Habitat loss and fragmentation are leading causes of species extinctions in terrestrial, aquatic and marine systems. Along coastlines, natural habitats support high biodiversity and valuable ecosystem services but are often replaced with engineered structures for coastal protection or erosion control. We coupled high-resolution shoreline condition data with an eleven-year time series of fish co...

The continuum hypothesis states that both deterministic and stochastic processes contribute to the assembly of ecological communities. However, the contextual dependency of these processes remains an open question that imposes strong limitations on predictions of community responses to environmental change. Here we measure community and habitat turnover across multiple vertical soil horizons at...

Bacterial dissolution and degradation of particles is an important process in the cycling of organic matter in the ocean. Because particles are the primary vehicles for vertical export of organic material from the oceans’ productive surface layer to the deep sea, bacteria associated with marine particles contribute to the export of organic matter and to the regulation of its magnitude and compo...

Interactions with microbial communities can have profound influences on animal physiology, thereby impacting animal performance and fitness. Therefore, it is important to understand the diversity and nature of host-microbe interactions in various animal groups (invertebrates, fish, amphibians, reptiles, birds, and mammals). In this perspective, I discuss how the field of host-microbe interactio...

There is a wealth of information on the Web about any number of topics. Many communities in developing regions are often interested in information relating to specific topics. For example, health workers are interested in specific medical information regarding epidemic diseases in their region while teachers and students are interested in educational information relating to their curriculum. Th...

Cyanobacteria and lichens living under sandstone surfaces in the McMurdo Dry Valleys require snow for moisture. Snow accumulated beyond a thin layer, however, is counterproductive, interfering with rock insolation, snow melting, and photosynthetic access to light. With this in mind, the facts that rock slope and direction control colonization, and that climate change results in regional extinct...

Based on results from a larger study of DARE stakeholders in Montana, it was found that some communities experienced difficulties materially supporting their local DARE program, despite a perceived need for such a service. Past literature has indicated that success in local development efforts is highly related to the ability of a community power structure to mobilize resources. This thesis exa...

This study describes the development of periphytic communities established on artificial Ž . substrates in tilapia Oreochromis niloticus cages during a 10-week experiment conducted in the Meghna River, Bangladesh. Qualitative and quantitative characteristics of the periphyton were recorded, including diatom community composition and primary productivity. Fish grazed actively on the periphyton a...

This position paper on expert finding presents a conceptual framework for the reuse and interlinking of existing, well-established vocabularies in the Semantic Web. Such a framework can be used to connect people with people, based on joint or complementing interests (e.g. the need to develop specific new or existing skills for upcoming projects). Driven by a requirement to find experts using th...

Data portability has become an important requirement on the Social Web. This paper describes how data and social network portability can be achieved by building upon existing Semantic Web developments such as SIOC and FOAF. The SIOC project provides a common format for expressing user-generated content in a machine-readable form and tools for import/export of this information, while the FOAF vo...