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- Sabatini, F. M., et al.
(författare)
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sPlotOpen - An environmentally balanced, open-access, global dataset of vegetation plots
- 2021
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Ingår i: Global Ecology and Biogeography. - : Wiley. - 1466-822X .- 1466-8238.
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Tidskriftsartikel (refereegranskat)abstract
- Motivation Assessing biodiversity status and trends in plant communities is critical for understanding, quantifying and predicting the effects of global change on ecosystems. Vegetation plots record the occurrence or abundance of all plant species co-occurring within delimited local areas. This allows species absences to be inferred, information seldom provided by existing global plant datasets. Although many vegetation plots have been recorded, most are not available to the global research community. A recent initiative, called 'sPlot', compiled the first global vegetation plot database, and continues to grow and curate it. The sPlot database, however, is extremely unbalanced spatially and environmentally, and is not open-access. Here, we address both these issues by (a) resampling the vegetation plots using several environmental variables as sampling strata and (b) securing permission from data holders of 105 local-to-regional datasets to openly release data. We thus present sPlotOpen, the largest open-access dataset of vegetation plots ever released. sPlotOpen can be used to explore global diversity at the plant community level, as ground truth data in remote sensing applications, or as a baseline for biodiversity monitoring. Main types of variable contained Vegetation plots (n = 95,104) recording cover or abundance of naturally co-occurring vascular plant species within delimited areas. sPlotOpen contains three partially overlapping resampled datasets (c. 50,000 plots each), to be used as replicates in global analyses. Besides geographical location, date, plot size, biome, elevation, slope, aspect, vegetation type, naturalness, coverage of various vegetation layers, and source dataset, plot-level data also include community-weighted means and variances of 18 plant functional traits from the TRY Plant Trait Database. Spatial location and grain Global, 0.01-40,000 m(2). Time period and grain 1888-2015, recording dates. Major taxa and level of measurement 42,677 vascular plant taxa, plot-level records. Software format Three main matrices (.csv), relationally linked.
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| 4. |
- Stanford, M., et al.
(författare)
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Oral tolerization with peptide 336-351 linked to cholera toxin B subunit in preventing relapses of uveitis in Behcet's disease.
- 2004
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Ingår i: Clinical and experimental immunology. - : Oxford University Press (OUP). - 0009-9104 .- 1365-2249. ; 137:1, s. 201-8
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Tidskriftsartikel (refereegranskat)abstract
- Behcet's disease (BD) specific peptide (p336-351) was identified within the human 60 kD heat shock protein (HSP60). Oral p336-351 induced uveitis in rats which was prevented by oral tolerization with the peptide linked to recombinant cholera toxin B subunit (CTB). This strategy was adopted in a phase I/II clinical trial by oral administration of p336-351-CTB, 3 times weekly, followed by gradual withdrawal of all immunosuppressive drugs used to control the disease in 8 patients with BD. The patients were monitored by clinical and ophthalmological examination, as well as extensive immunological investigations. Oral administration of p336-351-CTB had no adverse effect and withdrawal of the immunosuppressive drugs showed no relapse of uveitis in 5 of 8 patients or 5 of 6 selected patients who were free of disease activity prior to initiating the tolerization regimen. After tolerization was discontinued, 3 of 5 patients remained free of relapsing uveitis for 10-18 months after cessation of all treatment. Control of uveitis and extra-ocular manifestations of BD was associated with a lack of peptide-specific CD4+ T cell proliferation, a decrease in expression of TH1 type cells (CCR5, CXCR3), IFN-gamma and TNF-alpha production, CCR7+ T cells and costimulatory molecules (CD40 and CD28), as compared with an increase in these parameters in patients in whom uveitis had relapsed. The efficacy of oral peptide-CTB tolerization will need to be confirmed in a phase III trial, but this novel strategy in humans might be applicable generally to autoimmune diseases in which specific antigens have been identified.
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