Local tree cover predicts mosquito species richness and disease vector presence in a tropical countryside landscape.

Context: Land use change drives both biodiversity loss and zoonotic disease transmission in tropical countryside landscapes. Developing solutions for protecting countryside biodiversity, public health, and livelihoods requires understanding the scales at which habitat characteristics such as land cover shape biodiversity, especially for arthropods that transmit pathogens. Evidence increasingly shows that species richness for many taxa correlates with local tree cover.

Local tree cover predicts mosquito species richness and disease vector presence in a tropical countryside landscape.

Context: Land use change drives both biodiversity loss and zoonotic disease transmission in tropical countryside landscapes. Developing solutions for protecting countryside biodiversity, public health, and livelihoods requires understanding the scales at which habitat characteristics such as land cover shape biodiversity, especially for arthropods that transmit pathogens. Evidence increasingly shows that species richness for many taxa correlates with local tree cover.

Diagnostic and antibiotic stewardship lessons: an outpatient assessment of symptomatic reflex urinalysis ordering accuracy using an electronic best-practice alert.

Background: It is not well known how reliably clinicians order reflex urinalysis to microscopy and culture (rUA-cx) for outpatient urinary tract infection (UTI) workup. Antibiotic appropriateness cannot be fully appreciated until the prevalence of UTIs and asymptomatic bacteriuria (ASB) are realized.

Objective: This quality improvement study has two major aims, first to determine UTI symptom accuracy for rUA-cx ordering and second, to confirm UTI and ASB cases by integrating rUA-cx and cascaded urinalysis results.

Mutation Burden Independently Predicts Survival in the Pan-Cancer Atlas.

Purpose: Long-standing clinical predictors of cancer survival have included histopathologic type, stage, and grade. We hypothesized that the principal categories of tumor somatic mutations might also portend survival. We investigated this hypothesis using the Pan-Cancer Atlas, encompassing clinical, genomic, and outcome data of 10,652 patients and 32 cancer types.

Biodiversity and infrastructure interact to drive tourism to and within Costa Rica.

SignificanceTourism accounts for roughly 10% of global gross domestic product, with nature-based tourism its fastest-growing sector in the past 10 years. Nature-based tourism can theoretically contribute to local and sustainable development by creating attractive livelihoods that support biodiversity conservation, but whether tourists prefer to visit more biodiverse destinations is poorly understood. We examine this question in Costa Rica and find that more biodiverse places tend indeed to attract more tourists, especially where there is infrastructure that makes these places more accessible.

Prostate cancer risk variants of the HOXB genetic locus.

The G84E germline mutation of HOXB13 predisposes to prostate cancer and is clinically tested for familial cancer care. We investigated the HOXB locus to define a potentially broader contribution to prostate cancer heritability. We sought HOXB locus germline variants altering prostate cancer risk in three European-ancestry case-control study populations (combined 7812 cases and 5047 controls): the International Consortium for Prostate Cancer Genetics Study; the Nashville Familial Prostate Cancer Study; and the Prostate, Lung, Colorectal, and Ovarian Cancer Screening Trial.

Publisher Correction: Intensive farming drives long-term shifts in avian community composition.

An amendment to this paper has been published and can be accessed via a link at the top of the paper.

Practical genotyping by single-nucleotide primer extension.

Genome-wide association studies bring into focus specific genetic variants of particular interest for which validation is often sought in large numbers of study subjects. Practical alternative methods are limiting for the application of genotyping few variants in many samples. A common scenario is the need to genotype a study population at a specific high-value single nucleotide polymorphism (SNP) or insertion-deletion (indel).

8q24 genetic variation and comprehensive haplotypes altering familial risk of prostate cancer.

The 8q24 genomic locus is tied to the origin of numerous cancers. We investigate its contribution to hereditary prostate cancer (HPC) in independent study populations of the Nashville Familial Prostate Cancer Study and International Consortium for Prostate Cancer Genetics (combined: 2,836 HPC cases, 2,206 controls of European ancestry). Here we report 433 variants concordantly associated with HPC in both study populations, accounting for 9% of heritability and modifying age of diagnosis as well as aggressiveness; 183 reach genome-wide significance.

Intensive farming drives long-term shifts in avian community composition.

Agricultural practices constitute both the greatest cause of biodiversity loss and the greatest opportunity for conservation, given the shrinking scope of protected areas in many regions. Recent studies have documented the high levels of biodiversity-across many taxa and biomes-that agricultural landscapes can support over the short term. However, little is known about the long-term effects of alternative agricultural practices on ecological communities Here we document changes in bird communities in intensive-agriculture, diversified-agriculture and natural-forest habitats in 4 regions of Costa Rica over a period of 18 years.

Functional diversity overrides community-weighted mean traits in linking land-use intensity to hydrological ecosystem services.

