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The Natural History Museum is an international leader in the study of the natural world. Our science describes the diversity of nature, promotes an understanding of its past, and supports the anticipation and management of the impact of human activity on the environment.
The Museum's repository provides free access to publications produced by more than 300 scientists working here. Researchers at the Museum study a diverse range of issues, including threats to Earth's biodiversity, the maintenance of delicate ecosystems, environmental pollution and disease. The accessible repository showcases this broad research output.
The repository was launched in 2016 with an initially modest number of journal publications in its database. It now includes book chapters and blogs from Museum scientists.
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Pollinator-flower interactions in gardens during the COVID-19 pandemic lockdown of 2020During the main COVID-19 global pandemic lockdown period of 2020 an impromptu set of pollination ecologists came together via social media and personal contacts to carry out standardised surveys of the flower visits and plants in gardens. The surveys involved 67 rural, suburban and urban gardens, of various sizes, ranging from 61.18° North in Norway to 37.96° South in Australia, resulting in a data set of 25,174 rows, with each row being a unique interaction record for that date/site/plant species, and comprising almost 47,000 visits to flowers, as well as records of flowers that were not visited by pollinators, for over 1,000 species and varieties belonging to more than 460 genera and 96 plant families. The more than 650 species of flower visitors belong to 12 orders of invertebrates and four of vertebrates. In this first publication from the project, we present a brief description of the data and make it freely available for any researchers to use in the future, the only restriction being that they cite this paper in the first instance. The data generated from these global surveys will provide scientific evidence to help us understand the role that private gardens (in urban, rural and suburban areas) can play in conserving insect pollinators and identify management actions to enhance their potential.
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Subfossil cyclostome bryozoans from Daidokutsu submarine cave, Okinawa, JapanA sediment core (Core 19) taken in Daidokutsu cave on Ie Island, Okinawa, spans the last 7,000 years. The sampling of multiple taxa from this submarine cave has been aimed at understanding the Holocene history of biodiversity and ecological dynamics. The results have already been published for ostracods, molluscs, foraminifera and cheilostome bryozoans. The current study focuses on the cyclostome bryozoan fauna, establishing a taxonomic foundation that will contribute to an understanding of responses by the bryozoan community in this cave habitat to environmental and climate changes through the Holocene. Very little has been published on modern and Quaternary fossil cyclostomes from Japan, and nearly all publications predate the routine use of scanning electron microscopy in cyclostome taxonomy. Fifteen cyclostome species are described here from Daidokutsu. Eight of these are new species, the remaining seven were identified only to the genus level. The high proportion of new species may not only reflect the uniqueness of the Daidokutsu cyclostome fauna but also the scarcity of studies on Japanese cyclostomes and the inadequacy of descriptions and figures in older publications, which make it difficult or impossible to interpret the species they describe. Unlike cyclostome cave faunas from the Mediterranean, erect cyclostomes strongly outnumber species with encrusting colonies. In addition, the secondary homonymy of Parasmittina ligulata, used for both a new species from Daidokutsu Cave and a Western Atlantic species, is resolved by renaming the Japanese species Parasmittina vieirai nom. nov.
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Disporella guada sp. nov., an erect-ramose rectangulate cyclostome (Bryozoa, Stenolaemata) from the Carribean Sea: convergent evolution in bryozoan colony morphologyThe taxonomy of cyclostome bryozoans is founded on characters of the skeleton, but molecular sequence data have increasingly shown that established higher taxa are not monophyletic. Here we describe the skeletal morphology of a new species from Guadeloupe (French West Indies) with erect ramose colonies consisting of long, curved zooids that are typical of the suborder Cerioporina among living cyclostomes. However, molecular evidence from nuclear ribosomal RNA genes 18S and 28S places the new taxon in the suborder Rectangulata, where this colony-form has not been previously recorded. It nests firmly within the genus Disporella Gray, 1848, in a strongly supported clade that also includes Plagioecia patina (Lamarck, 1816) (Tubuliporina) and the sister taxa Doliocoitis cyanea Gordon & Taylor, 2001 (Rectangulata) and Favosipora rosea Gordon & Taylor, 2001 (Cerioporina). The short and robust branches of the new Guadeloupe cyclostome, here named Disporella guada Harmelin, Taylor & Waeschenbach sp. nov., are well adapted to life in shallow rocky sites exposed to severe wave action, which appear to be its exclusive habitat.
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Fenestella and other bryozoans in the Carboniferous rocks of the British IslesAsk a geologist to name a fossil bryozoan found in the rocks of the British Isles and the most likely answer will be Fenestella. The net-like fossils of Fenestella are especially abundant in the Carboniferous Limestone (Figs 1 and 2), although the genus, as used in its broadest sense, is also present in the Silurian, Devonian and Permian deposits of Britain.
