212 research outputs found
Obligate herbivory in an ancestrally carnivorous lineage: the giant panda and bamboo from the perspective of nutritional geometry
No full textHerbivores face various nutritional challenges in their life cycles, challenges that may become increasingly acute under ongoing environmental changes.
Here, focusing on calcium, phosphorus and nitrogen, we used nutritional geometry to analyse individual-based data on foraging and extraction efficiencies, and combined these with data on reproduction and migratory behaviour to understand how a large herbivorous carnivore can complete its life cycle on a narrow and seemingly low quality bamboo diet.
Behavioural results showed that pandas during the year switched between four main food categories involving the leaves and shoots of two bamboo species available. Nutritional analysis suggests that these diet shifts are related to the concentrations and balances of calcium, phosphorus and nitrogen. Notably, successive shifts in range use and food type corresponded with a transition to higher concentrations and/or a more balanced intake of these multiple key constituents.
Our study suggests that pandas obligatorily synchronize their seasonal migration and reproduction with the disjunct nutritional phenologies of two bamboo species. This finding has potentially important implications for habitat conservation for this species and, more generally, draws attention to the need for understanding the nutritional basis of food selection in devising management plans for endangered species.This is the peer reviewed version of the article, which has been published in final form at http://dx.doi.org/10.1111/1365-2435.1230
Ecological civilization: a revived perspective on the relationship between humanity and nature
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9. COMPARATIVE ECOLOGY OF GIANT PANDAS IN THE FIVE MOUNTAIN RANGES OF THEIR DISTRIBUTION IN CHINA
No full textComparative Ecology of Giant Pandas in the Five Mountain Ranges of Their Distribution in China
No full textGenus-wide characterization of bumblebee genomes provides insights into their evolution and variation in ecological and behavioral traits
No full textBumblebees are a diverse group of globally important pollinators in natural ecosystems and for agricultural food production. With both eusocial and solitary life-cycle phases, and some social parasite species, they are especially interesting models to understand social evolution, behavior, and ecology. Reports of many species in decline point to pathogen transmission, habitat loss, pesticide usage, and global climate change, as interconnected causes. These threats to bumblebee diversity make our reliance on a handful of well-studied species for agricultural pollination particularly precarious. To broadly sample bumblebee genomic and phenotypic diversity, we de novo sequenced and assembled the genomes of 17 species, representing all 15 subgenera, producing the first genus-wide quantification of genetic and genomic variation potentially underlying key ecological and behavioral traits. The species phylogeny resolves subgenera relationships while incomplete lineage sorting likely drives high levels of gene tree discordance. Five chromosome-level assemblies show a stable 18-chromosome karyotype, with major rearrangements creating 25 chromosomes in social parasites. Differential transposable element activity drives changes in genome sizes, with putative domestications of repetitive sequences influencing gene coding and regulatory potential. Dynamically evolving gene families and signatures of positive selection point to genus-wide variation in processes linked to foraging, diet and metabolism, immunity and detoxification, as well as adaptations for life at high altitudes. Our study reveals how bumblebee genes and genomes have evolved across the Bombus phylogeny and identifies variations potentially linked to key ecological and behavioral traits of these important pollinators.National Human Genome Research Institute (Grant U41HG007234)National Institutes of Health (Grant R01HG004037)Novartis Foundation (Grant 18B116)National Science Foundation (Grant DBI-1564611
Minimal Number of Sensor Nodes for Distributed Kalman Filtering
No full textFinding and identifying the minimal number of sensor nodes for a sensor network is one of the most basic problems for the implementation of distributed state estimators. Despite a plethora of research studied sensor networks, most of them ignored this problem or assumed the considered sensor network comes with an ideal number of sensor nodes. We revisit this problem in the current paper. To this end, the minimal number of sensor nodes problem is first formalized and a novel observability condition, namely, minimal nodes uniform observability (MNUO), is then proposed. Next, this MNUO is applied to study the stability issues of the distributed Kalman filtering algorithm. In what follows, under the condition of MNUO, conditions to ensure its stability are given and the results about the relation of the filtering performance before and after selecting the minimal number of sensor nodes are obtained. Finally, optimization solutions and an example are given to find the minimal number of sensor nodes for a sensor network.No Full Tex
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