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Fuel Taxes and the Poor challenges the conventional wisdom that gasoline taxation, an important and much-debated instrument of climate policy, has a disproportionately detrimental effect on poor people. Increased fuel taxes carry the potential to mitigate carbon emissions, reduce congestion, and improve local urban environment. As such, higher gasoline taxes could prove to be a fundamental part of

Cereal grasses of the Triticeae tribe have been the major food source in temperate regions since the dawn of agriculture. Their large genomes are characterized by a high content of repetitive elements and large pericentromeric regions that are virtually devoid of meiotic recombination. Here we present a high-quality reference genome assembly for barley (Hordeum vulgare L.). We use chromosome confo

Polyporales is strongly supported as a clade of Agaricomycetes, but the lack of a consensus higher-level classification within the group is a barrier to further taxonomic revision. We amplified nrLSU, nrITS, and rpb1 genes across the Polyporales, with a special focus on the latter. We combined the new sequences with molecular data generated during the PolyPEET project and performed Maximum Likelih

We integrate field data and phylogenetic comparative analyses to investigate causes of body size evolution and stasis in an old insect order: odonates ("dragonflies and damselflies"). Fossil evidence for "Cope's Rule" in odonates is weak or nonexistent since the last major extinction event 65 million years ago, yet selection studies show consistent positive selection for increased body size among

Comparisons of the strength and form of phenotypic selection among groups provide a powerful approach for testing adaptive hypotheses. A central and largely unaddressed issue is how fitness and phenotypes are standardized in such studies; standardization across or within groups can qualitatively change conclusions whenever mean fitness differs between groups. We briefly reviewed recent relevant li

Background: The dynamics of phosphorus (P) in the environment is important for regulating nutrient cycles in natural and managed ecosystems and an integral part in assessing biological resilience against environmental change. Organic P (Po) compounds play key roles in biological and ecosystems function in the terrestrial environment being critical to cell function, growth and reproduction. Scope:

Globally, freshwater ecosystems are warming at unprecedented rates and northern temperate lakes are simultaneously experiencing increased runoff of humic substances (brownification), with little known consequences for future conservation of biodiversity and ecosystem functioning. We employed an outdoor mesocosm experiment during spring and summer to investigate the combined effects of gradually in

Rising carbon dioxide (CO2) concentrations and temperatures are expected to stimulate plant productivity and ecosystem C sequestration, but these effects require a concurrent increase in N availability for plants. Plants might indirectly promote N availability as they release organic C into the soil (e.g., by root exudation) that can increase microbial soil organic matter (SOM) decomposition (“pri

The first checklist of the odonates from Guyana is presented, including 46 new species records. Literature sources are provided for all species and for the new records full locality data, color scans or field photographs, taxonomic and biological notes, and maps for those species whose distribution range is increased considerably.

Reproducible climate reconstructions of the Common Era (1 CE to present) are key to placing industrial-era warming into the context of natural climatic variability. Here we present a community-sourced database of temperature-sensitive proxy records from the PAGES2k initiative. The database gathers 692 records from 648 locations, including all continental regions and major ocean basins. The records

Background: The loss of carbon (C) from agricultural soils has been, in part, attributed to tillage, a common practice providing a number of benefits to farmers. The promotion of less intensive tillage practices and no tillage (NT) (the absence of mechanical soil disturbance) aims to mitigate negative impacts on soil quality and to preserve soil organic carbon (SOC). Several reviews and meta-analy

The majority of herbivorous insects are specialized in host use. Even among insects that use many hosts, local specialization is common with a single host plant often being used in any given locality. Here, we establish such a pattern for the European swallowtail butterfly, Papilio machaon. We sampled larvae on five different natural hosts at eight sites in Sweden, each locality showing local mono

During the Early and Mid-Holocene significant changes in the ecology and socio-cultural spheres occurred around the Baltic Sea. Because of the underlying climatic changes and thus environmental alterations, the area was the scene for various cultural developments during the period under investigation. In the course of the melting of the glaciers at the end of the last Ice Age, isostatic and eustat

In temperate latitudes, many insects enter diapause (dormancy) during the cold season, a period during which developmental processes come to a standstill. The wood white (Leptidea sinapis) is a butterfly species distributed across western Eurasia that shows photoperiod-induced diapause with variation in critical day-length across populations at different latitudes. We assembled transcriptomes and