The rapid expansion and increasing mobility of human populations make understanding the evolution of parasite virulence a public health priority. The potential for the swift evolution of virulence in response to changes in host ecology has motivated the integration of evolutionary ecology with epidemiological theory, as part of the emerging field of evolutionary epidemiology. Virulence is the p...

The world’s population of nearly one billion in 1800 has grown to approximately 6.9 billion today, and population projections suggest that the world population will fall somewhere between 8 and 10.5 billion by 2050, depending on changes in national level fertility and mortality rates ( UNPD 2010). Nearly all of the world’s net population growth over the coming 40 years will occur in cities in l...

The origins of biological complexity in microbial ecosystems are encoded within the collective genomes of the community. Cultivation-independent genomic studies provide direct access to the genomes of naturally occurring microbes, cultivated or not. Genome-enabled approaches are now significantly advancing current knowledge of genome content, diversity, population biology and evolution in natur...

Background Estimating the abundance of organisms. Ecology is often referred to as the "study of distribution and abundance". This being true, we would often like to know how many of a certain organism are in a certain place, or at a certain time. Information on the abundance of an organism, or group of organisms is fundamental to most questions in ecology. However, we can rarely do a complete c...