NSF HELPS FUND RESEARCH ON GENETIC ORIGINS OF BIRDS

FROM:  NATIONAL SCIENCE FOUNDATION 
'Big bang' of bird evolution mapped by international research team
Genes reveal histories of bird origins, feathers, flight and song

The genomes of modern birds tell a story: Today's winged rulers of the skies emerged and evolved after the mass extinction that wiped out dinosaurs and almost everything else 66 million years ago.

That story is now coming to light, thanks to an international collaboration that has been underway for four years.

The first findings of the Avian Phylogenomics Consortium are being reported nearly simultaneously in 23 papers--eight papers in a special issue this week of Science, and 15 more in Genome Biology, GigaScience and other journals.

The results are funded in part by the National Science Foundation (NSF).

Scientists already knew that the birds that survived the mass extinction experienced a rapid burst of evolution.

But the family tree of modern birds has confused biologists for centuries, and the molecular details of how birds arrived at the spectacular biodiversity of more than 10,000 species was barely known.

How did birds become so diverse?

To resolve these fundamental questions, a consortium led by Guojie Zhang of the National Genebank at BGI in China and the University of Copenhagen; neuroscientist Erich Jarvis of Duke University and the Howard Hughes Medical Institute; and M. Thomas P. Gilbert of the Natural History Museum of Denmark has sequenced, assembled and compared the full genomes of 48 bird species.

The species include the crow, duck, falcon, parakeet, crane, ibis, woodpecker, eagle and others, representing all major branches of modern birds.

"BGI's strong support and four years of hard work by the entire community have enabled us to answer numerous fundamental questions on an unprecedented scale," said Zhang.

"This is the largest whole genomic study across a single vertebrate class to date. The success of this project can only be achieved with the excellent collaboration of all the consortium members."

Added Gilbert, "Although an increasing number of vertebrate genomes are being released, to date no single study has deliberately targeted the full diversity of any major vertebrate group.

"This is what our consortium set out to do. Only with this scale of sampling can scientists truly begin to fully explore the genomic diversity within a full vertebrate class."

"This is an exciting moment," said Jarvis. "Lots of fundamental questions now can be resolved with more genomic data from a broader sampling. I got into this project because of my interest in birds as a model for vocal learning and speech production in humans, and it has opened up some amazing new vistas on brain evolution."

This first round of analyses suggests some remarkable new ideas about bird evolution.

The first flagship paper published in Science presents a well-resolved new family tree for birds, based on whole-genome data.

The second flagship paper describes the big picture of genome evolution in birds.

Six other papers in the special issue of Science report how vocal learning may have independently evolved in a few bird groups and in the human brain's speech regions; how the sex chromosomes of birds came to be; how birds lost their teeth; how crocodile genomes evolved; and ways in which singing behavior regulates genes in the brain.

New ideas on bird evolution

"This project represents the biggest step forward yet in our understanding of how bird diversity is organized and in time and space," said paper co-author Scott Edwards, on leave from Harvard University and currently Director of NSF's Division of Biological Infrastructure.

"Because this information is so fundamental to our understanding of biodiversity, it will help everyone--from birdwatchers to artists to museum curators--better organize knowledge of bird diversity."

The new bird tree will change the way we think about bird diversity, said Edwards. "The fact that many birds associated with water--loons, herons, penguins, petrels and pelicans--are closely related suggests that adaptations to lakes or seas arose less frequently than we thought."

Added paper co-author David Mindell, an evolutionary biologist and program director in NSF's Division of Environmental Biology, "We found strong support for close relationships that might be surprising to many observers.

"Grebes are closely related to flamingos, but not closely related to ducks; falcons are closely related to songbirds and parrots but not closely related to hawks; and swifts are closely related to hummingbirds and not closely related to swallows."

Genome-scale datasets allowed scientists to "track the sequence of divergence events and their timing with greater precision than previously possible," said Mindell.

"Most major types of extant birds arose during a 5-10 million year interval at the end of the Cretaceous period and the extinction of non-avian dinosaurs about 66 million years ago."

It takes a consortium...of 200 scientists, 80 institutions, 20 countries

The Avian Phylogenomics Consortium has so far involved more than 200 scientists from 80 institutions in 20 countries, including the BGI in China, the University of Copenhagen, Duke University, the University of Texas at Austin, the Smithsonian Institution, the Chinese Academy of Sciences, Louisiana State University and others.

