Search

The collection of caterpillar fungus accounts for 50–70% of the household income of thousands of Himalayan communities and has an estimated market value of $5–11 billion across Asia. However, Himalayan collectors are at multiple economic disadvantages compared with collectors on the Tibetan plateau because their product is not legally recognized. Using a customized hybrid-enrichment probe set and market-grade caterpillar fungus (with samples up to 30 years old) from 94 production zones across Asia, we uncovered clear geography-based signatures of historical dispersal and significant isolation-by-distance among caterpillar fungus hosts. This high-throughput approach can readily distinguish samples from major production zones with definitive geographical resolution, especially for samples from the Himalayan region that form monophyletic clades in our analysis. Based on these results, we propose a two-step procedure to help local communities authenticate their produce and improve this multi-national trade-route without creating opportunities for illegal exports and other forms of economic exploitation. We argue that policy makers and conservation practitioners must encourage the fair trade of caterpillar fungus in addition to sustainable harvesting to support a trans-boundary conservation effort that is much needed for this natural commodity in the Himalayan region.

This paper investigated two end-to-end approaches for the identification of spoken language from webcast sources. Long short-term memory (LSTM) and self-attention mechanism architectures are adopted and compared against a deep convolution network baseline model. These methods focused on the performance of spoken language identification (LID) on variable length utterance. The dataset used for experimental evaluation contains five language data collected from webcast (Webcast-5) and ten Chinese dialect language datasets from IFLYTEK (IFLYTEK-10). The end-to-end LID system was trained using five kinds of acoustic features: Mel-frequency cepstral coefficients (MFCCs), shifted delta cepstral coefficients (SDC), Perceptual Linear Prediction (PLP), log Mel-scale filter bank energies (Fbank) and spectrogram energies. The best model using a single feature set achieves an accuracy of 79.6% and a Cavg of 10.87%.

Artificial intelligence (AI) is widely used in the fields of images, voice, games, etc., but very few is reported in the field of radio monitoring. In order to achieve automatic and intelligent FM broadcasting monitoring, an AI-assisted FM broadcasting monitoring and localization system which consists spectrum sensing node (SSN) cluster and server is presented in this paper. In the system, we monitor the radio spectrum in FM band, and use convolutional neural network (CNN) to classify the spectrum data and realize the discrimination between licensed and unlicensed broadcasting. For localization of unknown transmitter, three SSNs are deployed in the campus of Yunnan University, which is divided into 12 regions. A transmitter is located at each region to transmit broadcasting signal, while each SSN receive the spectrum data and send it to the server to construct a fingerprint database for further location of unknown transmitter. Through collecting the spectrum datasets in the experiment, both the received signal strength (RSS) and the spectrum data fingerprints-based localization strategies are implemented based on AI algorithms.

Correspondence: Astrid Cruaud, INRA-UMR Centre de Biologie et de Gestion des Populations, CBGP, (INRA/IRD/CIRAD/Montpellier SupAgro), Campus International de Baillarguet, CS 30016, 34988 Montferrier-sur Lez, France. E-mail: cruaud@supagro.inra.fr; International audience; Background: Non-pollinating Sycophaginae (Hymenoptera, Chalcidoidea) form small communities within Urostigma and Sycomorus fig trees. The species show differences in galling habits and exhibit apterous, winged or dimorphic males. The large gall inducers oviposit early in syconium development and lay few eggs; the small gall inducers lay more eggs soon after pollination; the ostiolar gall-inducers enter the syconium to oviposit and the cleptoparasites oviposit in galls induced by other fig wasps. The systematics of the group remains unclear and only one phylogeny based on limited sampling has been published to date. Here we present an expanded phylogeny for sycophagine fig wasps including about 1.5 times the number of described species. We sequenced mitochondrial and nuclear markers (4.2 kb) on 73 species and 145 individuals and conducted maximum likelihood and Bayesian phylogenetic analyses. We then used this phylogeny to reconstruct the evolution of Sycophaginae life-history strategies and test if the presence of winged males and small brood size may be correlated. Results: The resulting trees are well resolved and strongly supported. With the exception of Apocrytophagus, which is paraphyletic with respect to Sycophaga, all genera are monophyletic. The Sycophaginae are divided into three clades: (i) Eukoebelea; (ii) Pseudidarnes, Anidarnes and Conidarnes and (iii) Apocryptophagus, Sycophaga and Idarnes. The ancestral states for galling habits and male morphology remain ambiguous and our reconstructions show that the two traits are evolutionary labile. Conclusions: The three main clades could be considered as tribes and we list some morphological characters that define them. The same biologies re-evolved several times independently, which make Sycophaginae an interesting model to test predictions on what factors will canalize the evolution of a particular biology. The ostiolar gallinducers are the only monophyletic group. In 15 Myr, they evolved several morphological adaptations to enter the syconia that make them strongly divergent from their sister taxa. Sycophaginae appears to be another example where sexual selection on male mating opportunities favored winged males in species with small broods and wingless males in species with large broods. However, some species are exceptional in that they lay few eggs but exhibit apterous males, which we hypothesize could be due to other selective pressures selecting against the reappearance of winged morphs