Publications by authors named "Nunez-Penichet C"
Article Synopsis
- Traditional hardiness zones for plants mainly focus on surviving cold winter conditions, overlooking other critical stressors like summer heat and humidity.
- This study proposes a new framework for defining hardiness zones that includes factors like heat, cold, dryness, and moisture to better address plant challenges related to climate change.
- The research specifically examines 872 tree species in the U.S. to enhance our understanding of how different climatic conditions impact plant health, aiming to inform horticultural and agricultural practices.
Article Synopsis
- Changes in land cover in Cuba over the last 35 years were assessed, focusing on how these changes impact plant and moth distributions.
- The study analyzed satellite images from 1985 and 2020, categorizing land into seven types, while noting significant growth in "forest and shrubs" at the expense of agricultural lands.
- This transformation highlights a potential opportunity for biodiversity conservation, particularly in areas now dominated by forest and shrubs, emphasizing the need for further research on biodiversity in these habitats.
Article Synopsis
- The fundamental ecological niche is crucial for understanding species distribution, population dynamics, and conservation, but linking specific genomic regions to environmental adaptations is complicated due to various confounding factors.
- This study uses genomic data from Anopheles gambiae to evaluate different Genome Environment Association (GEA) methods to identify real genetic adaptations versus random variations linked to environmental factors.
- Although some GEA methods show promise in handling genetic variation without generating false positives, the challenge remains in distinguishing true environmental adaptations from random correlations, suggesting a more complex, interconnected genomic regulatory system influences adaptations.
The Asian giant hornet (AGH, ) is the world's largest hornet, occurring naturally in the Indomalayan region, where it is a voracious predator of pollinating insects including honey bees. In September 2019, a nest of Asian giant hornets was detected outside of Vancouver, British Columbia; multiple individuals were detected in British Columbia and Washington state in 2020; and another nest was found and eradicated in Washington state in November 2020, indicating that the AGH may have successfully wintered in North America. Because hornets tend to spread rapidly and become pests, reliable estimates of the potential invasive range of in North America are needed to assess likely human and economic impacts, and to guide future eradication attempts.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFBiomass is an important indicator of various ecological factors in insect populations and communities. Although the utility of this variable is proven, it is usually dismissed in ecological studies, generally, because of the difficulty of measuring it. Considering that insect biomass is apparently declining worldwide, here, we aimed to test the accuracy of forewing length as an estimator of body mass in Neotropical Ichneumonidae to help in monitoring insect biomass.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFWe point out complications inherent in biodiversity inventory metrics when applied to large-scale datasets. The number of units of inventory effort (e.g.
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