University of East Anglia

About: University of East Anglia is a education organization based out in Norwich, Norfolk, United Kingdom. It is known for research contribution in the topics: Population & Climate change. The organization has 13250 authors who have published 37504 publications receiving 1669060 citations. The organization is also known as: UEA.

Evolution on oceanic islands: molecular phylogenetic approaches to understanding pattern and process.

Abstract: By their very nature oceanic island ecosystems offer great opportunities for the study of evolution and have for a long time been recognized as natural laboratories for studying evolution owing to their discrete geographical nature and diversity of species and habitats. The development of molecular genetic methods for phylogenetic reconstruction has been a significant advance for evolutionary biologists, providing a tool for answering questions about the diversity among the flora and fauna on such islands. These questions relate to both the origin and causes of species diversity both within an archipelago and on individual islands. Within a phylogenetic framework one can answer fundamental questions such as whether ecologically and/or morphologically similar species on different islands are the result of island colonization or convergent evolution. Testing hypotheses about ages of the individual species groups or entire community assemblages is also possible within a phylogenetic framework. Evolutionary biologists and ecologists are increasingly turning to molecular phylogenetics for studying oceanic island plant and animal communities and it is important to review what has been attempted and achieved so far, with some cautionary notes about interpreting phylogeographical pattern on oceanic islands.

Doubled length of western European summer heat waves since 1880

Abstract: [1] We analyzed a new data set of 54 high-quality homogenized daily maximum temperature series from western Europe (Austria, Belgium, Croatia, Czech Republic, Denmark, Finland, France, Germany, Ireland, Netherlands, Portugal, Spain, Sweden, Switzerland, United Kingdom) to define more accurately the change in extreme warm Daily Summer Maximum Temperature (DSMT). Results from the daily temperature homogeneity analysis suggest that many instrumental measurements in the late 19th and early 20th centuries were warm-biased. Correcting for these biases, over the period 1880 to 2005 the length of summer heat waves over western Europe has doubled and the frequency of hot days has almost tripled. The DSMT Probability Density Function (PDF) shows significant changes in the mean (+1.6 ± 0.4°C) and variance (+6 ± 2%). These conclusions help further the evidence that western Europe's climate has become more extreme than previously thought and that the hypothesized increase in variance of future summer temperature has indeed been a reality over the last 126 years.

Mutual mate choice and sex differences in choosiness

Abstract: Sexual competition is associated closely with parental care because the sex providing less care has a higher potential rate of reproduction, and hence more to gain from competing for multiple mates. Sex differences in choosiness are not easily explained, however. The lower-caring sex (often males) has both higher costs of choice, because it is more difficult to find replacement mates, and higher direct benefits, because the sex providing more care (usually females) is likely to exhibit more variation in the quality of contributions to the young. Because both the costs and direct benefits of mate choice increase with increasing parental care by the opposite sex, general predictions about sex difference in choosiness are difficult. Furthermore, the level of choosiness of one sex will be influenced by the choosiness of the other. Here, we present an ESS model of mutual mate choice, which explicitly incorporates differences between males and females in life history traits that determine the costs and benefits of choice, and we illustrate our results with data from species with contrasting forms of parental care. The model demonstrates that sex differences in costs of choice are likely to have a much stronger effect on choosiness than are differences in quality variation, so that the less competitive sex will commonly be more choosy. However, when levels of male and female care are similar, differences in quality variation may lead to higher levels of both choice and competition in the same sex.

Plasmon-enhanced upconversion in single NaYF4:Yb3+/Er3+ codoped nanocrystals.

Abstract: In this Letter we report the plasmon-enhanced upconversion in single NaYF4 nanocrystals codoped with Yb3+/Er3+. Single nanocrystals and gold nanospheres are investigated and assembled in a combined confocal and atomic force microscope setup. The nanocrystals show strong upconversion emission in the green and red under excitation with a continuous wave laser in the near-infrared at 973 nm. By the use of the atomic force microscope, we couple single nanocrystals with gold spheres (30 and 60 nm in diameter) to obtain enhanced upconversion emission. An overall enhancement factor of 3.8 is reached. A comparison of time-resolved measurements on the bare nanocrystal and the coupled nanocrystal−gold sphere systems unveil that faster excitation as well as faster emission occurs in the nanocrystals.

Governance for Sustainability: Towards a ‘Thick’ Analysis of Environmental Decisionmaking

Abstract: Environmental decisions made by individuals, civil society, and the state involve questions of economic efficiency, environmental effectiveness, equity, and political legitimacy. These four criteria are constitutive of the economic, social, and environmental dimensions of sustainable development, which has become the dominant rhetorical device of environmental governance. We discuss the tendency for disciplinary research to focus on particular subsets of the four criteria, and argue that such a practice promotes solutions that do not acknowledge the dynamics of scale and the heterogeneity of institutional contexts. We advocate an interdisciplinary framework for the analysis of environmental decisionmaking that seeks to identify legitimate and context-sensitive institutional solutions producing equitable, efficient, and effective outcomes. We demonstrate the usefulness of our approach by using it to examine decisions concerning contested nature conservation and multiple-use commons in the management of Hic...