We may not be able to make you love reading, but archaeology of knowledge will lead you to love reading starting from now. Book is the window to open the new world. The world that you want is in the better stage and level. World will always guide you to even the prestige stage of the life. You know, this is some of how reading will give you the kindness. In this case, more books you read more knowledge you know, but it can mean also the bore is full.

The archaeology of knowledge

There is growing recognition that classifying terrestrial plant species on the basis of their function (into 'functional types') rather than their higher taxonomic identity, is a promising way forward for tackling important ecological questions at the scale of ecosystems, landscapes or biomes. These questions include those on vegetation responses to and vegetation effects on, environmental changes (e.g. changes in climate, atmospheric chemistry, land use or other disturbances). There is also growing consensus about a shortlist of plant traits that should underlie such functional plant classifications, because they have strong predictive power of important ecosystem responses to environmental change and/or they themselves have strong impacts on ecosystem processes. The most favoured traits are those that are also relatively easy and inexpensive to measure for large numbers of plant species. Large international research efforts, promoted by the IGBP–GCTE Programme, are underway to screen predominant plant species in various ecosystems and biomes worldwide for such traits. This paper provides an international methodological protocol aimed at standardising this research effort, based on consensus among a broad group of scientists in this field. It features a practical handbook with step-by-step recipes, with relatively brief information about the ecological context, for 28 functional traits recognised as critical for tackling large-scale ecological questions.

/pdf/a-handbook-of-protocols-for-standardised-and-easy-2uo4112zhh.pdf

A handbook of protocols for standardised and easy measurement of plant functional traits worldwide

An important aim of plant ecology is to identify leading dimensions of ecological variation among species and to understand the basis for them. Dimensions that can readily be measured would be especially useful, because they might offer a path towards improved worldwide synthesis across the thousands of field experiments and ecophysiological studies that use just a few species each. Four dimensions are reviewed here. The leaf mass per area-leaf lifespan (LMA-LL) dimension expresses slow turnover of plant parts (at high LMA and long LL), long nutrient residence times, and slow response to favorable growth conditions. The seed mass-seed output (SM-SO) dimension is an important predictor of dispersal to establishment opportunities (seed output) and of establishment success in the face of hazards (seed mass). The LMA-LL and SM-SO dimensions are each underpinned by a single, comprehensible tradeoff, and their consequences are fairly well understood. The leaf size-twig size (LS-TS) spectrum has obvious consequences for the texture of canopies, but the costs and benefits of large versus small leaf and twig size are poorly understood. The height dimension has universally been seen as ecologically important and included in ecological strategy schemes. Nevertheless, height includes several tradeoffs and adaptive elements, which ideally should be treated separately. Each of these four dimensions varies at the scales of climate zones and of site types within landscapes. This variation can be interpreted as adaptation to the physical environment. Each dimension also varies widely among coexisting species. Most likely this within-site variation arises because the ecological opportunities for each species depend strongly on which other species are present, in other words, because the set of species at a site is a stable mixture of strategies.

/pdf/plant-ecological-strategies-some-leading-dimensions-of-xkw2sqjd4d.pdf

Plant Ecological Strategies: Some Leading Dimensions of Variation Between Species

Publisher Summary The study of leaf anatomy and of the mechanisms of the opening and closing of stomatal guard cells leads one to suppose that the stomata constitute the main or even the sole regulating system in leaf transpiration. Meteorologists have developed a wide variety of formulae for estimating evaporation from vegetation that are based entirely on weather variables and take no account at all of the species composition or stomatal properties of the transpiring vegetation. These “potential evaporation” formulae are widely and, to a large degree, successfully used for estimating evaporation from vegetation that is not water-stressed. Transpiration depends on stomatal conductance, net radiation receipt and upon air saturation deficit, temperature, and wind speed. Saturation deficit and wind speed vary through leaf boundary layers, through canopies, and through the atmosphere above the canopies. The sensitivity of saturation deficit to changes in stomatal conductance depends on where the saturation deficit is measured. If all of the stomata on a single leaf change aperture in unison, there may be a substantial change in saturation deficit measured at the leaf surface but a negligible change in saturation deficit measured a centimetre or two away, outside the leaf boundary layer.

Stomatal Control of Transpiration: Scaling Up from Leaf to Region

Contents

 Summary

I Introduction
II Variability of N : P ratios in response to nutrient  supply
III Critical N : P ratios as indicators of nutrient  limitation
IV Interspecific variation in N : P ratios
V Vegetation properties in relation to N : P ratios
VI Implications of N : P ratios for human impacts  on ecosystems
VII Conclusions

