Conserving Plants as Evolutionary Entities: Successes and Unanswered Questions from New Zealand and Elsewhere

Introduction: The Domestication of Plants and Animals: Ten Unanswered Questions

Some 15,000 to 10,000 years ago, humans started seeding and harvesting plants and maintaining animals in order to augment the food they obtained from wild-growing plants and hunting. These seemingly simple activities set in motion a long-term process that has led to the dominance of agriculture as we know it today. With the exception of a few remaining hunter–gatherer groups, agriculture has no...

Unanswered questions from Corticus and pragmatic suggestions

Professor Vincent, in an eloquent commentary in Critical Care, calls for a further trial into supraphysiological cortico-steroid therapy in vasopressor-resistant shock [1]. Together with editorials in several of the intensive care journals, he has pointed out many of the shortcomings in the Corticus trial [2]. We would like to add to this chorus by posing a further question to the authors and p...

E-Learning: some unanswered questions

Unanswered questions, the epidemiology of a community outbreak: meningococcal C disease in Northland, New Zealand, 2011.

AIM We describe the epidemiology of a community outbreak of Meningococcal C disease in Northland in 2011, and national trends in serogroup C disease in New Zealand. METHODS Notification data from EpiSurv for all meningococcal C cases were analysed for 2011 for Northland and for the period 2001-2011 nationally. RESULTS In 2011, the rate of group C meningococcal disease for the population in ...

Potential ecosystem service delivery by endemic plants in New Zealand vineyards: successes and prospects

Vineyards worldwide occupy over 7 million hectares and are typically virtual monocultures, with high and costly inputs of water and agro-chemicals. Understanding and enhancing ecosystem services can reduce inputs and their costs and help satisfy market demands for evidence of more sustainable practices. In this New Zealand work, low-growing, endemic plant species were evaluated for their potent...