the fauna of the superfamily bombylioidea was studied in alborz province, iran during 2012. two families (bombyliidae and mythicomyiidae), eight genera and ten species were identified, of which two species, exoprospora dispar loew, 1869; parageron lutescens (bezzi, 1925), are new records for the iranian fauna. an identification key for the species of the family mythicomyiidae known from iran is...

Lifemapper (http://www.lifemapper.org) is a predictive electronic atlas of the Earth’s biological biodiversity. Using a screensaver version of the GARP genetic algorithm for modeling species distributions, Lifemapper harnesses vast computing resources through ’volunteers’ PCs similar to SETI@home, to develop models of the distribution of the worlds fauna and flora. The Lifemapper project’s prim...

a survey on the megachilid bees (hymenoptera: megachilidae) fauna of northern iran, between 2010 and 2011, led to the identification of eleven species of the genus coelioxys latreille belonging to subgenera allocoelioxys (6 species), boreocoelioxys (2 species), coelioxys (2 species) and liothyrapis (1 species). of these, six species and one subgenus (liothyrapis) are new to the fauna of iran. d...

We argue that for a personal agent working within a Semantic Web framework, machine learning is essential. We identify two topologies in the Semantic Web, and refer to these as: (1) semantic forests (disjoint trees) and (2) true semantic webs (complex interconnected graphs). An example of (1) is Citeseer BibTeX mapped to RDF; an example of (2) is FOAF, an RDF representation of people and their ...

The abiotic and biotic gradients on mountains have enormous potential to improve our understanding of species distributions, species richness patterns and conservation. Here we describe how abiotic factors change with elevation, how flora and fauna respond to these changes and how elevational species richness patterns have been studied to uncover drivers of biodiversity. There are four main tre...

An updated checklist of the scorpion fauna of Iran, as well as a brief history of taxonomic research on scorpions of Iran is presented. The checklist is based on records of scorpion species whose presence has been confirmed in Iran through field expeditions, examination of scorpion collections, literature review, and personal communications from researchers. The scorpion fauna consists of 51 sp...

Using mtDNA sequences and 12 microsatellite loci, we compare populations of Testudo graeca from Sardinia and North Africa. The observed pattern of almost no differentiation combined with reduced variation in the Sardinian population is consistent with introduction in prehistoric or historic times from what is now Tunisia and neighbouring Algeria. Furthermore, in the light of the recently publis...