Ecosystem Service Provision by Secondary Forests in Shifting Cultivation Areas Remains Poorly Understood

Tropical secondary forests regenerating after shifting cultivation in the Philippines uplands are important carbon sinks

In the tropics, shifting cultivation has long been attributed to large scale forest degradation, and remains a major source of uncertainty in forest carbon accounting. In the Philippines, shifting cultivation, locally known as kaingin, is a major land-use in upland areas. We measured the distribution and recovery of aboveground biomass carbon along a fallow gradient in post-kaingin secondary fo...

Tropical forests and shifting cultivation: secondary forest fallow dynamics among traditional farmers of the Peruvian Amazon

Tropical secondary forests created by swidden-fallow agriculture cover extensive areas in the humid tropics and yield significant ecological and economic benefits, yet forest fallowing behaviour among swidden cultivators remains poorly understood. This paper reports on a study of forest fallow management among Amazonian peasant farmers in a traditional, riverside community near Iquitos, Peru. D...

Thrombosis – Besieged but Poorly Understood

In biology, thrombosis is a mechanism of maintaining the integrity of biological surfaces in higher mammals, limiting fluid loss, and facilitating the recognition, containment, and destruction of pathogens and foreign materials by a scaffold of fibrin and DNA strands. However, thrombosis may also lead to vascular occlusion and subsequent tissue damage. In medicine, thrombosis is a hallmark of l...

Premenstrual asthma: still poorly understood.

Oligonucleotide microarrays: widely applied--poorly understood.

Microarray technology, which has been around for almost two decades, now provides an indispensable service to the biomedical research community. Soaring demand for high-throughput screening of genes potentially associated with cancer and other diseases, as well as the increased need for identifying microorganisms, have substantially opened up the application of this technology to many fields of...