*Correspondence: John A. Jones, Biology Department, Appalachian State University, 572 Rivers Street, Boone, NC 28608-2027, USA e-mail: [email protected] Determining how to best measure habitat quality is essential for many conservation plans and basic ecological questions. Territory quality is thought to be a product of physical habitat characteristics (i.e., habitat quality) and the densit...

Simplification of natural habitats is a growing global concern demanding that ecologists better understand how habitat heterogeneity influences the structure and functioning of ecosystems. While there is extensive evidence that physical habitat heterogeneity affects the structure of biotic communities (i.e., organismal abundance, distribution, diversity, etc.), ecologists know little about how ...

abstract:dam construction providebenefits to local communities including hydropower generation and flood protection, but also harmsfish species by altering physical habitat andproviding pollution during the construction process. evaluating river reaches habitat suitability level mayknow how the habitat and which extentaffected by dams. this study used a systems analysis approach to preliminaril...

Understanding spatial physical habitat selection driven by competition and/or predator-prey interactions of mobile marine species is a fundamental goal of spatial ecology. However, spatial counts or density data for highly mobile animals often (1) include excess zeros, (2) have spatial correlation, and (3) have highly nonlinear relationships with physical habitat variables, which results in the...

Like invasive macrophytes, some native macrophytes are spreading rapidly with consequences for community structure. There is evidence that the native alga Caulerpa filiformis is spreading along intertidal rocky shores in New South Wales, Australia, seemingly at the expense of native Sargassum spp. We experimentally investigated the role physical disturbance plays in the spread of C. filiformis ...

The Clean Water Act mandates that the chemical, physical, and biological integrity of our nation's waters be maintained and restored. Physical integrity has often been defined as physical habitat integrity, and as such, data collected during biological monitoring programs focus primarily on habitat quality. However, we argue that channel stability is a more appropriate measure of physical integ...