资源环境科技发展态势分析平台

Variation in vegetation and climate affects the long-term changes in bird communities in intensive-agriculture habitats, but not in diversified-agriculture or natural-forest habitats, by changing the local colonization and extinction rates.

Agricultural practices constitute both the greatest cause of biodiversity loss and the greatest opportunity for conservation(1,2), given the shrinking scope of protected areas in many regions. Recent studies have documented the high levels of biodiversity-across many taxa and biomes-that agricultural landscapes can support over the short term(1,3,4). However, little is known about the long-term effects of alternative agricultural practices on ecological communities(4,5) Here we document changes in bird communities in intensive-agriculture, diversified-agriculture and natural-forest habitats in 4 regions of Costa Rica over a period of 18 years. Long-term directional shifts in bird communities were evident in intensive- and diversified-agricultural habitats, but were strongest in intensive-agricultural habitats, where the number of endemic and International Union for Conservation of Nature (IUCN) Red List species fell over time. All major guilds, including those involved in pest control, pollination and seed dispersal, were affected. Bird communities in intensive-agricultural habitats proved more susceptible to changes in climate, with hotter and drier periods associated with greater changes in community composition in these settings. These findings demonstrate that diversified agriculture can help to alleviate the long-term loss of biodiversity outside natural protected areas(1).

Dualities-mathematical mappings between different systems-can act as hidden symmetries that enable materials design beyond that suggested by crystallographic space groups.

The impact of topological defects associated with grain boundaries (GB defects) on the electrical, optical, magnetic, mechanical and chemical properties of nanocrystalline materials(1,2) is well known. However, elucidating this influence experimentally is difficult because grains typically exhibit a large range of sizes, shapes and random relative orientations(3-5). Here we demonstrate that precise control of the heteroepitaxy of colloidal polyhedral nanocrystals enables ordered grain growth and can thereby produce material samples with uniform GB defects. We illustrate our approach with a multigrain nanocrystal comprising a Co3O4 nanocube core that carries a Mn3O4 shell on each facet. The individual shells are symmetry-related interconnected grains(6), and the large geometric misfit between adjacent tetragonal Mn3O4 grains results in tilt boundaries at the sharp edges of the Co3O4 nanocube core that join via disclinations. We identify four design principles that govern the production of these highly ordered multigrain nanostructures. First, the shape of the substrate nanocrystal must guide the crystallographic orientation of the overgrowth phase(7). Second, the size of the substrate must be smaller than the characteristic distance between the dislocations. Third, the incompatible symmetry between the overgrowth phase and the substrate increases the geometric misfit strain between the grains. Fourth, for GB formation under near-equilibrium conditions, the surface energy of the shell needs to be balanced by the increasing elastic energy through ligand passivation(8-10). With these principles, we can produce a range of multigrain nanocrystals containing distinct GB defects.