Atmospheric and climatic change can alter plant biomass production and plant community composition. However, we know little about how climate change-induced alterations in biomass production affect plant species composition. To better understand how climate change will alter both individual plant species and community biomass, we manipulated atmospheric [CO2], air temperature, and precipitation...

Africa is home to the last intact guild of large carnivores and thus provides the only opportunity to investigate mechanisms of coexistence among large predator species. Strong asymmetric dominance hierarchies typically characterize guilds of large carnivores; but despite this asymmetry, subdominant species may persist alongside their stronger counterparts through temporal partitioning of habit...

The oribatid mites of a high-Andean cushion peatland in southern Peru were investigated. A total 17 mite species, belonging to eight families, could be identified five different microhabitats. rarefaction analysis showed potential community maximum 18 taxa per 1000 specimens for this site. Ranked species abundance revealed three dominant, subdominant, recedent, two subrecedent and four sporadic...

BACKGROUND Global climate change is rapidly altering species range distributions and interactions within communities. As ranges expand, invading species change interactions in communities which may reduce stability, a mechanism known to affect biodiversity. In aridland ecosystems worldwide, the range of native shrubs is expanding as they invade and replace native grassland vegetation with signi...

The African wild dog (Lycaon pictus) is an endangered exotic canid with less than 5500 animals remaining in the wild. Despite numerous strategies to conserve this species, numbers of free-living animals are in decline. It is a highly social species with a complex pack structure: separate male and female dominant hierarchies with, typically, participation of subdominant adults in the rearing of ...

The nonlinear propagation of electromagnetic waves in pair plasmas, in which the electrostatic potential plays a very important but subdominant role of a "binding glue" is investigated. Several mechanisms for structure formation are investigated, in particular, the "asymmetry" in the initial temperatures of the constituent species. It is shown that the temperature asymmetry leads to a (localizi...

Subdominant CD8(+) T-cell responses contribute to control of several viral infections and to vaccine-induced immunity. Here, using the lymphocytic choriomeningitis virus model, we demonstrate that subdominant epitopes can be more reliably identified by DNA immunization than by other methods, permitting the identification, in the virus nucleoprotein, of two overlapping subdominant epitopes: one ...