Hillsborough County, Florida, is a karst region that is heavily urbanized, yet no study has been undertaken measuring the degree of human disturbance. Van Beynen and Townsend (2005) created a hierarchical and standardized disturbance index specifically designed for karst environments. To address the problem of determining human disturbance in the county, the above index was successfully applied...

BACKGROUND It is well documented that friends' externalizing problems and negative parent-child interactions predict externalizing problems in adolescence, but relatively little is known about the role of siblings. This four-wave, multi-informant study investigated linkages of siblings' externalizing problems and sibling-adolescent negative interactions on adolescents' externalizing problems, w...

Classical metapopulation theory assumes a static landscape. However, empirical evidence indicates many metapopulations are driven by habitat succession and disturbance. We develop a stochastic metapopulation model, incorporating habitat disturbance and recovery, coupled with patch colonization and extinction, to investigate the effect of habitat dynamics on persistence. We discover that habitat...

Recent discoveries stress the importance of studying positive emotion disturbances (PED) yet there remains little empirical work or integrative conceptual framework in this domain. We suggest that an ideally suited opportunity to advance the study of PED is to consider a cross-species evolutionary framework. We apply this framework—drawing from principles of stabilizing selection—to recent empi...

Although positive emotion research has begun to flourish, the extremes and potential costs of positive emotion remain understudied. This is an ideal clinical model for studying the ways in which positive emotions are disrupted in bipolar disorder. Bipolar disorder is characterized by extreme bouts of expansive and persistent positive feelings. This paper reviews recent experimental studies, sel...

Whether biological diversity within communities is limited by local interactions or regional species pools remains an important question in ecology. In this paper, we investigate how an experimentally applied tree-harvesting disturbance gradient influenced local-regional richness relationships. Plant species richness was measured at three spatial scales (2 ha = regional; 576 m2 and 1 m2 = local...