Previous attempts to reconstruct the avian family tree using partial DNA sequencing or anatomical and behavioral traits have met with contradiction and confusion.

Because modern birds split into species early and in such quick succession, they did not evolve enough distinct genetic differences at the genomic level to clearly determine their early branching order, the researchers said.

To resolve the timing and relationships of modern birds, consortium scientists used whole-genome DNA sequences to infer the bird species tree.

"In the past, people have been using 10 to 20 genes to try to infer the species relationships," Jarvis said.

"What we've learned from doing this whole-genome approach is that we can infer a somewhat different phylogeny [family tree] than what has been proposed in the past.

"We've figured out that protein-coding genes tell the wrong story for inferring the species tree. You need non-coding sequences, including the intergenic regions. The protein-coding sequences, however, tell an interesting story of proteome-wide convergence among species with similar life histories."

Where did all the birds come from?

This new tree resolves the early branches of Neoaves (new birds) and supports conclusions about relationships that have been long-debated.

For example, the findings support three independent origins of waterbirds.

They also indicate that the common ancestor of core landbirds, which include songbirds, parrots, woodpeckers, owls, eagles and falcons, was an apex predator, which also gave rise to the giant terror birds that once roamed the Americas.

The whole-genome analysis dates the evolutionary expansion of Neoaves to the time of the mass extinction event 66 million years ago.

This contradicts the idea that Neoaves blossomed 10 to 80 million years earlier, as some recent studies have suggested.

Based on this new genomic data, only a few bird lineages survived the mass extinction.

They gave rise to the more than 10,000 Neoaves species that comprise 95 percent of all bird species living with us today.

The freed-up ecological niches caused by the extinction event likely allowed rapid species radiation of birds in less than 15 million years, which explains much of modern bird biodiversity.

For answers, new computational tools needed

Increasingly sophisticated and more affordable genomic sequencing technologies, and the advent of computational tools for reconstructing and comparing whole genomes, have allowed the consortium to resolve these controversies with better clarity than ever before, the researchers said.

With about 14,000 genes per species, the size of the datasets and the complexity of analyzing them required new approaches to computing evolutionary family trees.

These were developed by computer scientists Tandy Warnow at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, funded by NSF, Siavash Mirarab of the University of Texas at Austin, and Alexis Stamatakis at the Heidelburg Institute for Theoretical Studies.

Their algorithms required the use of parallel processing supercomputers at the Munich Supercomputing Center, the Texas Advanced Computing Center, and the San Diego Supercomputing Center.

"The computational challenges in estimating the avian species tree used around 300 years of CPU time, and some analyses required supercomputers with a terabyte of memory," Warnow said.

The bird project also had support from the Genome 10K Consortium of Scientists (G10K), an international science community working toward rapidly assessing genome sequences for 10,000 vertebrate species.

"The Avian Genomics Consortium has accomplished the most ambitious and successful project that the G10K Project has joined or endorsed," said G10K co-leader Stephen O'Brien, who co-authored a commentary on the bird sequencing project in GigaScience.

-NSF-
Media Contacts
Cheryl Dybas, NSF,

SCIENTISTS WORK TO PRESERVE BIODIVERSITY

FROM:  NATIONAL SCIENCE FOUNDATION 
Protecting biodiversity

In one of the world's richest biological hotspots, an international group of scientists works to preserve biodiversity amid climate change
The Congo Basin is an unruly ribbon of tropical forest: Over a million square miles spanning six countries in Central Africa, running inward along the equator from the continent's western coast. It is the second-largest contiguous tropical forest in the world. The basin is home to the classics of African wildlife--chimpanzees, elephants, gorillas--along with thousands of other less well-known species: pale, long-legged Golden Puddle Frogs, hook-beaked Olive Sunbirds, and squat Blue Duikers, which look like shrunken antelopes.

This wealth of flora and fauna, much of it native to the region, is enough to qualify the Congo Basin as a biodiversity hotspot: a biologically rich area threatened by outside forces. In Central Africa, those forces include deforestation, climate change, hunting and more.

The region is "so enriched with life," says Mary "Katy" Gonder, a Drexel University biologist and one of the lead researchers on the Central African Biodiversity Alliance (CABA). "And that life is precarious right now."

