BACKGROUND Continental slopes are among the steepest environmental gradients on earth. However, they still lack finer quantification and characterisation of their faunal diversity patterns for many parts of the world. METHODOLOGY/PRINCIPAL FINDINGS Changes in fish community structure and diversity along a depth gradient from 50 to 1200 m were studied from replicated stereo baited remote under...

Invertebrate diversity is important for a multitude of ecosystem services and as a component of the larger ecological food web. A better understanding of the factors influencing invertebrate taxonomic richness and diversity at both local and landscape scales is important for conserving biodiversity within the agricultural landscape. The aim of this study was to determine if invertebrate richnes...

ion geospatial domain ontology Figure 2: The distinction between three types of concepts leads to geospatial domain ontologies which are not biased by implementation needs. For example, a town is often represented as a point feature in geospatial applications. But in the first place, the “real world” town has no ontological relation to the representational structure of a point. The domain of ge...

This extended abstract digests a formal mathematical schema for the generation of representations over basic sensory motor neural perceptions. This representation can then be applied for a broad spectrum of cognitive and behavioral mechanisms. Category theoretical constructs provide tools of rigour that capture a structural essence but avoid over determinism. The mathematical setting systematiz...

Land use change modifies the environment at multiple spatial scales, and is a main driver of species declines and deterioration of ecosystem services. However, most of the research on the effects of land use change has focused on taxonomic diversity, while functional diversity, an important predictor of ecosystem services, is often neglected. We explored how local and landscape scale characteri...

We determined the accuracy and reproducibility of whole-community fatty acid methyl ester (FAME) analysis with two model bacterial communities differing in composition by using the Microbial ID, Inc. (MIDI), system. The biomass, taxonomic structure, and expected MIDI-FAME profiles under a variety of environmental conditions were known for these model communities a priori. Not all members of eac...

A bacteria library was constructed from the caecum of a rabbit maintained under standard conditions. The complete gene 16S rRNA gene was sequenced. The 228 clones obtained were distributed in 70 operational taxonomic units (OTUs). The large majority of the OTUs were composed of one or two clones and seven OTUs contained half of the sequences. Fourteen sequences had high similarity to the sequen...