Successful economic development is usually characterized by two salient phenomena: industrialization and demographic transition. Chronologically both events happen so closely to each other that historians and economists alike suspect that they are interrelated. This paper develops a theory for their interaction with a special emphasis on the different pattern and pace of transition in cross-cou...

Spawning sites used by one or more species were located by intensively searching nearshore coral reefs of Kimbe Bay (New Britain, Papua New Guinea). Once identified, the spawning sites were surveyed repeatedly within fixed 5 m radius circular areas, for  > 2000 h of observations ranging from before dawn to after dusk spanning 190 days between July 2001 and May 2004. A total of 38 spawning sites...

The specificity of the interactions between plants and their consumers varies considerably. The evolutionary and ecological factors underlying this variation are unclear. Several potential explanatory factors vary with latitude, for example plant species richness and the intensity of herbivory. Here, we use comparative phylogenetic methods to test the effect of latitude on host range in scale i...

The Ellenburger Group of the West Texas Permian Basin is part of a Lower Ordovician carbonate platform sequence that covers a large area of the United States. During the Early Ordovician, the Permian Basin area was located on the southwest edge of the Laurentia plate between 20° and 30° latitude. The equator crossed northern Canada, situating Texas in a tropical to subtropical latitude. The are...

A large body of research dating back to the 19th century has shown evidence for consistent relationships between ecological variables across geographical space (Lomolino et al., 2006; Gaston et al., 2008). These so-called ecogeographical ‘rules’ are often observed both within and among species and across lineages. Here we focus on three of the most familiar Department of Biology, University of ...

Many traits are assumed to have a causal (necessary) relationship with one another because of their common covariation with a physiological, ecological or geographical factor. Herein, we demonstrate a straightforward test for inferring causality using residuals from regression of the traits with the common factor. We illustrate this test using the covariation with latitude of a proxy for the ci...

Latitudinal variation in thermal reaction norms of key fitness traits may inform about the response of populations to climate warming, yet their adaptive nature and evolutionary potential are poorly known. We assessed the contribution of quantitative genetic, neutral genetic and environmental effects to thermal reaction norms of growth rate for populations of the damselfly Ischnura elegans. Amo...

We examined whether a reported northward expansion of the geographic distribution limit of the disease-transmitting tick Ixodes ricinus and an increased tick density between the early 1980s and mid-1990s in Sweden was related to climatic changes. The annual number of days with minimum temperatures above vital bioclimatic thresholds for the tick's life-cycle dynamics were related to tick density...

Among birds, northern temperate species generally have larger clutches, shorter development periods and lower adult survival than similarly-sized southern and tropical species. Even though this global pattern is well accepted, the driving mechanism is still not fully understood. The main theories are founded on the differing environmental seasonality of these zones (higher seasonality in the No...

Many macroecological patterns of biodiversity, including the relationship between latitude and species richness, are well-described. Data collected in a repeatable, standardized manner can advance the discipline beyond the description of patterns and be used to elucidate underlying mechanisms. Using standardized field methods and a hyper-diverse focal taxon, viz. Coleoptera, we aim to (1) descr...