The process of photosynthesis is facilitated in a plant by pores in its surface called stomata. When a particular stoma is open, CO2 is absorbed through its aperture, but H2O is also lost due to evaporation. Thus a plant will seek a stomatal aperture that balances its need for CO2 with its aversion to H2O loss. In order to visualize a particular leaf’s stomatal aperture distribution and how it ...

Making links between ecological processes and the scales at which they operate is an enduring challenge of community ecology. Our understanding of ecological communities cannot advance if we do not distinguish larger scale processes from smaller ones. Variability at small spatial scales can be important because it carries information about biological interactions, which cannot be explained by e...

Landscape structure may affect individual dispersal abilities, thus influencing the genotypic and phenotypic composition of populations. We analyzed the interplay among landscape, behavior, and evolutionary processes by correlating habitat patchiness to the variability in vocalizations of Dupont's Lark Chersophilus duponti, one of the most habitat-selective and rare European songbirds. We tape-...

The incidence and degree of patchiness of mucosal abnormality in both coeliac disease (CD) and dermatitis herpetiformis (DH) is documented. As judged by both stereomicroscopy and subjective histology, patchiness occurred frequently in both CDand DH patients. In most cases the difference of abnormality was of only one grade, but in approximately 25% as assessed by stereomicroscopy and 10% as ass...

Disentangling the demographic processes that determine the genetic structure of a given species is a fundamental question in conservation and management. In the present study, the population structure of the European eel was examined with a multidisciplinary approach combining the fields of molecular genetics and population dynamics modelling. First, we analyzed a total of 346 adult specimens o...

We have developed cellular automaton models for two species competing in a patchy environment. We have modeled three common types of competition: facilitation (in which the winning species can colonize only after the losing species has arrived) inhibition (in which either species is able to prevent the other from colonizing) and tolerance (in which the species most tolerant of reduced resource ...

Divergent adaptation to different environments can promote speciation, and it is thus important to consider spatial structure in models of speciation. Earlier theoretical work, however, has been limited to particularly simple types of spatial structure (linear environmental gradients and spatially discrete metapopulations), leaving unaddressed the effects of more realistic patterns of landscape...