scholarly journals The Burgess Shale paleocommunity with new insights from Marble Canyon, British Columbia

Paleobiology ◽  
2020 ◽  
Vol 46 (1) ◽  
pp. 58-81 ◽  
Author(s):  
Karma Nanglu ◽  
Jean-Bernard Caron ◽  
Robert R. Gaines
Keyword(s):  
British Columbia ◽  
National Park ◽  
Species Abundance ◽  
Species Level ◽  
Data Sets ◽  
Ecological Groups ◽  
Burgess Shale ◽  
Temporal Scales ◽  
Data Set ◽  
Exceptional Preservation

AbstractThe middle (Wuliuan Stage) Cambrian Burgess Shale is famous for its exceptional preservation of diverse and abundant soft-bodied animals through the “thick” Stephen Formation. However, with the exception of the Walcott Quarry (Fossil Ridge) and the stratigraphically older Tulip Beds (Mount Stephen), which are both in Yoho National Park (British Columbia), quantitative assessments of the Burgess Shale have remained limited. Here we first provide a detailed quantitative overview of the diversity and structure of the Marble Canyon Burgess Shale locality based on 16,438 specimens. Located 40 km southeast of the Walcott Quarry in Kootenay National Park (British Columbia), Marble Canyon represents the youngest site of the “thick” Stephen Formation. We then combine paleoecological data sets from Marble Canyon, Walcott Quarry, Tulip Beds, and Raymond Quarry, which lies approximately 20 m directly above the Walcott Quarry, to yield a combined species abundance data set of 77,179 specimens encompassing 234 species-level taxa. Marble Canyon shows significant temporal changes in both taxonomic and ecological groups, suggesting periods of stasis followed by rapid turnover patterns at local and short temporal scales. At wider geographic and temporal scales, the different Burgess Shale sites occupy distinct areas in multivariate space. Overall, this suggests that the Burgess Shale paleocommunity is far patchier than previously thought and varies at both local and regional scales through the “thick” Stephen Formation. This underscores that our understanding of Cambrian diversity and ecological networks, particularly in early animal ecosystems, remains limited and highly dependent on new discoveries.

scholarly journals A reexamination of Yuknessia from the Cambrian of British Columbia and Utah

2015 ◽  
Vol 89 (1) ◽  
pp. 82-95 ◽  
Author(s):  
Steven T. LoDuca ◽  
Jean-Bernard Caron ◽  
James D. Schiffbauer ◽  
Shuhai Xiao ◽  
Anthony Kramer
Keyword(s):  
Electron Microscopy ◽  
Scanning Electron Microscopy ◽  
British Columbia ◽  
National Park ◽  
Red Alga ◽  
Fine Scale ◽  
Burgess Shale ◽  
Phylogenetic Affinity ◽  
New Material ◽  
Scanning Electron

AbstractTo investigate the phylogenetic affinity of Yuknessia simplex Walcott, 1919, scanning electron microscopy was applied to the Burgess Shale (Cambrian Series 3, Stage 5) type material and to new material from the Trilobite Beds (Yoho National Park) and specimens from the Cambrian of Utah. On the basis of fine-scale details observed using this approach, including banding structure interpreted as fusellae, Yuknessia Walcott, 1919 is transferred from the algae, where it resided for nearly a century, to the extant taxon Pterobranchia (Phylum Hemichordata). Considered as such, Yuknessia specimens from the Trilobite Beds and Spence Formation (Utah) are amongst the oldest known colonial pterobranchs. Two morphs regarded herein as two different species are recognized from the Trilobite Beds based on tubarium morphology. Yuknessia simplex has slender erect tubes whereas Yuknessia stephenensis n. sp., which is also known in Utah, has more robust erect tubes. The two paratypes of Y. simplex designated by Walcott (1919) are formally removed from Yuknessia and are reinterpreted respectively as an indeterminate alga and Dalyia racemata Walcott, 1919, a putative red alga.

Defusing Technology:Technology Diffusion in British Columbia

1993 ◽  
Vol 9 (1) ◽  
pp. 46-61 ◽  
Author(s):  
Arminée Kazanjian ◽  
Kathryn Friesen
Keyword(s):  
British Columbia ◽  
Historical Data ◽  
Current Data ◽  
Fiscal Year ◽  
Data Sets ◽  
Canadian Province ◽  
Data Set ◽  
Time Periods ◽  
Institutional Profile ◽  
Areas Of Interest

AbstractIn order to explore the diffusion of the selected technologies in one Canadian province (British Columbia), two administrative data sets were analyzed. The data included over 40 million payment records for each fiscal year on medical services provided to British Columbia residents (2,968,769 in 1988) and information on physical facilities, services, and personnel from 138 hospitals in the province. Three specific time periods were examined in each data set, starting with 1979–80 and ending with the most current data available at the time. The detailed retrospective analysis of laboratory and imaging technologies provides historical data in three areas of interest: (a) patterns of diffusion and volume of utilization, (b) institutional profile, and (c) provider profile. The framework for the analysis focused, where possible, on the examination of determinants of diffusion that may be amenable to policy influence.

