Online gaming communities are an important class of virtual communities. They comprise complex and dynamic socio-technical systems, in which conflict is inevitable. Understanding how these communities manage conflict and how conflict management relates to other governance processes such as activity design and change management is essential to ensure their sustainability. This paper concerns a l...

Online communities are continuously evolving socio-technical systems. To provide them with better change management support, a systematic analysis of the norms that govern their evolution is required. In this paper, we present an approach that was used to analyze the community dynamics in an online law journal. Electronic journals in the legal domain are essential instruments in the validation ...

Range migrations in response to climate change, invasive species and the emergence of novel ecosystems highlight the importance of temporal turnover in community composition as a fundamental part of global change in the Anthropocene. Temporal turnover is usually quantified using a variety of metrics initially developed to capture spatial change. However, temporal turnover is the consequence of ...

This study was carried out to determine seasonal variation and zooplankton community structure in Karataş Lake, Southern Turkey. Zooplankton samples were collected seasonally between 2002 and 2003 in two stations using a zooplankton net of 55-µm mesh size. A total of 42 taxa were identified, including 19 taxa (45.2 %) Rotifera, 16 taxa (38.1 %) Cladocera, and 7 taxa (16.7 %). Copepoda. Among th...

Assessments of radiological impacts on humans and other biota from potential releases to the biosphere from a deep geologic repository for spent nuclear fuel are associated with several challenges. Releases, if any, will likely occur in a far future and to an environment that will have experienced substantial transformations. Such releases would occur over very long periods during which environ...

Dating the Tree of Life has now become central to relating patterns of biodiversity to key processes in Earth history such as plate tectonics and climate change. Regions with a Mediterranean climate have long been noted for their exceptional species richness and high endemism. How and when these biota assembled can only be answered with a good understanding of the sequence of divergence times f...

Timing and magnitude of surface uplift are key to understanding the impact of crustal deformation and topographic growth on atmospheric circulation, environmental conditions, and surface processes. Uplift of the East African Plateau is linked to mantle processes, but paleoaltimetry data are too scarce to constrain plateau evolution and subsequent vertical motions associated with rifting. Here, ...

Biodiversity changes are lagging behind current climate warming. The underlying determinants of this climatic debt are unknown and yet critical to understand the impacts of climate change on the present biota and improve forecasts of biodiversity changes. Here we assess determinants of climatic debt accumulated in French forest herbaceous plant communities between 1987 and 2008 (that is, a 1.05...

In global climate change scenarios, seawater warming acts in concert with multiple stress sources, which may enhance the susceptibility of marine biota to thermal stress. Here, the responsiveness to seasonal gradual warming was investigated in temperate mussels from a chronically stressed population in comparison with a healthy one. Stressed and healthy mussels were subjected to gradual tempera...

Concern regarding the biological effects of climate change has led to a recent surge in research to understand the consequences of phenological change for species interactions. This rapidly expanding research program is centered on three lines of inquiry: (1) how the phenological overlap of interacting species is changing, (2) why the phenological overlap of interacting species is changing, and...