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For more information on these science news and feature story tips, please contact the public information officer at the end of each item at (703) 292-8070. Editor: Josh Chamot Contents of this News Tip:
Augmented Reality Brings Dinosaurs into the 21st Century
Biological Mission to an (Almost) Unknown PlanetThe mission of the ALL Species Foundation is to enable the discovery of all life on Earth in 25 years. Now, the foundation is participating in a species inventory program - co-developed with support from NSF and the Alfred P. Sloan Foundation. The Planetary Biodiversity Inventories (PBI) program, also managed by NSF, is the first of its kind to invite teams of investigators to conduct a worldwide, species-level, systematic inventory of an entire, major group of organisms. "The Planetary Biodiversity Inventories Program is a major step forward in the exploration of life on Earth; knowledge acquired will have relevance for all disciplines of biology, for the management of the environment, and for the promotion of human welfare," said biologist E. O. Wilson of Harvard University. PBI projects will be large-scale, multi-investigator, multi-institutional, and multi-national in scope, and they will provide the first rigorous models for answering global-scale questions. The inventories will allow researchers to track species distribution and characteristics across ecological space and through geological time. [Cheryl Dybas] Study of Endangered Tortoises May Reveal Impact of Diseases on EcosystemsBuilding on 10 years of research into an upper respiratory tract disease that has devastated endangered gopher tortoises across the United States, scientists are trying to grasp how chronic diseases spread. The researchers are using wild animal disease as a model for understanding not just the impact of chronic disease on animals, but also on entire ecosystems. "The tortoise is unique, as it has about the same life span as a human, and reaches reproductive age at about the same time," said Mary Brown of the University of Florida and a lead scientist for the NSF-funded study. "Lots of changes have occurred in the tortoise's habitat, many of which are human-induced." The researchers are interested in learning how natural factors combine with human-induced ones, such as relocation and fire exclusion, and how those relationships interact with biological and microbial factors to determine the incidence of disease. In the first year of the new project, the team plans to study more than 700 tortoises at 30 sites in Florida to determine population characteristics, habitat quality, and upper respiratory tract disease status at each location. The sites include state parks, water management areas, military reserves, and private holdings. In subsequent years, the researchers will focus on 12 of the sites using ecological, molecular and other tools to determine the influence of human-induced factors in disease spread and virulence. The results should shed light on how disease in its various stages affects tortoise populations. "Infectious diseases are an ever-present risk to wildlife, particularly in situations in which animals are removed from their natural habitat for captive breeding programs, or during conditions of stress, such as release into new habitats or encroachment into their habitats by human urbanization," said Brown. "This is even more important when the species concerned is a keystone species, such as the Florida gopher tortoise, that is critical to ecosystem health." As many as 360 animal species depend on the gopher tortoise for survival, including other threatened species like the indigo snake. [Cheryl Dybas]
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