Explore the vast range of titles available.

Peru is a megadiverse country with native species of all kinds, including dye plants, which have been used for hundreds of years by the local population. Despite the fact that many of these natural dyes are of a superior quality compared to synthetic ones and do not have the harmful effects that the latter may cause to human health, due to the lack of documentation and dissemination, ethnobotanical knowledge is unfortunately being lost with the passing of generations. In order to preserve and spread such valuable knowledge, this study conducted a comprehensive taxonomic, phytogeographic, and ethnobotanical inventory of dye plants based on periodical botanical explorations in selected locations of Northern Peru during the span of two decades. A critical review of the specialized bibliography was then carried out and the findings were verified with the personal knowledge and experience of both the researchers and the local and regional people. The results of the inventory record 32 species of dye plants from Northern Peru distributed in 22 families, of which the following stand out due to the number of species: Fabaceae (5), Anacardiaceae (2), Annonaceae (2), Asteraceae (2), Berberidaceae (2), Rosaceae (2), and Solanaceae (2). Of the 32 dye species identified, four are considered endemic from Peru: Berberis buceronis J.F. Macbr., Caesalpinia paipai Ruiz & Pav., Coreopsis senaria S.F. Blake & Sherf., and Lomatia hirsuta (Lam.) Diels. The study also found that species such as Bixa orellana L., Indigofera suffruticosa Mill., Sambucus peruviana, and the lichen Usnea baileyi (Stirton) Zahlbr have not been commercially exploited in Peru despite the fact that they already constitute a great economic source for several countries.

The Darwin Core Archive (DwC-A) format, based on the Darwin Core standard (Wieczorek et al. 2012), facilitates the exchange, management, and integration of biodiversity data from multiple sources. This ability to collate biodiversity data allows datasets to be aggregated at community-supported infrastructures, merged in different combinations, meta-analyzed and submitted to public repositories (Baker et al. 2014). Thus, the DwC-As serve as unifying archives in concatenated collective efforts, such as biodiversity inventories at different spatial and taxonomic scales. Here we describe PyDwCA*1, 2, a Python library implemented to handle the \"star scheme\" of DwC-A. This new library reads compressed zip files containing the expected meta.xml and uses it to assign the core component and its extensions. It also provides Python classes to define the core, the extensions, and the metadata file for creating an archive and writing it into a compressed zip file. PyDwCA also implements functionality to select, filter and merge DwC-A files. We present this new tool in the context of the construction of the Chilean National Biodiversity Inventory (Fig. 1), but PyDwCA serves as a versatile technical solution applicable to different contexts in the field of biodiversity informatics (e.g., integration of datasets from biological collection and sampling events). To exemplify how PyDwCA works, we present the step-by-step integration of the Chilean Catalogue of Vascular Plants (Rodriguez et al. 2018) on a matrix provided by the Catalogue of Life (Banki 2024), filtered with the species with occurrences recorded for Chile in the Global Biodiversity Information Facility (GBIF) (GBIF.Org 2023).

