<i>Psoroma inflatum</i> sp. nov. is described from mountains in Canterbury and Otago in New Zealand’s South Island. It is related to <i>P. hypnorum</i>, but differs in having a strongly inflated and glossy thallus. The squamules are prostrate, ascending or erect, and form brown, coarsely coralloid patches. They lack a dorsiventral morphology and anatomy, in contrast to other Psoroma species, except ...

Temporal genomic data hold great potential for studying evolutionary processes such as speciation. However, sampling across speciation events would, in many cases, require genomic time series that stretch well back into the Early Pleistocene subepoch. Although theoretical models suggest that DNA should survive on this timescale1, the oldest genomic data recovered so far are from a horse specimen ...

Stomach content analyses are a valuable tool in human forensic science to interpret perimortem events. While the identifcation of food components of plant and animal origin has traditionally been conducted by macro- and microscopical approaches in case of incomplete digestion, molecular methods provide the potential to increase sensitivity and taxonomic resolution. In particular, DNA metabarcoding ...

The moose (Alces alces) is a dominant large mammalian herbivore in the world’s boreal zones. Moose exert significant browsing impacts on forest vegetation and are therefore often at the centre of wildlife-forestry conflicts. Consequently, understanding the drivers of their foraging behaviour is crucial for mitigating such conflicts. Management of moose in large parts of its range currently largely ...

Gibbosporina cyanea is described here as new to science, based on its holotype collected in Sri Lanka in the 1860s. The species is a bipartite cyanolichen in contrast to all other known Gibbosporina species, which are tripartites. The species appears to have evolved through cephalodia emancipation followed by divergence. Phyllidia indicate a cephalodiate evolutionary origin with a continued function ...

Diet studies are essential to understand animal ecology and ecosystem dynamics, especially in the case of large omnivores. These studies are particularly relevant in areas where human disturbance is intense and, thus, species dietary patterns might change due to the easy accessibility of food resources of human origin, which may hinder the ecosystem services these species provide. We assessed the ...

Being the most common human-created landforms, terrace construction has resulted in an extensive perturbation of the land surface. However, our mechanistic understanding of soil organic carbon (SOC) (de-)stabilization mechanisms and the persistence of SOC stored in terraced soils is far from complete. Here we explored the factors controlling SOC stability and the temperature sensitivity (<i>Q</i>< ...

The northernmost parts of Europe has a large number of sites with Stone Age house-pits, the majority of which date from c. 5000 BC onwards. Remarkably, the remains of these dwellings are many places still visible on the surface. In northern Norway, such dwellings concentrate in the coastal areas, with a more limited number found on inland sites. In order to use these in analyses of settlement duration, ...

Species breeding at high latitudes face a significant challenge of surviving the winter. Such conditions are particularly severe for diurnal marine endotherms such as seabirds. A critical question is therefore what behavioural strategies such species adopt to maximise survival probability. We tested 3 hypotheses: (1) they migrate to lower latitudes to exploit longer day length (‘sun-chasing’), (2) ...