background and aims. traditional methods of diagnosing periodontal diseases have their limitations, which include inability to provide information about the recent activity of the disease and difficulty in diagnosing the disease at an early stage when clinical changes have not started. this has necessitated the use of biomarkers designed to overcome these short-comings. materials and methods. a...

Soil salinity is generally spatially heterogeneous, but our understanding of halophyte physiology under such conditions is limited. The growth and physiology of the dicotyledonous halophyte Atriplex nummularia was evaluated in split-root experiments to test whether growth is determined by: (i) the lowest; (ii) the highest; or (iii) the mean salinity of the root zone. In two experiments, plants ...

Ria de Aveiro costal lagoon is a socio-ecological system framed between the land and sea. The embedded in biodiversity rich landscape mosaic comprising beaches, dunes, sandflats, mudflats, seagrasses, small water channels, one of largest saltmarsh areas Portugal Europe, supporting coastal food webs providing nursery for several species. Despite being Long-Term Ecological Research (LTER) site in...

Birds are one of the most diverse groups of ecosystem service providers, whose ecological functions range from creating soil to shaping primate behavior, Nevertheless, the impression that birds have little influence on ecological processes has been hard to change. Given the ongoing declines in avian functional groups, there is a pressing need to compare avian ecological functions to those of ot...

The objective of this research was to identify and describe the different Ecological Species Groups (vegetation types) present in the Rural Heritage Museum of Guilan. The study area was approximately 260 ha, which is located in the Saravan Forest Park in Guilan province, north of Iran. Sampling procedure was performed with a systematic random technique. A total of 89 plots were sampled. Classif...