Win-win for wind and wildlife: a vision to facilitate sustainable development.

Wind energy offers the potential to reduce carbon emissions while increasing energy independence and bolstering economic development. However, wind energy has a larger land footprint per Gigawatt (GW) than most other forms of energy production, making appropriate siting and mitigation particularly important. Species that require large unfragmented habitats and those known to avoid vertical structures are particularly at risk from wind development. Developing energy on disturbed lands rather than placing new developments within large and intact habitats would reduce cumulative impacts to wildlife. The U.S. Department of Energy estimates that it will take 241 GW of terrestrial based wind development on approximately 5 million hectares to reach 20% electricity production for the U.S. by 2030. We estimate there are ∼7,700 GW of potential wind energy available across the U.S., with ∼3,500 GW on disturbed lands. In addition, a disturbance-focused development strategy would avert the development of ∼2.3 million hectares of undisturbed lands while generating the same amount of energy as development based solely on maximizing wind potential. Wind subsidies targeted at favoring low-impact developments and creating avoidance and mitigation requirements that raise the costs for projects impacting sensitive lands could improve public value for both wind energy and biodiversity conservation.

No evidence of persistent Yersina pestis infection at prairie dog colonies in north-central Montana.

Sylvatic plague is a flea-borne zoonotic disease caused by the bacterium Yersinia pestis, which can cause extensive mortality among prairie dogs (Cynomys) in western North America. It is unclear whether the plague organism persists locally among resistant host species or elsewhere following epizootics. From June to August 2002 and 2003 we collected blood and flea samples from small mammals at prairie dog colonies with a history of plague, at prairie dog colonies with no history of plague, and from off-colony sites where plague history was unknown. Blood was screened for antibody to Y. pestis by means of enzyme-linked immunosorbent assay or passive hemagglutination assay and fleas were screened for Y. pestis DNA by polymerase chain reaction. All material was negative for Y. pestis including 156 blood samples and 553 fleas from colonies with a known history of plague. This and other studies provide evidence that Y. pestis may not persist at prairie dog colonies following an epizootic.

Evolution of morphological integration: developmental accommodation of stress-induced variation.

Extreme environmental change during growth often results in an increase in developmental abnormalities in the morphology of an organism. The evolutionary significance of such stress-induced variation depends on the recurrence of a stressor and on the degree to which developmental errors can be accommodated by an organism's ontogeny without significant loss of function. We subjected populations of four species of soricid shrews to an extreme environment during growth and measured changes in the patterns of integration and accommodation of stress-induced developmental errors in a complex of mandibular traits. Adults that grew under an extreme environment had lower integration of morphological variation among mandibular traits and highly elevated fluctuating asymmetry in these traits, compared to individuals that grew under the control conditions. However, traits differed strongly in the magnitude of response to a stressor--traits within attachments of the same muscle (functionally integrated traits) had lower response and changed their integration less than other traits. Cohesiveness in functionally integrated complexes of traits under stress was maintained by close covariation of their developmental variation. Such developmental accommodation of stress-induced variation might enable the individual's functioning and persistence under extreme environmental conditions and thus provides a link between individual adaptation to stress and the evolution of stress resistance.

Evolution of morphological integration. I. Functional units channel stress-induced variation in shrew mandibles.

Stress-induced deviations from normal development are often assumed to be random, yet their accumulation and expression can be influenced by patterns of morphological integration within an organism. We studied within-individual developmental variation (fluctuating asymmetry) in the mandible of four shrew species raised under normal and extreme environments. Patterns of among-individual variation and fluctuating asymmetry were strongly concordant in traits that were involved in the attachment of the same muscles (i.e., functionally integrated traits), and fluctuating asymmetry was closely integrated among these traits, implying direct developmental interactions among traits involved in the same function. Stress-induced variation was largely confined to the directions delimited by functionally integrated groups of traits in the pattern that was concordant with species divergence--species differed most in the same traits that were most sensitive to stress within each species. These results reveal a strong effect of functional complexes on directing and incorporating stress-induced variation during development and might explain the historical persistence of sets of traits involved in the same function in shrew jaws despite their high sensitivity to environmental variation.