The Avian Collection of the Zoological Museum of the University of Athens (ZMUA).

BACKGROUND: The Zoological Museum of the University of Athens (ZMUA) was established in 1858. It is the oldest natural history museum of Greece. The museum began its operation with the acquisition of a core collection and has been expanding ever since. One of the most substantial parts of the museum's collection consists of the avian exhibits, originating from around the world. NEW INFORMATION: Today, the avian collection consists of 2,948 specimens, preserved mostly through taxidermy, along with a significant number of eggs. The birds have been collected from around the world. A substantial part of the collection consists of individuals originating from Greece, Brazil, Canada and Australia. Having this valuable source of biogeographic information and a potential reserve of historical genetic diversity, ZMUA presents here the contents of the avian collection.

Value, but high costs in post-deposition data curation.

Discoverability of sequence data in primary data archives is proportional to the richness of contextual information associated with the data. Here, we describe an exercise in the improvement of contextual information surrounding sample records associated with metagenomics sequence reads available in the European Nucleotide Archive. We outline the annotation process and summarize findings of this effort aimed at increasing usability of publicly available environmental data. Furthermore, we emphasize the benefits of such an exercise and detail its costs. We conclude that such a third party annotation approach is expensive and has value as an element of curation, but should form only part of a more sustainable submitter-driven approach. Database URL: http://www.ebi.ac.uk/ena.

Centipede assemblages along an urbanization gradient in the city of Heraklion, Crete (Greece).

Global urbanization is a major force that causes alteration and loss of natural habitats. Urban ecosystems are strongly affected by humans and there is a gradient of decreasing human influence from city centers to natural habitats. To study ecological changes along this continuum, researchers introduced the urban-rural gradient approach. The responses of centipedes to an urbanization gradient (urban-suburban-rural areas) were studied using pitfall traps in and near the city of Heraklion, in the island of Crete, Greece, from November 2010 to November 2011. Our results do not support the intermediate disturbance hypothesis, in which suburban areas located in the transitional zone between urban and rural habitats failed to indicate significant increase in terms of species richness and diversity.