The causes of the gradients in species richness remain contentious because of multiple competing hypotheses, significant knowledge gaps, and regional effects of environmental and historical factors on species pools. Coastal zones are subject to particular sets of environmental constraints, thus identifying the drivers of species richness therein should shed light on the regional gradients of species diversity. Here, we investigate the geographic patterns and drivers of plant diversity across coastal regions while allowing for pervasive sampling deficiencies. Based on 142708 records of flowering plant occurrences, we mapped species richness and estimated the level of knowledge across the coastal zone of Brazil. Choline Based on inventory completeness, we used linear regression models to test the predictive power of environmental variables that represent different environmental hypotheses. Few cells (25%) were well-surveyed, reflecting little knowledge about the distribution and diversity of flowering plants on the highly-populated Brazilian coast. Still, we found support for the habitat heterogeneity hypothesis as the best explanation of the variation in species richness of flowering plants in this region. Soil properties and water constraints are also important factors. Although our work emphasises the paucity of information on plant diversity in tropical and human-dominated areas, we show that knowledge limitations should not curb our capability of addressing hypotheses about species diversity.Although ecological disturbances can have a strong influence on pollinators through changes in habitat, virtually no studies have quantified how characteristics of wildfire influence the demography of essential pollinators. Nevertheless, evaluating this topic is critical for understanding how wildfire is linked to pollinator population dynamics, particularly given recent changes in wildfire frequency and severity in many regions of the world. In this study, we measured the demographic response of the blue orchard bee (Osmia lignaria) across a natural gradient of wildfire severity to assess how variation in wildfire characteristics influenced reproductive output, offspring sex ratio, and offspring mass. We placed nest blocks with a standardized number and sex ratio of pre-emergent adult bees across the wildfire gradient, finding some evidence for a positive but highly variable relationship between reproductive output and fire severity surrounding the nest site at both local (100 m) and landscape (750 m) scales. In addition, the production of female offspring was > 10% greater at nest sites experiencing the greatest landscape-scale fire severity relative to the lowest-severity areas. The finding that blue orchard bees biased offspring production towards the more expensive offspring sex with increasing fire severity shows a functional response to changes in habitat quality through increased density of flowering plants. Our findings indicate that burned mixed-conifer forest provides forage for the blue orchard bee across a severity gradient, and that the increase in floral resources that follows high-severity fire leads females to shift resource allocation to the more costly sex when nesting.Understanding the mechanisms underlying population decline is a critical challenge for conservation biologists. Both deterministic (e.g. habitat loss, fragmentation, and Allee effect) and stochastic (i.e. demographic and environmental stochasticity) demographic processes are involved in population decline. Simultaneously, a decrease of population size has far-reaching consequences for genetics of populations by increasing the risk of inbreeding and the strength of genetic drift, which together inevitably results in a loss of genetic diversity and a reduced effective population size ([Formula see text]). These genetic factors may retroactively affect vital rates (a phenomenon coined 'inbreeding depression'), reduce population growth, and accelerate demographic decline. To date, most studies that have examined the demographic and genetic processes driving the decline of wild populations have neglected their spatial structure. In this study, we examined demographic and genetic factors involved in the decline of n population decline.Low-density lipoprotein receptor class A domain containing 2 (LDLRAD2) acts as a protein-coding gene in a large number of human diseases. However, the potential roles and underlying mechanism in pancreatic cancer remains unclear. Therefore, this study was conducted to address this question. Herein, we found that the expression of LDLRAD2 was elevated in pancreatic cancer tissues and cell lines. LDLRAD2 knockdown inhibited pancreatic cancer cell proliferation, migration, and invasion in vitro. Besides, silencing LDLRAD2 impaired tumor growth and metastasis in vivo and up-regulated the E-Cadherin level, whereas down-regulated the expression of N-Cadherin and Vimentin levels, which indicating that LDLRAD2 knockdown suppresses EMT. Additionally, LDLRAD2 knockdown decreased the Warburg effect and glycolytic enzymes expression. Pathway scan assay and western blotting assay indicated that LDLRAD2 knockdown significantly down-regulated the expression of phosphorylation of Akt and phosphorylation of mTOR, which suggested that knockdown of LDLRAD2 inhibits Akt/mTOR signaling pathway. Taken together, these findings suggested that LDLRAD2 may be an oncogene in pancreatic cancer via modulating Akt/mTOR signaling pathway.People often encounter various sources of ionizing radiation, both in modern medicine and under various environmental conditions, such as space travel, nuclear power plants or in conditions of man-made disasters that may lead to long-term cognitive impairment. Whilst the effect of exposure to low and high doses of gamma and X-radiation on the central nervous system (CNS) has been well investigated, the consequences of protons and heavy ions irradiation are quite different and poorly understood. As for the assessment of long-term effects of carbon ions on cognitive abilities and neurodegeneration, very few data appeared in the literature. The main object of the research is to investigate the effects of accelerated carbon ions on the cognitive function. Experiments were performed on male SHK mice at an age of two months. Mice were irradiated with a dose of 0.7 Gy of accelerated carbon ions with an energy of 450 meV/n in spread-out Bragg peak (SOBP) on a U-70 particle accelerator (Protvino, Russia). Two months after the irradiation, mice were tested for total activity, spatial learning, as well as long- and short-term hippocampus-dependent memory.