In marine environments, macrofauna living in or on the sediment surface may alter the structure, diversity and function of benthic microbial communities. In particular, microbial nitrogen (N)-cycling processes may be enhanced by the activity of large bioturbating organisms. Here, we study the effect of the burrowing mud shrimp Upogebia deltaura upon temporal variation in the abundance of genes ...

The present paper is primarily concerned with the study of L-guilds in an L-merotopic space. It is shown that every L-cluster is an L-guild; however the converse is not true. For contigual and regular L-merotopies, where on one side we gave an example of a space, which is neither contigual nor binary, on the other side we constructed L-merotopic spaces that are contigual and binary. It is shown...

Ants are known to function as reliable biological indicators for habitat impact assessment. They play a wide range of ecological roles depending on their feeding and nesting habits. By clustering ants in guilds, it is possible both to assess how agriculture and forest fragmentation can disturb ant communities and to predict the ecological impacts due to losses of a specific guild. This study ai...

Rainforest frogs are classi¢ed into nine ecological guilds based on features of reproduction, habitat use, temporal activity, microhabitat and body size. The largest ecological di¡erences are between the microhylid frogs and the rest of the frog species. Within the non-microhylids, there are two primary groups consisting of (i) regionally endemic rainforest specialists, and (ii) a more ecologic...

Although there have been advances in methods for extracting information about dispersal processes, it is still very difficult to measure them. Predicting dispersal groups using single readily-measured traits would facilitate the emergence of instructive comparisons among ecological strategies of plants and offer a path towards improved synthesis across field experiments. The leaf-height-seed sc...

The majority of the world's terrestrial large carnivores have undergone substantial range contractions and many of these species are currently threatened with extinction. However, there has been little effort to fully quantify the extent of large carnivore range contractions, which hinders our ability to understand the roles and relative drivers of such trends. Here we present and analyse a new...

Fungi typically live in highly diverse communities composed of multiple ecological guilds. Although high-throughput sequencing has greatly increased the ability to quantify the diversity of fungi in environmental samples, researchers currently lack a simple and consistent way to sort large sequence pools into ecologically meaningful categories. We address this issue by introducing FUNGuild, a t...