Biology subjects

Price, B. W.

Publications and source records attributed to Price, B. W..

3 recordsLinked to original sources

bioRxiv2025

Phylogenomics and Fossilized Birth-Death Dating Reveals Gondawanan Origin and Extensive Post-Cretaceous Diversification of Worldwide Cicadidae.

The Cretaceous-Paleogene (K-Pg) mass extinction resulted in a massive turnover in biodiversity. The oldest fossils of the globally-distributed insect family Cicadidae date to the Paleocene, suggesting that this family diversified after the K-Pg boundary. We analyzed 490 nuclear Anchored Hybrid Enrichment loci as well as mitochondrial genomes for the Cicadidae, sampling all five subfamilies and 82% of tribes, using concatenated maximum-likelihood and multi-species coalescent approaches to resolve the phylogenetic relationships of Cicadidae subfamilies. We estimated divergence times of Cicadidae lineages using a fossilized birth-death model augmented into the multispecies coalescent with 44 fossil taxa. We estimated a Cretaceous origin for Cicadidae with four of the five subfamilies diversifying shortly after the K-Pg extinction event. Our fossilized birth-death tip-dating approach improved the precision of age estimates for many cicada clades compared to dates based on node-calibration from previous studies. Our results augment insight into how the K-Pg mass extinction shaped present-day diversity.

evolutionary biology↗

bioRxiv2021

Applying computer vision to digitised natural history collections for climate change research: temperature-size responses in British butterflies

O_LINatural history collections (NHCs) are invaluable resources for understanding biotic response to global change. Museums around the world are currently imaging specimens, capturing specimen data, and making them freely available online. In parallel to the digitisation effort, there have been great advancements in computer vision (CV): the computer trained automated recognition/detection, and measurement of features in digital images. Applying CV to digitised NHCs has the potential to greatly accelerate the use of NHCs for biotic response to global change research. In this paper, we apply CV to a very large, digitised collection to test hypotheses in an established area of biotic response to climate change research: temperature-size responses. C_LIO_LIWe develop a CV pipeline (Mothra) and apply it to the NHM iCollections of British butterflies (>180,000 specimens). Mothra automatically detects the specimen in the image, sets the scale, measures wing features (e.g., forewing length), determines the orientation of the specimen (pinned ventrally or dorsally), and identifies the sex. We pair these measurements and meta-data with temperature records to test how adult size varies with temperature during the immature stages of species and to assess patterns of sexual-size dimorphism across species and families. C_LIO_LIMothra accurately measures the forewing lengths of butterfly specimens and compared to manual baseline measurements, Mothra accurately determines sex and forewing lengths of butterfly specimens. Females are the larger sex in most species and an increase in adult body size with warm monthly temperatures during the late larval stages is the most common temperature size response. These results confirm suspected patterns and support hypotheses based on recent studies using a smaller dataset of manually measured specimens. C_LIO_LIWe show that CV can be a powerful tool to efficiently and accurately extract phenotypic data from a very large collection of digital NHCs. In the future, CV will become widely applied to digital NHC collections to advance ecological and evolutionary research and to accelerate the use of NHCs for biotic response to global change research. C_LI

ecology↗

bioRxiv2019

DNA barcode reference libraries for the monitoring of aquatic biota in Europe: Gap-analysis and recommendations for future work

Effective identification of species using short DNA fragments (DNA barcoding and DNA metabarcoding) requires reliable sequence reference libraries of known taxa. Both taxonomically comprehensive coverage and content quality are important for sufficient accuracy. For aquatic ecosystems in Europe, reliable barcode reference libraries are particularly important if molecular identification tools are to be implemented in biomonitoring and reports in the context of the EU Water Framework Directive (WFD) and the Marine Strategy Framework Directive (MSFD). We analysed gaps in the two most important reference databases, Barcode of Life Data Systems (BOLD) and NCBI GenBank, with a focus on the taxa most frequently used in WFD and MSFD. Our analyses show that coverage varies strongly among taxonomic groups, and among geographic regions. In general, groups that were actively targeted in barcode projects (e.g. fish, true bugs, caddisflies and vascular plants) are well represented in the barcode libraries, while others have fewer records (e.g. marine molluscs, ascidians, and freshwater diatoms). We also found that species monitored in several countries often are represented by barcodes in reference libraries, while species monitored in a single country frequently lack sequence records. A large proportion of species (up to 50%) in several taxonomic groups are only represented by private data in BOLD. Our results have implications for the future strategy to fill existing gaps in barcode libraries, especially if DNA metabarcoding is to be used in the monitoring of European aquatic biota under the WFD and MSFD. For example, missing species relevant to monitoring in multiple countries should be prioritized. We also discuss why a strategy for quality control and quality assurance of barcode reference libraries is needed and recommend future steps to ensure full utilization of metabarcoding in aquatic biomonitoring.

ecology↗