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The Asia region harbors exceptional chondrichthyan (shark, ray, and chimaera) diversity but faces intense fishing pressure. The Important Shark and Ray Areas (ISRA) process provides a collaborative, evidence-based framework to identify critical habitats and inform spatial management. We assessed ISRAs across the Bay of Bengal, Southeast Asia, and the Northwest Pacific to characterize their extent, ecological significance, and...
SNAPSHOT USA 2024: Year 6 of the Coordinated National Camera Trap Survey of the United StatesNARA Subscribed
Motivation SNAPSHOT USA is an annual, multi‐contributor camera trap survey of mammals across the United States. The growing SNAPSHOT USA dataset is intended for tracking the spatial and temporal responses of mammal populations to changes in land use, land cover and climate. These data will be useful for exploring the drivers of spatial and temporal changes in relative abundance and distribution, as well as the impacts of speci...
Marine megafauna species are affected by a wide range of anthropogenic threats. To evaluate the risk of such threats, species’ vulnerability to each threat must first be determined. We build on the existing threats classification scheme and ranking system of the International Union for Conservation of Nature (IUCN) Red List of Threatened Species by assessing the vulnerability of 256 marine megafauna species to 23 at‐sea threat...
The Toxicology Investigators Consortium 2024 Annual ReportNARA Subscribed
The Night Parrot is a critically endangered nocturnal bird of Australia's arid zone. The species was “lost” for most of the 20th century until its rediscovery in 1990. Extant populations are now known in eastern and western Australia, but the species has been extirpated from much of its historical range. Here we estimate critically needed Essential Biodiversity Variables (EBVs) for the Night Parrot from historical and opportun...
Positive associations matter: Microbial relationships drive tick microbiome compositionNARA Subscribed
Untangling how factors such as environment, host, associations among bacterial species and dispersal predict microbial composition is a fundamental challenge. In this study, we use complementary machine‐learning approaches to quantify the relative role of these factors in shaping microbiome variation of the blacklegged tick Ixodes scapularis . I. scapularis is the most important vector for Borrelia burgdorferi (the causative a...
Actinidia seed-borne latent virus (ASbLV, Betaflexiviridae) is transmitted paternally and maternally at high ratesNARA Subscribed
Actinidia seed-borne latent virus (ASbLV, Betaflexiviridae , genus Prunevirus) was detected at high frequency in healthy seedlings grown from lines of imported seed in a New Zealand post-entry quarantine facility. To determine the route and efficiency of transmission of ASbLV in this dioecious crop species, we developed a rapid molecular protocol and identified a reliable progeny plant tissue to determine paternal and maternal...
Promoting FAIR Data Through Community-driven Agile Design: the Open Data Commons for Spinal Cord Injury (odc-sci.org)NARA Subscribed
The past decade has seen accelerating movement from data protectionism in publishing toward open data sharing to improve reproducibility and translation of biomedical research. Developing data sharing infrastructures to meet these new demands remains a challenge. One model for data sharing involves simply attaching data, irrespective of its type, to publisher websites or general use repositories. However, some argue this creat...
Common, low-frequency, rare, and ultra-rare coding variants contribute to COVID-19 severityNARA Subscribed
The combined impact of common and rare exonic variants in COVID-19 host genetics is currently insufficiently understood. Here, common and rare variants from whole-exome sequencing data of about 4000 SARS-CoV-2-positive individuals were used to define an interpretable machine-learning model for predicting COVID-19 severity. First, variants were converted into separate sets of Boolean features, depending on the absence or the pr...
Animal-borne video camera systems have long-been used to capture the fine-scale behaviors and unknown aspects of the biology of marine animals. However, their utility to serve as robust scientific tools in the greater bio-logging research community has not been fully realized. Here we provide, for the first time, an application of 360-degree camera technology to a marine organism, using a large tiger shark as a proof-of-concep...
The ocean plays a crucial role in the functioning of the Earth System and in the provision of vital goods and services. The United Nations (UN) declared 2021–2030 as the UN Decade of Ocean Science for Sustainable Development. The Roadmap for the Ocean Decade aims to achieve six critical societal outcomes (SOs) by 2030, through the pursuit of four objectives (Os). It specifically recognizes the scarcity of biological data for d...
Refugia play a critical role in preserving species unable to move or adapt to cope with environmental change. The role of refugia as ‘museums of diversity’ means these environments have a high conservation priority. Less well known, however, is the role that isolated and fragmented refugia can play in the generation of new diversity. Here, we examined the diversification and evolutionary history of a community of endemic inver...
Cryptotephrochronology of the Eemian and the last interglacial–glacial transition in the North East AtlanticNARA Subscribed
The Eemian interglacial and the onset of the subsequent glacial period serve as the most recent analogue for the natural operation of the climate system during the current interglacial. Pronounced climatic oscillations occurred during this period, but their nature and pattern are poorly understood due to dating limitations and unknown phase relationships between different regions and archives. Tephrochronology offers considera...