As of October 2013, the prokaryotic genome dataset contains more than 15,000 genomes from almost 4,500 species representing a wide range of organisms. They include many important human pathogens, but also organisms that are of interest for non-medical reasons, biodiversity, epidemiology, and ecology. There are obligate intracellular parasites, symbionts, free-living microbes, hyperthermophiles ...

The metabolic theory of ecology links physiology with ecology, and successfully predicts many allometric scaling relationships. In recent years, proponents and critics of metabolic theory have debated vigorously about the scaling of metabolic rate. We show that the controversy arose, in part, because researchers examined the mean exponent separately from the variance. We estimate both quantitie...

Feeding ecology is central to an understanding of the ecology and life-history strategies of species. The abundance and distribution of food can affect a range of life-history traits, including body size, spatial organization or mating system (Partridge & Green, 1985; Vezina, 1985; Gittleman, 1986; Dayan & Simberloff, 1996; Geffen et al., 1996). Feeding Escuela Superior de Ciencias Experimental...

This report summarizes the proceedings of the Metagenomics, Metadata, Metaanalysis, Models and Metainfrastructure (M5) Roundtable at the 13th International Society for Microbial Ecology Meeting in Seattle, WA, USA August 22-27, 2010. The Genomic Standards Consortium (GSC) hosted this meeting as a community engagement exercise to describe the GSC to the microbial ecology community during this im...

The only thing about Nature that is certain and absolute is patchiness in space and time. All landscapes are patchy over a range of scales as consequences of natural and anthropogenic processes. To understand the dynamics of hierarchically structured, heterogeneous systems, models are important in several ways. Models can be used to generate new hypotheses, to clarify and test existing hypothes...

The broad range of subjects represented in this symposium highlight exciting new advances in the field of stream fish community ecology. Some of the chapters expand on themes (e.g., community stability, species interactions) that were represented in the 1987 publication Community and Evolutionary Ecology of North American Stream Fishes edited by W. J. Matthews and D. C. Heins. Others present re...

Industrial Ecology aims to inform decision making about the environmental impacts of industrial production processes by tracking and analyzing resource use and flows of industrial products, consumer products and wastes. Quantifying the patterns of use of materials and energy in different societies is one area of research in Industrial Ecology. An extensive literature is devoted in particular to...

We combine evolutionary biology and community ecology to test whether two species traits, body size and geographic range, explain long term variation in local scale freshwater stream fish assemblages. Body size and geographic range are expected to influence several aspects of fish ecology, via relationships with niche breadth, dispersal, and abundance. These traits are expected to scale inverse...