It’s possible that I shall make an ass of myself. But in that case one can always get out of it with a little dialectic. I have, of course, so worded my proposition as to be right either way (K.Marx, Letter to F.Engels on the Indian Mutiny)
Thursday, August 18, 2022
Scientists unravel biotic colonization history of subtropical East Asian caves
IMAGE: YANGZI CAVE IN GUANGXI, CHINA IS AN EXAMPLE OF A KARST CAVEview more
CREDIT: IBCAS
Caves have an isolated, strongly zonal environment and are home to unique and fragile biotas with high levels of endemism. However, little is known about how the biotic colonization of caves developed over time, especially in caves at middle and low latitudes.
To broaden knowledge in this area, researchers led by Prof. WANG Wei from the Institute of Botany of the Chinese Academy of Sciences (IBCAS) recently studied caves in subtropical East Asia to unravel their colonization history.
Subtropical East Asia holds the world's largest karst landform with numerous ancient caves. These caves harbor a high diversity of cave-dwelling organisms and are regarded as a biodiversity hotspot.
WANG's team selected 28 clades with 1,437 species for their study. These species belong to 43 genera from ferns, angiosperms, arachnids, amphibians, reptiles, fishes, and fungi.
The study showed that most cave colonization events occurred after the Oligocene-Miocene boundary and the surrounding forest was a major source of cave biodiversity. It also showed that biotic colonization during the Neogene experienced periods of acceleration and decline and was not a random process.
By modeling variations of distribution ranges of East Asian subtropical evergreen broad-leaf forests over time and analyzing paleoclimate data from 19 fossil sites, the researchers proposed that biotic colonization of subtropical East Asian caves during the Neogene occurred in conjunction with large-scale, seasonal climatic changes and the evolution of local forests.
"We discovered that climate changes over time and the evolution of local vegetation, as well as the establishment of seasonal climate, drove the biotic colonization of subtropical East Asian caves over time," said WANG, corresponding author of the study.
The scientists further proposed a climate-vegetation-relict model for subtropical East Asian cave biota, which may also help explain the evolutionary origins of other mid-latitude subterranean biotas.
"Cave biotas may be the extensions of local surface biotas," said WANG.
CAPTION
Colonization dynamics of subtropical East Asian caves in relation to paleogeoclimate and vegetation changes
Water quality trading has been proposed as a way to address water pollution, where one source of pollution is allowed to emit a pollutant at levels greater than required by buying "credits" from another source that is able to control pollution levels below the required threshold. An article published in Contemporary Economic Policy provides a comprehensive review of experiences with water quality trading programs worldwide over more than four decades.
The authors note that one of the biggest challenges of making water quality trading programs work is that agricultural production, an important source of pollution in many watersheds, remains largely unregulated.
"There is potential for water quality trading to evolve further and serve as a cost-effective pollution control instrument, but this requires nudging political will, in particular creating regulatory drivers for all pollution sources, streamlining competing policy programs, and making costs and benefits of trading clear and visible to all program participants,” said corresponding author Haiyan Liu, PhD, of the University of Waterloo, in Canada.
Embracing tourism could be the blueprint for Cornish fishers' sustainable success Peer-Reviewed Publication
UNIVERSITY OF SURREY
The voyage of Cornish fishers into tourism provides a potential model for the promotion of the 'Blue Economy' elsewhere, according to new research from the University of Surrey.
Researchers found that Cornish fishers' decision to transition to a model incorporating marine tourism – for example, taking customers on fishing trips – is helping to keep its fishing culture and tradition alive while preserving local finishing stocks.
Dr Anke Winchenbach, Lecturer in Tourism and Transport at the University of Surrey, said:
"Our study details how Cornish fishers have experienced the transition into tourism – and hopefully shows how fishing and the tourism industry can work together to help maintain the region's traditions while reaping the benefits of positive marine tourism.
"It's not a question of ditching tradition but showing how valuing tradition while embracing new opportunities delivers real economic and social benefit to the fishers and the region."
In the UK, the number of fishing operators has declined by 45 per cent since 1994 and 75 per cent between 1938 and 2020. The decline in fishing, as well as a lack of tourism promotion, partly contributes to a situation where 90 per cent of the UK's most deprived communities are at the coast.
Coastal and marine tourism is the second largest contributor to the Blue Economy and is the fastest growing area of contemporary tourism.
