Water scarcity is amongst the major challenges threatening smallholder sheep production in subsistence-oriented communal farms dryland areas. Local contextual factors are a prerequisite for effective policy development and optimisation of water resources management production. Two-hundred fifty-two structured questionnaires were administered to investigate that influence farmers’ perceived impa...

Phenotypic variation in four natural populations of Parrotia persica (Hamamelidaceae), a species considered a living fossil endemic to the Hyrcanian forest, was evaluated through leaf morphometric and multivariate analysis. Furthermore, plasticity and leaf fluctuating asymmetry (LFA) were studied. Our findings clearly displayed significant divergence among sites. The smallest lamina size, the h...

Wildfires are burning increasingly extensive areas of forest in Canada, reducing their capacity as carbon sinks. Here we compare the answers that four independent land cover datasets, produced from different satellite images (SPOT, Landsat, and MODIS), provide for the question of what burned in Canada in recent years. We harmonized the different datasets into a common, simpler legend consisting...

The Caspian (Hyrcanian) lowland forest zone in northern Iran is characterized by small remnant alder forest communities, dominated or subdominated with an Euxino-Hyrcanian element, Alnus glutinosa ssp. barbata. The first floristic inventory of these alder forests in northern Iran is presented. The floristic catalogue is based on the data of 133 phytosociological releves in eight different alder...

The genus Anthrenus, is in the subfamily Megatominae. It is relatively speciose within family Dermestidae and currently contains ca. 250 valid taxa which have been grouped within 10 subgenera. Most of the species are found in the Palearctic ecozone. Anthrenus (Helocerus) cechovskyi Háva & Kadej, sp. nov. is described from Nepal. The habitus, antenna, genitalia are illustrated and compared with ...

Increasing concern about declines in winter indices of abundance of sea ducks (Anatidae: Mergini) has prompted researchers and agencies to devote more resources to their study and monitoring (Sea Duck Joint Venture 2007*, 2008). However, determining the causes of the apparent decline (Bordage and Savard 1995; Savard et al. 1998; Caithamer et al. 2000*) is a challenge because few breeding baseli...

BACKGROUND Recent climatic history has strongly impacted plant populations, but little is known about its effect on microbes. Alders, which host few and specific symbionts, have high genetic diversity in glacial refugia. Here, we tested the prediction that communities of root symbionts survived in refugia with their host populations. We expected to detect endemic symbionts and a higher species ...