Mapping loci that control lateral spike development in Tibetan barley by bulked segregant analysis (BSA)北大核心CSCD

Fertility of lateral spikelets determines the two-rowed or six-rowed spikes of barley (Hordeum vulgare L.), which results in significantly different grain yields. The change in row type from two-rowed to six-rowed shows remarkable domestication characteristics. The Qinghai-Tibet plateau has abundant resources of wild and cultivated barley, and is considered one of the centers of domestication and genetic diversity of cultivated barley. In order to obtain a primary understanding of the genetic basis of lateral spike development regulation and the domestication process in cultivated Tibetan barley, an F2 segregation population was constructed by crossing the two-rowed wild barley accession ZYM0083 with the six-rowed landraces Linzhiheiliuleng. Genetic analysis showed that the row type was controlled by a single gene. Using the specific-locus amplified fragment sequencing (SLAF-seq) technology and bulked segregant analysis (BSA), two DNA pools from 22 two-rowed spike individuals and 22 six-rowed spike individuals of the F2 population were constructed and sequenced. A total of 456 691 SLAF tags were obtained. By adopting the ED and SNP index for association analysis, three candidate regions with a 53.84-Mb interval and containing 536 genes were obtained. Four-hundred thirteen, 189, and 160 annotated genes were acquired by GO, KEGG, and COG libraries, respectively. Loci that control lateral spike development in Tibetan barley were primarily mapped by SLAF-seq, and the results presented in this study will facilitate the fine mapping and cloning of target genes. © 2018 Science Press. All rights reserved.     

Using GIS for siting artificial reefs—Data issues, problems and solutions: ‘Real World’ to ‘Real World’

As GIS becomes an increasingly more ‘user-friendly’ tool, and more people recognize the benefits of the technology in their work environment, inevitably greater use will be made of it for a wide range of applications. The ease with which a GIS can now be used often overshadows the complexity underlying this technology and the potential difficulties that can (and do) arise when this is not fully understood. In practice, there are two routes open to the application of GIS technology for environmental studies. The first is to commission new data for the research. The second is to make use of existing data sets. Data are at the heart of any GIS application. A detailed knowledge about the data sources, the method of collection, capture, scale and sampling strategy, especially if the data are to be used in any analysis, modelling or simulation studies, is fundamental to any application. Unfortunately, information about data (metadata) is seldom available, especially for archival or legacy data sets. Furthermore, although it is now relatively easy to acquire digital data, to input, store, manipulate and display this data, and to output the results of any GIS analysis in the practical sense, little consideration is given to the problems associated with data quality and how this will ultimately affect present and future analyses and use of the output for planning and decision-making. The need to raise awareness about data quality for applications is set in the context of the development of an environmental database for the Moray Firth. Northeast Scotland, and more specifically the use of selected data sets from the database to aid in the proposed siting of an artificial reef. Using this example, this contribution explores the problems associated with the use of both existing analog and digital data sets as the basis for environmental applications, the problems of data acquisition, data quality, data standards, error and how these can affect the operational use of the data in GIS analyses. The solution to such problems appears to lie with improved error assessment and reporting. The outcome of this contribution is an attempt to offer guidance and solutions to researchers and applications specialists undertaking similar studies, by suggesting to what extent studies, such as the artificial reef siting, can safely make use of existing data sets without risking the problems associated with judgements based on inadequate information, and generated or inherent error.     

Modeling Opportunity Costs of Conservation in Transitional Landscapes

Abstract:  Conservation scientists recognize the urgency of incorporating opportunity costs into conservation planning. Despite this, applications to date have been limited, perhaps partly because of the difficulty in determining costs in regions with limited data on land prices and ownership. We present methods for estimating opportunity costs of land preservation in landscapes or ecoregions that are a changing mix of agriculture and natural habitat. Our approach derives from the literature on estimating land values as opportunity costs of alternate land uses and takes advantage of general availability of necessary data, even in relatively data-poor regions. The methods integrate probabilities of habitat conversion with region-wide estimates of economic benefits from agricultural land uses and estimate land values with a discount rate to convert annual values into net present values. We applied our method in a landscape undergoing agricultural conversion in Paraguay. Our model of opportunity costs predicted an independent data set of land values and was consistent with implicit discount rates of 15–25%. Model-generated land values were strongly correlated with actual land values even after correcting for the effect of property size and proportion of property that was forested. We used the model to produce a map of opportunity costs and to estimate the costs of conserving forest within two proposed corridors in the landscape. This method can be applied to conservation planning in situations where natural habitat is currently being converted to market-oriented land uses. Incorporating not only biological attributes but also socioeconomic data can help in the design of efficient networks of protected areas that represent biodiversity at minimum costs.     

