Infrastructural Connectivity and Difference

This chapter, Infrastructural connectivity and difference, presents two strategic planning proposals dealing with “direct” impacts of the construction of the China-Laos Railway. Practices of “sustainable” development, in those practices’ approaches, however genuine, to physically and economically connect communities to new markets and generate new economies, disrupt preexisting modes of connectivity, whether socioeconomic, cultural or ecological. One proposal offers strategies to mitigate the socioecological impacts of temporary access roads built tends of kilometers into rural landscape to construct the China-Laos Railway, while the other proposal offers physical and organizational strategies for impacted agricultural communities to mitigate the disruption of irrigation networks, fragmented farmlands, issues of development transparency and uncertainty in compensation timelines. Through these proposals’ analyses and strategic deployment of connectivity and emphasis of cultural and ecological difference, they may help reform discourse on the assessment of cumulative impacts in the development process.

Niche-based process and neutral dynamics emerge the per capita ecological difference and equivalence among species at different spatio-temporal-environmental scales

Reconciling niche-based process and neutral dynamics in a portion of an infinite system, the regional species pool may be already not free parameter, and the divergent ecological-evolutionary mechanisms may operate consistently. The individual-based model was implemented in the two-dimensional grid with periodic boundary condition. The model was explored using a fixed speciation rate, and a range of system sizes, dispersal rates, environmental structures and initial conditions of regional species pool. The model communities in the center of system had a fixed population size, and approximated from an area encompassing independent biogeographic units to an area packed in a biogeographic unit with open boundary conditions, and presented the three environmental structures; four humps, linear and random. Across scenarios, the number of guilds in system achieved first to a stationary state; then, the species richness converged eventually to a dynamical equilibrium through speciation-extinction balance. In simulations, the per capita ecological difference among species only contributed to the probabilities of immigration success, so the weighted lottery process was more efficient and immediate at higher dispersal rates. The increase of functional redundancy in model communities suggested that the relative role of neutral dynamics increased in an area encompassing independent biogeographic units. The variation partitioning based on canonical analysis inferred that not only the neutral dynamics among the species of single guild, but also the competition-colonization trade-off among the species of more than two guilds with similar environmental optimum and different levels of specialization operated in the spatial structures found within and among patchy habitats. Ecologist to disentangle the influence of alternative processes must shift focus from the contribution of local competitions and regional dispersals to detecting the spatio-temporal-environmental scales on which the per capita ecological difference and equivalence among species are emerged through divergent ecological-evolutionary mechanisms.

Does evolutionary relatedness predict ecological similarity?

A fundamental question in paleobiology is whether ecology is correlated with evolutionary history. By combining time-calibrated phylogenetic trees with genus occurrence data through time, we can understand how environmental preferences are distributed on a tree and evaluate support for models of ecological similarity. Exploring parameters that lend support to each evolutionary model will help address questions that lie at the nexus of the evolutionary and ecological sciences. We calculated ecological difference and phylogenetic distance between species pairs for 83 taxa used in recent phylogenetic revisions of the brachiopod order Strophomenida. Ecological difference was calculated as the pairwise distance along gradients of water depth, carbonate, and latitudinal affinity. Phylogenetic distance was calculated as the pairwise branch length between tips of the tree. Our results show no relationship between ecological affinity and phylogeny. Instead results suggest an ecological burst during the initial radiation of the clade. This pattern likely reflects scaling at the largest macroevolutionary and macroecological scales preserved in the fossil record. Hierarchical scaling of ecological and evolutionary processes is complex, but phylogenetic paleoecology is an avenue for better evaluating these questions.

Contested natures: Coca, the War on Drugs, and ecologies of difference in Colombia's Afro-Pacific

<p>While there is growing consensus that the 'war on drugs' has failed to decrease drug consumption in the Global North, we know much less about how drug production has impacted communities of the Global South. This is particularly true for the cultivation of coca leaf in Colombia, which is increasingly planted in isolated rural areas such as national parks and in the collectively titled lands of ethnic communities (indigenous and Afro-descendant) where it is both difficult to detect and to eradicate. This article explains how Afro-descendant communities in Colombia have resisted both coca cultivation and a controversial war on drugs strategy to eliminate coca –aerial eradication – through a framework of ecological difference. It also explores why political ecologists can be important allies in this struggle and in the greater context of socio<em>-</em>environmental justice for rural communities in the Global South. <strong></strong></p><p><strong>Key Words:</strong> rural, ethnic, difference, war, coca, Colombia</p>

New data on the Iberian endemic bee genus Flavipanurgus Warncke Hymenoptera: Apoidea: Andrenidae): Ecological and genomic data reveal a hidden species