Surrey's study shows that fishers who transition into marine tourism in Cornwall are not only experiencing a change in fortunes financially but report an improvement in their mental and physical health, thanks to a safer working environment and a sense of pride associated with using their fishing skills and knowledge. The diversification is seen as a win-win, with less pressure on fishing stocks, leading to a more sustainable industry.
The Surrey team also found that the fishers' new strategy has received support from local communities throughout Cornwall. The new endeavour allows traditions to remain alive and keeps fishers turned marine tourism operators connected to the sea while benefitting the local community.
Dr Winchenbach added:
"With tourism accounting for 20 per cent of employment in Cornwall and contributing just over £2 billion to the local economy through visitor-related spending, the regional debate has often pitched tourism against tradition.
"Our study suggests that tourism and tradition can work hand-in-hand to support the community, deliver economic and personal benefits through increasing social interactions and improving mental health."
Reference: Anke Winchenbach et al.; Constructing identity in marine tourism diversification; Annals of Tourism Research; Volume 95; July 2022; 10.1016/j.annals.2022.103441.
If you would like to interview Dr Anke Winchenbach, Lecturer from the School of Hospitality and Tourism Management at the University of Surrey, please contact the media relations team at mediarelations@surrey.ac.uk
The University of Surrey is a world-leading centre for excellence in sustainability – where our multi-disciplinary research connects society and technology to equip humanity with the tools to tackle climate change, clean our air, reduce the impacts of pollution on health and help us live better, more sustainable lives. The University is committed to improving its own resource efficiency on its estate and being a sector leader, aiming to be carbon neutral by 2030. A focus on research that makes a difference to the world has contributed to Surrey being ranked 55th in the world in the Times Higher Education (THE) University Impact Rankings 2022, which assesses more than 1,400 universities' performance against the United Nations' Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs).
IMAGE: EFFECT OF LAND COVER ON ECOREGION-SCALE SPATIAL PATTERNS OF MERCURY CONTAMINATION OF LARGEMOUTH BASS IN THE SOUTHEASTERN USview more
CREDIT: EFFECT OF LAND COVER ON ECOREGION-SCALE SPATIAL PATTERNS OF MERCURY CONTAMINATION OF LARGEMOUTH BASS IN THE SOUTHEASTERN US CHUMCHAL, M. ET AL FIRST PUBLISHED: 17 AUGUST 2022 HTTPS://ONLINELIBRARY.WILEY.COM/DOI/10.1002/ETC.5426
Consuming methylmercury-contaminated fish poses a hazard to human health. New research published in Environmental Toxicology and Chemistry may help environmental resource management officials predict which regions are likely to have fish with high concentrations of this toxin, without the need for extensive testing.
Investigators found that 72% of the variance in average concentrations of methylmercury in largemouth bass between regions of the Southeastern U.S. could be explained by the percent coverage of land by evergreen forests, emergent herbaceous wetlands, and pasture/hay.
The scientists explain that inorganic mercury from the atmosphere is deposited across the landscape, but that land cover determines how much of this inorganic mercury will be transported to freshwater systems and converted to methylmercury in aquatic environments.
“Our study suggests that monitoring efforts should focus on ecoregions with land cover types that increase the ‘sensitivity’ of water bodies to atmospheric mercury deposition,” said lead author Ray Drenner, PhD, of Texas Christian University. “We hope our study helps resource managers tasked with issuing fish consumption advisories for mercury.”
INSTITUTE OF ATMOSPHERIC PHYSICS, CHINESE ACADEMY OF SCIENCES
IMAGE: FARMERS ARE TRANSPLANTING RICE IN A PADDY FIELD IN HEILONGJIANG PROVINCE, NORTHEAST CHINA IN SPRING.view more
CREDIT: XIANLI YANG
Climate models had until recently not been performing very well predicting variation in the spring rainfall over northeast China, home to some of the country’s main cereal production. This uncertainty potentially puts the food security of the country—and even the world—at risk. Researchers have however now identified the problem: a previously unidentified major shift that occurred in the mid-1980s in atmospheric flows from the North Atlantic as a result of a weakening jet stream.
Northeast China, including Heilongjiang province—the country's largest grain producer—is one of the country's major breadbaskets. The area's agriculture is key to the nation's basic food self-sufficiency. And sowing season comes in the spring there. As a result, any changes that might be caused by global warming to springtime precipitation in the region will be vital to understand in order to ensure food security for the 1.4 billion people who make the country their home. And if China's ability to feed itself is threatened, so is that of the rest of the world.