Funded in part by the National Science Foundation (NSF), the Alliance is an international partnership of scientists, students and policy makers working to build a framework to conserve biodiversity in Central Africa. The partnership spans three continents, and includes researchers from the U.S., Cameroon, Equatorial Guinea, Gabon, Germany and the United Kingdom.

NSF funding for CABA comes through the Partnerships in International Research and Education (PIRE) program, which supports innovative, international research and education collaborations. PIRE projects stimulate scientific discovery and strengthen U.S. universities; the projects forge worldwide partnerships and help train a globally engaged scientific and engineering workforce.

CABA also receives funding from the Arcus Foundation and the Exxon Mobil Foundation.

To build a conservation framework, they are using genomic tools and environmental modeling to identify areas worth conserving: sweet spots that both maximize the pattern of biodiversity and the processes that produce and maintain it.

All research is rooted in the region's socioeconomic realities. From the start, CABA members have met with government officials in the region, to ensure that policy makers are both informed about the research and play a role shaping it. Training future scientists and engineers is also a big piece of the project. They've held professional development workshops for students and scientists--both American and African--to discuss everything from experiment design and statistics to grant writing and leadership. CABA members have also helped facilitate workshops for women in science, through COACh (Committee on the Advancement of Women Chemists) International.

Exposing American students to globally focused research, partnerships and--for most of the them--a completely foreign part of the world is another "great benefit" of the project, says Nicola Anthony, a biologist at the University of New Orleans and another lead CABA scientist. "Even if they don't end up in science for a career, they'll be much better global citizens as a result of this."

CABA's "breadth and effectiveness are very impressive," says Lara Campbell, a program manager in NSF's International Science and Engineering section, which funds PIRE. "They are producing a strong cadre of American and African scientists prepared to address the many future challenges of climate change impacts on ecosystems."

-- Jessica Arriens
Investigators
Thomas Smith
Nicola Anthony
Mary Katherine Gonder
Related Institutions/Organizations
University of California-Los Angeles
University of New Orleans
Drexel University

HERBEVORES AND FERTILIZER CAN INCREASE PLANT BIODIVERSITY

FROM:  NATIONAL SCIENCE FOUNDATION 
Herbivores + light = more plant biodiversity in fertilized grasslands
Research on six continents shows that it all comes down to the light
It all comes down to the light. At least in plant species diversity in fertilized grasslands.

Fertilizing by humans and plant-eating by herbivores can combine to benefit plant biodiversity--if enough light still reaches the ground, according to results of a study by ecologists Elizabeth Borer and Eric Seabloom of the University of Minnesota and colleagues.

The findings, published this week in the online edition of the journal Nature, are important in a world where humans are changing both where herbivores are found and the supply of plant nutrients such as nitrogen, phosphorus and potassium.

Enter the Nutrient Network

To conduct the study, Borer and Seabloom enlisted the help of the Nutrient Network, or NutNet, an experiment they and other researchers began as a way to understand how grasslands around the world respond to changing environments.

NutNet scientists at 40 sites set up plots with and without added fertilizer and with and without fences to keep out local herbivores such as deer, kangaroos, sheep or zebras.

The research took place in the United States, Canada, China, Australia, Switzerland, United Kingdom, South Africa, Tanzania, Germany and Argentina.

The scientists' hypothesis was that grassland plant species losses caused by eutrophication (overfertilization) could be offset by the increased light availability that results when taller plants are munched down by herbivores like deer and sheep.

This "trimming" by herbivores ultimately lets in more light, fueling increased plant growth.

The experiment, replicated in 40 grasslands on six continents, demonstrated that the researchers had it right.

New explanation for grassland plant biodiversity

"Global patterns of biodiversity have largely defied explanation due to many interacting, local driving forces," says Henry Gholz, a program director in the National Science Foundation's (NSF) Division of Environmental Biology, which funded coordination of the research, along with the many institutions involved.

"These results show that grassland biodiversity is likely largely determined by the offsetting influences of nutrition and grazing on light capture by plants," Gholz says.

In the study, the ecologists measured the amount of plant material, the light reaching the ground and the number of species of plants in the plots.

When the scientists compared results across the sites, they found that fertilizer both reduced the number of plant species in the plots and favored those that were faster-growing. Species less able to tolerate a lack of light in shady conditions were literally overshadowed by their faster-growing neighbors.

So there were fewer kinds of plants, but taller-growing ones.

