The availability of plants and freshwater shapes the diets and social behavior of chimpanzees, our closest living relative. However, limited evidence about the spatial relationships shared between ancestral human (hominin) remains, edible resources, refuge, and freshwater leaves the influence of local resources on our species' evolution open to debate. Exceptionally well-preserved organic geoch...

Morphological and biogeochemical evidence suggest that australopithecines had diets markedly different from those of extant great apes. Stable carbon isotope analysis, for example, has shown that significant amounts of the carbon consumed by australopithecines were derived from C photosynthesis in plants. This means that australopithecines were 4 eating large quantities of C plants such as trop...

Opportunities to directly study infrequent forest disturbance events often lead to valuable information about vegetation dynamics. In mesic temperate forests of North America, stand-replacing crown fire occurs infrequently, with a return interval of 2000-3000 years. Rare chance events, however, may have profound impacts on the developmental trajectories of forest ecosystems. For example, it has...

Black ash (Fraxinus nigra) is a species used for basketmaking by several Native American Tribes in Eastern North America. In recent years, there has been a decline in availability of quality ‘basket trees’, and the purpose of this study was to determine what site characteristics allow for the growth of appropriate ring widths required for black ash splints used to make baskets. Three ecosystems...

We compared the amount and composition of different aboveground biomass (BM) fractions of four mires with their net ecosystem CO2 exchange (NEE) measured by eddy covariance. We found clear differences in response of green biomass (GBM) of plant functional types (PFTs) to water table (WT), which resulted in larger spatial variation in GBM within a mire than variation between mires. GBM varied be...

Phylogenetic analysis of amplified fragment length polymorphisms (AFLP) was used to infer patterns of morphologic and chromosomal evolution in an eastern North American group of sedges (ENA clade I of Carex sect. Ovales). Distance analyses of AFLP data recover a tree that is topologically congruent with previous phylogenetic estimates based on nuclear ribosomal DNA (nrDNA) sequences and provide...

The diets of Australopithecus africanus and Paranthropus robustus are hypothesized to have included C4 plants, such as tropical grasses and sedges, or the tissues of animals which themselves consumed C4 plants. Yet inferences based on the craniodental morphology of A. africanus and P. robustus indicate a seasonal diet governed by hard, brittle foods. Such mechanical characteristics are incompat...

We investigated the regional patterns of karyotype (chromosome) variation and population genetic structure in 22 Chicago region populations of Carex scoparia, a sedge species that exhibits remarkable chromosomal variation. Karyotype rearrangements are common, with our counts in the species ranging from 2n = 62 to 2n = 68 and multiple counts fixed within at least some populations. As would be ex...

BACKGROUND Cyperus scariosus R. Br and Cyperus rotundus L are widely used in ayurvedic preparation for the treatment of diabetes and other diseases. The early literature, so far, does not indicate the presence of any bioactive principle isolated from these plants. OBJECTIVE To identify free radical scavenging, anti-diabetic and anti- inflammatory principles from these two species. MATERIALS...

Grass dynamics play a major role in the density and diversity of grazing mammals. To understand drivers grass quality quantity, we assessed height, cover, soft-texture, green leaves, reproductive phase species relation to 13 ecological covariates belonging climate, vegetation, human disturbance, wild herbivores at Point Calimere Wildlife Sanctuary, southern India during November 2018─September ...