Unfortunately, up until now, climate models have not done a very good job of simulating variability in spring rainfall over northeast China—which also includes the provinces of Jilin, Liaoning, and eastern Inner Mongolia—compared to how well they perform for other areas.
“It had long been thought that the sea-surface temperature over North Atlantic Ocean were closely related to springtime precipitation in northeast China,” said Zhiwei Zhu, lead author of the paper and researcher with the Key Laboratory of Meteorological Disaster at Nanjing University of Information Science and Technology. “But this was too crude an understanding, and seasonal predictions for the northeast China have just been completely off compared to how well models perform seasonal predictions for the rest of the country.”
It may seem far-fetched that sea-surface temperature in the North Atlantic can affect spring rains as far away as northeast China, but such long-distance production of anomalies taking place thousands of kilometers away—termed ‘teleconnections’ by climate scientists and oceanographers—are common both in the atmosphere and the ocean.
An example of such teleconnections are Rossby waves, also called planetary waves, westerly winds that flow in very large wavy patterns meandering from south to north and back again. Rossby waves form as a result of the rotation of the Earth and contribute to the transfer of heat from the tropics to the poles and of cold air to the tropics. A succession of these waves is called a wave train.
“But our predictions based off these teleconnections were somehow wrong,” added Professor Zhu.
In order to better come to grips with what was happening in the northeast China, the researchers produced a fresh analysis considering average monthly precipitation data from gauge stations throughout China and monthly average sea-surface temperatures taken by the US National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) over a sixty-year period (1961–2020).
They found that there had been a major change in the atmospheric teleconnections between the tropical North Atlantic and northeast Chinese spring rainfall in that time.
Until the mid-1980s, spring rains in the Chinese northeast had been linked to a Rossby wave train that propagated along the westerly jet stream and were coupled to extratropical (mid-latitude) North Atlantic sea surface temperature, not tropical sea-surface temperatures.
Then, in the mid-eighties, there was an abrupt shift, and ever since, northeast Chinese spring rains have been linked to a completely different Rossby wave train that propagate along a great circle route (the shortest route between two points on the surface of a sphere) that is coupled with tropical North Atlantic sea-surface temperatures.
As the atmospheric teleconnections have shifted, so have any anomalous sea-surface temperatures associated with them, and thus altering the origins of the northeast Chinese spring rains.
In essence, they found that the linkage between northeast China spring rainfall and North Atlantic regional sea-surface temperature is unstable, not permanent as had earlier been thought.
This alternating of Rossby wave trains has in turn been caused by a weakening over the decades of the westerly jet stream—narrow bands of strong winds in the upper atmosphere—over North America (Climate scientists have hypothesized that the jet stream may gradually weaken as a result of global warming).
Moving forward, climate scientists need to pay close attention to such decadal shifts, the researchers say, in order to produce better predictions of climate variation for northeast China and perhaps even the whole of northeast Asia in the spring.
Having identified the cause of the of the faulty climate predictions for the region, the researchers now intend to develop a better, decadal-varying seasonal prediction model covering a century-long period.
IMAGE: THE IMAGE ABOVE SHOWS A COMPARISON BETWEEN LINEAR AND CIRCULAR ECONOMY MODELS. AS THE NAME SUGGESTS, THE RESOURCE GOES THROUGH A TAKE-MAKE-CONSUME-DISPOSE SEQUENCE LINEARLY TO FINALLY PRODUCE A LARGER AMOUNT OF WASTE MATERIAL IN A LINEAR ECONOMY. ON THE OTHER HAND, IN CIRCULAR ECONOMY, THE RESOURCE CYCLES THROUGH THE PRODUCTION LOOP WITH LESSER WASTE AS WELL AS SOME USEFUL BIPRODUCTS, WHICH IS WELL IN TUNE WITH THE ASPIRATIONS OF MANY SDGS.view more
CREDIT: CIRCULAR ECONOMY, TSINGHUA UNIVERSITY PRESS.
Circular economy is a brilliant concept that has found its way not only in elevating various aspects of our lives but also in solidifying future plans and goals for a sustainable society. In that sense, it also has high potential in achieving United Nations 2030 agenda for sustainable development goals (SDGs) that was adopted in 2015 with the motive of “transforming our world”. It has been recognized composedly by the local and the national governments alike, as well as by mainstream private sectors that aim to achieve the UN agenda for SDGs.