Cambrian Lagerstätten: their distribution and significance

1985 ◽  
Vol 311 (1148) ◽  
pp. 49-65 ◽  
Keyword(s):  
British Columbia ◽  
Special Reference ◽  
Community Ecology ◽  
Lower Cambrian ◽  
South Australia ◽  
Burgess Shale ◽  
Middle Cambrian ◽  
Upper Cambrian ◽  
Exceptional Preservation ◽  
Biotic Diversity

The geological setting, biotic diversity and taphonomy of Cambrian soft-bodied Lagerstätten are reviewed with special reference to the Lower Cambrian Emu Bay Shale (South Australia) and Kinzers Formation (Pennsylvania), and the Middle Cambrian Stephen Formation (Burgess Shale and adjacent localities, British Columbia). Brief mention is made also of a number of more minor occurrences in the U.S.A., China and Spain. Exceptional preservation in the Upper Cambrian is discussed by K. J. Müller (this symposium). These soft-bodied Lagerstätten afford a series of special insights into the nature of Cambrian life. Emphasis is laid on the information they provide with regards (i) levels of diversity and the proportion of skeletized taxa; (ii) the origin and relative success of bodyplans; (iii) community ecology and evolution.

scholarly journals How to Draw a Neighborhood? The Potential of Big Data, Regionalization, and Community Detection for Understanding the Heterogeneous Nature of Urban Neighborhoods.

2019 ◽  
Author(s):  
Ate Poorthuis
Keyword(s):  
Big Data ◽  
Social Life ◽  
Technical Problem ◽  
Data Availability ◽  
Data Sets ◽  
Temporal Scales ◽  
Data Set ◽  
Heterogeneous Nature ◽  
Spatio Temporal ◽  
Neighborhood Boundaries

How to draw neighborhood boundaries, or spatial regions in general, has been a long‐standing focus in Geography. This article examines this question from a methodological perspective, often referred to as regionalization, with an empirical study of neighborhoods in New York City. I argue that methodological advances, combined with the affordances of big data, enable a different, more nuanced approach to regionalization than has been possible in the past. Conventional data sets often dictate constraints in terms of data availability and spatio‐temporal granularity. However, big data is now available at much finer spatio‐temporal scales and covers a wider array of aspects of social life. The emergence of these data sets supports the notion that neighborhoods can be fuzzy and highly dependent on spatio‐temporal scales and socio‐economic variables. As such, these new data sets can help to bring quantitative analysis in line with social theory that has long emphasized the heterogeneous nature of neighborhoods. This article uses a data set of geotagged tweets to demonstrate how different “sets” of neighborhoods may exist at different spatio‐temporal scales and for different algorithms. Such varying neighborhood boundaries are not a technical problem in need of a solution but rather a reflection of the complexity of the underlying urban fabric.

scholarly journals MetaFlow: Metagenomic profiling based on whole-genome coverage analysis with min-cost flows

2016 ◽  
Author(s):  
Ahmed Sobih ◽  
Alexandru I. Tomescu ◽  
Veli Mäkinen
Keyword(s):  
High Throughput Sequencing ◽  
Synthetic Data ◽  
Species Level ◽  
Data Sets ◽  
Human Gut ◽  
Matching Problem ◽  
Data Set ◽  
Coverage Analysis ◽  
Metagenomic Sample ◽  
Human Stool

High-throughput sequencing (HTS) of metagenomes is proving essential in understanding the environment and diseases. State-of-the-art methods for discovering the species and their abundances in an HTS metagenomic sample are based on genome-specific markers, which can lead to skewed results, especially at species level. We present MetaFlow, the first method based on coverage analysis across entire genomes that also scales to HTS samples. We formulated this problem as an NP-hard matching problem in a bipartite graph, which we solved in practice by min-cost flows. On synthetic data sets of varying complexity and similarity, MetaFlow is more precise and sensitive than popular tools such as MetaPhlAn, mOTU, GSMer and BLAST, and its abundance estimations at species level are two to four times better in terms of L1-norm. On a real human stool data set, MetaFlow identifiesB.uniformisas most predominant, in line with previous human gut studies, whereas marker-based methods report it as rare. MetaFlow is freely available athttp://cs.helsinki.fi/gsa/metaflow

A New ?lamellipedian arthropod from the Early Cambrian Sirius Passet Fauna of North Greenland

