Host-associated organisms (e.g., parasites, commensals, and mutualists) may rely on their hosts for only a portion of their life cycle. The life-history traits and physiology of hosts are well-known determinants of the biodiversity of their associated organisms. The environmental context may strongly influence this interaction, but the relative roles of host traits and the environment are poorl...

Environmental volunteering and environmental citizen science projects both have a pivotal role in civic participation. However, one of the common challenges is recruiting and retaining an adequate level of participant engagement to ensure the sustainability of these projects. Thus, understanding patterns of participation is fundamental to both types of projects. This study uses and builds on ex...

To date, inappropriately adjusted driving speed is still one of the main causes for traffic accidents (Aarts et al., 2011). Recent theoretical approaches of modeling speed behavior assume that choice of speed is partly determined by environmental characteristics (e.g. Fuller, 2005). In addition, empirical studies revealed an influence of basic changes of environmental characteristics (e.g. Godl...

Concern regarding global change has increased the need to understand the relationship between fire regime characteristics and the environment. Pyrogeographical theory suggests that fire regimes are constrained by climate, vegetation and fire ignition processes, but it is not obvious how fire regime characteristics are related to those factors. We used a three-matrix approach with a multivariate...

The pH of the water associated with toxic blooms of cyanobacteria is typically in the alkaline range; however, previously only microcystin-degrading bacteria growing in neutral pH conditions have been isolated. Therefore, we sought to isolate and characterize an alkali-tolerant microcystin-degrading bacterium from a water bloom using microcystin-LR. Analysis of the 16S rRNA gene sequence reveal...

Introduction: In our study, various test methods were adopted to explore the mineralogical characteristics, grindability, particle morphology, size distribution, and environmental leaching toxicity of iron ore tailings (lOTs). Methods: The include petrographic analysis, X-ray diffraction (XRD), scanning electronic microscopy (SEM), synchronous thermal analyzer (DSC-TGA), electron probe microana...

Abstract Storms that produce gargantuan hail (defined here as ≥ 6 inches or 15 cm in maximum dimension), although seemingly rare, can cause extensive damage to property and infrastructure, injury even death humans animals. Currently, we are limited our ability accurately predict detect on radar. In this study, analyze the environments radar characteristics of hail-producing storms define parame...