Flavipanurgus is a small genus of panurgine bees known only from the Iberian Peninsula. Despite its status as one of the few bee genera endemic to Europe, Flavipanurgus are poorly represented in collections and until recently, their ecology had been almost unknown. Flavipanurgus ibericus (Warncke, 1972) was described from southern Iberia, with a northern subspecies F. i. kastiliensis (Warncke, 1987) later described from the north. Recent collections in Portugal have revealed clear differences in the pollen collecting patterns of the two taxa, with southern females collecting exclusively from Jasione montana and northern females from Sedum species. In combination with this ecological difference, COI and 28S barcode data indicate that Flavipanurgus kastiliensis stat. nov. should be raised to full species status. The male of Flavipanurgus ibericus s. str. is described for the first time, and updated keys to Flavipanurgus species are provided. Flavipanurgus fuzetus Patiny, 1999 is recorded for the first time from Spain. Further significant records and new floral associations for Flavipanurgus are also presented.

Security beyond resilience

This review article reads across David Chandler’s Resilience, Brad Evans and Julian Reid’s Resilient Life and Elizabeth Povinelli’s Economies of Abandonment to explore the possibilities for critical thought on security beyond resilience. Read together, these works suggest that resilience approaches offer a topological form of security that interiorizes the outside’s de-territorializing potential – a movement that might be countered by a radical atmospherics of security that enables socio-ecological difference to persist as difference. At stake is the relation between critique and potentiality: while topological security turns critique into a stabilizing force, atmospheric security refuses the demands for socio-ecological difference to make itself legible as either proper adaptation or improper maladaptation. An atmospherics of security orients politics and ethics around both the durative and anticipatory temporal registers of potentiality.

Population Genetic Analysis of Streptomyces albidoflavus Reveals Habitat Barriers to Homologous Recombination in the Diversification of Streptomycetes

ABSTRACTExamining the population structure and the influence of recombination and ecology on microbial populations makes great sense for understanding microbial evolution and speciation. Streptomycetes are a diverse group of bacteria that are widely distributed in nature and a rich source of useful bioactive compounds; however, they are rarely subjected to population genetic investigations. In this study, we applied a five-gene-based multilocus sequence analysis (MLSA) scheme to 41 strains ofStreptomyces albidoflavusderived from diverse sources, mainly insects, sea, and soil. Frequent recombination was detected inS. albidoflavus, supported by multiple lines of evidence from the pairwise homoplasy index (Φw) test, phylogenetic discordance, the Shimodaira-Hasegawa (SH) test, and network analysis, underpinning the predominance of homologous recombination withinStreptomycesspecies. A strong habitat signal was also observed in both phylogenetic and Structure 2.3.3 analyses, indicating the importance of ecological difference in shaping the population structure. Moreover, all three habitat-associated groups, particularly the entomic group, demonstrated significantly reduced levels of gene flow with one another, generally revealing habitat barriers to recombination. Therefore, a combined effect of homologous recombination and ecology is inferred forS. albidoflavus, where dynamic evolution is at least partly balanced by the extent that differential distributions of strains among habitats limit genetic exchange. Our study stresses the significance of ecology in microbial speciation and reveals the coexistence of homologous recombination and ecological divergence in the evolution of streptomycetes.

A Class of Hyperspace Systems and Distributional Chaos

Research on dynamical system has penetrated into many problems of agricultural production, such as prediction of corn yield, analysis on operational situation of irrigation district and research on ecological difference equation. In this paper, we investigated dynamical properties for non-primitive substitution and the set-valued maps induced by the substitution. We proved In two cases that the hyperspace systems induced by non-primitive substitution are not distributional chaotic.

Notes on morphology and ecological difference between species of pontoniine shrimp genus Crinotonia Marin (Caridea: Palaemonidae) associated with shallow-water feather stars Phanogenia spp. (Crinoidea: Comasteridae)

Freshly collected material of the pontoniine genus Crinotonia Marin, 2006 allows ecological separation of two known species. Crinotonia attenuatus (Bruce, 1971) inhabits the common yellow feather star Phanogenia gracilis (Hartlaub, 1890) (Crinoidea: Comasteridae) whereas С . anastasiae Marin, 2006 is a symbiont of the black-colored Phanogenia sp., probably, Phanogenia multibrachiata (Carpenter, 1888) or an undescribed comasterid species. The species of Crinotonia are also distinguished by coloration, size and depth range with С . anastasiae being smaller and deeper dwelling than C. antenuatus. Remarks on coloration, morphology and ecology of the shrimps and hosts are given.