scholarly journals Is sociality associated with high longevity in North American birds?

2008 ◽  
Vol 4 (2) ◽  
pp. 146-148 ◽  
Author(s):  
D.T Blumstein ◽  
A.P Møller
Keyword(s):  
North American ◽  
Bird Species ◽  
Life History Trait ◽  
Sampling Effort ◽  
Maximum Lifespan ◽  
First Reproduction ◽  
North American Bird ◽  
Species Specific ◽  
Linear Contrasts ◽  
The Relationship

Sociality, as a life-history trait, should be associated with high longevity because complex sociality is characterized by reproductive suppression, delayed breeding, increased care and survival, and some of these traits select for high longevity. We studied the relationship between cooperative parental care (a proxy of complex sociality) and relative maximum lifespan in 257 North American bird species. After controlling for variation in maximum lifespan explained by body mass, sampling effort, latitude, mortality rate, migration distance and age at first reproduction, we found no significant effect of cooperative care on longevity in analyses of species-specific data or phylogenetically independent standardized linear contrasts. Thus, sociality itself is not associated with high longevity. Rather, longevity is correlated with increased body size, survival rate and age of first reproduction.

scholarly journals Pervasive poleward shifts among North American bird species

Biodiversity ◽  
2008 ◽  
Vol 9 (3-4) ◽  
pp. 114-116 ◽  
Author(s):  
A. Townsend Peterson ◽  
Enrique Martínez-Meyer
Keyword(s):  
North American ◽  
Bird Species ◽  
North American Bird

scholarly journals Taxonomic Checklists as Biodiversity Data: How Series of Checklists can Provide Information on Synonymy, Circumscription Change and Taxonomic Discovery

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
Gaurav Vaidya
Keyword(s):  
North American ◽  
Geographical Area ◽  
Bird Species ◽  
Software Tool ◽  
Biodiversity Data ◽  
Taxonomic Change ◽  
Biodiversity Database ◽  
Taxonomic Changes ◽  
North American Bird ◽  
Species Being

Taxonomic checklists are a fundamental and widely-used product of taxonomy, providing a list of recognized taxa within a taxonomic group in a particular geographical area. Series of taxonomic checklists provide snapshots of recognized taxa over a period of time. Identifying and classifying the changes between these checklists can provide information on rates of name, synonym and circumscription change and can improve aggregation of datasets reconciled to different checklists.To demonstrate this, I used a series of North American bird checklists to test hypotheses about drivers of splitting rates in North America birds. In particular, I asked if splitting was predominantly undoing previous lumping that happened during the heyday of the modern synthesis. I found that bird species have been split at an accelerating rate since the 1980s. While this was partially the result of previously lumped species being resplit, most splits were unrelated to previous lumps and thus represent new discoveries rather than simply the undoing of previous circumscription changes. I also used a series of North American freshwater algal checklists to measure stability over fifteen years, and found that 26% of species names were not shared or synonymized over this period. Rates of synonymization, lumping or splitting of species remained flat, a marked difference from North American birds. Species that were split or lumped (7% of species considered) had significantly higher abundance than other species in the USGS NAWQA dataset, a biodiversity database that uses these checklists as an index. They were associated with 19% of associated observations, showing that a small number of recircumscribed species could significantly affect interpretation of biodiversity data.To facilitate this research, I developed a software tool that could identify and annotate taxonomic changes among a series of checklists, and could use this information to aggregate biodiversity data, which will hopefully facilitate similar research in the future. My dissertation demonstrates the value of taxonomic checklists series to answer specific questions about the drivers of taxonomic change ranging from philosophical and technical changes to characteristics of species themselves such as their abundance.

scholarly journals The Avian Diet Database as a source of quantitative information on bird diets

2021 ◽  
Vol 8 (1) ◽  
Author(s):  
Allen H. Hurlbert ◽  
Aaron M. Olsen ◽  
Melissa M. Sawyer ◽  
Patrick M. Winner
Keyword(s):  
North American ◽  
Habitat Type ◽  
Bird Species ◽  
Quantitative Information ◽  
North American Bird

AbstractThis data paper describes a compilation of 73,075 quantitative diet data records for 759 primarily North American bird species, providing standardized information not just on the diet itself, but on the context for that diet information including the year, season, location, and habitat type of each study. The methods used for collecting and cleaning these data are described, and we present tools for summarizing and visualizing diet information by bird species or prey.

scholarly journals Envelope and pre-membrane protein structural amino acid mutations mediate diminished avian growth and virulence of a Mexican West Nile virus isolate