 Acknowledgements


 References



Summary
Nitrogen (N) and phosphorus (P) availability limit plant growth in most terrestrial ecosystems. This review examines how variation in the relative availability of N and P, as reflected by N : P ratios of plant biomass, influences vegetation composition and functioning. Plastic responses of plants to N and P supply cause up to 50-fold variation in biomass N : P ratios, associated with differences in root allocation, nutrient uptake, biomass turnover and reproductive output. Optimal N : P ratios – those of plants whose growth is equally limited by N and P – depend on species, growth rate, plant age and plant parts. At vegetation level, N : P ratios 20 often (not always) correspond to N- and P-limited biomass production, as shown by short-term fertilization experiments; however long-term effects of fertilization or effects on individual species can be different. N : P ratios are on average higher in graminoids than in forbs, and in stress-tolerant species compared with ruderals; they correlate negatively with the maximal relative growth rates of species and with their N-indicator values. At vegetation level, N : P ratios often correlate negatively with biomass production; high N : P ratios promote graminoids and stress tolerators relative to other species, whereas relationships with species richness are not consistent. N : P ratios are influenced by global change, increased atmospheric N deposition, and conservation managment.

https://nph.onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/epdf/10.1111/j.1469-8137.2004.01192.x

N : P ratios in terrestrial plants: variation and functional significance

John Deely (April 26, 1942 – January 7, 2017) was a philosopher and a semiotician who made a massive impact on both general semiotics and biosemiotics through his expansion of the study of the fundamentals of semiotics (the study of signs and semiosis) and his positioning an analysis of the history of semiotics as the centrepoint of his complete re-orientation of the history of philosophy. Born on 26 April 1942 in Chicago, Illinois, Deely was educated at the St. Thomas Aquinas Institute School of Philosophy in River Forest, Illinois. He received his PhD in 1967 with a dissertation that was later published in monograph form as The tradition via Heidegger: An essay on the meaning of being in the philosophy of Martin Heidegger (Deely 1971). A long-time appointment at Loras College in Dubuque, Iowa from 1976 to 1999 was followed with a Chair at the University of St. Thomas, Houston from 1999 to 2015 and then as a Professor of Philosophy in residence at St. Vincent’s College, Latrobe from 2015 until his death. Following his early anthology edited together with Raymond Nogar, The problem of evolution: A Study of the philosophical repercussions of evolutionary science (1973) and his Introducing semiotic: Its history and doctrine (1982), Deely became well-known in semiotics for his Basics of semiotics (1990), 1 his scholarly edition of Tractatus de signis: The semiotic of John Poinsot (1985 and 2013) and his Four ages of understanding: The first postmodern survey of philosophy from ancient times to the turn of the twenty-first century (2001) as well as a succession of penetrating books and journal articles that elucidated key issues in contemporary semiotics. Biosemiotics (2017) 10:1–4 DOI 10.1007/s12304-017-9291-x

John Deely, from the Point of View of Biosemiotics

Chapter 27: Summing up: In lieu of an introduction

Animals are treated in philosophy dominantly as opposed to humans, without revealing their independent semiotic richness. This is a direct consequence of the common way of defining the uniqueness of humans. We analyze the concept of ‘semiotic animal’, proposed by John Deely as a definition of human specificity, according to which humans are semiotic (capable of understanding signs as signs), unlike other species, who are semiosic (capable of sign use). We compare and contrast this distinction to the more standard ways of drawing the distinction between humans and animals.

The Semiotic Species: Deelying with Animals in Philosophy

Juri Lotman wrote, in Russian, a book Непредсказуемые механизмы культуры — the unpredictable mechanisms of culture. Its English translator, Brian Baer, preferred to translate the title as The Unpredictable Workings of Culture (Lotman 2013). He had a reason for this — many scholars tend to refuse the term ‘mechanism’ for the phenomena of meaning-making. However, there exist quite clear cultural differences in this opinion. For instance in Russian, ‘mechanisms’ (механизмы) are understood so broadly that there is no question to use the term for purely mental creations; the case is similar in German, in Estonian, and in several other languages. It seems that the applicability of this term to culture is correlated with the usage of the term ‘science’. In Russian, in German, and in Estonian, the humanities are sciences (гуманитарные науки, Geisteswissenschaften, humanitaarteadused), while the English-language tradition tends to separate the humanities from the sciences. However, the latter has many exceptions even in English. This has to do with the discussions about the position of semiotics, of course. Although some would claim that semiotics is rather a doctrine or point of view, still we notice that semiotics is considered as science not only by Juri Lotman or Umberto Eco, but also by Charles S. Peirce (see Salupere 2011). Obviously, the question of whether semiotics is science or not is about more than usage of the word. There exist certain deep differences between semiosic and nonsemiosic systems which are related to the methods of acquiring knowledge about these. There is a difference between the study of knowledge or knowledge-acquisition (i.e., semiosic systems) and the study of non-knowledge (i.e., physical systems) — despite their union in semiosis. This said, we see that the wording Beyond Mechanism is not scientifically meaningless, however; it can also be read as On the Mechanisms of Semioses. Understanding should go beyond the words. Biosemiotics (2014) 7:465–470 DOI 10.1007/s12304-014-9209-9

Beyond Word: On the Semiotic Mechanisms

Here we publish an interview with Jesper Hoffmeyer, conducted in 2012–2014.

Kalevi Kull

Papers

John Deely, from the Point of View of Biosemiotics

Chapter 27: Summing up: In lieu of an introduction

The Semiotic Species: Deelying with Animals in Philosophy

Beyond Word: On the Semiotic Mechanisms

Jesper Hoffmeyer: Biosemiotics Is a Discovery