As the human population expands, landscapes worldwide are becoming fragmented into remnant patches of original habitat, surrounded by agriculture and other human land uses. With diminishing opportunities to preserve large tracts of pristine habitat, the future of biodiversity conservation lies increasingly in these fragmented areas. Therefore, understanding the processes at work in fragmented l...

Mobile agents are a promising approach to distributed software. The typical programming paradigm considers a mobile agent to be a mobile object or a group of objects migrating together. Important issues of this approach are abstraction, encapsulation, a welldefined interface, and the clear definition of a migration entity. Putting the whole functionality of an agent into one migration entity is...

As ancient gymnosperm and woody plants, cycads have survived through dramatic tectonic activities, climate fluctuation, and environmental variations making them of great significance in studying the origin and evolution of flora biodiversity. However, they are among the most threatened plant groups in the world. The principal aim of this review is to outline the distribution, diversity, and con...

AIM OF THE STUDY Pilot study to analyse the efficacy and embryo morphology using a new human embryo culture medium (GM501) versus the conventional used medium (ISM1). METHODS Over a four-month period, all patients at the Leuven Institute of Fertility and Embryology (LIFE) were -randomly allocated to have their embryos cultured in either the standard sequential culture medium ISM1 (control) or...

Habitat corridors are important tools for maintaining connectivity in increasingly fragmented landscapes, but generally they have been considered in single-species approaches. Corridors intended to facilitate the movement of multiple species could increase persistence of entire communities, but at the likely cost of being less efficient for any given species than a corridor intended specificall...

We present BOAR, a forest-structured library of predeened Fragmented Objects (FOs) encapsulating commonly used distributed abstractions. We identify three kinds of interaction FO types (channel, sharing, and synchronization), which can be beneecially included in BOAR. A channel FO type encapsulates a remote or group invocation protocol. A sharing FO type encapsulates a sharing mechanisms such a...

Anthropogenic habitat disturbance is a major threat to biodiversity worldwide. Yet, before population declines are detectable, individuals may suffer from chronic stress and impaired immunity in disturbed habitats, making them more susceptible to pathogens and adverse weather conditions. Here, we tested in a paleotropical forest with ongoing logging and fragmentation, whether habitat disturbanc...

We characterize allelic and gene expression variation between populations of the Glanville fritillary butterfly (Melitaea cinxia) from two fragmented and two continuous landscapes in northern Europe. The populations exhibit significant differences in their life history traits, e.g. butterflies from fragmented landscapes have higher flight metabolic rate and dispersal rate in the field, and high...

Understanding the consequences of habitat fragmentation has come mostly from comparisons of patchy and continuous habitats. Because fragmentation is a process, it is most accurately studied by actively fragmenting large patches into multiple smaller patches. We fragmented artificial seagrass habitats and evaluated the impacts of fragmentation on fish abundance and species richness over time (1 ...