An herbivore is an herbivore is an herbivore?

In both fertilized and unfertilized plots, removal of vegetation by herbivores increased the amount of light reaching the ground. The taller plants were eaten by the herbivores. Then plant species diversity increased.

The results were the case whether the grassland was in Minnesota, the United Kingdom or Tanzania, and whether the herbivores were rabbits, sheep or elephants.

"This suggests that these effects dovetail with changes in light availability at the ground level," says Borer. "That appears to be a big factor in maintaining or losing biodiversity in grasslands."

Light a key piece of the puzzle

In short, Borer says, "where we see a change in light, we see a change in biodiversity" for the better.

The findings offer important insights into how humans are affecting prairies, savannas, alpine meadows and other grasslands by adding fertilizers.

In showing how fertilization, grazing, light availability and biodiversity are linked, scientists are closer to understanding grassland ecosystems in a changing world.

-- Cheryl Dybas
Investigators
Elizabeth Borer
Related Institutions/Organizations
University of Minnesota-Twin Cities

STUDY LOOKS AT TOMATOES ON THE WILDSIDE TO EXAMINE BIODIVERSITY

Supermarket Tomatoes.  Credit:  USDA-Wikimedia.

FROM:  NATIONAL SCIENCE FOUNDATION 
Staple of recipe favorites--the tomato--reveals processes that maintain biodiversity

No hothouse plants: Study examines supermarket tomatoes' wild relatives, which live in Earth's most extreme environments
Tomatoes are in almost everything we eat, from salad and soup to chili and pizza. For some, tomato-based dishes are featured during the holiday season.

Most people don't realize, however, that there are more than a dozen wild tomato species, or that wild tomatoes grow in the deserts, rainforests and highlands of South America and on the Galapagos Islands.

These wild species don't have the big, bold fruits we're used to seeing in the supermarket, though. Wild tomato fruits are smaller, from the size of a pea to that of a large marble and are sometimes green and bitter when they're ripe.

But compared with their domesticated relatives, wild tomatoes are more diverse in many hidden and not-so-hidden ways.

Now scientists are using the genomes of wild tomatoes to study the processes that drive Earth's biodiversity.

Their goal is to learn how species cope with differences in climate and natural enemies, and what might happen in this time of environmental change.

Wild tomato genomes as a framework for understanding biodiversity

To study natural trait and genome diversity in wild tomatoes, scientists Leonie Moyle, David Haak and Matthew Hahn of Indiana University Bloomington received a grant from the National Science Foundation's (NSF) Dimensions of Biodiversity program.

Dimensions of Biodiversity is part of NSF's Science, Engineering and Education for Sustainability investment and is supported by NSF's Directorates for Biological Sciences and Geosciences.

Scientists funded through Dimensions of Biodiversity integrate genetic, taxonomic and functional approaches in their research.

"The resulting discoveries go beyond expanding our knowledge of the depth and breadth of life on Earth," says John Wingfield, NSF assistant director for Biological Sciences.

"They have the potential to revolutionize the way we manage agriculture, practice medicine, address global climate change and develop new technologies."

The award to Moyle's team funds sequencing of the complete set of all expressed genes (the transcriptome) in populations of wild tomato species.

"Variations within and between these wild tomato genomes can be compared by using the genome sequence of the domesticated tomato as a 'backbone,'"says Moyle.

By linking this genome-wide sequence data with information on wild tomato trait variation, the biologists hope to identify the genes responsible for adaptation to environmental change.

The research focuses on the role of drought and of defense against herbivores, or plant-eaters, in the diversity of wild tomatoes.

"These factors," says Haak, "capture two of the most important aspects of any plant's environment: climate and natural enemies."

Wild tomatoes: From hothouse to deep freeze

While domesticated tomatoes thrive only in agricultural irrigation, wild tomatoes live in some of the planet's most extreme environments.

They're among the few plants found in the driest place on Earth--the Atacama Desert in Chile. Other wild tomatoes blossom along the rocky, salty shores of the Galapagos Islands, and in the daily rains of Ecuador's rainforests.

But it's not just the climate in which they grow that varies among wild tomatoes.

The plants bristle with an array of natural defenses, from dense coverings of plant hairs to toxins deadly against insect attackers.

Measuring biodiversity in plant defenses

In a forthcoming paper in the journal Ecology, Haak, Moyle and colleagues document large differences in defenses among wild tomatoes.

