The more xeric southand west-facing slopes of the Ouachita Mountains of west-central Arkansas once supported fire-maintained shortleaf pine (Pinus echinata) forests with a well-developed herbaceous understory. Fire suppression following the original harvest of these forests resulted in forests with increasingly abundant woody vegetation in the understory, midstory, and canopy, and a very suppre...

M. Ambrosio, R. Antolini, C. Aramo, G. Auriemma, A. Baldini, G. C. Barbarino, B. C. Barish, G. Battistoni, R. Bellotti, C. Bemporad , P. Bernardini , H. Bilokon , V. Bisi , C. Bloise , C. Bower , S. Bussino, F. Cafagna, M. Calicchio, D. Campana , M. Carboni, M. Castellano, S. Cecchini, F. Cei , V. Chiarella, B. C. Choudhary, S. Coutu , L. De Benedictis, G. De Cataldo, H. Dekhissi , C. De Marzo,...

BACKGROUND AND AIMS Beginning in the last two decades of the 14th century, richly illuminated versions of the Tacuinum Sanitatis, the Latin translation of an 11th-century Arabic manuscript known as Taqwim al-Sihha bi al-Ashab al-Sitta, were produced in northern Italy. These illustrated manuscripts provide a window on late medieval life in that region by containing some 200 full-page illustratio...

The Corsican Nuthatch (Sitta whiteheadi) is red-listed as vulnerable to extinction by the IUCN because of its endemism, reduced population size, and recent decline. A further cause is the fragmentation and loss of its spatially-restricted favourite habitat, the Corsican pine (Pinus nigra laricio) forest. In this study, we aimed at estimating the potential impact of climate change on the distrib...

Noise may drive changes in the composition and abundance of animals that communicate vocally. Traffic produces low-frequency noise (<3 kHz) that can mask acoustic signals broadcast within the same frequency range. We evaluated whether birds that sing within the frequency range of traffic noise are affected by acoustic masking (i.e., increased background noise levels at the same frequency of voc...

Evolution of complex cognition in animals has been linked to complex social behaviour. One of the costs of sociality is increased competition for food which may be reduced by food caching, but cache theft may undermine the benefits of caching. In birds, sophisticated food-caching-related cognition has been demonstrated only for corvids and attributed to their highly social behaviour. Many non-c...

Landscape-scale disturbance events, including ecological restoration and fuel reduction activities, can modify habitat and affect relationships between species and their environment. To reduce the risk of uncharacteristic stand-replacing fires in the southwestern United States, land managers are implementing restoration and fuels treatments (e.g., mechanical thinning, prescribed fire) in progre...