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Anthropogenically-modified soil increases the performance of non-native plants in a subarctic ecosystem
No full textWaste dumps contain human-modified soils that differ substantially from soils in natural areas. Such soils can create a suitable environment for weedy non-native species, so that waste dumps can act as epicentres for further dispersal. In the subarctic town of Churchill, Manitoba, Canada, multiple sites have been anthropogenically disturbed by the input of manure, agricultural waste and garden waste. Large populations of non-native plants often dominate these anthropogenically-altered sites, while nearby undisturbed areas with natural soil remain free of non-native species. When soil from these dumps is moved to other areas for construction, road repair or other purposes, these non-natives can travel with it and potentially establish new populations. In this study, we conducted soil addition experiments to investigate whether human-modified soil provide an ameliorated environment for non-native species when they are moved together into native-dominated subarctic ecosystems. We found that non-native species were able to germinate and survive in soils translocated from dumpsites into previously uninvaded areas in tundra or boreal forest. In addition, we found that deeper translocated soil tended to further increase the growth of non-native species. These results indicate that transported dumpsite soil creates an improved environment for non-native plants temporarily. However, survival decreased over time, suggesting that the ameliorated below-ground associated conditions were not sufficient to allow persistence in natural environments. As the climate continues to warm, anthropogenic soil movement may increase future risk of spread into currently inhospitable habitats
Effect of plant-related threats on lizards of open sand steppes: a snapshot at the beginning of the spread of a novel invader
No full textGrasslands have undergone significant loss of area and species diversity worldwide. The spread of invasive alien plant species further exacerbates the degradation of these ecosystems. Reptile populations are particularly affected by changes caused by invasive plants. Pannonian sand steppe grasslands, typical of the lowland regions within the Central European Carpathian Basin, are distinctive habitats that are rapidly shrinking in extent. These grasslands provide habitats for numerous grassland specialists, such as the Balkan wall lizard (Podarcis tauricus). Over the last few years, a new invader, the sand dropseed (Sporobolus cryptandrus), native to the North American prairies, has appeared in this community and spread aggressively. In addition, shrub encroachment due to pasture abandonment and reforestation has further reduced the area of these communities. In this study, we explored how the densities of two lizard species, the Balkan wall lizard and the Eastern green lizard (Lacerta viridis), a potential competitor of the Balkan wall lizard inhabiting these open grasslands, respond to increasing coverage of non-native invasive plants and the encroachment of woody vegetation. We surveyed lizard populations at six sites and assessed the effects of these threats using single-visit N-mixture models. The results showed varied effects on the abundance of the two lizard species: sand dropseed negatively affected the Balkan wall lizard, while woody encroachment positively influenced the Eastern green lizard
Astragalus zibaishanensis sp. nov. (Fabaceae), a new species from Shaanxi, China
No full textAstragalus zibaishanensis sp. nov. (Fabaceae) is described and illustrated from Shaanxi, China. This new species is similar to Astragalus monadelphus, A. xitaibaicus and A. neomonodelphus by having yellow petals, pseudomonadelphous androecium, and stipitate legumes, but can be distinguished by its stem 0.9–1.5 mm in diameter; leaflets 5–7, hairy adaxially and abaxially; calyx teeth triangular, ca. 0.5 mm long; standard 17–20 mm long; wings 18–21 mm long; keels 17–20 mm long; pistil glabrous; legume glabrous, with a stipe 10–11 mm long. Astragalus zibaishanensis is unique in Astragalus by having pseudomonadelphous androecium. Phylogenetic analyses confirm that the new species is a member of A. sect. Cenantrum. The nuclear ITS tree shows that A. zibaishanensis forms a clade with A. henryi, A. umbellatus, A. chilienshanensis, A. moellendorffii, A. przewalskii, A. monadelphus, A. xitaibaicus and A. neomonodelphus
Biodiversity Information Standards (TDWG): Social and Conceptual Infrastructure for Integrating Biodiversity Information