They used bioassays--experiments in which living organisms are used to reveal the potency or concentration of a substance.

In this case, they fed leaf samples of different wild tomato species to tobacco hornworms.

The tobacco hornworm--also known as the tomato hornworm--is an enemy of both domesticated and wild tomatoes. It rapidly eats its way through the plants' leaves.

Each hornworm caterpillar was weighed before and after feeding to determine how much it had gained on a diet of wild tomato leaves.

Those tomatoes on which caterpillars gained little or no weight, says Haak, have more natural defenses than those on which the caterpillars gained weight.

In one wild tomato species, caterpillars lost significant weight; they refused to consume the plant's toxic leaves.

The researchers showed that the level of natural defense varies widely among wild tomato species.

"Although all wild tomatoes are closely related, these patterns of defense variation don't simply follow historical, evolutionary relationships," says Moyle. "The defense level of each wild tomato population is likely shaped by responses to local herbivores."

Linking biodiversity to genomics to understand environmental responses

Moyle and Haak are using DNA sequencing to look at the genes that are expressed differently in wild tomatoes with varying levels of natural defenses, and with differences in responses to drought.

Genes that are consistently up- or down-regulated in these conditions, says Moyle, can reveal the changes important for responding to and coping with environmental stresses.

"By linking data on DNA sequence variation, and on variation in gene expression, with wild tomatoes' responses to drought and natural enemies," she says, "we may find a powerful model for understanding the genetics of responses to environmental change."

The study could also uncover genetic variations helpful in improving domesticated tomatoes and their cultivated relatives, including potatoes and peppers.

"This research on tomatoes' wild relatives offers insights into the huge reservoir of genetic information available to ensure our future food security," says Simon Malcomber, lead NSF program director for Dimensions of Biodiversity.

"Tomatoes are one of the most widely consumed foods around the world," he says. "Studies such as this provide important information that could be used to improve herbivore resistance in crop cultivars."

Next time you're in the supermarket, tomatoes are worth a closer look. These common plants may offer a glimpse of our global food security, and of Earth's environmental future.

-- Cheryl Dybas, NSF
Investigators
David Haak
Leonie Moyle
Matthew Hahn
Related Institutions/Organizations
Indiana University
Related Programs
Dimensions of Biodiversity

WHERE DISEASES AND CLIMATE CHANGE INTERSECT

Rat Eating Seeds.  Credit:  Wikimedia.

FROM:  NATIONAL SCIENCE FOUNDATION

Infectious diseases and climate change intersect with no simple answers
Climate change is already affecting the spread of infectious diseases--and human health and biodiversity worldwide--according to disease ecologists reporting research results in this week's issue of the journal Science.

Modeling disease outcomes from host and parasite responses to climate variables, they say, could help public health officials and environmental managers address the challenges posed by the changing landscape of infectious disease.

"Earth's changing climate and the global spread of infectious diseases are threatening human health, agriculture and wildlife," said Sam Scheiner, National Science Foundation (NSF) program director for the joint NSF-National Institutes of Health Ecology and Evolution of Infectious Diseases Program, which funded the research.

"Solving these problems requires a comprehensive approach that unites scientists from biology, the geosciences and the social sciences."

According to lead author Sonia Altizer of the University of Georgia, the issue of climate change and disease has provoked intense debate over the last decade, particularly in the case of diseases that affect humans.

In the Science paper, Altizer and her colleagues--Richard Ostfeld of the Cary Institute of Ecosystem Studies; Pieter Johnson of the University of Colorado; Susan Kutz of the University of Calgary and Canadian Cooperative Wildlife Health Centre; and Drew Harvell of Cornell University--laid out an agenda for future research and action.

"For a lot of human diseases, responses to climate change depend on the wealth of nations, healthcare infrastructure, and the ability to take mitigating measures," Altizer said.

"The climate signal, in many cases, is hard to tease apart from other factors like vector control, and vaccine and drug availability."

In diseases affecting wildlife and agricultural ecosystems, however, findings show that climate warming is already causing changes.

"In many cases, we're seeing an increase in disease and parasitism," Altizer said. "But the effect of climate change on these disease relationships depends on the physiology of the organisms and on the structure of natural communities."