Biodiversity inventories and monitoring techniques for marine fishes often overlook small (<5 cm), bottom‐associated (‘cryptobenthic’) fishes, and few standardized, comparative assessments of cryptobenthic fish communities exist. We sought to develop a standardized, quantitative survey method for cryptobenthic fishes that permits their sampling across a variety of habitats and conditions. Fish‐specific autonomous reef monitoring structures (FARMS) are designed to sample cryptobenthic fishes using a suite of accessible and affordable materials. To generate a variety of microhabitats, FARMS consist of three layers of stacked PVC pipes in three different sizes, as well as a bottom and top level of loose PVC‐pipe fragments in a mesh basket. We deployed FARMS across a variety of habitats, including coral reefs, seagrass beds, oyster reefs, mangroves, and soft‐bottom habitats across six locations (Hawai'i, Texas, Panama, Saudi Arabia, Brazil, and Curaçao). From shallow estuaries to coral reefs beyond 100 m depth, FARMS attracted distinct communities of native cryptobenthic fishes with strong site or habitat specificity. Comparing the FARMS to communities sampled with alternative methods (enclosed clove‐oil stations on coral reefs in Panama and oyster sampling units on oyster reefs in Texas) suggests that FARMS yield a subset of cryptobenthic fish species that are representative of those present on local coral and oyster reefs. While FARMS yield fewer individuals per sample, they are efficient sampling devices relative to the sampled area. We demonstrate that FARMS represent a useful tool for standardized collections of cryptobenthic fishes. While natural substrata are bound to yield more mature communities with a larger number of individuals and wider range of specialist species, the potential to deploy and retrieve FARMS in turbid environments, beyond regular SCUBA depth, and where fish collections using anaesthetics or ichthyocides are forbidden suggests that they are a valuable complementary technique to survey fishes in aquatic ecosystems. Deploying FARMS in locations and habitats where cryptobenthic fish communities have not been studied in detail may yield many valuable specimens of unknown or poorly known species.

Cuc Phuong National Park is located along a range of limestone karst mountains in northern Vietnam and spans over an area of 222 km² mainly covered by tropical evergreen forest. While a number of works have focused on the park’s rich terrestrial mollusc fauna to date, the most extensive survey so far was carried out in 1998. In the present paper with its corresponding data package, we focus on the land snails and slugs recorded in the park during the VIETBIO inventory work between 29 April and 10 May 2019. Throughout this survey, live specimens and empty shells of terrestrial molluscs were collected at 34 sampling sites via visual search and additional soil sampling. Furthermore, we summarise the current knowledge on the park’s land molluscs. We present new data on the terrestrial mollusc fauna of Cuc Phuong National Park, which are linked to collection material stored at the Museum für Naturkunde Berlin (dry shells, wet specimens, samples for long-term tissue preservation) and to a smaller part at the Institute of Ecology and Biological Resources, Ha Noi (dry shells). Our data package contains a Darwin Core Archive with respective collection data, and four further data sets with photos of sampling sites and live specimens. We provide soil pH values and information on the microhabitats where live specimens were collected. In addition, the paper includes photos of collection material, which were partly taken with a DORA station developed for the high-volume imaging of molluscan specimens. In total, 116 species and 1 additional subspecies of land snails and slugs from 23 families were recorded. From the (sub-)species found, we matched 70 with nominal species-group taxa, while 47 remained provisionally named, with most of the latter likely belonging to undescribed species. However, as the taxonomic identification was only based on shell morphology, external features of the soft body, and sampling locality, it should still be regarded as provisional. We collected a total of 2666 specimens, 1909 of them alive and 757 as empty shells. From all taxa recorded, ca. 26% were only found at one sampling site each and ca. 15% were represented only by a single individual, which indicates that many species are rare or unevenly distributed. Based on our survey and previous works, we compiled a comprehensive list of 159 species and 1 additional subspecies known from Cuc Phuong National Park, about one-third of them non-eupulmonates, which places the park amongst the most species-rich tropical forest regions known worldwide. A mark-recapture analysis, based on the 1998 collection and our survey, resulted in an estimate of 178 ± 7 species of shelled land molluscs present in the park. When adding further (semi-)slug species that were disregarded for this analysis, at least 184 ± 7 terrestrial mollusc species can be expected. The high overall number of species in the park probably results from a combined effect of allopatric, mosaic, and sympatric diversity.

