BioScience articles from February 2003

BioScience archives from February 2003

Combining tradition and science. (Editorial).
February 1, 2003... Rice is humans' most important food crop. Some 400 million metric tons are harvested each year, and the familiar grains are the daily nourishment of billions. During the famed Green Revolution that started in the 1960s, plant breeding...

What conservation can learn from other fields about monitoring and evaluation. (Viewpoint).
February 1, 2003... The field of conservation suffers from having no common approaches for measuring bottom-line success, describing the assumptions made by practitioners, comparing projects' effectiveness and efficiency, and capturing learning. As a result,...

Neutral theory: A new, unified model for ecology. (Feature).
February 1, 2003... In evolutionary time, species come and go. In ecological time--anything from days to decades or even centuries--most species, in most places, persist They do so in complex networks of local communities and extended metacommunities, within and...

Army Corps: retreating or issuing a new assault on wetlands? (Washington Watch).
February 1, 2003... In an apparent about-face, the Army Corps of Engineers has revised its regulatory guidance letter on wetland mitigation. The revision, released in late December 2002, comes slightly more than a year after the Corps' first attempt at a guidance...

Modeled climate-induced Glacier change in Glacier National Park, 1850-2100. (Articles).
February 1, 2003... The glaciers in the Blackfoot-Jackson Glacier Basin of Glacier National Park, Montana, decreased in area from 21.6 square kilometers ([km.sup.2]) in 1850 to 7.4 [km.sup.2] in 1979. Over this same period global temperatures increased by...

Energetic adaptations along a broad latitudinal gradient: implications for widely distributed assemblages. (Articles).
February 1, 2003... Most community-based models in ecology assume that all individuals within a species respond similarly to environmental conditions and thereby exert identical effects as consumers or prey. Rather, individuals differ among systems, with important...

Temporal separation and speciation in periodical cicadas. (Articles).
February 1, 2003... Speciation, the set of processes by which two populations of one species become distinct species, is an important topic in evolutionary biology. It is usually impractical to conduct experiments on how new species form, but occasionally the...

Conserving traditional rice varieties through management for crop diversity. (Articles).
February 1, 2003... In situ, on-farm conservation is an important complement to ex situ conservation of traditional crop varieties. In Yunnan Province, China, management for crop diversity by mixed planting (intercropping) of traditional and hybrid rice varieties...

The evolutionary indeterminism thesis. (Thinking of Biology).
February 1, 2003... Evolutionary indeterminists argue that, in addition to any indeterminism introduced by quantum events, at least some evolutionary processes are themselves fundamentally indeterministic. That is, they maintain that the chance element in...

Advocacy and credibility of ecological scientists in resource decisionmaking: A regional study. (Forum).
February 1, 2003... In this article we report on a regional study in the Pacific Northwest concerning the attitudes of scientists, resource managers, representatives of interest groups, and members of the involved public regarding preferred roles for research and...

Microbial Actors in the Evolutionary Drama. (Books).
February 1, 2003... Liaisons of Life: From Hornworts to Hippos, How the Unassuming Microbe Has Driven Evolution. Tom Wakeford. Wiley, New York, 2001. 212 pp. $24.95 (ISBN 0471399728 cloth). Wakeford hiked the fens and watched insects on the waters amongst the...

Roll Over, Adam Smith: The "New Economy of Nature" Overlooks the Origins of Money. (Books).
February 1, 2003... The New Economy of Nature: The Quest to Make Conservation Profitable. Gretchen C. Daily and Katherine Ellison, eds. Island Press, Washington, DC, 2001. 260 pp. $25.00 (ISBN 1559639458 cloth). Gretchen Daily and Katherine Ellison are...

Life History: A Synthesis. (Books).
February 1, 2003... Life History Evolution. Derek A. Roff. Sinauer Associates, Sunderland, MA, 2001. 527 pp., illus. $54.95 (ISBN 0878937560 paper). Derek Roff is one of the foremost authorities in life history, with a scholarly output that includes both...

AIBS Public Policy Office expands areas of coverage, staff. (AIBS News).
February 1, 2003... AIBS member societies and organizations continue to be generous in providing funds earmarked for expanded public policy activities. The AIBS Public Policy Office will now cover research funding, education policy, and research regulations, as...

AIBS Public Policy Office issues year-end report, seeks additional funding. (AIBS News).
February 1, 2003... AIBS recently sent a 2002 year-end report on its public policy activities (online at www.aibs.org/publicpolicy/resources/2002 report) to the leaders of the following AIBS member societies and organizations that are providing earmarked funds for...

BioOne Publishers and Partners Meeting, 14 March 2003. (AIBS News).
February 1, 2003... The first BioOne Publishers and Partners Meeting will be held on 14 March 2003 at the Key Bridge Marriott Hotel, in Arlington, Virginia. The meeting is designed to inform current and potential BioOne publishers, learn of their interests, and in...

AIBS seeking biologists to participate in the Science and Engineering Congressional Visits Day, 2-3 April 2003. (AIBS News).
February 1, 2003... This spring, AIBS will join with more than 20 other scientific societies and organizations to participate in Congressional Visits Day, sponsored by the Science, Engineering, and Technology Working Group (SETWG). The two-day event is scheduled...

Calendar of meetings.
February 1, 2003... February 9-14 American Society of Limnology and Oceanography, The Earth's Eyes: Aquatic Sciences through Space and Time, Salt Lake City, UT; Web site: www.aslo.org/slc2003/ 10-12 American Association of Pharmaceutical Scientists,...

What wilderness remains. (Bio Briefs).
February 1, 2003... Nearly half of the world's land, or 46 percent, is still wild, according to a Conservation International (CI) study to be published this spring as a book, Wilderness: Earth's Last Wild Places (University of Chicago Press, 2003). Yet just 7...

Marine reserve model protects biodiversity and fisheries. (Bio Briefs).
February 1, 2003... Practical questions of how to conserve biodiversity do not usually have straightforward answers, particularly when it comes to the marine environment. Not only do scientists debate the fundamental details of habitat and species conservation,...