Spatial characteristics of phytoplankton blooms often reflect the horizontal transport properties of the oceanic turbulent flow in which they are embedded. Classically, bloom response to horizontal stirring is regarded in terms of generation of patchiness following large-scale bloom initiation. Here, using satellite observations from the North Pacific Subtropical Gyre and a simple ecosystem mod...

1. How organisms locate their hosts is of fundamental importance in a variety of basic and applied ecological fields, including population dynamics, invasive species management and biological control. However, tracking movement of small organisms, such as insects, poses significant logistical challenges. 2. Mass-release and individual–mark–recapture techniques were combined in an individually m...

The ecological causation hypothesis for secondary sexual dimorphism was tested in Salix glauca, a dioecious willow shrub. Plants growing in a Colorado Rocky Mountain (USA) krummholz mosaic of mesic and xeric patches were monitored for four consecutive years. Ecological causation is predicated on unique resource demands associated with sexual function. In S. glauca, seeds have twofold higher N a...

Examination of genetic and ecological relationships within sibling species complexes can provide insights into species diversity and speciation processes. Alpheus angulatus and A. armillatus, two snapping shrimp species with overlapping ranges in the north-western Atlantic, are similar in morphology, exploit similar ecological niches and appear to represent recently diverged sibling species. We...

Metapopulations are models of ecological systems, describing the interactions and the behavior of populations that live in fragmented habitats. In this paper, we present a model of metapopulations based on the multivolume simulation algorithm tau-DPP, a stochastic class of membrane systems, that we utilize to investigate the influence that different habitat topologies can have on the local and ...

Habitat fragmentation is one of the largest threats to biodiversity. Landscape corridors, which are hypothesized to reduce the negative consequences of fragmentation, have become common features of ecological management plans worldwide. Despite their popularity, there is little evidence documenting the effectiveness of corridors in preserving biodiversity at large scales. Using a large-scale re...

Dispersal has long been recognized as a mechanism that shapes many observed ecological and evolutionary processes. Thus, understanding the factors that promote its evolution remains a major goal in evolutionary ecology. Landscape connectivity may mediate the trade-off between the forces in favour of dispersal propensity (e.g. kin-competition, local extinction probability) and those against it (...

Historical reference conditions provide important context for creating ecological restoration and management plans. The U.S. 19th Century Public Land Survey (PLS) records provide extensive ecological information for constructing such reference conditions. We used PLS records to reconstruct pre-Euro-American tree species cover class and vegetation structure types for the Midwest Driftless Area, ...

This study investigated land use changes, and their ecological effects in Wuhan (1987-2005). Remote Sensing techniques extracted land use data, whilst the spatial analyst software, Fragstats quantified ecological metrics at both landscape and class levels. The results showed increased urban and agricultural land uses (1987-2005); with urban land increasing more than 250 percent. This was largel...

Ecological systems can be seen as networks of interactions between individual, species, or habitat patches. A key feature of many ecological networks is their organization into modules, which are subsets of elements that are more connected to each other than to the other elements in the network. We introduce MODULAR to perform rapid and autonomous calculation of modularity in sets of networks. ...