BACKGROUND Many ecosystem services provided by forests are important for the livelihoods of indigenous people. Sacred forests are used for traditional practices by the ethnic minorities in northern Thailand and they protect these forests that are important for their culture and daily life. Swidden fallow fields are a dominant feature of the agricultural farming landscapes in the region. In this...

Euphorbia melanohydrata subsp. conica, here described as a new subspecies, is only known from a small area within the Gariep Centre of Endemism, southwestern Namibia. Diagnostic characters for subsp. conica include a distinctly conical or ovoid habit, a thickened main root usually without rhizomatous branches (plants not clump-forming), tuberculate lateral branches that often rebranch and persi...

Many evolutionary arguments are based on the assumption that quantitative characters are highly evolvable entities that can be rapidly moulded by changing selection pressures. The empirical evaluation of this assumption depends on having an operational measure of evolvability that reflects the ability of a trait to respond to a given external selection pressure. We suggest short-term evolvabili...