Charles Darwin recognized that flowering plants have an unrivalled diversity of sexual systems. Determining the ecological and genetic factors that govern sexual diversification in plants is today a central problem in evolutionary biology. The integration of phylogenetic, ecological and population-genetic studies have provided new insights into the selective mechanisms that are responsible for ...

The purpose of ecological niche modelling is to obtain a probabilistic species distribution based on species localization and environmental data. The problem is highly complex from the architectural viewpoint because its requirements include different distributed, interoperable and integration issues. Monolithic solutions were proposed and implemented but they were not able to achieve all requi...

The practice of assigning monetary values to ecological goods and services, in order to resolve what David Pearce calls the “zero price problem” has been a subject of debate practically since it was first proposed. At present, many working in the area of ecological economics are cautious of its use and even some who endorse monetary valuation justify its use on pragmatic rather than purely theo...

At the moment, there is no single conceptual theoretical model of gambling that adequately accounts for the multiple biological, psychological and ecological variables contributing to the development of pathological gambling. Advances in this area are hampered by imprecise definitions of pathological gambling, failure to distinguish between gambling problems and problem gamblers and a tendency ...

This paper is part of an on-going research which attempts to reveal whether an analogy between ecology and architecture can benefit architectural design and if so, then in what ways. The analogy is done through an interpretation of three ecological principles which define the organization of living systems and then attempts to reveal how these three ecological principles may be implemented in a...

Ecological environment is the key point of improving the flower’s quality and quantity. Due to China's flower production management at a lower level, there is no scientific method in real-time monitoring of the flower’s ecological environment. In order to solve the problem such as high costs; poor monitoring point scalability, poor mobility and other issues in traditional flower basement’s data...

Emission trading schemes like the European Union Emissions Trading System (EUETS) try to reconcile economic efficiency and ecological efficiency by creating financial incentives for companies to invest in climate-friendly innovations. Using real options methodology we demonstrate that under uncertainty economic and ecological efficiency are still mutually exclusive. This problem is even tighten...

Article history: Received 29 June 2006 Received in revised form 19 February 2007 Accepted 15 March 2007 Scaling of ecological data can present a challenge firstly because of the large amount of information contained in an ecological data set, and secondly because of the problem of fitting data to models that we want to use to capture structure. We present a measure of similarity between data co...