Many exploited reef fish are vulnerable to overfishing because they concentrate over hard-bottom patchy habitats. How mobile reef fish use patchy habitat, and the potential consequences on demographic parameters, must be known for spatially explicit population dynamics modeling, for discriminating essential fish habitat (EFH), and for effectively planning conservation measures (e.g., marine pro...

The Endangered Species Act of 1973 has challenged scientists perhaps more than any other legislation. In response, the scope of wildlife biology has been redefined and expanded, adaptive management has evolved into a population recovery technique, population viability analysis and other problem solving methods are being developed, and the very definition of a biological species is being reexami...

brown bear (ursus arctos) is one of the most important carnivores in iran. however, information on its habitat associations is scared. based on ecological niche factor analysis (enfa) method, a summer habitat suitability model was developed for this species in the southern part of alborz protected area. our results showed that, brown bears prefer higher altitudes and northern aspects in their p...

Strategies for conserving plant diversity in agroecosystems generally focus on either expanding land area in non-crop habitat or enhancing diversity within crop fields through changes in within-field management practices. In this study, we compare effects on landscape-scale species richness from such land-sharing or land-sparing strategies. We collected data in arable field, grassland, pasture,...

An autonomous agent (animat, hypothetical animal), called the (archae) paddler, is simulated in sufficient detail to regard its simulated aquatic locomotion (paddling) as physically possible. The paddler is supposed to be a model of an animal that might exist, although it is perfectly possible to view it as a model of a robot that might be built. The agent is assumed to navigate in a simulated ...

Habitat suitability models have been extensively used by conservation planners to estimate the likelihood of occurrence and abundance of threatened wildlife species in terrestrial ecosystems, but they have been rarely applied to aquatic environment. In this study a GIS-based habitat suitability (HS) model has been developed to identify suitable sites for Manila clam (Tapes philippinarum) farmin...

Vocal responses to anthropogenic noise have been documented in several species of songbird. However, only a few studies have investigated whether these adjustments are made in "real time" or are longer-term responses to particular soundscapes. Furthermore, increased ambient noise often is accompanied by structural changes to the habitat, including the introduction of noisy roadways and the remo...

BACKGROUND Species movement responses to landscape structures have been studied using a variety of methods, but movement research is still in need of simple methods that help predicting and comparing movements across structurally different landscapes. We demonstrate how habitat-specific movement models can be used to disentangle causes of differentiated movement patterns in structurally differe...

Spatially referenced mark-recapture data are becoming increasingly available, but the analysis of such data has remained difficult for a variety of reasons. One of the fundamental problems is that it is difficult to disentangle inherent movement behavior from sampling artifacts. For example, in a typical study design, short distances are sampled more frequently than long distances. Here we pres...