You pour a scoop of ditch water in the DNA scanner, and voilà: you know exactly which plants and animals the ditch accommodates. Well, it is not that simple yet, but according to Ph.D. candidate Kevin Beentjes, we can already ...
Ecology
Apr 8, 2021
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7
A sustained dialogue must be established between molecular ecologists, policymakers and other stakeholders for DNA-based approaches to be adopted in marine monitoring and assessment, according to KAUST scientists and colleagues.
Plants & Animals
Sep 16, 2020
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6
Wildlife traffickers do their best to make animal and plant parts unidentifiable. When customs officials find bones, maybe all they can say, is that the bones belonged to large cats. Then they have to ask: are those tiger ...
Ecology
Nov 20, 2017
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197
The European and Mediterranean species of the paper wasp genus Polistes were recently revised by scientists at the SNSB-Zoologische Staatssammlung München (ZSM).
Plants & Animals
Nov 13, 2017
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2
Chironomids are also called non-biting midges or lake flies. Xiaolong Lin is a PhD candidate at the Norwegian University of Science and Technology's (NTNU) University Museum in Trondheim. He devotes almost all his time to ...
Plants & Animals
Oct 26, 2017
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32
The ability to identify individual plant species from tiny amounts of material has a surprising range of uses, from monitoring bee populations to assessing the contents of food and nutritional supplements, as well as working ...
Biotechnology
Mar 16, 2017
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9
The massive decline of over 75% insect biomass reported from Germany between 1989 and 2013 by expert citizen scientists proves the urgent need for new methods and standards for fast and wide-scale biodiversity assessments. ...
Plants & Animals
Dec 5, 2016
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8
Substantial methodological biases in soil fungal diversity were demonstrated by an Estonian-German research consortium (University of Tartu and EMBL). It turns out that even sophisticated and innovative approaches such as ...
Biotechnology
Sep 2, 2015
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9
With unprecedented biodiversity loss occurring, we must determine how many species we share the planet with. This can start in our backyards, but speed is critical. A new study shows how biodiversity inventories can be accelerated ...
Ecology
Sep 1, 2015
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47
The quality of waters can be assessed using of the organisms occurring therein. This approach often results in errors, because many species look alike. Therefore, new methods focus on DNA analyses instead. Biologists at the ...
Ecology
Jul 9, 2015
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11
