In cocoa (Theobroma cacao) agroforestry systems, upper canopy trees and food crops are frequently planted for shade, diversification of farm products, and improved soil fertility. As diversification remains a top priority for farm economic and environmental sustainability, system management plays a substantial role in farm diversity, requiring long-term analysis. We measured species richness dy...

Online communities suffer serious newcomer attrition. This paper explores whether and how early activity diversity – the degree to which a newcomer engages in a wide range of a site’s activities in the first session – is associated with their longevity. We introduce a metric (DSCORE) to characterize early activity diversity in online sites and run our analyses on an online community ‘MovieLens’...

Forests contribute significantly to terrestrial biodiversity conservation. Monitoring of tree species diversity is vital due climate change factors. Remote sensing imagery a means data collection for predicting species. Since various sensors have different spectral and spatial resolutions, it worth comparing them ascertain which could influence the accuracy prediction diversity. Hence, this stu...

Lowland meadow irrigation used to be widespread in Central Europe, but has largely been abandoned during the 20th century. As a result of agri-environment schemes and nature conservation efforts, meadow irrigation is now being re-established in some European regions. In the absence of natural flood events, irrigation is expected to favour fauna typical of lowland wet meadows. We analysed the ef...

This study investigated the biodiversity, phylogeny, and antifungal activity of endophytic fungi isolated from Zanthoxylum bungeanum. A total of 940 isolates obtained were grouped into 93 morphotypes, 43 species, and 23 genera, which were authenticated by molecular identification based on rDNA internal transcribed spacer (ITS) sequence analysis. A high diversity of endophytic fungi from Z. bung...

We investigated the composition and structure of fungal communities associated with leaf litter generated by Clusia nemorosa and Vismia guianensis that belong to phylogenetically-related botanical families and exist together in a remnant of the Atlantic Forest in Bahia, Brazil. Samplings were conducted during wet (June 2011) and dry (January 2013) seasons in Serra da Jibóia. The fungi were isol...

The history of medicine division of the National Library of Medicine has in its manuscripts collection a body of correspondence that vividly describes the strong views held by James Y Simpson in espousing the use of obstetric anaesthesia. The collection consists of 31 letters written by Simpson, mostly from Edinburgh, to the London obstetrician Francis Henry Ramsbotham during the years 1844-53 ...

INTRODUCTION Assessing left ventricular (LV) systolic function in a rapid and reliable way can be challenging in the critically ill patient. The purpose of this study was to evaluate the feasibility and reliability of, as well as the association between, commonly used LV systolic parameters, by using serial transthoracic echocardiography (TTE). METHODS Fifty patients with shock and mechanical...

Pollen allergies have been rapidly increasing over the last decades. Many allergenic proteins and non-allergenic adjuvant compounds of pollen are involved in the plant defense against environmental or microbial stress. The first aim of this study was to analyze and compare the colonizing microbes on allergenic pollen. The second aim was to investigate detectable correlations between pollen micr...

Ecological interactions between aboveground and belowground biodiversity have received many attentions in the recent decades. Although soil biodiversity declined with the decrease of plant diversity, many previous studies found plant species identities were more important than plant diversity in controlling soil biodiversity. This study focused on the responses of soil biodiversity to the alter...