Comparative studies on the responses to salt stress of taxonomically related taxa should help to elucidate relevant mechanisms of stress tolerance in plants. We have applied this strategy to three Plantago species adapted to different natural habitats, P. crassifolia and P. coronopus-both halophytes-and P. major, considered as salt-sensitive since it is never found in natural saline habitats. G...

A list of “ecologically informed values” of biodiversity is introduced. These aspects have rarely been the object of normative treatments. Ecologists introduced these scientific concepts as “values”, even though they are based on factual information only. Thus, ecological evaluation often remains implicit or personal. Besides diversity also complementarity, rarity, threat, irreplaceability, and...

In life, risk is reward and vice versa. Unfortunately, the big rewards people desire are relatively unlikely to occur. This relationship between risk and reward or probabilities and payoffs seems obvious to the financial community and to laypeople alike. Yet theories of decision making have largely ignored it. We conducted an ecological analysis of life's gambles, ranging from the domains of ro...

This article presents a synthetic modeling approach to the problem of grounded construction of concepts. In many computational models of grounded language acquisition and evolution, meanings are created in the process of discrimination between a chosen object and other objects present on the scene of communication. We argue that categories constructed for the purpose of identification rather th...

Evolution by natural selection acts on natural populations amidst migration, gene-by-environmental interactions, constraints, and tradeoffs, which affect the rate and frequency of adaptive change. We asked how many and how rapidly loci change in populations subject to severe, recent environmental changes. To address these questions, we used genomic approaches to identify randomly selected singl...

SYNOPSIS. The last three decades have brought clear recognition that many populations of animals are experiencing severe declines or local and global extinctions. Many examples have become common knowledge to the general public, such as worldwide declines in amphibian populations and extensive loss of coral reefs. The mechanisms underlying these and other changes are poorly understood. However,...