Large-scale patterns of species richness is an important issue in biogeography and ecology. The Qinghai-Tibetan Plateau (QTP) is a biodiversity hotspot in the world, which has an important status in the zoogeographical realms. Here, we analyzed the diversity patterns of Hemipteran insects in the QTP, and tested whether the patterns can be jointly explained by modern environmental as well as historical factors. A comprehensive geographic distribution dataset consisting of 1,166 Hemipteran species, which belong to 510 genera and 53 families, was compiled and used in our analyses. Patterns of richness were mapped into a grid-based map with a spatial resolution of 0.5 • × 0.5 •. An unbalanced diversity pattern of the Hemipteran insects in the QTP was presented, with more species in the eastern and southern parts of the plateau, while few species in the northern and main surface of the plateau. The northwestern Sichuan, the southern Gansu, the southeastern Tibet, the northwestern Yunnan and the eastern Qinghai were identified as diversity hotspots of species richness. Further analyses based on General linear models and Random Forest indicated that the diversity patterns of Hemipteran insects were influenced by both contemporary environmental factors and historical factors (e.g., habitat heterogeneity, climate stability, energy availability). Specifically, the species richness patterns of all Hemipteran insects in the QTP have been mainly affected by elevation range, temperature annual range, min temperature of coldest month, mean temperature of coldest quarter and the temperature change since the Last Glacial Maximum. In contrast, the water-related variables have relatively small effects on species richness. In addition, although habitat heterogeneity was indicated the most important factor for different suborders of Hemiptera, the climate stability was another dominate factor for Heteroptera and Auchenorrhyncha, while Sternorrhyncha was more affected by historical climate change.
Institutional collaboration promotes development and technical advances in science. A social network analysis is often used to assess the evolutionary dynamics of institutional collaboration in many fields. However, there has been no social network analysis of the insect taxonomy field based on bibliometric data. To explore the evolutionary pattern of institutional collaboration in this field, a total of 21 095 articles were collected from the Web of Science between 1997 and 2016. According to author affiliations data, we found increasingly closer collaboration has occurred in this network over time. Due to economic development, social attention, and policies supporting science and research, developing countries such as China and Brazil have shown a strong upward tendency towards collaboration since 2001. However, the development of institutional collaboration reveals imbalance of taxonomic effort and requires careful attention to certain aspects. Several countries have published numerous research articles, whereas most countries have published a small number of papers. Most institutions have tended to collaborate with institutions from same country, neighbouring countries or continent. Some institutions in developing countries (e.g. China) have numerous collaborators, however these institutions only played a modest role in introducing new collaboration between their collaborators. More work needs be done to improve intermediary ability and to reduce the influence of geographical distance. This study offered a vision for understanding the evolutionary dynamics of institutional collaboration in the insect taxonomy field, and it also suggested further enhancement of institutional collaboration in some weak aspects.
Aphids are associated with an array of symbionts that have diverse ecological and evolutionary effects on their hosts. To date, symbiont communities of most aphid species are still poorly characterized, especially for the social aphids. In this study, high-throughput 16S rDNA amplicon sequencing was used to assess the bacterial communities of the social aphid Pseudoregma bambucicola, and the differences in bacterial diversity with respect to ant attendance and time series were also assessed. We found that the diversity of symbionts in P. bambucicola was low and three dominant symbionts (Buchnera, Pectobacterium and Wolbachia) were stably coexisting. Pectobacterium may help P. bambucicola feed on the hard bamboo stems, and genetic distance analysis suggests that the Pectobacterium in P. bambucicola may be a new symbiont species. Wolbachia may be associated with the transition of reproduction mode or has a nutritional role in P. bambucicola. Statistical tests on the diversity of bacterial communities in P. bambucicola suggest that aphid populations attended by ants usually have a significantly higher evenness than populations without ant attendance but there was no significant difference among aphid populations from different seasons.
The morphology of many insect species is usually influenced by environmental factors and therefore high phenotypic variation exists even within a species. This causes difficulty and uncertainty in species taxonomy, which can be remedied by using molecular data and integrative taxonomy. Astegopteryxbambusae and A.bambucifoliae are currently regarded as two closely related aphid species with similar bamboo hosts and overlapping distributions in the oriental region. However, in practice it is hard to distinguish between them. By incorporating molecular data from four mitochondrial and nuclear genes as well as morphological information from an extensive collection of live specimens, the present study indicates that A.bambucifoliae is a junior synonym of A.bambusae. The data also indicate that large-scale geographic patterns of population differentiation may exist within this species.
In the present study, a global presence/absence dataset including 2486 scale insect species in 157 countries was extracted to assess the establishment risk of potential invasive species based on a self-organizing map (SOM). According to the similarities in species assemblages, a risk list of scale insects for each country was generated. Meanwhile, all countries in the dataset were divided into five clusters, each of which has high similarities of species assemblages. For those countries in the same neuron of the SOM output, they may pose the greatest threats to each other as the sources of potential invasive scale insect species, and therefore, require more attention from quarantine departments. In addition, normalized ζi values were used to measure the uncertainty of the SOM output. In total, 9 out of 63 neurons obtained high uncertainty with very low species counts, indicating that more investigation of scale insects should be undertaken in some parts of Africa, Asia and Northern Europe.
scite is a Brooklyn-based organization that helps researchers better discover and understand research articles through Smart Citations–citations that display the context of the citation and describe whether the article provides supporting or contrasting evidence. scite is used by students and researchers from around the world and is funded in part by the National Science Foundation and the National Institute on Drug Abuse of the National Institutes of Health.
hi@scite.ai
10624 S. Eastern Ave., Ste. A-614
Henderson, NV 89052, USA
Copyright © 2024 scite LLC. All rights reserved.
Made with 💙 for researchers
Part of the Research Solutions Family.