biodiversity plays a crucial role in stability and productivity of natural ecosystem. the main goal of this research was to classify ecological groups in steppe rangeland and investigate their relationships with plant diversity indices. therefore, fifty different land unit tracts (lut) were identified in khod-neuk basin, yazd province, iran, in 2010. vegetation and soil samples were taken in th...

pollination and pest control are perhaps the best-known ecological services performed by hover flies. the species diversity and their abundance have an influential impact on the ecological services provided by this family. to find out species diversity of adult flower flies associated with agroecosystems in kerman province, a biodiversity survey using insect net and color water traps was conduc...

BACKGROUND "The enigma of soil animal species diversity" was the title of a popular article by J. M. Anderson published in 1975. In that paper, Anderson provided insights on the great richness of species found in soils, but emphasized that the mechanisms contributing to the high species richness belowground were largely unknown. Yet, exploration of the mechanisms driving species richness has fo...

We present a Markov chain model of succession in a rocky subtidal community based on a long-term (1986-1994) study of subtidal invertebrates (14 species) at Ammen Rock Pinnacle in the Gulf of Maine. The model describes successional processes (disturbance, colonization, species persistence, and replacement), the equilibrium (stationary) community, and the rate of convergence. We described succes...

While many studies have shown that urbanization and land-use type significantly impact species richness and evenness, few studies have investigated the mechanisms by which these changes occur. A residential neighborhood at ASU-Polytechnic Campus has been designed with 4 different neighborhood landscape regimes and provides the ideal opportunity to explore how local neighborhood landscaping affe...

Contrary to common belief, decomposition of diversity into independent richness and evenness components is mathematically impossible. However, richness can be decomposed into independent diversity and evenness or inequality components. The evenness or inequality component derived in this way is connected to most of the common measures of evenness and inequality in ecology and economics. This pe...

Observations were made on the occurrence, abundance, richness, and diversity of waterbirds in 15 major lakes in Bangalore city during 2008 - 2009. During the study period 35 species of aquatic birds were recorded. The number of aquatic bird species recorded at various lakes ranged from 23 to 35. The percent abundance of waterbirds recorded in the study lakes ranged from 2.46 to 21.49 and itwas ...

Recent empirical work in numerous systems has demonstrated the interdependence of spatial and temporal accumulation of species in the species-time-area relationship (STAR). The purpose of this study was to develop a process-based stochastic model for the STAR that assumes species neutrality and to compare the model's expectations to data collected on plant species in a tallgrass prairie. We var...