ALBERT

Description: Assessments of anthropogenic impacts on marine wildlife often concentrate on large-scale displacement. However, changes in the activity patterns of animals that do not flee could also affect their energy balance. Increasing boat traffic raises concerns for exposed marine mammals. Understanding risk perception is critical for effective mitigation and management, but it is hard to disentangle the effect of noise, physical presence of boats, and context. We used passive acoustic techniques to quantify how boat disturbance affected bottlenose dolphin foraging activity, and characterized the conditions influencing responses. To account for potential masking effects of boat noise on foraging vocalizations (buzzes), we developed a novel procedure to estimate the relationship between buzz detection probability and noise levels in particular 1/3 octave bands. Bayesian hierarchical modeling was then used to assess the effect of boat presence on buzz occurrence, as well as potential interactions with noise level, location, year, day, hour, dolphin group size, and boat type and number. Our results indicate that boat presence was associated with a short-term 49% reduction in foraging activity, but there was no relationship with noise level. Differences between sites and between years suggested a variable susceptibility depending on foraging conditions. This effect increased for increasing number of boats and depended on boat type. This is the first study conclusively showing that boat physical presence, and not just noise, plays a large role in disturbance.

Description: Annual precipitation for the last 2,500 years was reconstructed for northeastern Qinghai from living and archaeological juniper trees. A dominant feature of the precipitation of this area is a high degree of variability in mean rainfall at annual, decadal, and centennial scales, with many wet and dry periods that are corroborated by other paleoclimatic indicators. Reconstructed values of annual precipitation vary mostly from 100 to 300 mm and thus are no different from the modern instrumental record in Dulan. However, relatively dry years with below-average precipitation occurred more frequently in the past than in the present. Periods of relatively dry years occurred during 74-25 BC, AD 51-375, 426-500, 526-575, 626-700, 1100-1225, 1251-1325, 1451-1525, 1651-1750 and 1801-1825. Periods with a relatively wet climate occurred during AD 376-425, 576-625, 951-1050, 1351-1375, 1551-1600 and the present. This variability is probably related to latitudinal positions of winter frontal storms. Another key feature of precipitation in this area is an apparently direct relationship between interannual variability in rainfall with temperature, whereby increased warming in the future might lead to increased flooding and droughts. Such increased climatic variability might then impact human societies of the area, much as the climate has done for the past 2,500 years.

Description: The climatic conditions of mountain habitats are greatly influenced by topography. Large differences in microclimate occur with small changes in elevation, and this complex interaction is an important determinant of mountain plant distributions. In spite of this, elevation is not often considered as a relevant predictor in species distribution models (SDMs) for mountain plants. Here, we evaluated the importance of including elevation as a predictor in SDMs for mountain plant species. We generated two sets of SDMs for each of 73 plant species that occur in the Pacific Northwest of North America; one set of models included elevation as a predictor variable and the other set did not. AUC scores indicated that omitting elevation as a predictor resulted in a negligible reduction of model performance. However, further analysis revealed that the omission of elevation resulted in large over-predictions of species' niche breadths—this effect was most pronounced for species that occupy the highest elevations. In addition, the inclusion of elevation as a predictor constrained the effects of other predictors that superficially affected the outcome of the models generated without elevation. Our results demonstrate that the inclusion of elevation as a predictor variable improves the quality of SDMs for high-elevation plant species. Because of the negligible AUC score penalty for over-predicting niche breadth, our results support the notion that AUC scores alone should not be used as a measure of model quality. More generally, our results illustrate the importance of selecting biologically relevant predictor variables when constructing SDMs.

Description: Pumas are one of the most studied terrestrial mammals because of their widespread distribution, substantial ecological impacts, and conflicts with humans. Extensive efforts, often employing genetic methods, are undertaken to manage this species. However, the comparison of population genetic data is difficult because few of the microsatellite loci chosen are shared across research programs. Here, we describe the development of PumaPlex, a high-throughput assay to genotype 25 single nucleotide polymorphisms in pumas. We validated PumaPlex in more than 700 North American pumas (Puma concolor couguar), and demonstrated its ability to generate reproducible genotypes and accurately identify individuals. Furthermore, we compared PumaPlex with traditional genotyping of 12 microsatellite loci in fecal DNA samples and found that PumaPlex produced significantly more genotypes with fewer false alleles. PumaPlex promotes the cross-laboratory comparison of genotypes, is easily expandable in the future, and is a valuable tool for the genetic monitoring and management of North American puma populations.

Description: The dataset consists of: three orthophotos and DEMs derived from Stereo Geo-Eye and Worldview imagery; and two velocity maps derived from TerraSAR-X imagery. The DEM-orthophoto pairs cover the debris-covered tongue of Ngozumpa Glacier at 5m horizontal resolution for 9 June 2010 (GeoEye-1), 23 December 2012 (GeoEye-1) and 5 January 2015 (WorldView-3). The 'annual' velocity map is based on feature tracking on images acquired on 29 January 2015 and 5 January 2016. The 'velocity difference' map shows the difference between the 'annual' values and velocities derived from images covering a minimal 'winter' period: 19 September 2014 to 18 January 2015.

Description: A total of 35 samples from the late-middle Eocene to earliest Oligocene (643.73-520.88 mbsf) were analysed for their pollen and spore content. Slides were analysed using a Leica DM500 and Leica DM2000 transmitted light microscopes at 200x and 1000x magnification. Where possible, counts of 300 (excluding reworked grains) sporomorphs were made. Only samples containing 50 or more in situ sporomorphs were used for further analysis and evaluation. Sporomorph diversity was measured using both the Shannon–Wiener index and the observed number of taxa. A rarefaction method for sums of ≥50 and ≥100 grains was applied, so that the effect caused by differences in the sample size may be removed allowing the estimation of the number of sporomorph species at a constant sample size. Detrended Correspondence Analysis (DCA) was performed, with downweighting of rare species by removing pollen types whose representation is 〈5%. Estimates for terrestrial mean annual temperature (MAT), mean annual precipitation (MAP), warmest month mean temperature (WMMT) and coldest month mean temperature (CMMT) were obtained using the NLR approach in conjunction with the Probability Density Function (PDF) method.