No full textThe International Working Group on Taxonomic Databases (TDWG)*1 was established in 1985 to promote biodiversity data sharing and collaboration among organizations, projects, and people who manage biodiversity information. To achieve these goals TDWG develops standards for publishing biodiversity data and provides a forum for advancing biodiversity informatics.TDWG provides critical elements for developing biodiversity information standards, including: an organizational structure, processes for ratifying and maintaining standards, and the collaboration tools available to participants. TDWG's role as an open standards body creates a complementary partnership with the Global Biodiversity Information Facility (GBIF). TDWG’s organizational structure is established in its Constitution and includes an Executive Committee, a suite of standing committees for on-going operational concerns, a Technical Architecture Group (TAG), and an array of interest, task and maintenance groups that develop and maintain standards. These groups and committees provide TDWG’s administration, maintain existing standards and best practices, and support the efforts of the community to create, expand and implement data standards using current methodologies of computer and information science. TDWG’s Process prescribes how interest and task groups are established to develop standards. Interest groups typically form organically when people with a shared interest in a particular aspect of biodiversity science determine that the science can be better supported by integrating information they create and manage. An interest group is established by writing a charter that describes its purpose and scope, the way of work, and how to become involved. The group designates one or more conveners, who are then responsible for managing the group and communicating with the Executive. The conveners submit the charter to the Executive for approval, and the approved charter is posted on the TDWG website and announced via email and social media. In addition, collaboration tools, such as a GitHub repository, mailing list, and slack channel can be created to support the group’s work. Interest groups explore problems and plan the development of potential solutions. When a plan has taken shape, a task group is established within the interest group by drafting its charter using a similar template and having it approved by the Executive. The essential difference between an interest and task group is that an interest group continues as long as the community’s interest sustains it, whereas a task group works to a schedule and dissolves when the task is finished. Throughout the exploration and planning phases, an interest group should seek advice from the TAG on methods for developing the standard and the framework for documenting it.The TDWG Process also specifies how a standard gets ratified. When a draft is complete the conveners submit it to the Executive, which then appoints a review manager to shepherd the draft through review. Ratification entails both expert and public review, combining the familiar practice of scientific peer review and the internet practice of open source improvement. The review manager summarizes the review outcomes and makes a recommendation to the Executive. When a consensus indicates that the standard is usable and contains no serious problems, the Executive ratifies the standard. The standard is registered and a landing page with a standard suite of metadata is posted on the TDWG website. If the standard contains terms and definitions, URL targets are created in https://rs.tdwg.org. In many cases, a website specific to the standard is established in the TDWG domain, and guides people in how to use the standard. Finally, a maintenance group is established to receive feedback and modification proposals from the community, and ensure that the standard continues to improve. Maintenance groups use a similar, but less cumbersome process, the Vocabulary Maintenance Standard (VMS), to add, change, or deprecate elements of ratified standards.When TDWG was founded, members were focussed primarily on taxonomic compilations; basic species information, such as scientific names and synonyms, geographic distributions, and bibliographies of essential literature. During the 1990s, the number and size of primary biodiversity databases (e.g., natural history collection databases) grew exponentially, and soon it was recognized that a global data infrastructure would be needed to integrate all these data resources and support biodiversity science (Robbins 1996). GBIF was established in 2001 to meet that need, and since then TDWG and GBIF have been engaged in a complementary informal partnership. TDWG’s role in this partnership has been to establish and maintain standards for the key concepts in primary biodiversity data. GBIF's role has been to develop and maintain the technology that enables access to the world's biodiversity data as a well integrated resource. By necessity, GBIF was created through international agreement, as an organization responsive to governments, ensuring that this global data infrastructure is effective and sustained. TDWG, on the other hand, is an open standards organization that enables any member of the global community to participate in developing the data concepts required for biodiversity science.While TDWG's basic standards have helped to integrate immense quantities of primary biodiversity data, they have also imposed limitations. For example, presence-only occurrence data supports only a limited class of methods for species distribution modeling. Our more recent efforts, however, are broadening the kinds of primary data that can be brought to bear on documenting biodiversity and its change over time. These include the Humboldt extension for surveys and monitoring, and the environmental DNA standard (eDNA) for documenting occurrences through the traces of DNA left in the environment. Finally, the Darwin Core Data Package, recently developed by GBIF and currently in review by TDWG, should enable us to mobilize more kinds of data, broaden our community, and support new advances in biodiversity science
