Urbanization strongly affects biodiversity, altering natural communities and often leading to a reduced species richness. Yet, despite its increasingly recognized importance, how urbanization impacts on the health of individual animals, wildlife populations and on disease ecology remains poorly understood. To test whether, and how, urbanization-driven ecosystem alterations influence pathogen dy...

Following a mainstream British newspaper’s claim to have uncovered a new crime threat of ‘on-street grooming’, extensive and emotive debate continues around the so-called ‘Asian sex gang’ problem in the UK. This article examines the construction of a new racial crime threat, assessing the validity of its foundations and exploring its possible causes and consequences. Grooming is shown to be a d...

Predators commonly share prey with human exploiters, intuitively suggesting that there is an inherent human–predator conflict through competition for prey. Here we studied the effects of fishing and predation mortality on biomass distributions and yields of shared prey using a size-structured model of competing populations, describing the life histories of Baltic Sea sprat and herring. Whereas ...

High-volume, high-speed data streams may overwhelm the capabilities of stream processing systems; techniques such as data prioritization, avoidance of unnecessary processing and ondemand result production may be necessary to reduce processing requirements. However, the dynamic nature of data streams, in terms of both rate and content, makes the application of such techniques challenging. Such t...

Mutualisms can be viewed as biological markets in which partners of different species exchange goods and services to their mutual benefit. Trade between partners with conflicting interests requires mechanisms to prevent exploitation. Partner choice theory proposes that individuals might foil exploiters by preferentially directing benefits to cooperative partners. Here, we test this theory in a ...

Geological survey organisations (GSOs) are established by most nations to provide a geoscience knowledge base for effective decision-making on mitigating the impacts of natural hazards and global change, and on sustainable management of natural resources. The value of the knowledge base as a national asset is continually enhanced by exchange of knowledge between GSOs as data and information pro...

Although Internet scanning is one of the most popular malware propagation methods, sound measurements about its success rate are not generally available. In this work, we assess the success rate of an Internet-wide scanning event that was orchestrated by the Sality botnet during February 2011 using data from a university network. We first use unsampled NetFlow records from the border router of ...

Negotiating agents are an increasing factor in large-scale multi agents systems today. Thus, the need to design a high-performance agent, able to interact with its surrounding in order to achieve its goals, is in demand. It is especially beneficial to design an agent able to perform well in all environments a cooperative environment where all agents work together to achieve a joint goal (for ex...

Abstract The red fox ( Vulpes vulpes ) is one of the most adaptable carnivorans, thriving in cities across globe. We used GPS-tracking five suburban foxes high-density residential suburbs Perth, Western Australia to quantify (1) their habitat selection and (2) home range area. All showed statistically significant avoidance locations (p < 0.001) preference for parkland 0.001), with native veg...

Knowing the ecological requirements of bird species is essential for their successful conservation. We studied niche characteristics birds in managed small-sized green spaces urban core areas southern (Kavala, Greece) and northern Europe (Rovaniemi, Finland), during breeding season, based on a set 16 environmental variables using Outlying Mean Index, multivariate ordination technique. Overall, ...