Microbial ecological studies have been remarkably promoted by the high-throughput sequencing approach with explosive information of taxonomy and relative abundance. However, relative abundance does not reflect the quantity of the microbial community and the inter-sample differences among taxa. In this study, we refined and applied an integrated high-throughput absolute abundance quantification ...

Due to time and financial constraints indices are often used to obtain landscape-scale estimates of relative species abundance. Using two different field methods and comparing the results can help to detect possible bias or a non monotonic relationship between the index and the true abundance, providing more reliable results. We used data obtained from camera traps and feces counts to independe...

There is now evidence that aerobic anoxygenic phototrophic (AAP) bacteria are widespread across aquatic systems, yet the factors that determine their abundance and activity are still not well understood, particularly in freshwaters. Here we describe the patterns in AAP abundance, cell size and pigment content across wide environmental gradients in 43 temperate and boreal lakes of Québec. AAP ba...

It is widely accepted that distributions of plants and animals are broadly constrained by their physiological tolerances to climatic factors (Woodward, 1987, 1990). This generalization is held to be true for species at a variety of spatial scales (Whittaker et al., 2001), although there is a wide recognition that the importance of climate is best expressed at large spatial scales (Rahbek & Grav...

Many trait-based plant investigations have neglected the intraspecific trait variations. A lot of ecologists consider that this is unreasonable, because intraspecific variation significantly affects various ecological dynamics. However, it is not feasible to record the traits of each plant individually at every community site. Therefore, the aim of this study was to determine in which circumsta...

Courant and Deardorff (1992) show theoretically that an extremely uneven distribution of factors within a country can induce behavior at odds with overall comparative advantage. We demonstrate the importance of this insight for developing countries. We show that Mexican regions exhibit substantial variation in skill abundance, offer significantly different relative factor rewards, and produce d...