Taxonomy OWLizer: A Tool for Converting Taxonomic Data into OWL
No full textThe growing demand for high-quality, interoperable biodiversity data exposes the current challenges of standardizing taxonomic information across platforms. While the Global Biodiversity Information Facility Backbone Taxonomy (GBIF Secretariat 2023) offers a valuable reference for species names, translating this information into formal ontology structures for semantic integration remains a complex task. A key challenge lies in the dynamic nature of taxonomic knowledge: as GBIF-BT is continuously updated, ontologies built manually from its data risk becoming outdated or misaligned. Without automated mechanisms for synchronizing with these updates, such ontologies may fail to reflect current taxonomic consensus, limiting their interoperability and long-term usefulness in biodiversity informatics.To address this problem, we developed the Taxonomy OWLizer (TOWLizer), a lightweight web application that allows users to convert species names into Web Ontology Language (OWL) ontologies based on taxonomic data retrieved directly from the GBIF Species API, as detailed in Fig. 1. Users input one or multiple scientific names, and the application fetches, organizes, and outputs a structured OWL file, facilitating taxonomic integration into semantic web projects. OWLizer automates synonym handling (see Fig. 2) and taxonomic hierarchy generation, and reuses GBIF URIs in the code, following linked data principles (Berners-Lee 2006). It aims to lower the technical barriers for researchers working in biodiversity informatics who need machine-actionable taxonomies but may lack programming expertise.The application was implemented using HTML, JavaScript, Bootstrap, and a Flask backend, with ChatGPT-4 providing support for code drafting and debugging, which accelerated prototyping and streamlined development. The tool is freely available through a GitHub-hosted interface with the backend deployed on Render, and a backup archived in Zenodo (Soares 2025).TOWLizer has some limitations though. Its performance depends on free-tier hosting services: the backend may enter a sleep state after periods of inactivity, causing occasional delays, while caching is limited to local storage on a single device and browser. The algorithm is also sensitive to typographical errors in scientific names; a recommended workflow is to combine ChatGPT for spelling verification with TOWLizer for synonym management. Finally, GBIF URLs used in the application do not yet support content negotiation, which constrains their reusability in some semantic web contexts. We tested TOWLizer in the development of a real-world ontology, namely the Agricultural Product Types Ontology (APTO), which was designed to represent agricultural commodities in Brazil. In this context, we addressed the content negotiation issue by replacing the GBIF URLs with URIs from the APTO namespace. These URIs are served via AgroPortal (Jonquet et al. 2018), enabling proper content negotiation.Despite these constraints, the Taxonomy OWLizer has proven to be a practical and accessible way to generate OWL representations of taxonomic data. It provides an initial step toward automating taxonomic ontology construction, highlights the potential of AI-assisted development, and contributes to ongoing discussions in biodiversity informatics about sustainable, interoperable, and machine-actionable taxonomies. More details on the tool development are provided in Soares et al. 2025
Further taxonomic studies of the mimetic genus Euryobeidia Fletcher, 1979 (Lepidoptera, Geometridae, Ennominae, Baptini), with descriptions of four new taxa and two status changes
No full textThe genus Euryobeidia Fletcher, 1979, is reviewed based on morphological characters and available molecular data of cytochrome c oxidase subunit I. Four new taxa of this genus are described: E. supercostata sp. nov. and E. tigratoides sp. nov. from Hainan, China; E. xuei sp. nov. from N. Vietnam and Yunnan, China; and E. tigratoides leopardiformis subsp. nov. from Hubei and Sichuan, China. E. incrassata Xiang & Han, 2017 is downgraded to subspecies rank under E. languidata (Walker, 1862) (E. languidata incrassata Xiang & Han, 2017, stat. nov.). The subspecies E. languidata yakushimensis Inoue, 1976, is raised to species status (E. yakushimensis Inoue, 1976, stat. nov.). Adult males and females of all taxa mentioned above, including their genitalia, are illustrated, except for E. supercostata sp. nov. and E. xuei sp. nov., which are known only from males. An identification key and a geographic distribution map for all known taxa of Euryobeidia are presented. The systematics and mimetic relationships of Euryobeidia are briefly discussed
The genus Acontista (Mantodea, Acontistidae) in North and Central America: new records for Mexico, Honduras, and Panama using a citizen-science platform
No full textNew records of mantises of the genus Acontista Saussure & Zehntner, 1894 (Mantodea, Acontistidae) are made for North and Central America via the examination of material deposited in scientific collections as well as using the citizen-science platform iNaturalist: Acontista cordillerae Saussure, 1869 is newly recorded from the Mexican states of Campeche, Chiapas, Colima, Hidalgo, Nayarit, Puebla, Quintana Roo, Sinaloa, and Yucatan, and it is also recorded for the first time from Honduras. Acontista fraterna Saussure & Zehntner, 1894 is recorded for the first time from Panama. The color patterns of both species are discussed
