Naturalis Biodiversity Center (Dutch: Nederlands Centrum voor Biodiversiteit Naturalis) is a national museum of natural history and a research center on biodiversity in Leiden, Netherlands. It was named the European Museum of the Year 2021.Although its current name and organization are relatively recent, the history of Naturalis can be traced back to the early 1800s. Its collection includes approximately 42 million specimens, making it one of the largest natural history collections in the world.
The Persian Gulf is both an ecologically fragile marine system and a global energy chokepoint. Past conflicts have shown that warfare in the region can cause extensive and persistent damage to coastal and marine habitats. Today, that risk is amplified by the Gulf’s shallow, semi-enclosed character, restricted exchange with the open ocean, extreme temperature and salinity, expanding hypoxia, and heavy reliance on desalination and other seawater-dependent infrastructure. Armed conflict could therefore trigger oil and chemical releases, chronic contamination, and habitat degradation, with cascading consequences for fisheries, water security, shipping, and industrial operations. Because these impacts are foreseeable and could be severe, prolonged, and transboundary, environmental preparedness in the Gulf should be integrated into regional security, infrastructure protection, and emergency planning.
Ancient herbaria are invaluable archives for botany and ethnobotany, offering unique historical baselines on plant diversity, distribution, and human–plant relationships that are sometimes absent from modern datasets. We studied a rediscovered, century-old herbarium collected by Austrian ethnologist Martin Gusinde in southern Patagonia. Preserved at the Missiemuseum in Steyl, the Netherlands, the collection comprises 105 specimens representing 90 species, 71 genera, and 43 families, with approximately 35
Mitochondrial genomes offer valuable insights into biological and phylogenetic processes, yet the factors shaping their architecture across metazoan lineages remain poorly understood, largely due to limited taxonomic sampling. To address this gap, we analyzed mitochondrial genomes from 20 species spanning a broad taxonomic spectrum of the phylum Gastrotricha. Our findings, supported by phylogenetic analyses based on mitochondrial datasets, reveal two distinct evolutionary patterns: one lineage displays remarkable conservation in genome structure, while the other exhibits variability in gene content, arrangement, strand polarity, and repeat abundance. These contrasting patterns appear to be related to differences in reproductive strategies (hermaphroditism vs. parthenogenesis) and ecological habitats (marine vs. freshwater). While these associations are intriguing, further data are needed to understand the underlying processes. This study highlights the importance of broad phylum-scale mitogenomic sampling for uncovering genomic diversity and advancing our understanding of mitochondrial evolution across Metazoa.
Bees are essential for ecosystem functioning, pollinating many wild and crop plant species. Predicting which species are most vulnerable to global changes, and how their loss may impact ecosystems and human well-being, is critical. Comprehensive information on bee response and effect traits is fundamental to these assessments. However, the Raunkiærian shortfall-insufficient trait data-remains significant for bees, particularly in the Neotropics. Moreover, it remains uncertain whether conservation strategies based on functional diversity from temperate regions can be generalized to the Neotropics. To address this gap, we compiled a comprehensive and validated dataset on Brazilian bee traits, covering 24 traits related to sociality (100% of the species with some information), nesting (88%), body size (71%), and buzzing capacity (42%) on 2,066 Brazilian bee species. The trait data here presented is a crucial resource for evaluating bee species' pollination effectiveness and susceptibility to global change. Comparative analysis with regions with ample trait data-USA, Europe, and China-revealed notable differences. Brazilian bees exhibited a higher prevalence of aboveground nesting species, especially compared to Europe. The proportion of eusocial species was also greater than in Europe and the United States, and more similar to China. Differently from other regions, Brazilian eusocial bees were significantly smaller than their non-eusocial counterparts. These cross-regional comparisons highlight the importance of geographically tailored conservation strategies and underscore the need for extensive trait data to accurately predict regional vulnerabilities and ecological impacts in a rapidly changing world.
The names published by Linnaeus in Species Plantarum represent the foundation of modern plant taxonomy. Despite their systematic value, very few of Linnaeus's original type specimens have been analyzed using current DNA sequencing technologies. Here, we performed high-throughput sequencing on Linnean and other type specimens of Ulva, a genus of ecological and commercial importance. Chloroplast and mitochondrial genomes were assembled for Linnaeus's U. compressa, U. intestinalis, U. lanceolata, and U. linza as well as Kützing's Phycoseris smaragdina type specimens. Phylogenetic analyses of these data showed that the names U. compressa and U. intestinalis were correctly applied, but U. linza and U. lanceolata were misapplied. Ulva linza is the earliest available name for the European species currently called U. pseudocurvata. The correct name for the globally distributed species previously known as U. "linza" is Ulva smaragdina (Kützing) comb. nov. The names Ulva lanceolata, U. crispata, and Phycoseris olivacea do not represent distinct species, instead being heterotypic synonyms of U. compressa, and P. planifolia is a heterotypic synonym of U. intestinalis. These results demonstrate that genetic characterization of type material can unequivocally resolve longstanding taxonomic debates over scientific names.
