Ecology in an anthropogenic biosphere Ellis, Erle C
Ecological monographs,
2015-August, 20150801, August 2015, 2015-08-00, Letnik:
85, Številka:
3
Journal Article
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Humans, unlike any other multicellular species in Earth's history, have emerged as a global force that is transforming the ecology of an entire planet. It is no longer possible to understand, ...predict, or successfully manage ecological pattern, process, or change without understanding why and how humans reshape these over the long term. Here, a general causal theory is presented to explain why human societies gained the capacity to globally alter the patterns, processes, and dynamics of ecology and how these anthropogenic alterations unfold over time and space as societies themselves change over human generational time. Building on existing theories of ecosystem engineering, niche construction, inclusive inheritance, cultural evolution, ultrasociality, and social change, this theory of anthroecological change holds that sociocultural evolution of subsistence regimes based on ecosystem engineering, social specialization, and non-kin exchange, or "sociocultural niche construction," is the main cause of both the long-term upscaling of human societies and their unprecedented transformation of the biosphere. Human sociocultural niche construction can explain, where classic ecological theory cannot, the sustained transformative effects of human societies on biogeography, ecological succession, ecosystem processes, and the ecological patterns and processes of landscapes, biomes, and the biosphere. Anthroecology theory generates empirically testable hypotheses on the forms and trajectories of long-term anthropogenic ecological change that have significant theoretical and practical implications across the subdisciplines of ecology and conservation. Though still at an early stage of development, anthroecology theory aligns with and integrates established theoretical frameworks including social-ecological systems, social metabolism, countryside biogeography, novel ecosystems, and anthromes. The "fluxes of nature" are fast becoming "cultures of nature." To investigate, understand, and address the ultimate causes of anthropogenic ecological change, not just the consequences, human sociocultural processes must become as much a part of ecological theory and practice as biological and geophysical processes are now. Strategies for achieving this goal and for advancing ecological science and conservation in an increasingly anthropogenic biosphere are presented.
Cognition is not just 'in the head'; it extends well beyond the skull and the skin. Non-Cartesian Cognitive Science views cognition as being embodied, environmentally embedded, enacted, encultured, ...and socially distributed. The Douglas Fir Group (2016) likewise recognizes languages as emergent, social, integrated phenomena. Language is the quintessence of distributed cognition. Language cognition is shared across naturally occurring, culturally constituted, communicative activities. Usage affects learning and it affects languages, too. These are essential components of a theory of language cognition. This article summarizes these developments within cognitive science before considering implications for language research and teaching, especially as these concern usage-based language learning and cognition in second language and multilingual contexts. Here, I prioritize research involving corpus-, computational-, and psycho-linguistics, and cognitive psychological, complex adaptive system, and network science investigations of learner-language interactions. But there are many other implications. Looking at languages through any one single lens does not do the phenomena justice. Taking the social turn does not entail restricting our research focus to the social. Nor does it obviate more traditional approaches to second language acquisition. Instead it calls for greater transdisciplinarity, diversity, and collaborative work.
Anthropogenic transformation of the terrestrial biosphere Ellis, Erle C.
Philosophical transactions of the Royal Society of London. Series A: Mathematical, physical, and engineering sciences,
03/2011, Letnik:
369, Številka:
1938
Journal Article
Recenzirano
Human populations and their use of land have transformed most of the terrestrial biosphere into anthropogenic biomes (anthromes), causing a variety of novel ecological patterns and processes to ...emerge. To assess whether human populations and their use of land have directly altered the terrestrial biosphere sufficiently to indicate that the Earth system has entered a new geological epoch, spatially explicit global estimates of human populations and their use of land were analysed across the Holocene for their potential to induce irreversible novel transformation of the terrestrial biosphere. Human alteration of the terrestrial biosphere has been significant for more than 8000 years. However, only in the past century has the majority of the terrestrial biosphere been transformed into intensively used anthromes with predominantly novel anthropogenic ecological processes. At present, even were human populations to decline substantially or use of land become far more efficient, the current global extent, duration, type and intensity of human transformation of ecosystems have already irreversibly altered the terrestrial biosphere at levels sufficient to leave an unambiguous geological record differing substantially from that of the Holocene or any prior epoch. It remains to be seen whether the anthropogenic biosphere will be sustained and continue to evolve.
