Life Sciences Commons^™

Population Demography, Spatial Ecology, And Habitat Use Of The Florida Box Turtle (Terrapene Bauri) On A Barrier Island, Michael D. Mills

USF Tampa Graduate Theses and Dissertations

Turtles are one the most threatened vertebrate groups in the world due to anthropogenic threats such as habitat loss and overexploitation. In addition to occupying a range that has been vulnerable to major habitat loss, the Florida box turtle (Terrapene bauri) is particularly at risk of overexploitation due to its popularity in the pet trade. Sanibel Island is a barrier island in southwest Florida that has experienced major habitat loss and is the site of a recent poaching event. In response to these threats, studies of both the population demography and spatial ecology were conducted on Sanibel’s Florida box turtle …

Introducing Interdisciplinary Curricula Into Conservation Biology: Exploring Changes In Students’ Perceived Proenvironmental Attitudes And Behaviors, Jasmine Janes, Lindsay J. Mccunn

Journal of Educational Research and Practice

Today, conserving the natural environment is paramount. Educators have been striving to develop pedagogical approaches that facilitate greater engagement in conservation behaviors. However, many of these reforms have been targeted at an institutional level, without necessarily testing whether changes in proenvironmental perceptions, attitudes, or behaviors occur for students. This step seems important when developing conservation biology courses that provide well-rounded education that may better prepare students for future challenges in biodiverse conservation contexts. Our objective was to assess the proenvironmental attitudes and conservation values of undergraduate students enrolled in an undergraduate conservation biology course before and after instruction to determine …

Biodiversity And Foraging Preferences Of Bee Communities At Pinnacles National Park Over Time, Abigail M. E. Lehner

All Graduate Theses and Dissertations, Spring 1920 to Summer 2023

Bees are considered to be the most important animal pollinator, providing billions of dollars in pollination services each year. Despite their importance in both natural and agricultural settings, the status of most native bees is unknown. Native bees are subject to a variety of threats including habitat loss, pesticide use, and climate change. Yet, monitoring programs have been implemented in few natural areas. Pinnacles National Park, PNP, in California is one of the only natural areas to have a large historical dataset on bees across decades with surveys conducted in 1996, 1997, 1998, 1999, 2002, 2011, and 2012. These surveys …

Molecular And Morphological Investigations Of Grouper (Serranidae) Biodiversity In Saudi Arabia, Mohammad Saeed Al Jazza Alqahtani

Theses and Dissertations

Chapter 1: The seas surrounding the Arabian Peninsula, which represent the northernmost portion of the Indian Ocean, are considered to have the highest aquatic biodiversity among the worlds marine regions. Seas that surround the Arabian Peninsula include the Red Sea, the Gulf of Aden, the Arabian Sea, the Gulf of Oman, and the Arabian Gulf. In aggregate, this area harbors a large number of endemic and more widespread marine species, including fishes, echinoderms, and corals.

There are unique challenges involved in grouper species identification in the Arabian region including ‘familiar’ Arabic species designations that are not standardized in the Arabic …

Distribution Of Carrion-Associated Beetles And Their Phoretic Mites Along An Urban-Rural Gradient In Northeast Alabama, Kennedy Norris

Theses

Global insect decline has been linked to urbanization, most notably by habitat fragmentation. These insects perform important ecological functions such as pollination, managing pests, and decomposing carrion to recycle nutrients back into the environment. Despite the importance of nutrient recycling behavior displayed by carrion-associated beetles, little research has been done on them in the southeastern US. Previous studies have found a relationship between urbanization, less favorable environmental conditions, carrion availability, and decreased insect diversity. However, no studies have been conducted in the southeastern United States on the relationship of these beetles to their environment despite having the highest rates of …

Anti-Bat Ultrasound Production In Moths Is Globally And Phylogenetically Widespread, Jesse R. Barber, Brian C. Leavell, Krystie A. Miner, Brandt Quirk-Royal

Biology Faculty Publications and Presentations

Warning signals are well known in the visual system, but rare in other modalities. Some moths produce ultrasonic sounds to warn bats of noxious taste or to mimic unpalatable models. Here, we report results from a long-term study across the globe, assaying moth response to playback of bat echolocation. We tested 252 genera, spanning most families of large-bodied moths, and document anti-bat ultrasound production in 52 genera, with eight subfamily origins described. Based on acoustic analysis of ultrasonic emissions and palatability experiments with bats, it seems that acoustic warning and mimicry are the raison d'être for sound production in most …