Embracing comparative biology, natural history encompasses those sciences that discover, decipher and classify unique (idiographic) details of landscapes, and extinct and extant biodiversity. Intrinsic to these multifarious roles in expanding and consolidating research and knowledge, natural history endows keystone support to the veracity of law-like (nomothetic) generalizations in science. What science knows about the natural world is governed by an inherent function of idiographic discovery; characteristic of natural history, this relationship is exemplified wherever an idiographic discovery overturns established wisdom. This nature of natural history explicates why inventories are of such epistemological importance. Unfortunately, a Denigration of Natural History weakens contemporary science from within. It expresses in the prevalent, pervasive failure to appreciate this pivotal role of idiographic research: a widespread disrespect for how natural history undergirds scientific knowledge. Symptoms of this Denigration of Natural History present in negative impacts on scientific research and knowledge. One symptom is the failure to appreciate and support the inventory and monitoring of biodiversity. Another resides in failures of scientiometrics to quantify how taxonomic publications sustain and improve knowledge. Their relevance in contemporary science characteristically persists and grows; so the temporal eminence of these idiographic publications extends over decades. This is because they propagate a succession of derived scientific statements, findings and/or conclusions - inherently shorter-lived, nomothetic publications. Widespread neglect of natural science collections is equally pernicious, allied with disregard for epistemological functions of specimens, whose preservation maintains the veracity of knowledge. Last, but not least, the decline in taxonomic expertise weakens research capacity; there are insufficient skills to study organismal diversity in all of its intricacies. Beyond weakening research capacities and outputs across comparative biology, this Denigration of Natural History impacts on the integrity of knowledge itself, undermining progress and pedagogy throughout science. Unprecedented advances in knowledge are set to follow on consummate inventories of biodiversity, including the protists. These opportunities challenge us to survey biodiversity representatively—detailing the natural history of species. Research strategies cannot continue to ignore arguments for such an unprecedented investment in idiographic natural history. Idiographic shortcuts to general (nomothetic) insights simply do not exist. The biodiversity sciences face a stark choice. No matter how charismatic its portrayed species, an incomplete ‘Brochure of Life' cannot match the scientific integrity of the ‘Encyclopedia of Life'.

Protists have scarcely been considered in traditional perspectives and strategies in environmental management and biodiversity conservation. This is a remarkable omission given that these tiny organisms are highly diverse, and have performed as key ecological players in evolutionary theatres for over a billion years of Earth history. Protists hold key roles in nearly all ecosystems, notably as participants in fluxes of energy and matter through foodwebs that centre on their predation on microbes. In spite of this, they have been largely ignored in conservation issues due to a widespread, naive belief that protists are ubiquitous and cosmopolitanously distributed. Nevertheless, recent research shows that many protists have markedly restricted distributions. These range from palaeoendemics (Gondwanan-Laurasian distribution) to local endemics. Our ignorance about the ultimate and proximate causes of such acute disparities in scale-dependent distributions of protists can be flagged as a singular reason to preserve these more cryptic participants in ecological and evolutionary dynamics. This argument is disturbing when one considers anthropogenic modifications of landscapes and the very poorly understood roles of protists in ecological processes in soils, not least in agroecolandscapes and hydrological systems. Major concerns include host specific symbiotic, symphoric and parasitic species which become extinct, unseen and largely unknown, alongside their metazoan hosts; change or loss of habitats; massive change or loss of type localities; and losses of unique genetic resources and evolutionary potential. These concerns are illustrated by examples to argue that conservation of protists should be integral to any strategy that traditionally targets vascular plants and animals. The ongoing decline in research capacity to inventory and classify protist diversity exemplifies a most acute symptom of the failures, at local, national and international levels, to support scientific responses to the biodiversity crisis. Responsible responses to these severe problems need to centre on the revival of natural history as the core discipline in biology.

