Fire is an important tool in tropical forest management, as it alters forest composition, structure, and the carbon budget. The United Nations program on Reducing Emissions from Deforestation and Forest Degradation (REDD+) aims to sustainably manage forests, as well as conserve and enhance their carbon stocks. Despite the crucial role of fire management, decision-making on REDD+ interventions fails to systematically include fires. Here, we address this critical knowledge gap in two ways. First, we review...

Allele_scores_Ceroxylon_quindiuense_complexThese are allele scores (diploid) for populations studied in cited articlegenepop_Cquindicomplex2.txt

Non-Timber Forest Products like palm fruits are fundamental in the livelihood of Amerindian groups. For the last 10 years the fruits of wild palm species, like Euterpe precatoria and Mauritia flexuosa, have been entering into global markets. These species are mostly harvested felling the adults, a practice that may have a disproportionate impact in the conservation of the populations. We studied the demography of E. precatoria and M. flexuosa, two important palms of the Amazon,...

Soil macroinvertebrate communities have been assessed worldwide using the standard ISO/TSBF sampling procedure. The Macrofauna database currently comprises 3694 sites distributed throughout 41 countries, from 55º S latitude to 57ºN, sea level to over 4000m in elevation, in total annual total rainfall regimes between 500 and >3000mm and 5 to 32ºC mean temperature. These communities are significantly influenced by climatic parameters, soil texture and vegetation cover. Abundance and diversity were highest in tropical rain forests...

Epiphyte trait data for the paper Hietz et al. 2021 Putting vascular epiphytes on the traits map. Journal of Ecology Plant functional traits impact the fitness and environmental niche of plants. Major plant functional types have been characterized by their trait spectrum, and the environmental and phylogenetic imprints on traits have advanced several ecological fields. Yet very few trait data on epiphytes, which represent almost 10% of vascular plants, are available. We collated >80,000 mostly...

This dataset consists of banding data (N = 1589 captures, 129 bird species), including morphological and breeding biology measures, collected from understory birds in subtropical cloudforest at roughly 2000 m.a.s.l. in the municipality of El Cairo in Colombia's Western Andes (Serrania de los Paraguas range). Roughly 8,350 net hours were divided into two three-month field seasons (June-August 2017 and January-March 2018), both corresponding to local dry seasons. Birds were banded along 500-meter transects in forest...

Grass-dominated ecosystems cover ~40% of Earth’s surface with tropical grasses accounting for ~20% of global net primary productivity. C3 (cool/temperate) and C4 (tropical and subtropical) grass distribution is driven primarily by temperature. In this work, we used phytolith assemblages collected from vegetation plots along an elevation and temperature gradient in the Northern Andes (Colombia and Ecuador) to develop a paleothermometer for the region. To accomplish this, we created a transfer function based on the relationship...

The pig, Sus scrofa, is a foreign species to the American continent. Although pigs originally introduced in the Americas should be related to those from the Iberian Peninsula and Canary islands, the phylogeny of current creole pigs that now populate the continent is likely to be very complex. Because of the extreme climates that America harbours, these populations also provide a unique example of a fast evolutionary phenomenon of adaptation. Here, we provide a genome...

Nectar robbers use a hole made in the perianth to extract nectar. Since robbers may modify plant fitness, they play an important role by driving evolution on floral traits, shaping population structure and influencing community dynamics. Although nectar robbing is widespread in angiosperms, the causes and ecological implications of this behaviour on large ecological scales are still unexplored. Our aim is to study the frequency of nectar robbing in plants of temperate and tropical regions...

Plant responses induced by herbivore damage can provide fitness benefits, but can also have important costs due to altered interactions with mutualist pollinators. We examined the effects of plant responses to herbivory in a hummingbird-pollinated distylous shrub, Palicourea angustifolia. Through a series of field experiments we investigated whether damage from foliar herbivores leads to a reduction in fruit set, influences floral visitation, or alters floral traits that may influence pollinator preference or pollinator efficiency. Foliar...

The spatial heterogeneity of resource availability is a major driver of biodiversity patterns. Some environmental conditions and resources are characterized by large-scale patterns of variation within the landscape. Clumped local discontinuities or discrete elements also increase spatial heterogeneity, romoting local “biodiversity hot-spots” by modifying habitat characteristics and promoting plant-animal interactions. Clay licks are faunal attractors owing to their role in the nutritional ecology of the user species; nevertheless, the effect of their presence on the...

Ischemic stroke causes vascular and neuronal tissue deficiencies that could lead to significant functional impairment and/or death. Although progenitor-based vasculogenic cell therapies have shown promise as a potential rescue strategy following ischemic stroke, current approaches face major hurdles. Here we used fibroblasts nanotransfected with Etv2, Foxc2, and Fli1 (EFF), to drive reprogramming-based vasculogenesis, intracranially, as a potential therapy for ischemic stroke. Perfusion analyses suggest that intracranial delivery of EFF-nanotransfected fibroblasts led to a dose-dependent increase...