Life After Death – Does Carcass Biodiversity Scale With Carcass Body Size?, Troy Warfield

Biological Sciences Undergraduate Honors Theses

Mammals play a large role in the ecosystems where some, especially large-bodied mammals, act as ecosystem engineers. Mammal carcasses, particularly those of large body mass act as a temporary island of dense nutrients that support other organisms, including other mammal species, for an extended period. Research in this field currently focuses on the link between mammal carcass size and nutrient availably or on non-mammalian size and biodiversity, but little is available on the correlation between mammal carcass size and its influence on ecosystem biodiversity. Here we ask, does the available biomass (i.e., body size) of the carcass affect its role …

Tree Species Diversity Increases With Conspecific Negative Density Dependence Across An Elevation Gradient, Joseph A. Lamanna, F. Andrew Jones, Davod M. Bell, Robert J. Pabst, David C. Shaw

Biological Sciences Faculty Research and Publications

Elevational and latitudinal gradients in species diversity may be mediated by biotic interactions that cause density-dependent effects of conspecifics on survival or growth to differ from effects of heterospecifics (i.e. conspecific density dependence), but limited evidence exists to support this. We tested the hypothesis that conspecific density dependence varies with elevation using over 40 years of data on tree survival and growth from 23 old-growth temperate forest stands across a 1,000-m elevation gradient. We found that conspecific-density-dependent effects on survival of small-to-intermediate-sized focal trees were negative in lower elevation, higher diversity forest stands typically characterised by warmer temperatures and greater …

The Consequences Of Climate Change For Native Bee Assemblages, Melanie R. Kazenel

Biology ETDs

Recent declines in terrestrial arthropod biodiversity highlight the need to pinpoint which taxa and ecosystem services are most threatened, and why. But, for most of the world’s ~20,000 bee species, we lack robust evidence of population trends, and the role of climate change remains surprisingly little studied. I used long-term bee monitoring data from the Sevilleta Long-Term Ecological Research Program (Socorro, NM, USA), along with complementary experimental and observational data, to examine how climate relates to bee abundance and diversity patterns over time and space, and to identify the traits that govern bees’ climate sensitivities.

Ecological Stressors Impact Soil Biodiversity, Kaleb Frierson, John Carlile

Transformations: Presentation Slides

Soil biodiversity serves ecologically important roles like nutrient cycling and is used as an indicator of community disturbance. North American forests host a multitude of ecological stressors, including invasive plants, earth worms, and deer abundance. While relationships between deer and invasive species, as well as relationships between macroinvertebrates and worms have been heavily investigated, the effects of invasive plant species like Pale Swallowwort on soil biodiversity are unknown. To test our hypothesis that Pale Swallowwort affects soil biodiversity, we collected leaf litter from three state parks throughout Central New York at sites with and without the invasive plant. Samples were …

Phylogenomic Discordance Suggests Polytomies Along The Backbone Of The Large Genus Solanum, Edeline Gagnon, Rebeccca Hilgenhof, Andrés Orejuela, Angela J. Mcdonnell, Gaurav Sablok, Xavier Aubriot, Leandro Giacomin, Yuri Gouvêa, Thamyris Bragionis, João Renato Stehmann, Lynn Bohs, Steven Dodsworth, Christopher T. Martine, Péter Poczai, Sandra Knapp, Tiina Särkinen

Faculty Journal Articles

Premise of the study

Evolutionary studies require solid phylogenetic frameworks, but increased volumes of phylogenomic data have revealed incongruent topologies among gene trees in many organisms both between and within genomes. Some of these incongruences indicate polytomies that may remain impossible to resolve. Here we investigate the degree of gene-tree discordance in Solanum, one of the largest flowering plant genera that includes the cultivated potato, tomato, and eggplant, as well as 24 minor crop plants.