Springs ecosystems are globally abundant, geomorphologically diverse, and bioculturally productive, but are highly imperiled by anthropogenic activities. More than a century of scientific discussion about the wide array of ecohydrological factors influencing springs has been informative, but has yielded little agreement on their classification. This lack of agreement has contributed to the global neglect and degradation of springs ecosystems by the public, scientific, and management communities. Here we review the historical literature on springs classification variables, concluding that site-specific source geomorphology remains the most diagnostic approach. We present a conceptual springs ecosystem model that clarifies the central role of geomorphology in springs ecosystem development, function, and typology. We present an illustrated dichotomous key to terrestrial (non-marine) springs ecosystem types and subtypes, and describe those types. We identify representative reference sites, although data limitations presently preclude selection of continentally or globally representative reference springs of each type. We tested the classification key using data from 244 randomly selected springs of 13 types that were inventoried in western North America. The dichotomous key correctly identified springs type in 87.5% of the cases, with discrepancies primarily due to differentiation of primary vs. secondary typology, and insufficient inventory team training. Using that information, we identified sources of confusion and clarified the key. Among the types that required more detailed explanation were hypocrenes, springs in which groundwater is expressed through phreatophytic vegetation. Overall, springs biodiversity and ecosystem complexity are due, in part, to the co-occurrence of multiple intra-springs microhabitats. We describe microhabitats that are commonly associated with different springs types, reporting at least 13 microhabitats, each of which can support discrete biotic assemblages. Interdisciplinary agreement on basic classification is needed to enhance scientific understanding and stewardship of springs ecosystems, the loss and degradation of which constitute a global conservation crisis.

In the context of the sixth wave of extinction, reliable surveys of biodiversity are increasingly needed to infer the cause and consequences of species and community declines, identify early warning indicators of tipping points, and provide reliable impact assessments before engaging in activities with potential environmental hazards. DNA metabarcoding has emerged as having potential to provide speedy assessment of community structure from environmental samples. Here we tested the reliability of metabarcoding by comparing morphological and molecular inventories of invertebrate communities associated with seagrasses through estimates of alpha and beta diversity, as well as the identification of the most abundant taxa. Sediment samples were collected from six Zostera marina seagrass meadows across Brittany, France. Metabarcoding surveys were performed using both mitochondrial (Cytochrome Oxidase I) and nuclear (small subunit 18S ribosomal RNA) markers, and compared to morphological inventories compiled by a long-term benthic monitoring network. A sampling strategy was defined to enhance performance and accuracy of results by preventing the dominance of larger animals, boosting statistical support through replicates, and using two genes to compensate for taxonomic biases. Molecular barcodes proved powerful by revealing a remarkable level of diversity that vastly exceeded the morphological survey, while both surveys identified congruent differentiation of the meadows. However, despite the addition of individual barcodes of common species into taxonomic reference databases, the retrieval of only 36% of these species suggest that the remaining were either not present in the molecular samples or not detected by the molecular screening. This finding exemplifies the necessity of comprehensive and well-curated taxonomic reference libraries and multi-gene surveys. Overall, results offer methodological guidelines and support for metabarcoding as a powerful and repeatable method of characterizing communities, while also presenting suggestions for improvement, including implementation of pilot studies prior to performing full \"blind\" metabarcoding assessments to optimize sampling and amplification protocols.

Despite the widespread use of the HEXACO model as a descriptive taxonomy of personality traits, there remains limited information on the test-retest reliability of its commonly-used inventories. Studies typically report internal consistency estimates, such as alpha or omega, but there are good reasons to believe that these do not accurately assess reliability. We report 13-day test-retest correlations of the 100- and 60-item English HEXACO Personality Inventory-Revised (HEXACO-100 and HEXACO-60) domains, facets, and items. In order to test the validity of test-retest reliability, we then compare these estimates to correlations between self- and informant-reports (i.e., cross-rater agreement), a widely-used validity criterion. Median estimates of test-retest reliability were .88, .81, and .65 ( N = 416) for domains, facets, and items, respectively. Facets’ and items’ test-retest reliabilities were highly correlated with their cross-rater agreement estimates, whereas internal consistencies were not. Overall, the HEXACO Personality Inventory-Revised demonstrates test-retest reliability similar to other contemporary measures. We recommend that short-term retest reliability should be routinely calculated to assess reliability.