2011 ◽  
Vol 92 (12) ◽  
pp. 2810-2820 ◽  
Author(s):  
Stanley A. Langevin ◽  
Richard A. Bowen ◽  
Wanichaya N. Ramey ◽  
Todd A. Sanders ◽  
Payal D. Maharaj ◽  
...  
Keyword(s):  
West Nile Virus ◽  
North American ◽  
Structural Changes ◽  
Bird Species ◽  
Virus Genome ◽  
West Nile ◽  
North American West ◽  
Amino Acid Mutations ◽  
North American Bird ◽  
Mexican Strains

The hallmark attribute of North American West Nile virus (WNV) strains has been high pathogenicity in certain bird species. Surprisingly, this avian virulent WNV phenotype has not been observed during its geographical expansion into the Caribbean, Central America and South America. One WNV variant (TM171-03-pp1) isolated in Mexico has demonstrated an attenuated phenotype in two widely distributed North American bird species, American crows (AMCRs) and house sparrows (HOSPs). In order to identify genetic determinants associated with attenuated avian replication of the TM171-03-pp1 variant, chimeric viruses between the NY99 and Mexican strains were generated, and their replicative capacity was assessed in cell culture and in AMCR, HOSP and house finch avian hosts. The results demonstrated that mutations in both the pre-membrane (prM-I141T) and envelope (E-S156P) genes mediated the attenuation phenotype of the WNV TM171-03-pp1 variant in a chicken macrophage cell line and in all three avian species assayed. Inclusion of the prM-I141T and E-S156P TM171-03-pp1 mutations in the NY99 backbone was necessary to achieve the avian attenuation level of the Mexican virus. Furthermore, reciprocal incorporation of both prM-T141I and E-P156S substitutions into the Mexican virus genome was necessary to generate a virus that exhibited avian virulence equivalent to the NY99 virus. These structural changes may indicate the presence of new evolutionary pressures exerted on WNV populations circulating in Latin America or may signify a genetic bottleneck that has constrained their epiornitic potential in alternative geographical locations.

scholarly journals A Risk-Based Approach to Assess the Operational Resilience of Transmission Grids

2020 ◽  
Vol 10 (14) ◽  
pp. 4761
Author(s):  
Milorad Papic ◽  
Svetlana Ekisheva ◽  
Eduardo Cotilla-Sanchez
Keyword(s):  
Power System ◽  
North American ◽  
Response Times ◽  
Transmission System ◽  
Energy Delivery ◽  
The North ◽  
System Components ◽  
Bulk Power ◽  
Definition Of ◽  
The Relationship

Modern risk analysis studies of the power system increasingly rely on big datasets, either synthesized, simulated, or real utility data. Particularly in the transmission system, outage events have a strong influence on the reliability, resilience, and security of the overall energy delivery infrastructure. In this paper we analyze historical outage data for transmission system components and discuss the implications of nearby overlapping outages with respect to resilience of the power system. We carry out a risk-based assessment using North American Electric Reliability Corporation (NERC) Transmission Availability Data System (TADS) for the North American bulk power system (BPS). We found that the quantification of nearby unscheduled outage clusters would improve the response times for operators to readjust the system and provide better resilience still under the standard definition of N-1 security. Finally, we propose future steps to investigate the relationship between clusters of outages and their electrical proximity, in order to improve operator actions in the operation horizon.

scholarly journals Domain randomization-enhanced deep learning models for bird detection

2021 ◽  
Vol 11 (1) ◽  
Author(s):  
Xin Mao ◽  
Jun Kang Chow ◽  
Pin Siang Tan ◽  
Kuan-fu Liu ◽  
Jimmy Wu ◽  
...  
Keyword(s):  
Deep Learning ◽  
Continuous Monitoring ◽  
Bird Species ◽  
Training Data ◽  
Learning Models ◽  
Fine Grained ◽  
Bird Detection ◽  
Relationship Of ◽  
The Relationship

AbstractAutomatic bird detection in ornithological analyses is limited by the accuracy of existing models, due to the lack of training data and the difficulties in extracting the fine-grained features required to distinguish bird species. Here we apply the domain randomization strategy to enhance the accuracy of the deep learning models in bird detection. Trained with virtual birds of sufficient variations in different environments, the model tends to focus on the fine-grained features of birds and achieves higher accuracies. Based on the 100 terabytes of 2-month continuous monitoring data of egrets, our results cover the findings using conventional manual observations, e.g., vertical stratification of egrets according to body size, and also open up opportunities of long-term bird surveys requiring intensive monitoring that is impractical using conventional methods, e.g., the weather influences on egrets, and the relationship of the migration schedules between the great egrets and little egrets.

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