Plants provide us with food, pastures for livestock, and places for recreation and wellbeing. They also directly and indirectly provide numerous invaluable ecosystem services such as water regulation, carbon sequestration and flood prevention. As a result, it is imperative that we understand how plant populations are responding to climate constraints now, and use that information to predict how they are likely to respond to climatic changes in the future.In fact it might be very important…

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Human-mediated transport beyond biogeographic barriers has led to the introduction and establishment of alien species in new regions worldwide. However, we lack a global picture of established alien species richness for multiple taxonomic groups. The number of established alien species varies across the world and it is where the most established alien species can be found and which factors influence their distribution. An international team created a database for eight animal and plant groups (mammals, birds,…

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Number of samples in the NCBI GEOOpen data is a vital pillar of open science and a key enabler for reproducibility, data reuse, and novel discoveries. Enforcement of open-data policies, however, largely relies on manual efforts, which invariably lag behind the increasingly automated generation of biological data.Researchers routinely deposit data in online repositories. But they are only human and its not rare that they forget to inform a repository to release their data once a…

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Meloidogyne incognita in actionFor most animal species sexual reproduction is favored over asexual reproduction. A proposed mechanism to explain this is Muller's ratchet which assumes that the genomes of an asexual population accumulate deleterious mutations in an irreversible manner. However, this negative effect may not be prevalent in organisms which, while they reproduce asexually, also undergo other forms of recombination. Root-knot nematodes (Meloidogyne spp.) exhibit a diversity of reproductive modes ranging from obligatory sexual to fully asexual…

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After a longer silence due to some changes in the job and travel I am slowly picking up posting duties. I have decided to move the barcoding paper suggestions to Friday and rename these posts. If you happen to have nothing else to do on the weekend or in case you need some good reads for a quite moment, here they are:A combined meta-barcoding and shotgun metagenomic analysis of spontaneous wine fermentationWine is a complex…

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Save Coral Reefs: Costa Rica CallingHave you ever heard of the Area de Conservacion Guanacaste (ACG)? As an ecologist or conservation biologist you might have, as a barcoder it is very likely you have. Home to 2.4% of the world’s terrestrial biodiversity, the ACG in Costa Rica is the only protected area in the Neotropics that sweeps from Pacific Ocean waters up over the volcanic mountain range of the continental divide and down into the lowlands of…

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International course in DNA Metabarcoding: Part 1 – Field collecting and Molecular laboratory.Tromsø Museum (University of Tromsø, Norway), Forest Research Institute, Karelian Centre, Russian Academy of Sciences (Petrozavodsk, Russia), ForBio (Research School in Biosystematics), and SIU (Norwegian Centre for International Cooperation in Education) jointly offer an International Course in DNA Metabarcoding. The course will link its teaching program to the current research projects at the partner institutes to strengthen the connection between education and cutting…

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International course in DNA Metabarcoding: Part 1 – Field collecting and Molecular laboratory.Tromsø Museum (University of Tromsø, Norway), Forest Research Institute, Karelian Centre, Russian Academy of Sciences (Petrozavodsk, Russia), ForBio (Research School in Biosystematics), and SIU (Norwegian Centre for International Cooperation in Education) jointly offer an International Course in DNA Metabarcoding. The course will link its teaching program to the current research projects at the partner institutes to strengthen the connection between education and cutting…

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Online questionnaire on the openness and ethics of data in life sciencesDear colleague,I need your help.I am doing a study with my colleague Dimitris Damalas on the openness and ethics of data in life sciences. Thus we have prepared an online questionnaireThe objective of this questionnaire is to gain a better understanding of what researchers think on sharing and archiving, as well as barriers to the sharing and archiving of research data. The results of…

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Online questionnaire on the openness and ethics of data in life sciencesDear colleague,I need your help.I am doing a study with my colleague Dimitris Damalas on the openness and ethics of data in life sciences. Thus we have prepared an online questionnaireThe objective of this questionnaire is to gain a better understanding of what researchers think on sharing and archiving, as well as barriers to the sharing and archiving of research data. The results of…

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