BACKGROUND Free ranging foraging animals can vary their searching intensity in response to the profitability of the environment by modifying their movements. Marine diving animals forage in a three dimensional space and searching intensity can be varied in both the horizontal and vertical planes. Therefore understanding the relationship between the allocation of searching effort in these two sp...

Abstract Diversity indices are commonly used to measure changes in marine benthic communities. However, the reliability (and therefore suitability) of these for detecting environmental change is often unclear because small sample size and inappropriate choice communities analysis. This study explored uncertainties taxonomic density two community structure our target region, Japan, local areas w...

Historically, ecological monitoring of marine habitats has primarily relied on labour-intensive, non-automated survey methods. The field passive acoustic (PAM) demonstrated the potential this practice to automate surveying in habitats. This been through use ‘ecoacoustic indices’ quantify attributes from natural soundscapes. However, investigations using individual indices have had mixed success...

In the face of accelerated climate change, monitoring biodiversity has become a critical task for ecologists. Habitat loss is occurring at an alarming rate both in terrestrial and marine ecosystems, resulting in endangerment and extinction of species up to 1,000 times faster than natural rates. However, traditional biodiversity measurements are logistically and financially difficult, making bio...

In the search for the best ecological and economic indicators of ecosystem change, a unifying solution for joining data from disparate fields appears as a general rule: Organize data into space/time/topic hierarchies that permit convergence of data resulting from shared and appropriate scaling. The scale of the data selects for compatible methodologies, leading to data integration and the disco...

Many types of indices have been developed to assess benthic invertebrate community condition, but there have been few studies evaluating the relative performance of different index approaches. Here we calibrate and compare the performance of five indices: the Benthic Response Index (BRI), Benthic Quality Index (BQI), Relative Benthic Index (RBI), River Invertebrate Prediction and Classification...

105 inTroducTion Civilian Tactical Emergency Medical Support (TEMS) has a long history in the United States. Enormous progress has been made during the past ten years in developing professional and operational standards within the field. However, to date, there still exists no standard of care within TEMS specifically, and more broadly for high threat pre-hospital trauma care. Current civilian ...