Urbanization disrupts latitude-size rule in 17-year cicadas.

Many ectotherms show a decrease in body size with increasing latitude due to changes in climate, a pattern termed converse Bergmann's rule. Urban conditions-particularly warmer temperatures and fragmented landscapes-may impose stresses on development that could disrupt these body size patterns. To test the impact of urbanization on development and latitudinal trends in body size, we launched a citizen science project to collect periodical cicadas () from across their latitudinal range during the 2013 emergence of Brood II.

Variation in range size and dispersal capabilities of microbial taxa.

Geographic range size can span orders of magnitude for plant and animal species, with the study of why range sizes vary having preoccupied biogeographers for decades. In contrast, there have been few comparable studies of how range size varies across microbial taxa and what traits may be associated with this variation. We determined the range sizes of 74,134 bacterial and archaeal taxa found in settled dust collected from 1,065 locations across the United States.

The diversity of arthropods in homes across the United States as determined by environmental DNA analyses.

We spend most of our lives inside homes, surrounded by arthropods that impact our property as pests and our health as disease vectors and producers of sensitizing allergens. Despite their relevance to human health and well-being, we know relatively little about the arthropods that exist in our homes and the factors structuring their diversity. As previous work has been limited in scale by the costs and time associated with collecting arthropods and the subsequent morphological identification, we used a DNA-based method for investigating the arthropod diversity in homes via high-throughput marker gene sequencing of home dust.

The effect of habitual and experimental antiperspirant and deodorant product use on the armpit microbiome.

An ever expanding body of research investigates the human microbiome in general and the skin microbiome in particular. Microbiomes vary greatly from individual to individual. Understanding the factors that account for this variation, however, has proven challenging, with many studies able to account statistically for just a small proportion of the inter-individual variation in the abundance, species richness or composition of bacteria.

The ecology of microscopic life in household dust.

We spend the majority of our lives indoors; yet, we currently lack a comprehensive understanding of how the microbial communities found in homes vary across broad geographical regions and what factors are most important in shaping the types of microorganisms found inside homes. Here, we investigated the fungal and bacterial communities found in settled dust collected from inside and outside approximately 1200 homes located across the continental US, homes that represent a broad range of home designs and span many climatic zones. Indoor and outdoor dust samples harboured distinct microbial communities, but these differences were larger for bacteria than for fungi with most indoor fungi originating outside the home.

Continental-scale distributions of dust-associated bacteria and fungi.

It has been known for centuries that microorganisms are ubiquitous in the atmosphere, where they are capable of long-distance dispersal. Likewise, it is well-established that these airborne bacteria and fungi can have myriad effects on human health, as well as the health of plants and livestock. However, we have a limited understanding of how these airborne communities vary across different geographic regions or the factors that structure the geographic patterns of near-surface microbes across large spatial scales.

Fungi identify the geographic origin of dust samples.

There is a long history of archaeologists and forensic scientists using pollen found in a dust sample to identify its geographic origin or history. Such palynological approaches have important limitations as they require time-consuming identification of pollen grains, a priori knowledge of plant species distributions, and a sufficient diversity of pollen types to permit spatial or temporal identification. We demonstrate an alternative approach based on DNA sequencing analyses of the fungal diversity found in dust samples.

Too big to be noticed: cryptic invasion of Asian camel crickets in North American houses.

Despite the rapid expansion of the built environment, we know little about the biology of species living in human-constructed habitats. Camel crickets (Rhaphidophoridae) are commonly observed in North American houses and include a range of native taxa as well as the Asian Diestrammena asynamora (Adelung), a species occasionally reported from houses though considered to be established only in greenhouses. We launched a continental-scale citizen science campaign to better understand the relative distributions and frequency of native and nonnative camel crickets in human homes across North America.

Home life: factors structuring the bacterial diversity found within and between homes.

Most of our time is spent indoors where we are exposed to a wide array of different microorganisms living on surfaces and in the air of our homes. Despite their ubiquity and abundance, we have a limited understanding of the microbial diversity found within homes and how the composition and diversity of microbial communities change across different locations within the home. Here we examined the diversity of bacterial communities found in nine distinct locations within each of forty homes in the Raleigh-Durham area of North Carolina, USA, using high-throughput sequencing of the bacterial 16S rRNA gene.