Anthropogenic global changes in biodiversity are generally portrayed in terms of massive native species losses or invasions caused by recent human disturbance. Yet these biodiversity changes and others caused directly by human populations and their use of land tend to co-occur as long-term biodiversity change processes in the Anthropocene. Here we explore contemporary anthropogenic global patte...

Topographic organization is a hallmark of sensory cortical organization. Topography is robust at spatial scales ranging from hundreds of microns to centimeters, but can dissolve at the level of neighboring neurons or subcellular compartments within a neuron. This dichotomous spatial organization is especially pronounced in the mouse auditory cortex, where an orderly tonotopic map can arise from...

Recently there has been considerable concern about declines in bee communities in agricultural and natural habitats. The value of pollination to agriculture, provided primarily by bees, is >$200 billion/year worldwide, and in natural ecosystems it is thought to be even greater. However, no monitoring program exists to accurately detect declines in abundance of insect pollinators; thus, it is di...

The growth of social media and on-line social networks has opened up a set of fascinating new challenges and directions for researchers in both computing and the social sciences, and an active interface is growing between these areas. We discuss a set of basic questions that arise in the design and analysis of systems supporting on-line social interactions, focusing on two main issues: the role...

1. The taxonomic and functional composition of reef fish assemblages are quantified in three biogeographical regions: Great Barrier Reef, French Polynesia and Caribbean. Assemblages are described in three habitats of differing wave exposure. Functional abilities are estimated based on published analyses linking fin morphology and swimming performance. 2. Two questions were addressed: (1) To wha...

Paleontological information was used to evaluate and compare how Rocky Mountain mammalian communities changed during past global warming events characterized by different durations (350, ;10,000–20,000, and 4 million years) and different per–100-year warming rates (1.08C, 0.18C, 0.06–0.088C, 0.0002–0.00038C per 100 years). Our goals were to determine whether biotic changes observed today are ch...

Acid rain still poses a global problem today, exerting many adverse effects on man, animal, and materials. As its research question, the present study tries to find out whether or not acid rains exist in Akure, Nigeria. For so doing, it determines physico-chemical properties of rain water samples, namely pH, temp, Electrical Conductivity (EC), TDS, acidity, SO4-, NO2-, Cl-, and Free CO2. Accord...

Seawater microorganisms play an important role in coral reef ecosystem functioning and can be influenced by biological, chemical, physical features of reefs. As reefs continue to respond environmental changes, the seawater microbiome has been proposed as a conservation tool for monitoring perturbations. However, spatial variability microbial communities is not well studied, limiting our ability...