sabzkouh protected area, with the variety of natural ecosystems and landscapes, is very rich from the point of diversity in climate, topography, habitats and wildlife that is located in central zagros. evidences show that its ecosystems such as other iranian semiarid natural ecosystems, undergone changes in their vegetation structure over the past years. obtaining multi-spectral and multi-tempo...

reproduced by historical simulations with anthropogenic and natural forcings, but are absent if only natural forcings are considered, pointing to new potential fingerprints of anthropogenic warming. These results suggest a fundamental pattern of global warming over land that depend on the dryness of ecosystems in midand lowlatitudes, likely reflecting primarily the first order large-scale therm...

The rapid development of resistance in bacteria is an evolutionary response to the selective pressure of antibiotics and results from natural selection. It is established that microbial adaptation evolves, and the cause for the development of antibiotic resistance is the widespread misuse of antibiotics. Pollution of the environment by antibiotic resistance genes can increase the chances of hum...

Two main problems can be identified in fisheries currently: overfishing and negative effects on ecosystems (including bycatch). Both result in a reduction in natural capital. In recent years a concept for a theory of sustainability was developed at our institute. Part of the work has been to develop a strategy in fisheries for creating sustainable use systems, which can be considered as "invest...

A review of Paul W. Taylor's Respect for Nature: A Theory of aylor develops a biocentric environEnvironmental Ethics (Princeton: mental ethics based on moral Princeton University Press, 1986). agents' respect for inherently worthy moral subjects in nature. 329 pages, hardcover $37.50, Moral subjects consist of "the paperback $12.50. natural world ... the entire set of natural ecosystems on our ...

I n a country like India, millions of people rely on products from natural ecosystems to sustain their livelihood. Natural ecosystems provide clean water from watersheds, retention of soil and soil fertility, sequestration of carbon, as well as pollinators and natural predators of pests. For these reasons, rapid, often irreversible, loss of species and ecosystems is of more than just academic c...

Learning to appreciate novel ecosystems will take practice and, as we argue in this chapter, perhaps some new approaches to valuing them. The challenge is not in learning to value novel ecosystems for the first time. After all, as Jackson (Chapter 7) notes, novel ecosystems are nothing new. Significant new ecological assemblies have arisen throughout the past. What is different now is the pace ...

The capacity for nitrate reduction, as measured by nitrate reductase activity (NRA), was generally low for a range of plant communities in Australia (coastal heathland, rainforest, savanna woodland, monsoon forest, mangrove, open Eucalyptus forest, coral cay open forest) and only a loose relationship existed between NRA and leaf nitrogen concentration. This suggests that nitrate ions are not th...

The central goal of this thesis is to provide additional criteria towards implementing open-ended evolution in an artificial system. Methods inspired by biological evolution are frequently applied to generate autonomous agents too complex to design by hand. Despite substantial progress in the area of evolutionary computation, additional efforts are needed to identify a coherent set of requireme...