The mature grassland was much more sensitive to N‐induced changes in community structure, likely as a result of higher soil moisture accentuating limitation by N alone. Our findings suggest that the critical threshold for N‐induced species loss to mature Eurasian grasslands is below 1.75 g N m^?2 yr^?1, and that changes in aboveground biomass, species richness, and plant functional group composition to both mature and degraded ecosystems saturate at N addition rates of approximately 10.5 g N m^?2 yr^?1. This work highlights the tradeoffs that exist in assessing the total impact of N deposition on ecosystem function.     

Photography and the comparative method: the construction of an anthropological archive

In 1931‐2, Henry Balfour, the Curator of the Pitt Rivers Museum at the University of Oxford, decided to create a systematic archive out of the collection of ethnographic photographs that he had actively collected for the Museum over many years. The result was a series of thematically arranged boxes intended to form a cross‐cultural research resource. The archival groupings formed pose a series of questions about the legacy of cultural comparativism in the twentieth century as it emerged from Victorian socio‐cultural evolutionism and typological classification, and how it has been rethought within a shifting intellectual rationale for the ethnographic museum in more recent times. The article both examines the specific genealogy and broader historical contexts for the comparative method within the Pitt Rivers Museum itself, as well placing it within the context of other archival projects of the 1930s. Through a comparison with the photograph collection of the Warburg Institute, which was reorganized along similar lines at a similar period, we understand Balfour's project not simply as a final efflorescence of Victorian museum anthropology, but also as part of a wider universalizing archival movement of the inter‐war period. The article seeks to understand why the archive series Balfour created was not continued by subsequent curators at the Museum, arguing that the postcolonial period brought with it significant challenges to the identity and role of ethnographic museums, and especially the intellectual underpinnings of cultural comparativism, and that these challenges were engaged with by reinterpreting arrangement by type within a general humanist agenda.

Résumé

En 1931‐1932, Henry Balfour, conservateur du Pitt Rivers Museum à l'Université d'Oxford, décida de créer des archives systématiques à partir de la collection de photographies ethnographiques qu'il avait recueillie au fil des années pour son musée. Le résultat tient dans une série de boîtes classées par thèmes, censées constituer une ressource pour les recherches interculturelles. Les regroupements ainsi archivés posent une série de questions sur l'héritage du comparativisme culturel au XX^ème siècle, tel qu'il est né de l'évolutionnisme socioculturel victorien et de la classification typologique, et la manière dont il a été repensé plus récemment, avec l'évolution du cadre de justification intellectuelle du musée ethnographique. L'article examine spécifiquement la généalogie de la méthode comparative et, plus largement, son contexte historique, au Pitt Rivers Museum lui‐même et dans le contexte d'autres projets d'archivage des années 1930. Une comparaison avec la collection photographique de l'Institut Warburg, réorganisé vers la même époque et selon des principes similaires, fait apparaître le projet de Balfour non plus simplement comme une simple efflorescence de l'anthropologie muséographique victorienne, mais aussi comme un élément d'un mouvement d'archivage plus large, universalisant, pendant l'entre‐deux‐guerres. L'article cherche à comprendre pourquoi la série d'archives créée par Balfour n'a pas été continuée par les conservateurs suivants du musée. Selon l'auteur, la période postcoloniale a fortement remis en question l'identité et le rôle des musées ethnographiques et notamment les fondements intellectuels du comparativisme culturel, et la réponse à cette remise en question a pris la forme d'une réinterprétation de la classification typologique au sein d'un système global humaniste.     

