Use of space by both humans and other mammals should reflect underlying physiological, ecological, and behavioral processes. In particular, the space used by an individual for its normal activities should reflect the interplay of three constraints: (i) metabolic resource demand, (ii) environmental resource supply, and (iii) social behaviors that determine the extent to which space is used exclu...

Ecological opportunity is any change that allows populations to escape selection from competition and predation. After encountering ecological opportunity, populations may experience ecological release: enlarged population size, broadened resource use, and/or increased morphological variation. We identified ecological opportunity and tested for ecological release in three lizard colonists of Wh...

The spectacular diversity in sexually selected traits among animal taxa has inspired the hypothesis that divergent sexual selection can drive speciation. Unfortunately, speciation biologists often consider sexual selection in isolation from natural selection, even though sexually selected traits evolve in an ecological context: both preferences and traits are often subject to natural selection....

Density is a fundamental driver of many ecological processes including habitat selection. Theory on density-dependent habitat selection predicts that animals should be distributed relative to profitability of habitat, resulting in reduced specialization in selection (i.e. generalization) as density increases and competition intensifies. Despite mounting empirical support for density-dependent h...

Sample size sufficiency is a critical consideration for estimating resource selection functions (RSFs) from GPS-based animal telemetry. Cited thresholds include number of captured animals and as many relocations per N possible. These render RSF-based studies misleading if large sample sizes were truly insufficient, or unpublishable small sufficient but failed to meet reviewer expectations. We p...

Resource competition is thought to drive divergence in resource use traits (character displacement) by generating selection favoring individuals able to use resources unavailable to others. However, this picture assumes nutritionally substitutable resources (e.g., different prey species). When species compete for nutritionally essential resources (e.g., different nutrients), theory predicts tha...

nanocomposite materials have recently attracted increasing interests in the field of modelling. finite element modelling can be used for computation of bulk properties of polymer/clay nanocomposites. in this study, by   considering the structure of a nano-composite material, a quasi real model is proposed. the model has been used to predict the elastic constants by selection of suitable element...

Local contributions to beta diversity (LCBD) can be used identify sites with high ecological uniqueness and exceptional species composition within a region of interest. Yet, these indices are typically on local or regional scales relatively few sites, as they require information complete community compositions difficult acquire larger scales. Here, we investigated how LCBD predicted over broad ...