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Cryptolestes (Coleoptera: Laemophloeidae) are economically important pests, which damage stored products in granaries and mills. Because it is difficult to distinguish Cryptolestes species morphologically, we develop here a high sensitivity real-time PCR method for distinguishing five species of Cryptolestes (C. ferrugineus, C. pusillus, C. turcicus, C. pusilloides and C. capensis). The lower limit of DNA concentration required for species identification is 0.1 ng/μl for C. ferruginues and C. pusilloides, and 0.01 ng/μl for C. pusillus, C. turcicus, and C. capensis. This method successfully determined species assignments for previously unidentified Cryptolestes spp. Collected from the field and will facilitate Cryptolestes identification in the field of plant quarantine and stored product protection.

This Policy Brief results from a workshop held at Royal Holloway University of London and funded by PAGES, the Quaternary Research Association (QRA), and Chrono-environnement CNRS/Universitéde FrancheComté. The workshop gathered 30 international participants from 15 countries to discuss ongoing challenges on biodiversity conservation and fire policy at global scale. This initiative is promoted by the Global Paleofire Working Group (https://www.gpwg.paleofire.org/), a network of researchers promoting data collection and analyses of sedimentary charcoal records from around the world.

The document covers a program of study of the visual search process. During previous experimentation, peripheral discrimination gradients have been determined for several stimulus attributes -- color, size, shape, and lightness. The present study attempted to validate the predictive capacity of the data base and a model of visual search. Two experiments were conducted. In the first experiment, subjects searched for information in a variety of actual map segments. The predictions were found to have very little relationship to the obtained search times. Several possible reasons for failure of the model are discussed. In the second experiment, predictions were made of the time required to find targets in relatively unconstrained abstract fields containing many objects of different size or different color. Here the model's predictions were quite precise. It was concluded that, for accurate prediction of search times in complex situations, as represented by information to be located in maps, more information is required about two aspects of the search process -- the effect of target visibility and the peripheral discriminability of alphanumerics. (Author)