Small dams are ubiquitous yet poorly understood features in many streams. Dam removal is being used increasingly in stream restoration projects as a means to enhance habitat connectivity and ecosystem function. However, habitatand assemblage-level effects of small dams on stream mollusk assemblages are poorly documented. We examined associations between stream physicochemical habitat variables ...

Ecosystem engineers are species that alter the physical environment in ways that create new habitat or change the suitability of existing habitats for themselves or other organisms. In marine systems, much of the focus has been on species such as corals, oysters, and macrophytes that add physical structure to the environment, but organisms ranging from microbes to jellyfish and finfish that res...

Bird song is a sexual trait important in mate choice and known to be shaped by environmental selection. Here we investigate the ecological factors shaping song variation across a rainforest gradient in central Africa. We show that the little greenbul (Andropadus virens), previously shown to vary morphologically across the gradient in fitness-related characters, also varies with respect to song ...

We investigated daily and annual variation in the marine habitat selection of marbled murrelets Brachyramphus marmoratus (Alcidae) in the nearshore California Current System at scales of 10 to 100 km of coastline. We addressed 2 general questions: (1) how do murrelets select habitat while facing dramatic and often rapid variation in oceanographic conditions and prey availability; and (2) does s...

1. Many animals forage for non-food objects, such as nesting materials. In many organisms, the depots of such objects can be expansive, and are not intuitively adaptive. This study empirically explores varying theories for why these depots exist in the Florida harvester ant, Pogonomyrmex badius . 2. The Florida harvester ant, like its western congeners, collects and deposits large quantities of...

This work aims to parameterize the urban structure types (UST) in Santiago de Chile on statistical block level. In connotation of remote sensing UST are defined as land-use structure entities. Central input data for this object-oriented approach is spatially very high resolution panfused and atmospherically corrected Quickbird data. To analyse and assess the structural properties of urban landc...

Marine seafloor ecosystems, and efforts to restore them, depend critically on the influx and settlement of larvae following their pelagic dispersal period. Larval dispersal and settlement patterns are driven by a combination of physical oceanography and behavioral responses of larvae to a suite of sensory cues both in the water column and at settlement sites. There is growing evidence that the ...

Sandy coastal and inland beaches provide important habitat for shorebirds during the breeding, migration, and over-wintering seasons (Brown et al. 2000). These same beaches often are attractive to humans for recreation (Maguire et al. 2011), residential or commercial activity (Brown et al. 2010) and, in many areas, human use is intensive (De Ruyck et al. 1997). Human use of beaches can result i...

We present data on group structure and physical characteristics from free-ranging Simias concolor. Mean group size (n = 3) was 8.7 +/- 1.1 individuals with an average adult male:female sex ratio of 1:3. All individuals were sexed and allocated into three categories (infants, juveniles plus subadults and adults) on the basis of their physical development. Within age categories, head-body lengths...

Navigational and social challenges due to habitat conditions and sociality are known to influence dentate gyrus (DG) morphology, yet the relative importance of these factors remains unclear. Thus, we studied three natural populations of O. lunatus (Los Molles) and Octodon degus (El Salitre and Rinconada), two caviomorph species that differ in the extent of sociality and with contrasting vegetat...