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Changed fire regimes and the introduction of rabbits, cats, foxes, and large exotic herbivores have driven widespread ecological catastrophe in Australian arid and semi‐arid zones, which encompass over two‐thirds of the continent. These threats have caused the highest global mammal extinction rates in the last 200 years, as well as significantly undermining social, economic, and cultural practices of Aboriginal peoples of this region. However, a new and potentially more serious threat is emerging. Buffel grass (Cenchrus ciliaris L.) is a globally significant invader now widespread across central Australia, but the threat this ecological transformer species poses to biodiversity, ecosystem function, and culture has received relatively little attention. Our analyses suggest threats from buffel grass in arid and semi‐arid areas of Australia are at least equivalent in magnitude to those posed by invasive animals and possibly higher, because unlike these more recognized threats, buffel has yet to occupy its potential distribution. Buffel infestation also increases the intensity and frequency of wildfires that affect biodiversity, cultural pursuits, and productivity. We compare the logistical and financial challenges of creating and maintaining areas free of buffel for the protection of biodiversity and cultural values, with the creation and maintenance of refuges from introduced mammals or from large‐scale fire in natural habitats. The scale and expense of projected buffel management costs highlight the urgent policy, research, and financing initiatives essential to safeguard threatened species, ecosystems, and cultural values of Aboriginal people in central Australia. This manuscript compares the risks to biodiversity and culture of central Australia posed by buffel grass and feral animals and fire. Our analyses show that the threat from buffel is at least as serious as other recognized threats but more expensive to manage. We advocate for more resources for research and control of buffel grass.

Plant invasions drive biodiversity loss, transform ecosystems, and promote positive‐feedback cycles between invasion and fire. However, the long‐term impacts of invasive grasses across landscapes with diverse plant communities and interactions with fire are poorly known. Our objectives were to examine whether buffel grass (Cenchrus ciliaris), a globally significant plant invader, altered the abundance of understory and overstory plants, homogenized plant composition, and shifted ecosystems from woodlands to grassland and to explore interrelationships between invasion and fire. We combined two methodological approaches to assess invasion spread and impacts of buffel grass in the Aṉangu Pitjantjatjara Yankunytjatjara (APY) Lands of arid central Australia: a before‐after‐control‐impact (BACI) experiment over 25 years at 15 sites and a paired‐plot (randomized‐block) experiment at 18 sites. Both experiments spanned two geographic regions and multiple vegetation communities situated on flat plains and rocky hills. We used generalized linear mixed models to analyze predictions about plant abundance and permutational multivariate ANOVA (PERMANOVA) and permutational multivariate analysis of dispersion (PERMDISP) to examine changes in community composition. Fire and invasion interactions were explored using fire history or the relative fire tolerance of plant species as covariates, predictors, or responses. Fire interacted with the invasion process in multiple ways. Invaded sites had burnt more frequently and recently than native sites in one region, and where propagules were present in 1995, buffel grass abundance increased most when fires ensued. Abundance of understory plant functional groups (native grasses, ferns, and vines) decreased with invasion, and understory shrubs decreased due to frequent fires in invaded sites. Overstory composition shifted from fire‐sensitive species toward fire‐tolerant species, but this was not directly attributable to invasion. Partial evidence for ecosystem regime shifts included homogenization of understory communities in invaded rocky hills, and an increase in woody shrub cover at native but not invaded sites over 25 years, resulting in a 5% cover difference by 2019. Impacts were detected across heterogeneous ecological communities at a scale not previously tested amongst high background community variability. Although invasion is not dependent on fire, the acceleration of invasion spread and impacts with fire is a critical consideration for future research and management of grass invaders.

Climate change is affecting Antarctica and minimally destructive long-term monitoring of its unique ecosystems is vital to detect biodiversity trends, and to understand how change is affecting these communities. The use of automated or semi-automated methods is especially valuable in harsh polar environments, as access is limited and conditions extreme. We assessed moss health and cover at six time points between 2003 and 2014 at two East Antarctic sites. Semi-automatic object-based image analysis (OBIA) was used to classify digital photographs using a set of rules based on digital red, green, blue (RGB) and hue-saturation-intensity (HSI) value thresholds, assigning vegetation to categories of healthy, stressed or moribund moss and lichens. Comparison with traditional visual estimates showed that estimates of percent cover using semi-automated OBIA classification fell within the range of variation determined by visual methods. Overall moss health, as assessed using the mean percentages of healthy, stressed and moribund mosses within quadrats, changed over the 11 years at both sites. A marked increase in stress and decline in health was observed across both sites in 2008, followed by recovery to baseline levels of health by 2014 at one site, but with significantly more stressed or moribund moss remaining within the two communities at the other site. Our results confirm that vegetation cover can be reliably estimated using semi-automated OBIA, providing similar accuracy to visual estimation by experts. The resulting vegetation cover estimates provide a sensitive measure to assess change in vegetation health over time and have informed a conceptual framework for the changing condition of Antarctic mosses. In demonstrating that this method can be used to monitor ground cover vegetation at small scales, we suggest it may also be suitable for other extreme environments where repeat monitoring via images is required.

