Understanding the key aspects of plant regeneration from seeds is crucial in assessing species assembly to their habitats. However, the regenerative traits of seed dormancy and germination are underrepresented in this context. In the alpine zone, the large species and microhabitat diversity provide an ideal context to assess habitat-related regenerative strategies. To this end, seeds of 53 spec...

Terrestrial habitats exhibit a variety of light environments. If species exhibit evolutionary adaptations of their visual system or signals to habitat light conditions, then these conditions can directly influence the structure of communities. We evaluated habitat light characteristics and visual-signal design in a pair of sympatric species of lizards: Anolis cooki and Anolis cristatellus. We f...

The main objective of this study was to quantify the impacts of the run of river (ROR) scheme on the instream habitat and macroinvertebrate community. We sampled the macroinvertebrate assemblages and collected the habitat variables above and below an ROR hydropower plant: Aotou plant in the Hailang River, China. The effects of the ROR scheme on habitat conditions were examined using regulation-...

1. There is great interest on the effects of habitat fragmentation, whereby habitat is lost and the spatial configuration of remaining habitat patches is altered, on individual breeding performance. However, we still lack consensus of how this important process affects reproductive success, and whether its effects are mainly due to reduced fecundity or nestling survival. 2. The main reason for ...

Many species have already experienced distributional shifts due to changing environmental conditions, and analyzing past shifts can help us to understand the influence of environmental stressors on a species as well as to analyze the effectiveness of conservation strategies. We aimed to (1) quantify regional habitat associations of the California gnatcatcher (Polioptila californica); (2) descri...

Simplification of natural habitats is a growing global concern demanding that ecologists better understand how habitat heterogeneity influences the structure and functioning of ecosystems. While there is extensive evidence that physical habitat heterogeneity affects the structure of biotic communities (i.e., organismal abundance, distribution, diversity, etc.), ecologists know little about how ...

Large-scale and long-term habitat management plans are needed to maintain the diversity of habitat classes required by wildlife species. Planning efforts would benefit from assessments of potential climate and land-use change effects on habitats. We assessed climate and land-use driven changes in areas of closedand open-canopy forest across the Northeast and Midwest by 2060. Our assessments wer...

Habitat and species richness in drylands are affected by the dynamics of a few key species, termed "ecosystem engineers." These species modulate the landscape and redistribute the water resources so as to allow the introduction of other species. A mathematical model is developed for a pair of ecosystem engineers commonly found in drylands: plants forming vegetation patterns and cyanobacteria fo...

Table 1. Buffer distances and maximum elevation thresholds to define floodplain spatial extent..... 23 Table 2. Estimated total sockeye salmon run size (in thousands) for the Nushagak river watershed. Figure 2. Broad scale landscape processes and patterns such as climate and topography influence conditions at reach and microhabitat scales important for freshwater life stages of Pacific salmon, ...