Aim Wild bees still face striking shortfalls in knowledge of biodiversity key regions the world. This includes Europe, where despite a long tradition data gathering, continental scale distribution patterns wild have not been systematically analysed to date. study aims characterise large-scale to: (i) understand spatial–temporal heterogeneity databases, (ii) locate genuine diversity hotspots and...

AIM Phylogenetic diversity patterns are increasingly being used to better understand the role of ecological and evolutionary processes in community assembly. Here, we quantify how these patterns are influenced by scale choices in terms of spatial and environmental extent and organismic scales. LOCATION European Alps. METHODS We applied 42 sampling strategies differing in their combination o...

More than 185 species, strains and unclassified Theileria parasites are categorized in the Entrez Taxonomy. The accurate diagnosis and proper identification of the causative agents are important for understanding the epidemiology, prevention and appropriate treatment. This study aims to discuss the importance of two genes of Theileria annulata 18S ribosomal RNA (18S rRNA) and Theileria annulata...

Environmental drivers of biodiversity can be identified by relating patterns of community similarity to ecological factors. Community variation has traditionally been assessed by considering changes in species composition and more recently by incorporating phylogenetic information to account for the relative similarity of taxa. Here, we describe how an important class of measures including Bray...

Given a phylogenetic tree with leaves labeled by a collection of species, and with weighted edges, the "phylogenetic diversity" of any subset of the species is the sum of the edge weights of the minimal subtree connecting the species. This measure is relevant in biodiversity conservation where one may wish to compare different subsets of species according to how much evolutionary variation they...

Conservation biologists and community ecologists have increasingly begun to quantify the phylogenetic diversity and phylogenetic dispersion in species assemblages. In some instances, the phylogenetic trees used for such analyses are fully bifurcating, but in many cases the phylogenies being used contain unresolved nodes (i.e. polytomies). The lack of phylogenetic resolution in such studies, whi...