A paper describing circular economy as a vital enabler for the sustainable use of resources for achieving the UN agenda for SDGs appeared in the journal Circular Economyon June 17, 2022 (https://doi.org/10.1016/j.cec.2022.100001). In this article, Khajuria and co-authors focused on the promotion of circular economy arguing its significance in attaining SDGs under the United Nations agenda that aims on shifting the world onto a sustainable and resilient development path leaving no one behind. The authors review some distinctive case studies concerning the promotion of circular economy and their implementation aimed toward the SDGs and discuss some key points on the current standing and possible future directions in diverse scenarios.
In order to meet sustainable development goals, circular economy (with a “made-to-be-made-again” policy) represents a fundamental alternative to the linear economic model (with a “take-make-consume-dispose” policy) that is restorative to maintain the utility of products, components, and materials, and to retain their values. The main challenge is to minimize the need for new inputs of material and energy while reducing the environmental pressure linked to resource extraction, emissions, and waste. The circular economy model offers a new chance for innovation and integration among natural ecosystems, businesses model, public-private-partnership, our daily lives, society, and waste management. The image above shows a comparison between linear and circular economy models. As the name suggests, the resource goes through a take-make-consume-dispose sequence linearly to finally produce a larger amount of waste material in a linear economy. On the other hand, in circular economy, the resource cycles through the production loop with lesser waste as well as some useful biproducts, which is well in tune with the aspirations of many SDGs.
This article discusses several innovative circular economy solutions to waste including specific 3Rs policies and practices in some fast-developing countries including Bangladesh, China, Guyana, Thailand, and the Philippines. It compiles and discusses several distinctive ideas and visions considered during a special session held at the 16th International Conference on Waste Management and Technology, where several policymakers, engineers, researchers, and experts in the field of waste management from around the world exchanged opinions and shared knowledge on critical solutions and pathways to achieve multiple SDGs. The lead author, Anupam Khajuria, a researcher at the United Nations Centre for Regional Development, Japan, underlines – “3R has a central role in enhancing resource efficiency and creating a circular economy that enables society to maximize the economic return on limited resources”. The circular economy goes beyond recycling and is based on a restorative industrial system focused to treat waste as a resource. The implementation of a circular economy is specifically based on both resource efficiency and eco-efficiency, and it helps to move toward a green and sustainable economy. Khajuria explains that business models based on circular economy represent the decoupling of economic growth from resource consumption that boosts economic growth and product lifetime through repair, reuse, and ultimately recycling. “The unsustainable use of resources generates vast amounts of waste that may lead to serious environmental consequences including extreme climate changes”, articulates Khajuria. Managing waste in the most efficient and environment-friendly manner is therefore of great importance for the future. Khajuria further adds – “Technological innovations grounded on circular economy approach have been proven to be highly efficient for reducing the amount of final waste, for decreasing the use of virgin natural resources, as well as for increasing production efficiency that leads to a quality life concerning environmental health, right in tune with the UN agenda for SDGs”. According to Khajuria, the transition of sustainable waste management to circular economy utilizes the potential of waste by increasing recycling and reuse of waste material and aims to have a climate-neutral waste activity that helps to improve its economic balance.
It is evident that circular economy provides new opportunities and has positive effects on the UN SDGs, particularly, SDG 12 relates to responsible consumption and production. The circular economy offers a solution to address the issue of waste management in developing countries that can lead to maximizing the designed solution of the product as well as alleviate several issues such as poverty, hunger, and gender and social inequality. This also means that circular economy model can add various opportunities for a sustainable economy such as creating new jobs, green public procurement, technology transfer of frontier technology including the fourth industrial revolution (4IR) and artificial intelligence (AI), and implementation of digital and transferable knowledge.
“Since circular economy approach is based on recycling and reusing the waste material in a circular manner by extracting maximum benefits from the natural resources, it saves the environment from excessive toxic waste and from unnecessary resource extraction, and at the same time, increases the end product. However, despite several potential environmental and economic benefits of circular economy concept, the current pace of transformation is not adequate, and more efficient strategic approaches are necessary to accelerate this process”, explains Prabhat Verma, a co-author and a professor at Osaka University, Japan.
This article also debates that there are a number of circular economy options, including Nature-based Solutions (NbS) that can facilitate the transition to a circular economy and support the sustainable management of the environment, with a reduced carbon footprint. NbS offer opportunities to evaluate present growth trajectories holistically to balance and regenerate the embedded natural and human capital. The circular economy approach provides the necessary framework and conditions that could be leveraged to attract investments for NbS. Finally, it recognizes that various stakeholders, including governments, research institutes, and private enterprises are promoting and accelerating circular economy waste management solutions that require innovative technologies and management methods. Active collaboration of various stakeholders with their respective expertise would certainly bring in some phenomenon changes in the current situation and will accelerate the transition towards circular economy to meet the UN 2030 agenda for SDGs.