Lethal injuries on the scaphitid ammonoid Hoploscaphites nicolletii (Morton, 1842) in the Upper Cretaceous Fox Hills Formation, South Dakota, USA
No full textPredator–prey relationships are considered a major driver for the evolution of organisms, and thus contributed to shaping morphology, ecology, and diversity. During the Late Cretaceous of North America, ammonoid cephalopods were one of the most abundant and diverse marine invertebrates. Despite frequent reports of shell breakage in ammonoids, little is known pertaining to the frequency, position, and size of the shell break through a stratigraphic succession. In this study, we analyze an extensive collection of the scaphitid ammonoid Hoploscaphites nicolletii, which exhibits shell breakage, from the Upper Cretaceous (Maastrichtian) Fox Hills Formation in South Dakota, USA. We focus on four upper Maastrichtian assemblage zones listed stratigraphically from bottom to top—the lower nicolletii Assemblage Zone (LNAZ), the Limopsis-Gervillia Assemblage Zone (LGAZ), the upper nicolletii Assemblage Zone (UNAZ), and the Protocardia-Oxytoma Assemblage Zone (POAZ). Within the collection, we observed two primary types of breakage: ventral and lateral, each displaying a relatively consistent geometry. Lateral breaks, measuring a few centimeters, represent about 20–40% of the maximum conch diameter. Ventral breaks are slightly larger, representing 30–70% of the diameter. Both breakage types occur in the body chamber at approximately 90° from the aperture extending to near the last septum. We find that the incidence of injury increased from 6.6 to 13.7% with some fluctuation across the zones. The breakage size relative to body size does not exhibit a clear change across the assemblage zones. Additionally, no significant difference is apparent in the body size between injured and uninjured specimens within each zone. A weak positive correlation between the size of lateral breaks and maximum conch diameter in LNAZ suggests a tendency for larger predators to target larger individuals. Given the consistency of geometry and size, we presume that these breaks represent lethal injuries from durophagous predators. We propose coleoid cephalopods as the likely culprits for ventral injuries, although fish and crustaceans are plausible alternatives. Concerning lateral injuries, decapod crustaceans appear to be the most probable durophagous predators
First subioblattid roachoid (Insecta: Holopandictyoptera) from the Middle Triassic of Monte San Giorgio (Switzerland)
No full textA fossil attributed to the roachoid family of Subioblattidae, characterized by elongated ellipsoidal forewings and sigmoidal stem of radial vein, is described as Samaroblattella valmarensis sp. nov. The fossil displays a simple subcosta posterior, a long, narrow area posterior to cubitus posterior, with specific wing traits aligning it with Samaroblattella. It differs from Samaroblattella kenderlykensis in the pattern of forewing coloration. The morphology of the hind leg resembles that of the extant jumping cockroach Saltoblattella montistabularis, suggesting a possible jumping behavior, indicative of convergent evolution in Eoblattodea. The elongate ovipositor of this Subioblattidae differs significantly from the reduced ones of the crown group Dictyoptera. Subioblattidae were likely laying their eggs in sediment or plant tissues and did not have hardened ootheca as those in extant lineages. This discovery extends the temporal and geographical range of Samaroblattella, marking it the oldest known representative of the genus and establishing a connection between species from South Africa and Kazakhstan
Internal gonopod reconstruction in an amber-preserved millipede from the Cretaceous: Laeviglyphiulus patrickmuelleri n. gen., n. sp. (Diplopoda, Spirostreptida, Cambalopsidae)
No full textMicro computed tomography (µCT) scans allow a 3D reconstruction of characters otherwise hidden in fossil amber specimens. In this study we reveal the male copulatory legs (gonopods) retracted into the body, and other important morphological characters, for a fossil Juliformia millipede. Characters of the male gonopods are essential for the classification of numerous recent millipede groups. This made it previously almost impossible to correctly assign fossil millipedes to a recent taxon, especially in the Juliformia, where the gonopods are often retracted into the body. The millipede specimen analyzed here is preserved in Myanmar amber dating back to the Cretaceous, 98 MYA (± 0.63 MY). Gonopod and mouthpart characters identify the millipede as a member of the order Spirostreptida, family Cambalopsidae, the first known fossil of one of the most diverse extant SE Asians millipede groups. While the gonopods show similarities to the extant genera Hypocambala Silvestri, 1897, Plusioglyphiulus Silvestri, 1923 and Glyphiulus Gervais, 1847, the presence of neither carinate body rings, nor longitudinally striate metazona, nor a flattened leg pair 2, absence of both an enlarged collum and an enlarged leg pair 2 allows us to describe it as a new genus and species, Laeviglyphiulus patrickmuelleri n. gen., n. sp