BACKGROUND Forests occur across diverse biomes, each of which shows a specific composition of plant communities associated with the particular climate regimes. Predicted future climate change will have impacts on the vulnerability and productivity of forests; in some regions higher temperatures will extend the growing season and thus improve forest productivity, while changed annual precipitati...

butterflies of the inani reserve forest were studied between may 2014 and may 2015. one hundred twenty five species of butterflies belonging to 84 genera and six families (hesperiidae, papilionidae, pieridae, lycaenidae, riodinidae and nymphalidae) were recorded during this study. the highest number of species comprised family nymphalidae (38 species, 30.4%) followed by lycaenidae (35 species, ...

Recent years have seen the greatest ecological disturbances of our times, with global human expansion, species and habitat loss, climate change, and the emergence of new and previously-known infectious diseases. Biodiversity loss affects infectious disease risk by disrupting normal relationships between hosts and pathogens. Mosquito-borne pathogens respond to changing dynamics on multiple trans...

Changes in land cover during urbanization profoundly affect the diversity of bird communities, but the demographic mechanisms affecting diversity are poorly known. We advance such understanding by documenting how urbanization influences breeding dispersal-the annual movement of territorial adults-of six songbird species in the Seattle, WA, USA metropolitan area. We color-banded adults and mappe...

Plant biotechnology is a field of scientific research in which rapid advances have been made in recent years, and which appears to have much potential for further development. Numerous opportunities for using biotechnology in plant breeding have been identified, some of which might be appropriate for the improvement of crops in developing countries. In this conference we will focus on forest tr...

Fragmentation influences the population dynamics and community composition of vertebrate animals. Fragmentation effects on rodent species in forests may, in turn, affect seed predation and dispersal of many plant species. Previous studies have usually addressed this question by monitoring a single species, and their results are contradictory. Very few studies have discussed the fragmentation ef...

Smail, Robert A.; Lewis, David J. 2009. Forest-land conversion, ecosystem services, and economic issues for policy: a review. PNW-GTR-797. Portland, OR: U.S. Department of Agriculture, Forest Service, Pacific Northwest Research Station. 40 p. The continued conversion and development of forest land pose a serious threat to the ecosystem services derived from forested landscapes. We argue that de...

In a rapidly changing biosphere, approaches to understanding the ecology and evolution of forest species will be critical to predict and mitigate the effects of anthropogenic global change on forest ecosystems. Utilizing 26 forest species in a factorial experiment with two levels each of atmospheric CO2 and soil nitrogen, we examined the hypothesis that phylogeny would influence plant performan...