The field of habitat ecology has been muddled by imprecise terminology regarding what constitutes habitat, and how importance is measured through use, selection, avoidance and other bio-statistical terminology. Added to the confusion is the idea that habitat is scale-specific. Despite these conceptual difficulties, ecologists have made advances in understanding 'how habitats are important to an...

1) Laboratory of Apiculture and Social Insects, Department of Animal and Plant Sciences, University of Sheffield, Sheffield, S10 2TN, UK * Current address: Department of Ecology and Evolutionary Biology, Rice University, MS 170, 6100 Main, Houston, Texas 77005, USA (e-mail: [email protected]) 2) Laboratory of Entomology, Zoological Institute, Katholieke Universiteit Leuven, Naamsestraat 59, B-3...

Community ecology has long focused on energy and nutrients as currencies of species interactions. Evidence from physiological ecology and recent studies suggest that in terrestrial systems, water may influence animal behavior and global patterns of species richness. Despite these observations, water has received little attention as a currency directly influencing animal species interactions. He...

There is an increasing need to assess the effects of climate and land-use change on habitat quality, ideally from a mechanistic basis. The symposium "Molecules to Migration: Pressures of Life" at the Fourth International Conference in Africa for Comparative Physiology and Biochemistry, Maasai Mara National Reserve, Kenya, 2008, illustrated how the principles of biophysical ecology can capture t...

Detailed observation of the movement of individual animals offers the potential to understand spatial population processes as the ultimate consequence of individual behaviour, physiological constraints and fine-scale environmental influences. However, movement data from individuals are intrinsically stochastic and often subject to severe observation error. Linking such complex data to dynamical...

Contributions to this Theme Section (TS) articulate an increasingly powerful synthesis in ecology: understanding animal perceptual abilities lends insight into ecological interactions that, in turn, determine fundamental properties of populations of organisms and communities. This synthesis, often referred to as sensory ecology (e.g. Dusenbery 1992), has its antecedents in diverse fields rangin...

Fabien Aubret, Gordon M. Burghardt, Stéphanie Maumelat, Xavier Bonnet, and Don Bradshaw School of Animal Biology and Centre for Native Animal Research, University of Western Australia, Perth, Western Australia 6009, Australia, Centre d’Etudes Biologiques de Chizé, Centre d’Etudes Biologiques de Chizé, 79360 Villiers en Bois, France, Département de Biologie, Université de Poitiers, Poitiers, Fra...

Ecology is the study of living organisms and their environment in an attempt to explain and predict. While natural history involves the accumulation of detailed data with emphasis on the autecology of each species, the objectives of ecology in general and of functional ecology in particular are to develop predictive theories and to assemble the data to develop general models. Functional ecology...