The microbial ecology of any biodegradation system is the fundamental factor that controls both the effectiveness of the ongoing biodegradation process and also the ability of the biodegrading population to maintain stability at times of environmental stress. Studies are reported here which provide both initial information on the ecology of an oil degrading porous pavement system (PPS) and sign...

Rarely can a popularly oriented scientific text be described as accurate and beautiful: Dr. Stonelhouse's book is such a rarity. In the strict sense, this is not a text, for it does not catalog and describe in concise paragraphs each species and variant of flora and fauna existing in the Arctic and sub-Arctic areas; instead, it uses over 200 beautifully reproduced photograplhs to supplement the...

An ongoing debate in ecology concerns the impacts of ecological drift and selection on community assembly. Here, we show that there is a sharp phase transition in diverse ecological communities between a selection dominated regime (the niche phase) and a drift dominated regime (the neutral phase). Simulations and analytic arguments show that the niche phase is favored in communities with large ...

What are the mechanisms responsible for generating the erratic £uctuations observed in natural populations? This question has been at the centre of a long debate in contemporary ecology. The irregularities in the patterns of population abundance were initially mostly attributed to environmental factors. In the mid1970s, however, it was proposed that these £uctuations may be generated intrinsica...

A theoretical and quantitative framework of first principles would benefit estuarine and coastal ecologists in search of predictions to enhance our understanding and management of marine resources. The Metabolic Theory of Ecology describes a possible unifying theory for ecology, including mechanistically derived equations that predict scaling exponents observed in empirical, allometric relation...

Corporations have become the primary actors directing the structure and function of the global political economy and the influence of many of the largest transnational corporations exceed that of all but a handful of the most powerful nation-states. In the past decade, the power of transnational corporations has been consolidated through rapid capital accumulation, increasingly uniform producti...

The field cricket Gryllus campestris used to be very common throughout Europe, but in recent decades its population has declined. We study ecology and behavior of crickets near the Odolanów, Poland, between 2009 2011, with emphasis on the effects of grazing of cattle and horses on insects population. We compared the number of burrows per square meter on both grazed and non-grazed areas and exam...

1 Department of Ecology and Evolutionary Biology, Cornell University, Ithaca, NY, USA, 2 Institute of Vertebrate Biology, The Czech Academy of Sciences, Brno, Czech Republic, 3 Department of Zoology, Faculty of Science, Charles University in Prague, Prague, Czech Republic, 4 Department of Ecology and Evolutionary Biology, University of Colorado Boulder, Boulder, CO, USA, 5 School of Biological ...

Rosemary P. Collins1,*, Áslaug Helgadóttir2, Bodil E. Frankow-Lindberg3, Leif Skøt1, Charlotte Jones1 and Kirsten P. Skøt1 Institute of Biological, Environmental and Rural Sciences, Aberystwyth University, Plas Gogerddan, Aberystwyth SY23 3EB, UK, Agricultural University of Iceland, Keldnaholti, 112 Reykjavı́k, Iceland and Swedish University of Agricultural Sciences, Department of Crop Productio...

*Correspondence: Raine Kortet, Department of Biology, University of Eastern Finland, Yliopistokatu 7, PO Box 111, FI-80101 Joensuu, Finland e-mail: [email protected] Animals are often individually consistent in their behavior, not only over time, but also across different functional contexts. Recent research has focused on phenotypic and evolutionary mechanisms explaining such personality dif...