The future of forests around the world is uncertain: forests are being cleared and the lands converted to other uses, while existing forests face many challenges from a variety of sources. The pressures on forests come from two usually opposing perspectives, timber production and wildlife conservation. This special issue volume attempts to bridge between these two disciplines and attempts to mo...

Landscape pattern (land use and natural patchiness) and complex topography strongly influence regional variation in emissions of trace gases and pollutants, as well as atmospheric transport processes. This leads to small-scale variation in the amount of (biogenic) emission, atmospheric deposition and in local concentrations of atmospheric consitutents. This chapter addresses the most important ...

Studies of spatial patterns of landscapes are useful to quantify human impact, predict wildlife effects, or describe various landscape features. A robust landscape index should quantify two components of landscape diversity: composition and configuration. One category of landscape index is the contagion index. Some landscape ecologists promote the use of relative contagion indices. It is demons...

We present a multidimensional-scaling algorithm and novel visualization tool for interactive exploration of the functional roles of genes in a gene set. We reference a popular database of gene attributes to build a two-dimensional projection of a user’s set of query genes that reveals the functional structure of a set of genes as well the relationship of the query genes to the whole gene landsc...

A significant challenge in nature-inspired algorithmics is the identification of specific characteristics of problems that make them harder (or easier) to solve using specific methods. The hope is that, by identifying these characteristics, we may more easily predict which algorithms are best-suited to problems sharing certain features. Here, we approach this problem using fitness landscape ana...

Through a discussion of the perceptions of hunters within a New Zealand tourism context, this paper explores how different perspectives of the ‘connection’ between hunter and prey are performed by participants and analysed by scholars using distinct ethical approaches. It attempts to contribute to the conversation about hunting ethics within the tourism and recreation fields by discussing the l...

I examine some non-anthropic approaches to the string landscape. These approaches are based on finding the initial conditions of the universe using the wavefunction of the multiverse to select the most probable vacuum out of this landscape. All approaches tackled so far seems to have their own problems and there is no clear cut alternative to anthropic reasoning. I suggest that finding the init...

I. Continuous characters – ancestral states Many traits of interest are measured on continuous or metric scales – size and shape, physiological rates, etc. Continuous traits are often useful for species identification and taxonomic descriptions; historically, they were also used in phylogenetic analysis through the use of clustering algorithms that can group taxa based on multivariate phenetic ...

Conservation diagnosis should identify which demographic parameters (or vital rates) are having a negative effect on the population growth rate of a threatened organism. Diagnosis can analyse how the environment is influencing the vital rates of this organism. In the present study, we tried to improve the diagnosis of a critically endangered seabird, the Balearic shearwater Puffinus mauretanicu...

Recent developments in string theory have reinforced the notion that the space of stable supersymmetric and non-supersymmetric string vacua fills out a “landscape” whose features are largely unknown. It is then hoped that progress in extracting phenomenological predictions from string theory — such as correlations between gauge groups, matter representations, potential values of the cosmologica...