The flexibility of digestive traits characterizes a standard model of physiological flexibility, demonstrating that animals adjust their digestive attributes in order to maximize overall energy return. Using an intraspecific experimental study, we evaluated the amount of flexibility in digestive tract mass and length in individuals from field mouse populations inhabiting semi-arid and temperate...

Cyanobacterial diversity in soil crusts has been extensively studied in arid lands of temperate regions, particularly semi-arid steppes and warm deserts. Nevertheless, Arctic soil crusts have received far less attention than their temperate counterparts. Here, we describe the cyanobacterial communities from various types of soil crusts from Svalbard, High Arctic. Four soil crusts at different d...

The integration of phylogenetics, phylogeography and palaeoenvironmental studies is providing major insights into the historical forces that have shaped the Earth's biomes. Yet our present view is biased towards arctic and temperate/tropical forest regions, with very little focus on the extensive arid regions of the planet. The Australian arid zone is one of the largest desert landform systems ...

This paper reports the study of the effect of the length of the recorded data used for monthly rainfall forecasting. Monthly rainfall data for three periods of 5, 10, and 49 years were collected from Kermanshah, Mashhad, Ahvaz, and Babolsar stations and used for calibration time series models. Then, the accuracy of the forecasting models was investigated by the following year’s data. The follow...

Studying the microbial diversity of a unique biome such as the McMurdo Dry Valleys, Antarctica, is important to understand the sustainability of life under cold-arid conditions where other forms of life (i.e., plants and animals) do not exist. Pointing et al. (1) examined multidomain microbial diversity in the McKelvey valley using culture-independent molecular approaches and interestingly foun...

[1] Dozens of large, low‐gradient alluvial fans are present within impact crater basins on the cratered highlands of Mars. The timescales and climate conditions that were required to generate such fans are unknown, but testable through our understanding of terrestrial hill slope erosion in the presence of precipitation. Previous estimates of fan formation time vary from years to millions of yea...

In freshwater ecosystems, species compositions are known to be determined hierarchically by large to small‑scale environmental factors, based on the biological traits of the organisms. However, in ephemeral habitats this heuristic framework remains largely untested. Although temporary wetland faunas are constrained by a local filter (i.e., desiccation), we propose its magnitude may still depend...

Estimation of impervious surface area is important to the study of urban environments and social development, but surface characteristics, as well as the temporal, spectral, and spatial resolutions of remote sensing images, influence the estimation accuracy. To investigate the effects of regional environmental characteristics on the estimation of impervious surface area, we divided China into s...