At the organism level, climate change can alter the physiology of parasites. Some of the clearest examples are found in the Arctic, where temperatures are rising rapidly. Parasites are developing faster as a result. A lungworm that affects muskoxen, for instance, may be transmitted over a longer period each summer, making it a more serious problem for the populations it infects.

Climate change is also affecting entire plant and animal communities.

Community-level responses to rising temperatures are evident in tropical marine environments such as the coral reef ecosystems of the Caribbean. Warmer water temperatures have directly stressed corals and facilitated infections by pathogenic fungi and bacteria. When corals succumb, other species that depend on them are affected.

The potential consequences of these changes are serious. The combination of warmer temperatures and altered disease patterns is placing growing numbers of species at risk of extinction, the scientists say.

In human health, there is a direct risk from pathogens like dengue, malaria and cholera. All are linked to warmer temperatures.

Indirect risks also exist in threats to agricultural systems and game species that are crucial for subsistence and cultural activities.

The scientists recommend building on and expanding data on the physiological responses of hosts and parasites to temperature change. Those mechanisms may offer clues to how a system will respond to climate warming.

"We'd like to be able to predict, for example, that if the climate warms by a certain amount, then in a particular host-parasite system we might see an increase from one to two disease transmission cycles each year," Altizer said.

"But we'd also like to try to tie these predictions to actions that might be taken."

Some of those actions might involve more monitoring and surveillance, adjusting the timing of vector control measures and adopting new management measures.

These could include, for instance, closing coral reefs to human activity if a disease outbreak is predicted, or changing the planting strategy for crops to compensate for unusually high risks of certain diseases.

The researchers also point out that certain local human communities, such as those of indigenous peoples in the Arctic, could be disproportionately affected by climate-disease interactions.

Predicting where these local-scale effects might be most intense would allow societies to take measures to address issues such as health and food security.

"Involving local communities in disease surveillance," said Altizer, "could become essential."

UNDERSTANDING NATURES BIODIVERSITY: ECOLOGY AND EVOLUTIONARY BIOLOGY

Marbled Salamander.  Credit:  NSF/Wikimedia Commons

FROM: NATIONAL SCIENCE FOUNDATION

Understanding Biodiversity Patterns in Nature: It Takes Two Fields--Ecology and Evolutionary Biology
What do marbled and spotted salamanders in ponds in eastern North America have to teach us about biodiversity patterns elsewhere on Earth?

Plenty, if research conducted by biologist Mark Urban of the University of Connecticut is any guide.

In a paper published today in the journal Proceedings of the Royal Society B, Urban reports results that may fundamentally change how scientists view the importance of evolution in ecological research.

"This project looked closely at the separate and interactive contributions of genetic and environmental factors in shaping pond food webs," says Alan Tessier, program director in the National Science Foundation (NSF)'s Division of Environmental Biology, which funded the research.

"The results add to a growing understanding of the importance of genetic variation within species, and of eco-evolutionary processes in explaining patterns of biodiversity."

The findings show that the evolutionary divergence of populations is as important as biodiversity patterns based on ecological features, such as the presence of a top predator.

In this study, the subjects were the marbled salamander, an apex, or, top predator, in temporary ponds; the spotted salamander; and their shared zooplankton prey.

The marbled salamander breeds in the autumn. Its larvae grow under the ice of ephemeral ponds during winter.

As a result, marbled salamander larvae eat zooplankton all winter--and grow large enough to eat the spotted salamander larvae that hatch in these same ponds in late spring.

But Urban discovered that spotted salamanders sharing space with marbled salamanders have evolved so that they're born with voracious appetites.

Their increased foraging makes sense, he says, given that these salamanders live in ponds largely depleted of zooplankton prey, due to the presence of marbled salamanders.

The smaller salamanders need to grow quickly to reach a size at which marbled salamanders can't easily capture them.

"The evidence suggests that the repeated evolution of high foraging rates in spotted salamanders is an adaptive response to marbled salamander predation," says Urban.

Knowing how apex predators such as marbled salamanders structure biological communities, he says, requires that scientists understand their direct ecological effects as predators, and their indirect effects via the natural selection they impose.

"Finding that adaptive evolution may disguise strong ecological effects means that a range of ecological predictions are likely to be unreliable if we ignore how evolution affects biological communities."

Urban refers to this as "the invisible finger of evolution" which, he says, may tip the scales toward or away from ecological influences.

"That the effect of an apex predator can be so strong that it causes evolutionary responses in other species," he says, "shows that ecology and evolution are inexorably intertwined."