Methods

A densely sampled species-level phylogeny of Solanum is built using unpublished and publicly available Sanger sequences comprising 60% of all accepted species (742 spp.) …

People-Powered Research And Experiential Learning: Unravelling Hidden Biodiversity, Melanie Pivarski, Matt Von Konrat, Tom Campbell, Numerous Other Co-Authors

Biology Faculty Publications

Globally, thousands of institutions house nearly three billion scientific collections offering unparallelled resources that contribute to both science and society. For herbaria alone - facilities housing dried plant collections - there are over 3,000 herbaria worldwide with an estimated 350 million specimens that have been collected over the past four centuries. Digitisation has greatly enhanced the use of herbarium data in scientific research, impacting diverse research areas, including biodiversity informatics, global climate change, analyses using next-generation sequencing technologies and many others. Despite the entrance of herbaria into a new era with enhanced scientific, educational and societal relevance, museum specimens remain …

Towards Mapping Biodiversity From Above: Can Fusing Lidar And Hyperspectral Remote Sensing Predict Taxonomic, Functional, And Phylogenetic Tree Diversity In Temperate Forests?, Aaron G. Kamoske, Kyla M. Dahlin, Quentin D. Read, Sydne Record, Scott C. Stark, Shawn P. Serbin, Phoebe L. Zarnetske

Biology Faculty Research and Scholarship

Aim: Rapid global change is impacting the diversity of tree species and essential ecosystem functions and services of forests. It is therefore critical to understand and predict how the diversity of tree species is spatially distributed within and among forest biomes. Satellite remote sensing platforms have been used for decades to map forest structure and function but are limited in their capacity to monitor change by their relatively coarse spatial resolution and the complexity of scales at which different dimensions of biodiversity are observed in the field. Recently, airborne remote sensing platforms making use of passive high spectral resolution (i.e., …

Standardized Neon Organismal Data For Biodiversity Research, Daijiang Li, Sydne Record, Eric R. Sokol, Matthew E. Bitters, Melissa Y. Chen, Y. Anny Chung, Matthew R. Helmus, Ruvi Jaimes, Lara Jansen, Marta A. Jarzyna, Michael G. Just, Jalene M. Lamontagne, Brett A. Melbourne, Wynne Moss, Kari E. A. Norman, Stephanie M. Parker, Natalie Robinson, Bijan Seyednasrollah, Colin Smith, Sarah Spaulding, Thilina D. Surasinghe, Sarah K. Thomsen, Phoebe L. Zarnetske

Biology Faculty Research and Scholarship

Understanding patterns and drivers of species distribution and abundance, and thus biodiversity, is a core goal of ecology. Despite advances in recent decades, research into these patterns and processes is currently limited by a lack of standardized, high-quality, empirical data that span large spatial scales and long time periods. The NEON fills this gap by providing freely available observational data that are generated during robust and consistent organismal sampling of several sentinel taxonomic groups within 81 sites distributed across the United States and will be collected for at least 30 years. The breadth and scope of these data provide a …

A Flora Of Coyote Ridge And Flat, Inyo County, California, Martin Purdy

CGU Theses & Dissertations

California’s Sierra Nevada mountain range contains a disproportionate share of the state’s plant diversity and is one of the most floristically diverse regions of its size in the United States. The high Sierra Nevada, in particular, has been identified as an important center of species richness and endemism within California. Anthropogenic climate warming is expected to disproportionately affect mountain ecosystems, and models have predicted serious habitat contraction and extirpation for many alpine plant taxa. A specimen-based inventory of the vascular and non-vascular plants of Coyote Ridge and Flat was conducted to establish baseline data for one such sensitive alpine and …

Environmental Effects On Constructed Wetland Microbial Diversity And Function In The Context Of Wastewater Management, Sandrine Grandmont-Lemire

Cal Poly Humboldt theses and projects

Microbial communities play a crucial role in ecosystems, yet we know little about how microbial diversity influences ecosystem functioning. An important gap in our understanding is how environmental change affects microbial Biodiversity-Ecosystem Function relationships (BEF). These complex interactions between microbial biodiversity and ecosystem function can influence major biogeochemical processes, such as the nitrogen cycle in wetland ecosystems, which play an important role in managing wastewater. To address the effect of biodiversity on function, my study investigates the BEF relationships between microbial diversity and the function in terms of ammonia removal from wastewater at the Arcata Wastewater Treatment Facility (AWTF) both …

Final Report Floating Upwelling System Harvest Road Oceans, Robert Michael, Scott Bennett

Fisheries occasional publications

A Floating Upwelling System or FLUPSY is a mechanical system for the culture of seed stock during the nursery stage of commercial bivalve production.