human activities often adversely affect natural landscapes and ecosystems. natural landscapes consist of habitats, and habitat loss and fragmentation are major threats to biodiversity. environmental impact assessment (eia)as a systematic and well documented procedure to identify, describe and assess the direct and indirect effects of a developmental project in different environments does not co...

To increase the generality of biodiversity-ecosystem function theory, studies must be expanded to include real communities in a variety of systems. We modified J. W. Fox's approach to partition the influence of species richness on standing crop biomass (net biodiversity effect) of 21 freshwater mussel communities into trait-independent complementarity, trait-dependent complementarity (species w...

[1] Northern peatlands are likely to be important in future carbon cycle-climate feedbacks due to their large carbon pools and vulnerability to hydrological change. Use of non-peatland-specific models could lead to bias in modeling studies of peatland-rich regions. Here, seven ecosystem models were used to simulate CO2 fluxes at three wetland sites in Canada and the northern United States, incl...

Ecosystem services are now strongly applied to mangrove forests, though they are not a new way of viewing mangrove-people interactions; the benefits provided by such habitats, and the negative interactions (ecosystem disservices) between mangroves and people have guided perceptions of mangroves for centuries. This study quantified the ecosystem services and disservices of mangroves as written b...

Initiation of engagement between humans is a rich and complex process. Providing a humanoid robot with the ability to participate adequately in initiating engagement with a human offers some exciting challenges in designing the robot’s behaviors and in designing the evaluation experiments to test initiation.

Healthy forests provide human communities with a host of important ecosystem services, including the provision of food, clean water, fuel, and natural medicines. Yet globally, about 13 million hectares of forests are lost every year, with the biggest losses in Africa and South America. As biodiversity loss and ecosystem degradation due to deforestation continue at unprecedented rates, with conc...