Humans have fundamentally altered global patterns of biodiversity and ecosystem processes. Surprisingly, existing systems for representing these global patterns, including biome classifications, ...either ignore humans altogether or simplify human influence into, at most, four categories. Here, we present the first characterization of terrestrial biomes based on global patterns of sustained, direct human interaction with ecosystems. Eighteen âanthropogenic biomesâ were identified through empirical analysis of global population, land use, and land cover. More than 75% of Earth's iceâfree land showed evidence of alteration as a result of human residence and land use, with less than a quarter remaining as wildlands, supporting just 11% of terrestrial net primary production. Anthropogenic biomes offer a new way forward by acknowledging human influence on global ecosystems and moving us toward models and investigations of the terrestrial biosphere that integrate human and ecological systems.
Abstract
Protein glycosylation, and in particular N-linked glycans, is a hallmark of eukaryotic cells and has been well-studied in mammalian cells and parasites. However, little research has been ...conducted to investigate the conservation and variation of protein glycosylation pathways in other eukaryotic organisms. Euglena gracilis is an industrially important microalga, used in the production of biofuels and nutritional supplements. It is evolutionarily highly divergent from green algae and more related to kinetoplastid pathogens. It was recently shown that E. gracilis possesses the machinery for producing a range of protein glycosylations and make simple N-glycans, but the modified proteins were not identified. This study identifies the glycosylated proteins, including transporters, extracellular proteases, and those involved in cell surface signalling. Notably, many of the most highly expressed and glycosylated proteins are not related to any known sequences and are, therefore, likely to be involved in important novel functions in Euglena.
Lectin affinity and proteomics identified glycosylated and extracellular proteins, including transporters, proteases and signalling components, in the evolutionarily and industrially important protozoan alga Euglena gracilis.
Recent genome sequencing efforts have led to the rapid accumulation of uncharacterized or “orphaned” secondary metabolic biosynthesis gene clusters (BGCs) in public databases. This increase in ...DNA-sequenced big data has given rise to significant challenges in the applied field of natural product genome mining, including (i) how to prioritize the characterization of orphan BGCs and (ii) how to rapidly connect genes to biosynthesized small molecules. Here, we show that by correlating putative antibiotic resistance genes that encode target-modified proteins with orphan BGCs, we predict the biological function of pathway specific small molecules before they have been revealed in a process we call target-directed genome mining. By querying the pan-genome of 86 Salinispora bacterial genomes for duplicated house-keeping genes colocalized with natural product BGCs, we prioritized an orphan polyketide synthase-nonribosomal peptide synthetase hybrid BGC (tlm) with a putative fatty acid synthase resistance gene. We employed a new synthetic double-stranded DNA-mediated cloning strategy based on transformation-associated recombination to efficiently capture tlm and the related ttm BGCs directly from genomic DNA and to heterologously express them in Streptomyces hosts. We show the production of a group of unusual thiotetronic acid natural products, including the well-known fatty acid synthase inhibitor thiolactomycin that was first described over 30 years ago, yet never at the genetic level in regards to biosynthesis and autoresistance. This finding not only validates the target-directed genome mining strategy for the discovery of antibiotic producing gene clusters without a priori knowledge of the molecule synthesized but also paves the way for the investigation of novel enzymology involved in thiotetronic acid natural product biosynthesis.
Certified peer specialists (CPS) are mental health professionals who draw their expertise from lived experience with mental illness and mental distress. They tale a nonmedical, nonclinical approach ...to providing support to community members with mental health difficulties and in doing so, emphasize the role of social environmental factors that contribute to mental distress. Their perspectives are contrary to the biomedical perspective of mainstream psychiatry. While there is a significant body of literature on CPS, there is a dearth of research on how CPS engage in and perceive the broader mental health system. They resist the biomedicalization of mental illness by moving past labels and the language of pathology to facilitate recovery from mental illness and to resist stigma. Drawing from in-depth interviews with peer specialists, participant observation of a peer-run organization, and a survey of peer specialists across the United States, I ask the following research questions: How and why are CPS challenging the medical model of mental illness? How do CPS consider social environmental factors in the etiology of distress and what are the potential implications for resistance to both biomedicalization and stigmatization? My data suggest that CPS, in their critiques of the medical model and the mental health system, are actively resisting the biomedicalization of mental illness and focus on social environmental factors that contribute to experiences of distress. This research has meaningful implications for research on CPS and hope for recovery from mental illness.
