BACKGROUND Access to varied, healthy and inexpensive foods is an important public health concern that has been widely documented. Consequently, there is an increasing interest in identifying food deserts, that is, socially deprived areas within cities that have poor access to food retailers. In this paper we propose a methodology based on three measures of accessibility to supermarkets calculat...

12.2 Biological Crusts of Arid Regions ............................. 346 12.2.1 Characteristic Species ................................................... 346 12.2.2 Taxonomic Problems in Describing Crust Cyanobacteria ...................................................... 347 12.2.3 Environmental Factors .................................................. 348 12.2.3.1 Light .......................

Deserts are increasing in extent globally, but existing deserts are decreasing in health. The basic biology and ecology of foundation plant species in deserts are limited. This is a direct study that provides an estimate of the capacity for a locally dominant foundation shrub species in California to recover from damage. Desert shrubs are cleared and damaged by humans for many purposes includin...

Many island communities exhibit a highly nonrandom pattern of species composition in which smaller biotas contain successive subsets of the species in richer ones. Here, we examine the composition of continental communities to see whether this 'nested subset' pattern holds and, if so, to determine its spatial scale and environmental correlates. Granivorous rodent assemblages at 202 sites in Gre...

One popular justification for punishment is the just deserts rationale: A person deserves punishment proportionate to the moral wrong committed. A competing justification is the deterrence rationale: Punishing an offender reduces the frequency and likelihood of future offenses. The authors examined the motivation underlying laypeople's use of punishment for prototypical wrongs. Study 1 (N = 336...

Understanding microbial adaptation to environmental stressors is crucial for interpreting broader ecological patterns. In the most extreme hot and cold deserts, cryptic niche communities are thought to play key roles in ecosystem processes and represent excellent model systems for investigating microbial responses to environmental stressors. However, relatively little is known about the genetic...