Pain and violence towards women’s bodies appear at every turn in Paulina Chiziane’s 2002 novel Niketche: Uma história de poligamia, as the main plot revolves around the polygamous relationships between Tony, a senior police officer, and up to six different women from various parts of Mozambique. It can be argued that the novel proposes a new national allegory with female victims of polygamy at the center of a renewed, postcolonial Mozambique. Critics, such as Hilary Owen and Russell G. Hamilton, have studied Chiziane’s feminist politics and her use of storytelling techniques. However, the entanglement of trauma and war in Niketche is largely absent in recent literary criticism. Through the analysis of interior dialogue by the narrator, Rami, in chapter one, this article offers a close reading of the ways in which female survivors of war and sexual trauma deal with Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder (PTSD). I assert that Chiziane’s work enacts a two-fold history of personal and national trauma in a post-civil war and postcolonial setting in order to reconceptualize how traumatized women deal with their pain in cathartic and collective ways. The varied women’s encounters with violence signal that multiple forms of trauma often intertwine.

The return of the Florentine republic (1527–30) ushered in a tense period of political upheaval. As the city faced an imperial siege and bouts of famine and plague, the government promoted a vibrant spiritual program to combat dangers to its independence. The motet flourished within this environment, but the connections between this repertory and civic life in early sixteenth-century Florence have yet to be fully explored. Since the mid-twentieth century, music historians have examined Florentine manuscript sources of the motet (the Newberry Partbooks and Vallicelliana Partbooks) and have articulated various arguments for the political significance of these collections and the individual pieces they contain. Viewed as a whole, however, the repertory does not typically express partisan support for the Medici or the republic. One underlying thread tying many of these motets together is their function within ritual celebrations, particularly in uniting the community in prayer for collective relief. Philippe Verdelot’s wartime Congregati sunt inimici nostri exemplifies the multiple performance uses of motets in Florentine ritual contexts. Its compositional design and content reveal how Florentines turned to the motet to demonstrate communal solidarity and to seek divine aid in times of crisis.

Salmonella enterica subspecies I, serovar Typhimurium ( S. typhimurium ), is a leading cause of human gastroenteritis, and is used as a mouse model of human typhoid fever 1 . The incidence of non-typhoid salmonellosis is increasing worldwide 2 , 3 , 4 , causing millions of infections and many deaths in the human population each year. Here we sequenced the 4,857-kilobase (kb) chromosome and 94-kb virulence plasmid of S. typhimurium strain LT2. The distribution of close homologues of S. typhimurium LT2 genes in eight related enterobacteria was determined using previously completed genomes of three related bacteria, sample sequencing of both S. enterica serovar Paratyphi A ( S. paratyphi A) and Klebsiella pneumoniae , and hybridization of three unsequenced genomes to a microarray of S. typhimurium LT2 genes. Lateral transfer of genes is frequent, with 11% of the S. typhimurium LT2 genes missing from S. enterica serovar Typhi ( S. typhi ), and 29% missing from Escherichia coli K12. The 352 gene homologues of S. typhimurium LT2 confined to subspecies I of S. enterica —containing most mammalian and bird pathogens 5 —are useful for studies of epidemiology, host specificity and pathogenesis. Most of these homologues were previously unknown, and 50 may be exported to the periplasm or outer membrane, rendering them accessible as therapeutic or vaccine targets.

The return of the Florentine republic (1527–30) ushered in a tense period of political upheaval. As the city faced an imperial siege and bouts of famine and plague, the government promoted a vibrant spiritual program to combat dangers to its independence. The motet flourished within this environment, but the connections between this repertory and civic life in early sixteenth-century Florence have yet to be fully explored. Since the mid-twentieth century, music historians have examined Florentine manuscript sources of the motet (the Newberry Partbooks and Vallicelliana Partbooks) and have articulated various arguments for the political significance of these collections and the individual pieces they contain. Viewed as a whole, however, the repertory does not typically express partisan support for the Medici or the republic. One underlying thread tying many of these motets together is their function within ritual celebrations, particularly in uniting the community in prayer for collective relief. Philippe Verdelot’s wartime Congregati sunt inimici nostri exemplifies the multiple performance uses of motets in Florentine ritual contexts. Its compositional design and content reveal how Florentines turned to the motet to demonstrate communal solidarity and to seek divine aid in times of crisis.