The first few words of the title of this symposium are "Anchoring Biodiversity Information". In order to properly anchor anything for a long-lasting future, a solid foundation needs to have been laid. For the zoological portion of biodiversity information, that firm foundation is best exemplified in the works of Charles Davies Sherborn. This man, like others of his ilk, was intimately focused o...

Today’s plant communities are the result of long-term interactions between vegetation and site factors including man-made impacts. Current species diversity reflects historical as well as environmental factors since environmental change and human activities lead to changes in species composition and competition through biological invasions. It means that biodiversity as an indicator for the wel...

We used a relatively simple and direct remote-sensing approach to determine biodiversity values in arid ecosystems and thus identify potential conservation sites. We developed indices based on regression models between grass, shrub, litter, exposed-soil groundcover components, and Landsat thematic mapper satellite imagery reflectance values over a reference site in the northern Chihuahuan Deser...

Biological invasion is a widespread, but poorly understood phenomenon. Elton’s hypothesis, supported by theory, experiment, and anecdotal evidence, suggests that an important determinant of invasion success is resident biodiversity, arguing that high diversity increases the competitive environment of communities and makes them more difficult to invade. Observational studies of plant invasions, ...

Provision of free, universal access to biodiversity information is a practical imperative for the international conservation community — this goal should be accomplished by promotion of the Public Domain and by development of a sustainable Biodiversity Information Commons adapting emergent legal and technical mechanisms to provide a free, secure and persistent environment for access to and use ...

Access to and sharing of data is essential for biodiversity conservation. However, workers from developing nations that harbor rich biodiversity often do not have access to biodiversity information and often are not keen on making what data they have accessible to others. Open access initiatives offer a great opportunity to make the world’s biodiversity information accessible to anyone, at any ...

Conventional content-based filtering methods recommend documents based on extracted keywords. They calculate the similarity between keywords and user interests and return a list of matching documents. In the long run, this approach often leads to overspecialization and fewer new entries with respect to a user’s preferences. Here, we propose a semantic recommender system using Linked Open Data f...

sustainability of productions in agricultural ecosystems depends on conservation and amplification of biodiversity. this study was conducted to determine the planting area, species richness, species evenness and biodiversity of different agronomical, horticultural and livestock productions in kerman province. for this purpose, information about planting area of agronomical and horticultural pla...

two different microhabitats (cropped fields versus established date-palm farms) in two different cities in khuzestan province, southwestern iran, were sampled monthly during 2011-2012 in order to assess the role of anthropic uses of soil on the biodiversity of oribatid mites. a total of 17 species of oribatid mites belonging to 10 families and 15 genera were identified (nine species were collec...