Amazonian rainforests once thought to hold an innate pristine wilderness, are increasingly known to have been densely inhabited by populations showing a diverse and complex cultural background prior to European arrival. To what extent these societies impacted their landscape is unclear. Amazonian Dark Earths (ADEs) are fertile soils found throughout the Amazon Basin, created by pre-Columbian societies as a result of more sedentary habits. Much is known of the chemistry of these soils, yet their...

Low morphological differentiation among taxa hampers its appropriate identification, basic biological studies, and promotion of any conservation effort. Aiming to clarify the evolution and speciation among members of Pimelodus from the Magdalena-Cauca River basin, this study tested the hypothesis that P. yuma, P. grosskopfii and P. crypticus represent three independently evolving species and explored signals of interspecific hybridization. Likewise, we test the ancient hypothesis that the trans-Andean Pimelodus yuma and P. crypticus belong to the...

Sandflies of the family Psychodidae show notable diversity in both disease vector status and climatic niche. Psychodid species’ ranges can be solely tropical, confined to the temperate zones, or span both. We obtained observation site data, and associated climate data, for 223 psychodid species to understand which aspects of climate most closely predict distribution. Temperature and seasonality are strong determinants of species occurrence within the clade. We built a mitochondrial DNA phylogeny of Psychodidae, and...

Tree diversity and composition in Amazonia are known to be strongly determined by the water supplied by precipitation. Nevertheless, within the same climatic regime, water availability is modulated by local topography and soil characteristics (hereafter referred to as local hydrological conditions), varying from saturated and poorly drained to well-drained and potentially dry areas. While these conditions may be expected to influence species distribution, the impacts of local hydrological conditions on tree diversity and composition remain...

Ecological network approaches may contribute to conservation practices by quantifying within-community importance of species. In mutualistic plant-pollinator systems, such networks reflect potential pollination of the plants and a considerable portion of the energy consumption by the pollinators, two key components for each party. Here, we used two different sampling approaches to describe mutualistic plant-hummingbird networks from a cloud forest in the Colombian Western Andes, home to the Colorful Puffleg Eriocnemis mirabilis, an endemic and critically...

Interspecific gene flow is pervasive throughout the tree of life. Although detecting gene flow between populations has been facilitated by new analytical approaches, determining the timing and geography of hybridization has remained difficult, particularly for historical gene flow. A geographically explicit phylogenetic approach is needed to determine the overlap of ancestral populations. In this study, we performed population genetic analyses, species delimitation, simulations and a recently developed approach of species tree diffusion to infer the...

There is an increasing evidence that populations of ectotherms can diverge genetically in response to different climatic conditions, both within their native range and (in the case of invasive species) in their new range. Here, we test for such divergence in invasive whitefly Bemisia tabaci populations in tropical Colombia, by considering heritable variation within and between populations in survival and fecundity under temperature stress, and by comparing population differences with patterns established from putatively neutral...

BACKGROUND: American Creole cattle presumably descend from animals imported from the Iberian Peninsula during the period of colonization and settlement, through different migration routes, and may have also suffered the influence of cattle directly imported from Africa. The introduction of European cattle, which began in the 18th century, and later of Zebu from India, has threatened the survival of Creole populations, some of which have nearly disappeared or were admixed with exotic breeds. Assessment of...

Background: Seminal fluid proteins control many aspects of fertilization and in turn, they play a key role in post-mating sexual selection and possibly reproductive isolation. Because effective proteome profiling relies on the availability of high-quality DNA reference databases, our knowledge of these proteins is still largely limited to model organisms with ample genetic resources. New advances in sequencing technology allow for the rapid characterization of transcriptomes at low cost. By combining high throughput RNA-seq and...

1. The extent to which historical dispersal, environmental features and geographic barriers shape the phylogenetic structure and turnover of tree communities in northwestern Amazonia at multiple spatial scales remains poorly understood. 2. We used 85 floristically standardized 0.1-ha plots (DBH ³ 2.5 cm) distributed in three subregions of northwestern (NW) Amazonia across three main habitat types (floodplain, swamp, terra firme forests), to hypothesize that: i) historical dispersal overcome geographical barriers, which meant low local phylogenetic...

Some of the major impacts of climate change are expected in the poorest regions of the world where drought stress and nutrient deficiency are already a main issue. Legumes are an essential food crop for the poorest because of their high dietary protein and micronutrient contents. However, they are generally drought susceptible. Therefore, our goal in this study was to explore allele diversity at abiotic stress responsive candidate genes in the only drought tolerant cultivated...

Precise detection of invasive cancer on whole-slide images (WSI) is a critical first step in digital pathology tasks of diagnosis and grading. Convolutional neural network (CNN) is the most popular representation learning method for computer vision tasks, which have been successfully applied in digital pathology, including tumor and mitosis detection. However, CNNs are typically only tenable with relatively small image sizes (200x200 pixels). Only recently, Fully convolutional networks (FCN) are able to deal with larger...

Coca is the natural source of cocaine as well as a sacred and medicinal plant farmed by South American Amerindians and mestizos. The coca crop comprises four closely related varieties classified into two species (Amazonian and Huánuco varieties within Erythroxylum coca Lam., and Colombian and Trujillo varieties within E. novogranatense (D.Morris) Hieron.) but our understanding of their wild progenitor(s) and origins remains rudimentary. In this study we use genomic data from natural history collections to...