Information on tropical Asian vertebrates has traditionally been sparse, particularly when it comes to cryptic species inhabiting the dense forests of the region. Vertebrate populations are declining globally due to land‐use change and hunting, the latter frequently referred as “defaunation.” This is especially true in tropical Asia where there is extensive land‐use change and high human densities. Robust monitoring requires t...

In recent years, climate change in Central Asia, especially in Uzbekistan, has resulted in sharp alternation of dry and wet years. In such conditions, agriculture has turned into the most vulnerable sector. Agricultural producers have not been able to adapt to such variations of climatic conditions. Traditional irrigation approaches and agronomic operations are becoming unacceptable against the background of severe droughts or...

Summary Investigations of antibiotic resistance from an environmental prospective shed new light on a problem that was traditionally confined to a subset of clinically relevant antibiotic‐resistant bacterial pathogens. It is clear that the environmental microbiota, even in apparently antibiotic‐free environments, possess an enormous number and diversity of antibiotic resistance genes, some of which are very similar to the gene...

Based on comparative analysis of 16S rRNA sequences and the recently established phylogeny of the genus Desulfotomaculum , a set of phylogenetically nested hybridization probes was developed and characterized. A genus‐specific probe targets all known Desulfotomaculum species (with the exception of Desulfotomaculum acetoxidans ), and five specific probes target subclusters within the Desulfotomaculum genus. The dissociation tem...