Circular Economy is an international journal serving as a sharing and communication platform for novel contributions and outcomes on innovative techniques, systematic analysis, and policy tools of global, regional, national, local, and industrial park's waste management system to improve the reduce, reuse, recycle, and disposal of waste in a sustainable way.
Circular Economy is a fully open access journal. It is co-published by Tsinghua University Press and Elsevier, and academically supported by the School of Environment, Tsinghua University, and the Circular Economy Branch, Chinese Society for Environmental Sciences. At its discretion, Tsinghua University Press will pay the Open Access Fee for all published papers from 2022 to 2024.
Established in 1980, belonging to Tsinghua University, Tsinghua University Press (TUP) is a leading comprehensive higher education and professional publisher in China. Committed to building a top-level global cultural brand, after 41 years of development, TUP has established an outstanding managerial system and enterprise structure, and delivered multimedia and multi-dimensional publications covering books, audio, video, electronic products, journals and digital publications. In addition, TUP actively carries out its strategic transformation from educational publishing to content development and service for teaching & learning and was named First-class National Publisher for achieving remarkable results.
DEUTSCHES PRIMATENZENTRUM (DPZ)/GERMAN PRIMATE CENTER
IMAGE: THE MORE COMPLEX THE SOCIAL SYSTEM IS IN LEMURS, THE MORE SIGNALS THE ANIMALS USE TO COMMUNICATE.view more
CREDIT: CHRIS SCHLOEGL
Living together in groups entails constant interactions between individuals. Individuals need to permanently assess the behavior of others and to respond flexibly to it. Primates and other animals regulate and coordinate their interactions predominantly by vocal, visual, tactile, and olfactory signals. However, it is unclear what social or ecological factors influence the number of signals and the evolution of the various signaling modalities. One hypothesis holds that more complex signals have evolved in pair- or group-living species to regulate their more diverse social interactions. To investigate these relationships, Claudia Fichtel and Peter Kappeler, researchers in the Behavioral Ecology and Sociobiology Unit at the German Primate Center - Leibniz Institute for Primate Research, investigated which factors may explain the diversity of vocal, visual, and olfactory signaling repertoires in different lemur species. They were able to show that lemurs living in larger groups with correspondingly more complex social systems also have more complex communication systems in all three modalities. The size of the signaling repertoire could not be attributed to specific environmental factors, nor was it associated with body size or brain size (Philosophical Transactions B).
To regulate and coordinate interactions animals have to communicate. The lemurs of Madagascar communicate in different modalities and exhibit the major forms of social organization: they live either solitary, in pairs, or in groups. In addition, the activity patterns of the more than 120 known species vary. There are diurnal and nocturnal species, as well as species that are active day and night. "Because lemurs have evolved in isolation from other primates for more than 50 million years, they provide an excellent opportunity to identify fundamental principles in the coevolution of social and communicative traits," explains Peter Kappeler.
The vocal repertoire of lemurs is about as large as that of other monkey species. Lemurs also use vocalizations to signal their dominance status, resolve conflicts, signal their emotional state to others, maintain group cohesion, coordinate group movements, or defend territories. In addition, olfactory communication is prominent in lemurs. They have specialized glands on their genitalia, chest, hands or head, and their secretions are applied to trees, but also to conspecifics. Lemurs also use gestures or facial expressions to regulate social relationships. As, for example, submission in rank disputes is indicated by visual signals in some species but vocal signals in others, it is important to investigate the extent of the signaling repertoire in all modalities to understand whether increasing social complexity has facilitated the evolution of communicative complexity. The study showed that lemurs living in larger groups also evolved more vocal, visual, and olfactory signals. From this, the researchers concluded that communicative abilities have diversified in parallel with increasing social complexity. In addition, Fichtel and Kappeler were able to show that social complexity probably evolved first during evolution, followed by communicative complexity. Variation in other factors, such as habitat characteristics, activity patterns, or the number of lemur species existing in the same habitat, did not explain the evolution of more extensive communicative repertoires. Similarly, there was neither a relationship between vocal and visual repertoire size and brain size, nor between the number of scent glands or scent signals and body size of the lemur species.
