Many of the fundamental concepts in studying infectious diseases are rooted in population ecology. We describe the importance of population ecology in exploring central issues in infectious disease research including identifying the drivers and dynamics of host-pathogen interactions and pathogen persistence, and evaluating the success of public health policies. The use of ecological concepts in...

If the fraction of species in area A that are also found in one-half of that area is independent of A, the distribution of species is self-similar and a number of observed patterns in ecology, including the widely cited species-area relationship connecting species richness to censused area, follow. Self-similarity also leads to a species-abundance distribution, which deviates considerably from ...

Recent advances in molecular methods have dramatically improved knowledge of the microbial communities and their diversity in indoor environments. We have retrieved over 150 references with results of indoor microbial investigations and environmental factors. Representative papers are summarized here. The results show that buildings are complex, ecosystem-like, and that collaboration between mi...

synopsis. An understanding of interactions between the thermal physiology and ecology of ectotherms remains elusive, partly because information on the relative performance of whole-animal physiological systems at ecologically relevant body temperatures is limited. After discussing physiological systems that have direct links to ecology (e.g., growth, locomotor ability), we review analytical met...

It is now generally accepted in microbial ecology that cultivation-based approaches provide an incomplete picture of microbial diversity in the gastrointestinal (GI) tract because only a minority of microbes can be obtained in culture. Therefore, the application of molecular approaches, especially those focused on 16S ribosomal RNA (rRNA) sequence diversity, have become popular as they enable r...

1 Review of competition for a single substrate Paul Waltman’s chemostat-related work has had a large impact in population biology, ecology and bio-engineering. It has motivated and inspired the work of many other authors, including us. It seems appropriate to point out a major open problem which remains unresolved after more than thirty years and to touch on some other issues related to bacteri...

Mansour Mesdaghi was born in 1941 in Ghazvin, Iran, where he completed his elementary and high school.After graduation from Gorgan Forest and Range school, he had been employed in Ministry of Natural Resources as a technician in FAO branch of United Nation in collaboration with Dr. D. L. Goodwin, the Range Scientist at Houmand Range Research Station. He received his B.A degree in Economics at T...

Emerging infectious diseases are the focus of increased attention and even alarm in the scholarly and popular literature. The emergence of new diseases and the resurgence of older and previously recognized infectious diseases both in developing and developed country poses challenges for understanding the ecological web of causation, including social, economic, environmental and biological compo...

Feeding ecology is central to an understanding of the ecology and life-history strategies of species. The abundance and distribution of food can affect a range of life-history traits, including body size, spatial organization or mating system (Partridge & Green, 1985; Vezina, 1985; Gittleman, 1986; Dayan & Simberloff, 1996; Geffen et al., 1996). Feeding Escuela Superior de Ciencias Experimental...