Land-use intensification can importantly influence terrestrial ecosystem services by altering plant functional traits. Although we know that functional traits influence both ecosystem properties and services, we do not fully understand the mechanistic pathways governing these relationships nor how they will respond to global climate change. To identify the impact pathways of land-use intensity on hydrological services under changing precipitation regimes, we monitored hydrological services in 15 plots of different land-use types during 25 precipitation events (6 light, 8 moderate, and 11 heavy rains).

Author Correction: A global test of ecoregions.

The original paper was published without unique DOIs for GBIF occurrence downloads. These have now been inserted as references 70-76, and the error has been corrected in the PDF and HTML versions of the article.

A global test of ecoregions.

A foundational paradigm in biological and Earth sciences is that our planet is divided into distinct ecoregions and biomes demarking unique assemblages of species. This notion has profoundly influenced scientific research and environmental policy. Given recent advances in technology and data availability, however, we are now poised to ask whether ecoregions meaningfully delimit biological communities.

Magellanic penguin telomeres do not shorten with age with increased reproductive effort, investment, and basal corticosterone.

All species should invest in systems that enhance longevity; however, a fundamental adult life-history trade-off exists between the metabolic resources allocated to maintenance and those allocated to reproduction. Long-lived species will invest more in reproduction than in somatic maintenance as they age. We investigated this trade-off by analyzing correlations among telomere length, reproductive effort and output, and basal corticosterone in Magellanic penguins ().

Predator community composition is linked to soil carbon retention across a human land use gradient.

Soil carbon (C) storage is a major component of the carbon cycle. Consensus holds that soil C uptake and storage is regulated by plant-microbe-soil interactions. However, the contribution of animals in aboveground food webs to this process has been overlooked.

Telomeres shorten and then lengthen before fledging in Magellanic penguins ().

For all species, finite metabolic resources must be allocated toward three competing systems: maintenance, reproduction, and growth. Telomeres, the nucleoprotein tips of chromosomes, which shorten with age in most species, are correlated with increased survival. Chick growth is energetically costly and is associated with telomere shortening in most species.

Spatially-explicit models of global tree density.

Remote sensing and geographic analysis of woody vegetation provide means of evaluating the distribution of natural resources, patterns of biodiversity and ecosystem structure, and socio-economic drivers of resource utilization. While these methods bring geographic datasets with global coverage into our day-to-day analytic spheres, many of the studies that rely on these strategies do not capitalize on the extensive collection of existing field data. We present the methods and maps associated with the first spatially-explicit models of global tree density, which relied on over 420,000 forest inventory field plots from around the world.

Extent of atypical hyperplasia stratifies breast cancer risk in 2 independent cohorts of women.

Background: Women with atypical hyperplasia (AH) on breast biopsy have a substantially increased risk of breast cancer (BC). Here the BC risk for the extent and subtype of AH is reported for 2 separate cohorts.

Methods: All samples containing AH were included from 2 cohorts of women with benign breast disease (Mayo Clinic and Nashville).

Associations of prostate cancer risk variants with disease aggressiveness: results of the NCI-SPORE Genetics Working Group analysis of 18,343 cases.

Genetic studies have identified single nucleotide polymorphisms (SNPs) associated with the risk of prostate cancer (PC). It remains unclear whether such genetic variants are associated with disease aggressiveness. The NCI-SPORE Genetics Working Group retrospectively collected clinicopathologic information and genotype data for 36 SNPs which at the time had been validated to be associated with PC risk from 25,674 cases with PC.

A variant in the osteoprotegerin gene is associated with coronary atherosclerosis in patients with rheumatoid arthritis: results from a candidate gene study.

Objective: Patients with rheumatoid arthritis (RA) have accelerated atherosclerosis, but there is limited information about the genetic contribution to atherosclerosis in this population. Therefore, we examined the association between selected genetic polymorphisms and coronary atherosclerosis in patients with RA.

Methods: Genotypes for single-nucleotide polymorphisms (SNPs) in 152 candidate genes linked with autoimmune or cardiovascular risk were measured in 140 patients with RA.

Genetics of serum concentration of IL-6 and TNFα in systemic lupus erythematosus and rheumatoid arthritis: a candidate gene analysis.

Elevated concentrations of inflammatory mediators are characteristic of autoimmune disease accompanied by chronic or recurrent inflammation. We examined the hypothesis that mediators of inflammation known to be elevated in systemic lupus erythematosus (SLE) and rheumatoid arthritis (RA) are associated with genetic polymorphism previously identified in studies of inflammatory disease. Serum interleukin 6 (IL-6) and tumor necrosis factor alpha (TNFα) concentrations in patients with SLE (n = 117) or RA (n = 164) and in inflammatory disease-free control subjects (n = 172) were measured by multiplex ELISA.

Untangling the fungal niche: the trait-based approach.

Fungi are prominent components of most terrestrial ecosystems, both in terms of biomass and ecosystem functioning, but the hyper-diverse nature of most communities has obscured the search for unifying principles governing community organization. In particular, unlike plants and animals, observational studies provide little evidence for the existence of niche processes in structuring fungal communities at broad spatial scales. This limits our capacity to predict how communities, and their functioning, vary across landscapes.