-NSF-

PRE-COLOMBIAN HUMANS AND THEIR EFFECTS UPON THE AMAZON BASIN

Photo:  Blue Parrot.  Credit:  Wikipedia.
FROM:  NATIONAL SCIENCE FOUNDATION
Scientists Reconstruct Pre-Columbian Human Effects on the Amazon Basin
June 14, 2012
Small, shifting human populations existed in the Amazon before the arrival of Europeans, with little long-term effect on the forest.

That's the result of research led by Crystal McMichael and Mark Bush of the Florida Institute of Technology (FIT). The finding overturns the idea the Amazon was a cultural parkland in pre-Columbian times with large human populations that transformed vast tracts of the landscape.

The Amazon Basin is one of the highest biodiversity areas on Earth. Understanding how it was modified by humans in the past is important for conservation and for understanding the ecological processes in tropical rainforests.

McMichael, Bush and a team of researchers looked at how widespread human effects were in Amazonia before Europeans arrived. They published their results in this week's issue of the journal Science.

"The findings have major implications for how we understand the effect of the land-use change now occurring in Amazonia," said Alan Tessier, program director in the National Science Foundation's Division of Environmental Biology, which funded the research.
"Making the assumption that this system is resilient to deforestation, it turns out, isn't a position supported by historical evidence," Tessier said.

If the pre-Columbian Amazon was a highly altered landscape, then most of the Amazon's current biodiversity could have come from human effects.

The team retrieved 247 soil cores from 55 locations throughout the central and western Amazon, sampling sites that were likely disturbed by humans, such as river banks and other areas known from archaeological evidence to have been occupied by people.
They used markers in the cores to track the histories of fire, vegetation and human alterations of the soil.

The scientists conclude that people lived in small groups, with larger populations in the eastern Amazon--and most people lived near rivers.

They did not live in large settlements throughout the basin as was previously thought. Even sites of supposedly large settlements did not show evidence of high population densities and large-scale agriculture.

All the signs point to smaller, mobile populations before Europeans arrived. These small populations did not alter the forests substantially.

"The amazing biodiversity of the Amazon is not a by-product of past human disturbance," said McMichael. "We can't assume that these forests will be resilient to disturbance, because most of them have, at most, been lightly disturbed in the past.

"There is no parallel in western Amazonia for the scale of modern disturbance that accompanies industrial agriculture, road construction and the synergies of those disturbances with climate change."

Other co-authors of the paper are D.R. Piperno of the Smithsonian National Museum of Natural History; M.R. Silman of Wake Forest University; A.R. Zimmerman of the University of Florida; M.F. Raczka of FIT; and L.C. Lobato of the Federal University of Rondônia in Brazil.
-NSF-

U.S. OFFICIAL SPEAKS ON GOING GREEN WHILE IN VIETNAM

The following excerpt is from a U.S. State Department e-mail:
Remarks on Green Growth
Remarks Robert D. Hormats
Under Secretary for Economic, Energy and Agricultural Affairs National Economics University
Hanoi, Vietnam
March 21, 2012
Remarks as Prepared for Delivery
Thank you for the introduction and thank you for inviting me to talk about the green economy.
More than ever before, the wellbeing of our economy, the planet, and our energy security are inextricably linked. This connection hasn’t always been so obvious.

For much of the 20th century, businesses and governments typically focused on the allocation and optimization of their labor and capital resources for growth.

Their assumption was that natural and environmental resources were so abundant that they could be treated as “free” goods.

As a result of this logic, approximately one-third of the world’s biodiversity has been lost since 1970, three-fourths of the world’s marine fisheries are fully or over exploited, and two-fifths of the planet’s original forests are gone.

Business as usual is not a viable option. We need to revise our strategy going forward for the sake of our planet and for the continued success of our economies.
Moving to a green economy doesn’t mean sacrificing economic growth or creating fewer jobs. Quite the contrary.

Transitioning to a green economy is an opportunity for businesses and governments to implement practices that are more responsible to our citizens, our planet, and budgets.
There are numerous examples of businesses and investors seizing opportunities to improve profitability through the adoption of environmentally-friendly practices.
The World Wildlife Fund (an international NGO) has partnered with The Coca-Cola Company since 2007 to conserve priority river basins around the world and integrate sustainability into Coca-Cola’s operations.

