Biodiversity impacts of the 2019-2020 Australian megafires.

With large wildfires becoming more frequent, we must rapidly learn how megafires impact biodiversity to prioritize mitigation and improve policy. A key challenge is to discover how interactions among fire-regime components, drought and land tenure shape wildfire impacts. The globally unprecedented 2019-2020 Australian megafires burnt more than 10 million hectares, prompting major investment in biodiversity monitoring.

Smooth or Stepped? Laboratory Comparison of Enhanced Sonifications for Monitoring Patient Oxygen Saturation.

Background: The pulse oximeter (PO) provides anesthesiologists with continuous visual and auditory information about a patient's oxygen saturation (SpO). However, anesthesiologists' attention is often diverted from visual displays, and clinicians may inaccurately judge SpO values when relying on conventional PO auditory tones. We tested whether participants could identify SpO value (e.

Prey productivity and predictability drive different axes of life-history variation in carnivorous marsupials.

Variation in life-history strategies has usually been characterized as a single fast-slow continuum of life-history variation, in which mean lifespan increases with age at maturity as reproductive output at each breeding event declines. Analyses of plants and animals suggest that strategies of reproductive timing can vary on an independent axis, with iteroparous species at one extreme and semelparous species at the other. Insectivorous marsupials in the Family Dasyuridae have an unusually wide range of life-history strategies on both purported axes.

Time-lapse camera trapping as an alternative to pitfall trapping for estimating activity of leaf litter arthropods.

Pitfall trapping is the standard technique to estimate activity and relative abundance of leaf litter arthropods. Pitfall trapping is not ideal for long-term sampling because it is lethal, labor-intensive, and may have taxonomic sampling biases. We test an alternative sampling method that can be left in place for several months at a time: verticallyplaced time-lapse camera traps that have a short focal distance, enabling identification of small arthropods.

Phenotypes of the ovarian follicular basal lamina predict developmental competence of oocytes.

Background: The ovarian follicular basal lamina underlies the epithelial membrana granulosa and maintains the avascular intra-follicular compartment. Additional layers of basal lamina occur in a number of pathologies, including pili annulati and diabetes. We previously found additional layers of follicular basal lamina in a significant percentage of healthy bovine follicles.