The flow of energy within an ecosystem can be considered either top-down, where predators influence consumers, or bottom-up, where producers influence consumers. Plethodon cinereus (Red-backed Salamander) is a terrestrial keystone predator who feeds on invertebrates within the ecosystem. We investigated the impact of the removal of P. cinereus on the detritivore food web in an upland deciduous ...

Interval arithmetic techniques such as VALENCIA-IVP allow calculating guaranteed enclosures of all reachable states of continuous-time dynamical systems with bounded uncertainties of both initial conditions and system parameters. Considering the fact that, in naive implementations of interval algorithms, overestimation might lead to unnecessarily conservative results, suitable consistency tests...

A kerosene type hydrocarbon fraction (equivalent to 7 L m(-2)) was added to enclosures in the surface layer of high-arctic intertidal beach sediment. The experimental spill was repeated in two consecutive years in the period July-September. The rate and extent of hydrocarbon removal and the accompanying bacterial response were monitored for 79 days (2002) and 78 days (2003). The bulk of added k...

Here we assess the fitness consequences of the replacement of the Hoxa1 coding region with its paralog Hoxb1 in mice (Mus musculus) residing in semi-natural enclosures. Previously, this Hoxa1B1 swap was reported as resulting in no discernible embryonic or physiological phenotype (i.e., functionally redundant), despite the 51% amino acid sequence differences between these two Hox proteins. Withi...

Captive groups of primates often exhibit higher rates of aggression than wild, free-ranging groups. It is important to determine which factors influence aggression in captivity because aggression, particularly intense aggression, can be harmful to animal health and well-being. In this study, we investigated the effect of ground substrate as well as season, rank, age, and group size on rates of ...

Opaque enclosures of buildings play an essential role in the level of comfort experienced indoors and annual energy demand. The impact of solar radiation and thermal inertia of the materials that make up the multi-layer enclosures substantially modify thermal transmittance behaviour of the enclosures. This dynamic form of heat transfer, additionally affected by indoor HVAC systems, has a substa...

We assessed space use by 2 pairs of captive female rhesus monkeys recently transferred into 2 enclosures moderately larger than their former traditional research cages and providing elevated perches at or above human eye level for all monkeys. This new space did not affect the ongoing biomedical research in which these captive monkeys were involved, and we sought to determine whether they used ...

We describe a new formulation of the aerosol general dynamic equation (GDE) that incorporates the phase segregation in a binary aerosol. The model assumes that complete phase segregation is the thermodynamically favored state, that no thermodynamic activation energy exists, and that the segregation process is kinetically controlled. We develop a GDE formulation that involves the solution of a d...

We extend the framework for complexity of operators in analysis devised by Kawamura and Cook (2012) to allow for the treatment of a wider class of representations. The main novelty is to endow represented spaces of interest with an additional function on names, called a parameter, which measures the complexity of a given name. This parameter generalises the size function which is usually used i...