Water is the main ingredient in every one of Coca-Cola’s products. And, water is essential for the health of ecosystems and biodiversity.

Coca-Cola is on track to improve its water efficiency by 20 percent by the end of this year, compared to 2004. That means that they will have cut nearly 50 billion liters of water usage. This is a win, win partnership.

Value-added from sustainable business practices isn’t restricted to large corporations.
To demonstrate this, the State Department partnered with the World Environment Center and multinationals such as Walmart to help small and medium sized enterprises around the world improve their environmental performance, reduce costs, and improve efficiency and competitiveness.

Thirty-five small and medium sized businesses from Guatemala and El Salvador participated in the project to improve their environmental performance. They achieved a combined total savings of over $600,000 from an initial investment of approximately $300,000. That’s a very attractive return on investment, in addition to the environmental benefits.

These companies aren’t alone. More than 80 percent of Fortune 500 companies have created environmental charters and have adopted sustainability strategies because it helps their profitability.

Governments also have a role to play in driving private sector adoption of environmental technologies and investment in cleaner practices through financing and other fostering voluntary agreements, and by setting standards such as air and water pollution limits.
In addition, governments themselves have a responsibility to lead by example. That’s why, through the State Department’s Greening Diplomacy Initiative, we’re reducing energy consumption by consolidating our information technology platforms, lowering fuel costs by increasing the number of alternative fuel vehicles in our fleet, and improving the overall performance of our buildings.

Soon, approximately 45 percent of the energy delivered to the Department’s Washington, D.C. facilities will come from renewable sources. Similar to the private sector, the U.S. government simply cannot afford to waste energy.

The government of Vietnam has also made some promising strides on encouraging and adopting sustainable practices. Vietnam is an active partner with the United States, Cambodia, Laos, and Thailand in the Lower Mekong Initiative, which promotes regional cooperation in education, health, environment, and infrastructure.
Through the Initiative, we’re strengthening natural resource management in the region by building capacity and strengthening institutions.

And, Vietnam’s national “Payments for Forest Environmental Services” pilot project—with support from the United States—creates a mechanism to collect and distribute a portion of the economic value of ecological services provided by forests in the Lam Dong and Son La provinces.

The program provides incentives to landowners, farmers, and forest communities to better manage their land by assigning a value to Vietnam’s shared natural resource. Already, the program has helped protect over 210,000 hectares of threatened forest land and resulted in a 50 percent decrease in illegal logging and wildlife poaching in the Da Nhim watershed area.

Efforts like these are critical to drive our transition to a green economy, but it’s important to recognize that no one entity can do it alone. Neither the private sector, nor Vietnam, nor the United States. That’s why the United States is engaging the global community at Rio+20 to build greener and more inclusive economies, smarter cities, and to strengthen institutions and networks to address current and future challenges. Our approach to Rio+20 is focused on three key areas.

First, we’re advocating for broader adoption of clean, renewable energy by creating markets that attract private sector investments to underserved populations.
On the demand side, we are connecting the conservation of natural resources to profitability, thereby protecting the environment and freeing business resources for other types of job creating activities.

We’re working to catalyze private sector investment in green infrastructure projects in rapidly urbanizing areas because cities are major consumers of energy.
Second, ecosystem management and rural development are critical to secure the wellbeing of our natural environment. Agriculture is key in this context. To increase food yields and nutrition with fewer inputs and smaller impacts on the environment, we need both innovative agricultural technologies and improved understanding of agricultural systems.
That’s why we’re extending support for sustainable, agriculture-led growth that will help lift people out of poverty through the U.S.-led Feed the Future initiative.
Finally, we need to modernize our global institutions to be effective (and some might even say, relevant) in the 21stcentury. The Internet, social media, and other connection technologies allow us to transcend the walls of traditional institutions, fostering truly global collaboration.

By embracing twenty-first century connectivity, we can deploy the collective ingenuity and capability of governments, citizens, businesses, and civil society stakeholders from around the world to promote economic development and sustainable environmental practices.
In this context, we do not need new UN organizations; we need to make the existing structures more effective, efficient, and relevant to today’s world.

How we deal with this moment—whether we succumb to a zero-sum competition over increasingly limited resources or cooperate with each other to build green economies—will determine in large part the security and prosperity of America, Vietnam, and the world in the twenty-first century.
Thank you.