What Is a Specialist? Quantifying Host Breadth Enables Impact Prediction for Invasive Herbivores.

Herbivores are commonly classified as host specialists or generalists for various purposes, yet the definitions of these terms, and their intermediates, are often imprecise and ambiguous. We quantified host breadth for 240 non-native, tree-feeding insects in North America using phylogenetic diversity. We demonstrated that a partitioning of host breadth: (1) causes 67% of non-native insects to shift from a generalist to specialist category, (2) displays a reduction in host breadth from the native to introduced range, (3) identifies an inflection point in a model predicting the likelihood of non-native insect ecological impact, with a corresponding change in behaviour associated with specialists versus generalists, and (4) enables three models for strong prediction of whether a non-native forest insect will cause high impacts.

High species richness and turnover of vascular epiphytes is associated with water availability along the elevation gradient of Volcán Maderas, Nicaragua.

Research that has been conducted documenting species richness patterns on tropical mountains has resulted in conflicting observations: monotonic declines with increasing elevation, monotonic increases with increasing elevation, and a mid-elevation "bulge." Currently, it is unclear if these differences are due to environmental differences among study areas, the taxonomic groups or ecological groups (e.g.

Collections Education: The Extended Specimen and Data Acumen.

Biodiversity scientists must be fluent across disciplines; they must possess the quantitative, computational, and data skills necessary for working with large, complex data sets, and they must have foundational skills and content knowledge from ecology, evolution, taxonomy, and systematics. To effectively train the emerging workforce, we must teach science as we conduct science and embrace emerging concepts of data acumen alongside the knowledge, tools, and techniques foundational to organismal biology. We present an open education resource that updates the traditional plant collection exercise to incorporate best practices in twenty-first century collecting and to contextualize the activities that build data acumen.

Small herbaria contribute unique biogeographic records to county, locality, and temporal scales.

Premise: With digitization and data sharing initiatives underway over the last 15 years, an important need has been prioritizing specimens to digitize. Because duplicate specimens are shared among herbaria in exchange and gift programs, we investigated the extent to which unique biogeographic data are held in small herbaria vs. these data being redundant with those held by larger institutions.

Seeds attached to refrigerated shipping containers represent a substantial risk of nonnative plant species introduction and establishment.

The initial processes for successful biological invasions are transport, introduction, and establishment. These can be directly influenced or completely avoided through activities that reduce the number and frequency of entering nonnative propagules. Economic and environmental benefits through preventative monitoring programs at early stages of invasion far outweigh the long-term costs associated with mitigating ecological and economic impacts once nonnative species establish and spread.

An initial industrial flora: A framework for botanical research in cooperation with industry for biodiversity conservation.

Humans have created an accelerating, increasingly connected, globalized economy, resulting in a more globalized, shared flora. The prevention of new, establishing species is less costly, both economically and ecologically, and is more manageable than eradicating nonnative invasive species once they are widespread and negatively impactful. We ask if international trade hubs and points-of-entry with high-volume trade, constant disturbance, and propagule rain have a higher number of nonnative species compared to surrounding areas and if they may serve as initial establishment sites and refugia of nonnative, invasive populations.

Studies of Jatrogossone A as a Reactive Oxygen Species Inducer in Cancer Cellular Models.

Natural products continue to provide a platform to study biological systems. A bioguided study of cancer cell models led us to a new member of the jatrophane natural products from Jatropha gossypiifolia, which was independently identified and characterized as jatrogossone A (1). Purification and structure elucidation was performed by column chromatography and high-performance liquid chromatography-mass spectrometry and NMR techniques, and the structure was confirmed via X-ray crystallography.

The influence of herbivory and weather on the vital rates of two closely related cactus species.

Herbivory has long been recognized as a significant driver of plant population dynamics, yet its effects along environmental gradients are unclear. Understanding how weather modulates plant-insect interactions can be particularly important for predicting the consequences of exotic insect invasions, and an explicit consideration of weather may help explain why the impact can vary greatly across space and time. We surveyed two native prickly pear cactus species (genus ) in the Florida panhandle, USA, and their specialist insect herbivores (the invasive South American cactus moth, , and three native insect species) for five years across six sites.

Digitizing specimens in a small herbarium: A viable workflow for collections working with limited resources.

Premise Of The Study: Small herbaria represent a significant portion of herbaria in the United States, but many are not digitizing their collections.

Methods: At the Arkansas State University Herbarium (STAR), we have created a viable workflow to help small herbaria begin the digitization process, including suggestions for publishing data on the Internet. We calculated hourly rates of each phase of the digitization process.

Digitization workflows for flat sheets and packets of plants, algae, and fungi.

Effective workflows are essential components in the digitization of biodiversity specimen collections. To date, no comprehensive, community-vetted workflows have been published for digitizing flat sheets and packets of plants, algae, and fungi, even though latest estimates suggest that only 33% of herbarium specimens have been digitally transcribed, 54% of herbaria use a specimen database, and 24% are imaging specimens. In 2012, iDigBio, the U.

Semiochemicals from ex situ abiotically stressed cactus tissue: a contributing role of fungal spores?

Semiochemicals play a central role in communication between plants and insects, such as signaling the location of a suitable host. Fungi on host plants can also play an influential role in communicating certain plant vulnerabilities to an insect. The spiroketal conophthorin is an important semiochemical produced by developing fungal spores.

Host plant defense signaling in response to a coevolved herbivore combats introduced herbivore attack.

Defense-free space resulting from coevolutionarily naïve host plants recently has been implicated as a factor facilitating invasion success of some insect species. Host plants, however, may not be entirely defenseless against novel herbivore threats. Volatile chemical-mediated defense signaling, which allows plants to mount specific, rapid, and intense responses, may play a role in systems experiencing novel threats.

Underutilized resources for studying the evolution of invasive species during their introduction, establishment, and lag phases.

The early phases of biological invasions are poorly understood. In particular, during the introduction, establishment, and possible lag phases, it is unclear to what extent evolution must take place for an introduced species to transition from established to expanding. In this study, we highlight three disparate data sources that can provide insights into evolutionary processes associated with invasion success: biological control organisms, horticultural introductions, and natural history collections.

Translocation experiments with butterflies reveal limits to enhancement of poleward populations under climate change.

There is a pressing need to predict how species will change their geographic ranges under climate change. Projections typically assume that temperature is a primary fitness determinant and that populations near the poleward (and upward) range boundary are preadapted to warming. Thus, poleward, peripheral populations will increase with warming, and these increases facilitate poleward range expansions.