2009 ◽  
Vol 83 (5) ◽  
pp. 820-825 ◽  
Author(s):  
Linda Lagebro ◽  
Martin Stein ◽  
John S. Peel
Keyword(s):  
British Columbia ◽  
Soft Tissues ◽  
Early Cambrian ◽  
Burgess Shale ◽  
Exceptional Preservation ◽  
Geological Setting ◽  
North Greenland

The Non-Mineralized arthropod described herein is derived from the Sirius Passet fossil conservation deposit of North Greenland (82°47.6,N, 42°13.7ʹW), the oldest locality with exceptional preservation of soft tissues known from the Cambrian of Laurentia (Cambrian Series 2, Stage 3; Nevadella Zone). As such, it is broadly contemporaneous with the Chengjiang fauna of China (Hou et al., 2004) and some 10 million years older than the Burgess Shale fauna of British Columbia. The Sirius Passet fauna was first documented by Conway Morris et al. (1987) and its geological setting is discussed by Babcock and Peel (2007). In addition to the nevadiid trilobite Buenellus higginsi Blaker, 1988, the fauna is dominated by non-mineralized arthropods (Budd, 1993, 1995, 1997, 1999; Williams et al., 1996; Taylor, 2002). Other finds include sponges (Rigby, 1986), a lobopod (Budd and Peel, 1998), the earliest annelids (Conway Morris and Peel, 2008) and articulated halkieriids (Conway Morris and Peel, 1990, 1995), but most of the assemblage awaits description.

Paleocommunity Analysis of the Burgess Shale Tulip Beds, Mount Stephen, British Columbia: Comparison with the Walcott Quarry and Implications for Community Variation in the Burgess Shale

Paleobiology ◽  
2015 ◽  
Vol 42 (1) ◽  
pp. 27-53 ◽  
Author(s):  
Lorna J. O’Brien ◽  
Jean-Bernard Caron
Keyword(s):  
British Columbia ◽  
National Park ◽  
Suspension Feeding ◽  
Burgess Shale ◽  
Diversity Patterns ◽  
Ecological Patterns ◽  
Quantitative Analyses ◽  
Chengjiang Biota ◽  
Community Variation ◽  
Taxonomic Groups

AbstractThe Tulip Beds locality on Mount Stephen (Yoho National Park, British Columbia) yields one of the most abundant and diverse (~10,000 specimens in 110 taxa) Burgess Shale fossil assemblages in the Canadian Rockies. Detailed semi quantitative and quantitative analyses of this assemblage suggest strong similarities with the Walcott Quarry on Fossil Ridge. Both assemblages are dominated by epibenthic, sessile, and suspension feeding taxa, mostly represented by arthropods and sponges and have comparable diversity patterns, despite sharing only about half the genera. However, the Tulip Beds has a higher relative abundance of suspension feeders and taxa of unknown affinity compared to the Walcott Quarry. These biotic variations are probably largely attributable to ecological and evolutionary differences between the two temporally distinct communities that adapted to similar, but not identical, environmental settings. For instance, the Tulip Beds is farther away from the Cathedral Escarpment than the Walcott Quarry. The Tulip Beds and Walcott Quarry assemblages are more similar to each other than either one is to the assemblages of the Chengjiang biota, although the relative diversity of major taxonomic groups and ecological patterns are similar in all assemblages. The conserved diversity patterns and ecological structures among sites suggest that the ecological composition of Cambrian Burgess Shale-type communities was relatively stable across wide geographic and temporal scales.

scholarly journals Low-alpine vegetation in Gutulia National Park, Engerdal, Hedmark, Norway, and its relation to the environment

Sommerfeltia ◽  
1994 ◽  
Vol 21 (1) ◽  
pp. 1-53
Author(s):  
K. Rydgren
Keyword(s):  
Spatial Variation ◽  
Environmental Variables ◽  
National Park ◽  
Species Abundance ◽  
Soil Nutrient ◽  
Nutrient Status ◽  
Bottom Layer ◽  
Ecological Monitoring ◽  
Alpine Vegetation ◽  
Data Set

Abstract A reference site for vegetational and ecological monitoring of low-alpine vegetation has been established in Gutulia National Park, Engerdal, Hedmark, Norway. Fifty vegetation plots, each 1 m2, were distributed randomly along four open transects. Species abundance was recorded as frequency in 16 subplots. Each plot was supplied with measurements of 26 environmental variables. The first axes of DCA and LNMDS ordinations were closely similar. The first DCA axis was interpreted as a complex snow cover gradient. Several environmental variables varied along this gradient, among them unevenness, soil moisture and soil nutrient status. The cover of the bottom layer varied along the complex-gradient. DCA axis 2 was interpreted as a microclimatic gradient. Partitioning of the environmental· and spatial variation in species composition showed that the spatial variation in the data set was rather low. Monitoring alpine vegetation is considered important since alpine ecosystems may be particularly vulnerable to airborne pollution.

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