Relative density of finds for assessing similarity-based maps of orchid occurrence

Similarity-based mapping of the expected distribution of 10 orchid species was conducted in a study area covering 300 km² in south-eastern Estonia. The observation track and species finds were recorded during fieldwork. Absence locations were generated on the line of observation track. Both presence and absence sites having an in-between distance of at least 100 m were used as training data. Expected presence/absence of a species was calculated according to similarity between the predictable location and selected observations (examples) of presence and absence sites. For each species, the machine learning system identified the best predictive sets by selecting the most useful variables out of 136 map and remote sensing features. Similarity-based estimations were evaluated both by training fit and by independent verification data. Reliability of the predictive maps was expressed also by usefulness ratios—the densities of validation find sites (1) in the predicted presence area relative to the density of those in the predicted absence area, and (2) relative to the share of the observation track in the predicted presence area and in the predicted absence area. The predictive mapping was most efficient for Dactylorhiza incarnata, D. russowii, Epipactis palustris, and Goodyera repens. We conclude that the profound coverage of observations on any larger area is unrealistic and the reliability of similarity-based predictive maps depends on the representativity of existing records relative to the diversity of the study area. The investigation showed that the studied species are much more common in nature than the records in the national database indicate.     

A Multidisciplinary Approach to Assessing the Sustainability of Freshwater Crayfish Harvesting in Madagascar

Abstract:  There is growing interest among conservation decision makers in promoting harvesting of forest products as an incentive for communities to retain forest cover. Assessments of the sustainability of existing harvests are essential for implementing such policies. Madagascar's endemic freshwater crayfish, Astacoides spp., are harvested throughout their range. Despite their importance to human communities, Madagascar's crayfish, like much of the island's freshwater biodiversity, are poorly known, and there is concern that the harvest may be unsustainable. We investigated sustainability of the crayfish harvest in and around Ranomafana National Park in eastern Madagascar, focusing on the heavily harvested A. granulimanus. Several villages around the park have traditional taboos against selling crayfish, resulting in widely varying levels of crayfish exploitation. We used two approaches to assess sustainability of the harvest. First we used participatory mapping combined with a geographic information system analysis to produce a spatially accurate map of harvesting intensity. We then carried out mark-and-recapture sampling at 74 sites across a range of harvest intensities to test whether the level of harvesting was a significant predictor of crayfish density and structure. Second, we used size-structured matrix population models to estimate the forest area necessary to provide the observed annual harvest from one harvesting village and compared this estimate with the area available to the harvesters. Our findings show that the crayfish harvest in Ranomafana may be sustainable under current socioeconomic conditions, suggesting that A. granulimanus is less vulnerable to overexploitation than previously thought. We emphasize the importance of a multidisciplinary approach to assessing sustainability involving both ecological information about the harvested species and socioeconomic data about the level and spatial pattern of the harvest.     

Urban geochemical mapping studies: how and why we do them

Geochemical mapping is a technique rooted in mineral exploration but has now found worldwide application in studies of the urban environment. Such studies, involving multidisciplinary teams including geochemists, have to present their results in a way that nongeochemists can comprehend. A legislatively driven demand for urban geochemical data in connection with the need to identify contaminated land and subsequent health risk assessments has given rise to a greater worldwide interest in the urban geochemical environment. Herein, the aims and objectives of some urban studies are reviewed and commonly used terms such as baseline and background are defined. Geochemists need to better consider what is meant by the term urban. Whilst the unique make up of every city precludes a single recommended approach to a geochemical mapping strategy, more should be done to standardise the sampling and analytical methods. How (from a strategic and presentational point of view) and why we do geochemical mapping studies is discussed.