High spatial resolution three-dimensional (3D) measurements of vegetation by remote sensing are advancing ecological research and environmental management. However, substantial economic and ...logistical costs limit this application, especially for observing phenological dynamics in ecosystem structure and spectral traits. Here we demonstrate a new aerial remote sensing system enabling routine and inexpensive aerial 3D measurements of canopy structure and spectral attributes, with properties similar to those of LIDAR, but with RGB (red-green-blue) spectral attributes for each point, enabling high frequency observations within a single growing season. This “Ecosynth” methodology applies photogrammetric “Structure from Motion” computer vision algorithms to large sets of highly overlapping low altitude (<130m) aerial photographs acquired using off-the-shelf digital cameras mounted on an inexpensive (<USD$4000), lightweight (<2kg), hobbyist-grade unmanned aerial system (UAS). Ecosynth 3D point clouds with densities of 30–67pointsm−2 were produced using commercial computer vision software from digital photographs acquired repeatedly by UAS over three 6.25ha (250m×250m) Temperate Deciduous forest sites in Maryland USA. Ecosynth point clouds were georeferenced with a precision of 1.2–4.1m horizontal radial root mean square error (RMSE) and 0.4–1.2m vertical RMSE. Understory digital terrain models (DTMs) and canopy height models (CHMs) were generated from leaf-on and leaf-off point clouds using procedures commonly applied to LIDAR point clouds. At two sites, Ecosynth CHMs were strong predictors of field-measured tree heights (R2 0.63 to 0.84) and were highly correlated with a LIDAR CHM (R 0.87) acquired 4days earlier, though Ecosynth-based estimates of aboveground biomass and carbon densities included significant errors (31–36% of field-based estimates). Repeated scanning of a 50m×50m forested area at six different times across a 16 month period revealed ecologically significant dynamics in canopy color at different heights and a structural shift upward in canopy density, as demonstrated by changes in vertical height profiles of point density and relative RGB brightness. Changes in canopy relative greenness were highly correlated (R2=0.87) with MODIS NDVI time series for the same area and vertical differences in canopy color revealed the early green up of the dominant canopy species, Liriodendron tulipifera, strong evidence that Ecosynth time series measurements can capture vegetation structural and spectral phenological dynamics at the spatial scale of individual trees. The ability to observe canopy phenology in 3D at high temporal resolutions represents a breakthrough in forest ecology. Inexpensive user-deployed technologies for multispectral 3D scanning of vegetation at landscape scales (<1km2) heralds a new era of participatory remote sensing by field ecologists, community foresters and the interested public.
•Forest structure was mapped in 3D using a low cost unmanned aerial system (UAS).•Geometrically accurate 3D point clouds were generated using computer vision.•Computer vision natively couples observations of vegetation spectra and structure.•Repeat scans reveal dynamics in canopy attributes at the scale of individual trees.•Forest height, carbon, and color can now be mapped inexpensively on demand.
Sharing the land between nature and people Ellis, Erle C
Science (American Association for the Advancement of Science),
06/2019, Letnik:
364, Številka:
6447
Journal Article
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Conserving the planet's ecological heritage requires a new level of societal engagement
Human societies have long reshaped environments to sustain themselves. From bands of hunter-gatherers to ...agrarian empires to global supply chains, human societies have evolved unprecedented capacities to transform the biosphere, lithosphere, atmosphere, and climate (
1
). Today, the ups and downs of economies and polities shape Earth's ecology as surely as the weather does. Yet even though human societies have never been more globally capable, interconnected, or interdependent, the social institutions, processes, and infrastructures that sustain people and the rest of life on land remain remarkably complex and heterogeneous. From parcels to planet, the management of Earth's limited land is in the hands of nearly 8 billion people with different needs, wants, abilities, perspectives, and social relations. A better future for people and for the rest of nature will depend on bringing all these hands together to shape it.
In order to expedite the rapid and efficient discovery and isolation of novel specialized metabolites, while minimizing the waste of resources on rediscovery of known compounds, it is crucial to ...develop efficient approaches for strain prioritization, rapid dereplication, and the assessment of favored cultivation and extraction conditions. Herein we interrogated bacterial strains by systematically evaluating cultivation and extraction parameters with LC-MS/MS analysis and subsequent dereplication through the Global Natural Product Social Molecular Networking (GNPS) platform. The developed method is fast, requiring minimal time and sample material, and is compatible with high-throughput extract analysis, thereby streamlining strain prioritization and evaluation of culturing parameters. With this approach, we analyzed 146 marine Salinispora and Streptomyces strains that were grown and extracted using multiple different protocols. In total, 603 samples were analyzed, generating approximately 1.8 million mass spectra. We constructed a comprehensive molecular network and identified 15 molecular families of diverse natural products and their analogues. The size and breadth of this network shows statistically supported trends in molecular diversity when comparing growth and extraction conditions. The network provides an extensive survey of the biosynthetic capacity of the strain collection and a method to compare strains based on the variety and novelty of their metabolites. This approach allows us to quickly identify patterns in metabolite production that can be linked to taxonomy, culture conditions, and extraction methods, as well as informing the most valuable growth and extraction conditions.
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