A primary aim of community ecology is to identify the processes that govern multispecies assemblages across environmental gradients. Ecological networks comprising interacting species of plants and pollinators are particularly...
Figure 1: geoknife output from processing the PRISM dataset (Daly et al. 1994) according to ecoregion. Mean monthly precipitation for the month of May is shown here.
By Jordan Read
Downloading huge datasets for desktop processing can eat network...
Competition occurs when different living things harm one another. It is common in nature. As one example, the grass in my lawn becomes less dense when weeds run amok. But it isn’t clear...
We live in the shadows of lost giants. Until relatively recently almost every major vegetated land area on Earth possessed an abundance of large animals that we now only associate with African game parks. Mesmerizing early art shows how much these...
Migration in animals is one of the most spectacular biological phenomena on the planet. Theory predicts that, to evolve, the benefits of migration (in terms of lifetime reproductive success) should outweigh the costs of moving...
The Seewinkel region lies on the bordering lowland area between eastern Austria and western Hungary. It has sodic soil and several extremely shallow (<1 m) aquatic habitats, so-called soda pans were formed in...
Multiple anthropogenic pressures including the widespread introduction of non-native species threaten biodiversity and ecosystem functioning. Non-native species have been reported to induce ecological impacts...
Some species assemblages represent a narrow section of the tree of life, while others include a broader swath. This difference can be quantified with phylogenetic diversity measures, which describe the diversity of an...
Favourability models combining different factors in mainland Spain of four representative species: Chioglossa lusitanica, Iberolacerta cyreni, Pterocles orientalis, and Galemys pyrenaicus (favourability ranges from 0 to 1). Five alternative methodological...
Figure 1. Shifts in tree strategies along precipitation and temperature gradient in western USA. From left to right: Saguaro cacti (Carnegiea gigantea) in Arizona desert; cottonwoods (Populus fremontii) in Escalante (Utah); redwoods (Sequoia...
Global distribution of oceanic island treelines (red), continental island treelines (blue) vs mainland treelines (grey). While the mainland treelines are characterized by a subtropical double-hump, island treelines produce a single hump in the tropics and are substantially...
Figure 1. The eastern flank of Mont St-Joseph, in Parc national du Mont Mégantic, Québec. This photo was taken in spring, while deciduous trees (mostly sugar maple) were just leafing out (light green at low elevation). The dark green at high elevation is boreal forest,...
Figure 1. Mt Wilhelm (4509 m a.s.l.; the highest peak of Papua New Guinea) hosts one the most complete and largely undisturbed forest elevational gradient in tropics. Here I took photograph of the upper part of the gradient, from 2000 m to the summit of Mt Wilhelm with its...
