In soft-sediment systems, terrestrial sediment deposits may result in a marked change in habitat and benthic community composition. We conducted a series of experiments to investigate the behavioural response of juveniles of 2 bivalve species common on New Zealand intertidal sandflats (Paphies australis and Macomona liliana) to terrestrial sediments. Both species are able to actively disperse a...

—Research on amphibian movement patterns can aid in strengthening amphibian conservation strategies. Yet for many species, there remain substantial gaps in our knowledge of such movement patterns. From 1999–2002, we documented movement patterns to and from breeding pools of both adult and juvenile Rana sylvatica LeConte (Wood Frog) and Ambystoma maculatum Shaw (Spotted Salamander) by using drif...

Habitat valuation methods are most often developed and used to prioritize candidate lands for conservation. In this study the intent of habitat valuation was to inform the decision-making process for remediation of chemical contaminants on specific lands or surface water bodies. Methods were developed to summarize dimensions of habitat value for six representative aquatic and terrestrial contam...

Algal carbon has been increasingly recognized as the primary carbon source supporting large-river food webs; however, many of the studies that support this contention have focused on lotic main channels during low-flow periods. The flow variability and habitat-heterogeneity characteristic of these systems has the potential to significantly influence food web structure and must be integrated int...

The use of a seaweed habitat by red deer Cervus elaphus L. on the Isle of Rum, Scotland, was examined in detail. New information is provided on diet selection, timing of seaweed use relative to tides, interindividual differences in seaweed use, and sex differences in site use within the seaweed habitat (`site segregation'). Interestingly, seaweed use by adult males and females was closely corre...

It has long been maintained that the majority of terrestrial Antarctic species are relatively recent, post last glacial maximum, arrivals with perhaps a few microbial or protozoan taxa being substantially older. Recent studies have questioned this 'recolonization hypothesis', though the range of taxa examined has been limited. Here, we present the first large-scale study for mites, one of two d...

Fluxes of organic matter across habitat boundaries are common in food webs. These fluxes may strongly influence community dynamics, depending on the extent to which they are used by consumers. Yet understanding of basal resource use by consumers is limited, because describing trophic pathways in complex food webs is difficult. We quantified resource use for zooplankton, zoobenthos, and fishes i...

Becker et al. (1) showed a strong effect of habitat split on the richness of species with aquatic larvae but no effect on the richness of species with terrestrial development, both when habitat split was analyzed alone in linear regressions and when it was analyzed together with habitat loss and fragmentation in more complex path analyses. Cannatella (2) argues that if species with aquatic larv...

Central America is experiencing rapid forest loss and habitat degradation both inside and outside of protected areas. Despite increasing deforestation, the Caribbean region of Nicaragua plays an important role in the survival or extinction of large mammal populations in Central America given that it still retains core areas of habitat for large mammal species. The proposed interoceanic canal pr...

An individual’s sex, body size and colour pattern can influence its habitat use, and such partitioning can have important ecological and evolutionary consequences. We studied a system very different from those that have attracted previous research on this topic: sea snakes ( Emydocephalus annulatus ) in shallow-water coral-reef areas of New Caledonia. The snakes used habitats non-randomly in te...