"Our study shows that the complexity of vocal, olfactory, and visual communication in lemurs has coevolved with the complexity of the social system, but not with socio-ecological factors, such as the type of habitat or the number of other species in the same range," Claudia Fichtel concludes.
CAPTION
Verreaux's Sifakas foraging in Kirindy Forest in Madagascar. The more complex the social system is in lemurs, the more signals the animals use to communicate.
Scientists from Imperial College London and the Natural History Museum today published two concurrent papers analyzing UK bumblebee populations.
The first investigated the morphology (body shapes) of bee specimens dating back to 1900. Using digital images, the group first investigated the asymmetry in bumblebee wings as an indicator of stress. High asymmetry (very differently shaped right and left wings) indicates the bees experienced stress during development—an external factor that affected their normal growth.
Studying four UK bumblebee species, the group found evidence for stress getting higher as the century progressed from its lowest point around 1925. Further analysis showed that each bee species displayed a consistently higher proxy of stress in the latter half of the century.
Learning from the past to predict the future
By taking the climate conditions during the year of collection—namely annual mean temperature and annual rainfall—the team found that in hotter and wetter years bees showed higher wing asymmetry. The study is published today in the Journal of Animal Ecology.
Author Aoife Cantwell-Jones, from the Department of Life Sciences (Silwood Park) at Imperial, says that "by using a proxy of stress visible on the bee's external anatomy and caused by stress during development just days or weeks before, we can look to more accurately track factors placing populations under pressure through historic space and time."
Author Dr. Andres Arce, now at the University of Suffolk, stated that their "goal is to better understand responses to specific environmental factors and learn from the past to predict the future. We hope to be able to forecast where and when bumblebees will be most at risk and target effective conservation action."
Senior author Dr. Richard Gill, from the Department of Life Sciences (Silwood Park) at Imperial, says that "with hotter and wetter conditions predicted to place bumblebees under higher stress, the fact these conditions will become more frequent under climate change means bumblebees may be in for a rough time over the 21st century."
DNA from single legs
As well as measuring the wing shapes of bees, in a second parallel study the team successfully sequenced the genomes of over a hundred bumblebee museum specimens dating back more than 130 years. In a pioneering advance, ancient DNA methods typically used for studying wooly mammoths and ancient humans, were for the first time used on an insect population.
Scientists from the Natural History Museum and the Earlham Institute quantified DNA preservation using just a single bee leg from each of the bees studied. From these developments, published today in Methods in Ecology & Evolution, the researchers can now look to determine how the reported stress may lead to genetic diversity loss.
In conjunction with providing a new reference genome, the team will now use this data to study how bee genomes have changed over time, gaining an understanding of how whole populations have adapted—or not—to changing environments.
The value of museum collections
Focusing on bumblebee collections, the team worked with curators from the Natural History Museum London, National Museums Scotland, Oxford University Museum of Natural History, World Museum Liverpool, and Tullie House Museum Carlisle.
Author Dr. Victoria Mullin, from the Natural History Museum, say that "museum insect collections offer an unparalleled opportunity to directly study how the genomes of populations and species have been affected by environmental changes through time. However, they are a finite resource and understanding how best to utilize them for genetic studies is important."
Senior author Professor Ian Barnes, from the Natural History Museum, says that "one of the main problems with museum collections is that the quality of DNA can be very variable, making it difficult to predict which type of analyses we should do. We now have a much better idea about DNA preservation in insect collections, which is a massive boost to our ongoing work to understand the history and future of insect populations."
Dr. Gill concluded that "these studies showcase the value of leveraging museums specimens to go back in time and unlock the past's secrets. But what we have done is just the beginning, and by continuing our work with these vital public collections and collaborating with curators we can only discover more.
"This work was part of a Natural Environment Research Council-funded project and could not have been achieved without the commitment, hard work, and diligence of the museum curators, and our other collaborators. We are also grateful to BBSRC funds in supporting the generation of the bumblebee reference genome."Britain's butterflies are getting bigger as the climate changes
More information:Aoife Cantwell-Jones, et al, Signatures of increasing environmental stress in bumblebee wings over the past century: Insights from museum specimens,Journal of Animal Ecology(2022).doi.org/10.1111/1365-2656.13788
Victoria Mullin et al, First large-scale quantification study of DNA preservation in insects from natural history collections using genome-wide sequencing,Methods in Ecology & Evolution(2022).doi.org/10.1111/2041-210X.13945
