Heavy metals released by anthropogenic activities such as mining trigger profound changes to bacterial communities. In this study we used 16S SSU rRNA gene high-throughput sequencing to characterize the impact of a polymetallic perturbation and other environmental parameters on taxonomic networks within five lacustrine bacterial communities from sites located near Rouyn-Noranda, Quebec, Canada....

Marine protected areas (MPAs) are designed to reduce threats to biodiversity and ecosystem functioning from anthropogenic activities. Assessment of MPAs effectiveness requires synchronous sampling of protected and non-protected areas at multiple spatial and temporal scales. We used an autonomous underwater vehicle to map benthic communities in replicate 'no-take' and 'general-use' (fishing allo...

We propose a novel algorithm to extract taxonomic (or isa/instanceOf ) relations from category structure by classifying each category link. Previous algorithms mainly focus on lexical patterns of category names to classify whether or not a given category link is an isa/instanceOf. In contrast, our algorithm extracts intrinsic properties that represent the definition of given category name, and ...

Microbial metabolism powers biogeochemical cycling in Earth's ecosystems. The taxonomic composition of microbial communities varies substantially between environments, but the ecological causes of this variation remain largely unknown. We analyzed taxonomic and functional community profiles to determine the factors that shape marine bacterial and archaeal communities across the global ocean. By...

Biodiversity is of crucial importance for ecosystem functioning, sustainability and resilience, but the magnitude and organization of marine diversity at a range of spatial and taxonomic scales are undefined. In this paper, we use second-generation sequencing to unmask putatively diverse marine metazoan biodiversity in a Scottish temperate benthic ecosystem. We show that remarkable differences ...

Community structure of bacterioplankton was studied during the major growth season for phytoplankton (April to October) in the epilimnion of a temperate eutrophic lake (Lake Plusssee, northern Germany) by using comparative 5S rRNA analysis. Estimates of the relative abundances of single taxonomic groups were made on the basis of the amounts of single 5S rRNA bands obtained after high-resolution...

A major challenge facing biodiversity informatics is integrating data stored in widely distributed databases. Initial efforts have relied on taxonomic names as the shared identifier linking records in different databases. However, taxonomic names have limitations as identifiers, being neither stable nor globally unique, and the pace of molecular taxonomic and phylogenetic research means that a ...