Demographic Sensitivity of Population Change in Northern Bobwhite

Abstract: The northern bobwhite (Colinus virginianus) is an economically important gamebird that is currently undergoing widespread population declines. Despite considerable research on the population ecology of bobwhites, there have been few attempts to model population dynamics of bobwhites to determine the contributions of different demographic parameters to variance of the finite rate of population change (Λ). We conducted a literature review and compiled 405 estimates of 9 demographic parameters from 49 field studies of bobwhites. To identify demographic parameters that might be important for management, we used life-stage simulation analyses (LSA) to examine sensitivity of Λ to simulated variation in 9 demographic parameters for female bobwhites. In a baseline LSA based on uniform distributions bounded by the range of estimates for each demographic parameter, bobwhite populations were predicted to decline (Λ = 0.56) and winter survival of adults made the greatest contribution to variance of Λ (r² = 0.453), followed by summer survival of adults (r² = 0.163), and survival of chicks (r² = 0.120). Population change was not sensitive to total clutch laid, nest survival, egg hatchability, or 3 parameters associated with the number of nesting attempts (r²<0.06). Our conclusions were robust to alternative simulation scenarios, and parameter rankings changed only if we adjusted the lower bounds of winter survival upwards. Bobwhite populations were not viable with survival rates reported from most field studies. Survival rates may be depressed below sustainable levels by environmental conditions or possibly by impacts of capture and telemetry methods. Overall, our simulation results indicate that management practices that improve seasonal survival rates will have the greatest potential benefit for recovery of declining populations of bobwhites.     

CO2 effects on the water budget of grassland microcosm communities

Experimental grassland ecosystems, in microcosms 0.2 m in diameter and with a 0.95 m soil column, varied in their responses to elevated partial pressure of CO₂ (pCO₂) and altered moisture inputs. Ecosystems on moderately fertile sandstone soil and with a typical mix of moderately fast-growing sandstone species, responded to elevated pCO₂ with decreases in mid-season evapotranspiration of nearly 50%. This pattern reversed at the end of the growing season, and sandstone ecosystems under elevated pCO₂ continued active transpiration farther into the summer drought. The sandstone ecosystems appeared to convert mid-season water conservation into increased late-season growth. Effects of increased pCO₂ on ecosystem evapotranspiration were much smaller in ecosystems with very infertile serpentine soil and a diverse mixture of slow-growing serpentine species.     

Predicting the influence of wolf-provided carrion on scavenger community dynamics under climate change scenarios

Climate change poses an immediate threat to the persistence and distribution of many species, yet our ability to forecast changes in species composition is hindered by poor understanding of the extent to which higher trophic‐level interactions may buffer or exacerbate the adverse effects of warming. We incorporated species‐specific consumption data from 240 wolf‐killed elk carcasses from Yellowstone National Park into stochastic simulation models to link trends in the El Niño Southern Oscillation (ENSO) to food procurement by a guild of scavengers as a function of gray wolf reintroduction. We find that a shift in ENSO towards the El Niño (warming) phase of the cycle coincident with increasing global temperatures reduces carrion for scavengers, particularly those with strong seasonal patterns in resource use such as grizzly bears. Wolves alleviate these warming‐induced food shortages by rendering control over this crucial resource to biotic rather than abiotic factors. Ecosystems with intact top predators are likely to exhibit stronger biotic regulation and should be more resistant to climate change than ecosystems lacking them.     

The Ordovician-Silurian boundary stratotype: consequences of its approval by the IUGS

Lespérance, Pierre J., Barnes, Christopher R., Berry, William B. N., Boucot, Arthur J. & Mu En-zhi 1987 07 15: The Ordovician-Silurian boundary stratotype: consequences of its approval by the IUGS.
The Ordovician-Silurian stratotype at Dob's Linn, Scotland is the second systemic boundary approved by the International Union of Geological Sciences (IUGS). A review of the internationally accepted criteria required of a stratotype shows that few of these are possessed by the Dob's Linn section. The strongest attribute of the section is the presence of zonal graptolites, although the boundary is recognized primarily on a single biological event (base of acuminatus Zone) for which the evolutionary relationships of the taxa are not established. In approving this boundary proposal in 1985, which received only simple majority support within the Ordovician-Silurian Boundary Working Group (OSBWG) and which fails to meet most of the accepted prerequisites for a stratotype, the International Commission on Stratigraphy (ICS) and the IUGS have established an unfortunate precedent. It follows that future systemic boundaries need not meet the accepted standards. It raises serious questions on the assessment and voting procedures of the International Commission on Stratigraphy and on the credence accorded the recommendations developed by the International Subcommission on Stratigraphic Classification of IUGS.     

