Ciencia habilitada por datos de especímenes

Li, J., A. C. Hughes, and D. Dudgeon. 2019. Mapping wader biodiversity along the East Asian—Australasian flyway V. H. R. Paiva [ed.],. PLOS ONE 14: e0210552. https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pone.0210552

Background and goal: The study is conducted to facilitate conservation of migratory wader species along the East Asian-Australasian Flyway, particularly to 1) Identify hotspots of wader species richness along the flyway and effectively map how these might change between breeding, non-breeding and mi…

Chevalier, M. 2019. Enabling possibilities to quantify past climate from fossil assemblages at a global scale. Global and Planetary Change 175: 27–35. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.gloplacha.2019.01.016

The field of quantitative palaeoclimatology has made significant progress in the past decades. However, this progress has been spatially heterogeneous and strong discrepancies – both in terms of quality and density – exist between Europe and North America and the rest of the world. The need to balan…

Liu, X., T. M. Blackburn, T. Song, X. Li, C. Huang, and Y. Li. 2019. Risks of Biological Invasion on the Belt and Road. Current Biology 29: 499-505.e4. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.cub.2018.12.036

China’s Belt and Road Initiative (BRI) is an unprecedented global development program that involves nearly half of the world’s countries [1]. It not only will have economic and political influences, but also may generate multiple environmental challenges and is a focus of considerable academic and p…

Li, Q., Y. (Christopher) Liu, J. Jin, and C. Quan. 2018. Late Oligocene Fissistigma (Annonaceae) leaves from Guangxi, low-latitude China and its paleoecological implications. Review of Palaeobotany and Palynology 259: 39–47. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.revpalbo.2018.09.005

Fissistigma nanningense sp. nov. (Annonaceae) is described based on well-preserved mummified leaves from the Oligocene Yongning Formation of Nanning, Guangxi, southern China. They are characterized by retuse apex, a swollen petiole, eucamptodromous to simple brochidodromous secondary veins, percurre…

Xie, S.-P., S.-H. Zhang, T.-Y. Chen, X.-C. Zhang, X. Zeng, and Y. Yu. 2018. Late Miocene occurrence of monogeneric family Oleandraceae from southwest China and its implications on evolution of eupolypods I. Review of Palaeobotany and Palynology 256: 13–19. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.revpalbo.2018.05.002

Yunnan in SW China is a world renowned hotspot for diverse species of vascular plants such as ferns. However, fossil records of the Cenozoic ferns there are insufficient to clarify their phylogeny and historical biogeography from a geological perspective. Among these derived ferns, the monogeneric f…

Petersen, K. B., and M. Burd. 2018. The adaptive value of heterospory: Evidence from Selaginella. Evolution 72: 1080–1091. https://doi.org/10.1111/evo.13484

Heterospory was a pivotal evolutionary innovation for land plants, but it has never been clear why it evolved. We used the geographic distributions of 114 species of the heterosporous lycophyte Selaginella to explore the functional ecology of microspore and megaspore size, traits that would be corre…

Reichgelt, T., C. K. West, and D. R. Greenwood. 2018. The relation between global palm distribution and climate. Scientific Reports 8. https://doi.org/10.1038/s41598-018-23147-2

Fossil palms provide qualitative evidence of (sub-) tropical conditions and frost-free winters in the geological past, including modern cold climate regions (e.g., boreal, or polar climates). The freeze intolerance of palms varies across different organs and life stages, with seedlings in particular…

Antonelli, A., H. Hettling, F. L. Condamine, K. Vos, R. H. Nilsson, M. J. Sanderson, H. Sauquet, et al. 2016. Toward a Self-Updating Platform for Estimating Rates of Speciation and Migration, Ages, and Relationships of Taxa. Systematic Biology: syw066. https://doi.org/10.1093/sysbio/syw066

Rapidly growing biological data –including molecular sequences and fossils– hold an unprecedented potential to reveal how evolutionary processes generate and maintain biodiversity. However, researchers often have to develop their own idiosyncratic workflows to integrate and analyse these data for re…