Ethiopia is a world biodiversity hotspot and harbours levels of biotic endemism unmatched in the Horn of Africa, largely due to topographic-and thus habitat-complexity, which results from a very active geological and climatic history. Among Ethiopian vertebrate fauna, amphibians harbour the highest levels of endemism, making amphibians a compelling system for the exploration of the impacts of E...

Myanmar's recent transition from military rule towards a more democratic government has largely ended decades of political and economic isolation. Although Myanmar remains heavily forested, increased development in recent years has been accompanied by exceptionally high rates of forest loss. In this study, we document the rapid progression of deforestation in and around the proposed Lenya Natio...

Recent debates on the number of plant species in the vast lowland rain forests of the Amazon have been based largely on model estimates, neglecting published checklists based on verified voucher data. Here we collate taxonomically verified checklists to present a list of seed plant species from lowland Amazon rain forests. Our list comprises 14,003 species, of which 6,727 are trees. These figur...

Characterizing the trophic relationships between large herbivores and the outstanding plant diversity in rainforest is a major challenge because of their elusiveness. This is crucial to understand the role of these herbivores in the functioning of the rainforest ecosystems. We tested a non-invasive approach based on the high-throughput sequencing of environmental samples using small plant plast...

The ancient lowland Maya have been traditionally portrayed as swidden (shifting cultivation) agriculturalists (1). The persistence of the swidden concept has inhibited field inquiry of past modes of lowland subsistence, often preserving what may be an unfounded bias concerning the cultivation techniques employed by the Maya. Moreover, the absence of adequate subsistence research has, in effect,...

Hatchery-reared fish are commonly stocked into freshwaters to enhance recreational angling. As these fishes are often of high trophic position and attain relatively large sizes, they potentially interact with functionally similar resident fishes and modify food-web structure. Hatchery-reared barbel Barbus barbus are frequently stocked to enhance riverine cyprinid fish communities in Europe; the...

Public forests in central Leyte, Philippines provide an important source of annual food crops, perennial cash crops, and rattan and timber to lowland farmers. Household economic dependence upon and uses made of forest resources are associated with relative access to lowland-based activities, especially production of irrigated rice. Households unable to procure sufficient food staples through on...

Food cleaning is widespread in the animal kingdom, and a recent report confirmed that (amongst other behaviours) wild western lowland gorillas also show food cleaning. The authors of this report conclude that this behaviour, based on its distribution patterns, constitutes a potential candidate for culture. While different conceptualisations of culture exist, some more and some less reliant on b...

This paper proposes a pipelined dynamic bandwidth allocation (DBA) scheme for 10-gigabit-capable passive optical networks (XG-PONs). The proposed scheme performs a DBA operation in multiple stages to save power. Also, requests are forwarded to next stages to obtain high performance.

Evol<ed potential (EP) and event related potential (ERP) are methods to examine electrophysiological activities of the brain. One of the advantages of the EP/ERP is that we can examine on-going brain activities to a certain stimulus. They are also risk-free, relatively }ow cost techniques, so it is possible to examine larger group of subjects as compared with the methods discussed previously. O...