Markedly discordant mitochondrial DNA and allozyme phylogenies of tube-nosed fruit bats, Nyctimene, at the Australian–Oriental biogeographical interface

Australo-Papuan tube-nosed fruit bats of the genus Nyctimene reach their most westerly distribution on the island archipelagos of eastern Indonesia. A recent morphological examination indicates three species occur on Moluccan islands. Both allozyme electrophoresis and mitochondrial DNA (mtDNA) sequencing reveal there are only two species present, Nyctimene cephalotes and Nyctimene albiventer , but there is considerable disparity between the results obtained from the two genetic data sets. Allozyme data indicate N. albiventer occurs on Wokam, which sits on the Australian continental shelf and was joined to Australo-Papua during the last glacial maximum, and N. cephalotes on the other Moluccan islands, all of which are off the continental shelf. Divergence of these two species is dated at approximately 1.5 Mya. By contrast, the mtDNA gene tree shows two deep clades, one containing all specimens from Wokam and Yamdena, and the second all the specimens from the other islands. This especially marked incongruence between the two genetic data sets is ascribed to either a single introgression event of N. albiventer mtDNA into N. cephalotes on Yamdena at around 100 000 ya or lineage sorting of very old mtDNA lineages that coalesce a rather long time before the speciation event. These results highlight that caution should be exercised when relying on mtDNA as barcodes in species taxonomy. The continental-associated N. albiventer on Wokam has higher levels of allozyme heterozygosity and mtDNA nucleotide diversity than the N. cephalotes populations occurring on the more remote islands, indicating that this colonizing species has experienced bottlenecks and/or a low effective population size since speciation.  © 2008 The Linnean Society of London, Biological Journal of the Linnean Society , 2008, 93 , 589–602.     

Faecal case architecture in the gibbosus species group of Neochlamisus Karren, 1972 (Coleoptera: Chrysomelidae: Cryptocephalinae: Chlamisini)

Constructions composed of faeces are rare in insects, but occur in certain leaf-beetle clades. Members of the subfamily Cryptocephalinae share a complex behavioural and morphological synapomorphy, involving portable faecal cases that house the immature stages. A maternally initiated egg case is expanded and enlarged through four larval stadia, then sealed to provide a pupal chamber from which adults eventually emerge. We analyse and compare faecal-case architecture in ten taxa of the cryptocephaline genus Neochlamisus , and assess structural variation within a life cycle, between different 'host forms' of Neochlamisus bebbianae , and among species. These cases proved to be comprised primarily of faeces, with plant trichomes representing the only common secondary component. General architectural trends reflected variation in shape, faecal texture, and the incorporation and density of trichomes. Deviations of the Neochlamisus case from a simple geometrical gnomon reflect the changing body size of the animal, differential application of faeces, and shifts in the orientation of the carriage of the case. Neochlamisus cases are presumably energetically costly to produce, carry, and maintain, and some adaptive hypotheses of case evolution are proposed. Additionally, literature on case morphology in other camptosomates is reviewed.  © 2008 The Linnean Society of London, Zoological Journal of the Linnean Society , 2008, 152 , 315–351.     

DELIMITING SPAWNING AREAS OF WEAKFISH CYNOSCION REGALIS (FAMILY SCIAENIDAE) IN PAMLICO SOUND,NORTH CAROLINA USING PASSIVE HYDROACOUSTIC SURVEYS

ABSTRACT

Exact locations of spawning areas used by marine fishes are needed to design marine reserves and estimate spawning stocks. The location of spawning areas of soniferous fishes such as weakfish Cynoscion regalis can be determined by means of passive hydroacoustic surveys. We conducted nocturnal hydrophone surveys at 12 locations in Pamlico Sound in May of 1996 and 1997. Digital audio tapes were made of weakfish “purring” sounds, the tapes were analyzed spectrographically and compared with ichthyoplankton surveys taken at the same stations and times. All weakfish “purring” sounds were recorded at stations near inlets. Maximum sound pressure levels recorded after sunset were 127 dB (re 1 (μPa) for individual weakfish, but reached a maximum of 147 dB when weakfish and other fish were producing sounds simultaneously. The maximum distance that an individual weakfish “purr” can be detected above the background sound, assuming a cylindrical spreading model, is approximately 50 m. There was a strong association (r = 0.78) between the log₁₀— transformed abundance of early-stage sciaenid-type eggs and maximum sound pressure levels, with the greatest numbers occurring at the inlet stations. These results suggest that passive hydroacoustic surveys can be used to delimit spawning areas for conservation and management purposes.