Understanding spatial physical habitat selection driven by competition and/or predator-prey interactions of mobile marine species is a fundamental goal of spatial ecology. However, spatial counts or density data for highly mobile animals often (1) include excess zeros, (2) have spatial correlation, and (3) have highly nonlinear relationships with physical habitat variables, which results in the...

Proxies are adopted to represent biodiversity patterns due to inadequate information for all taxa. Despite the wide use of proxies, their efficacy remains unclear. Previous analyses focused on overall species richness for fewer groups, affecting the generality and depth of inference. Biological taxa often exhibit very different habitat preferences. Habitat groupings may be an appropriate approa...

Density-dependent (DD) and density-independent (DI) habitat selection is strongly linked to a species' evolutionary history. Determining the relative importance of each is necessary because declining populations are not always the result of altered DI mechanisms but can often be the result of DD via a reduced carrying capacity. We developed spatially and temporally explicit models throughout th...

Community assembly and the factors that influence it have long been a topic of interest to ecologists, but theory has yet to produce unequivocal evidence that communities assemble in predictable ways. The goal of this study was to document the relationship between ant communities and environmental variation between four habitat types. To accomplish this, ant communities and 16 environmental var...

Reeves's Pheasant (Syrmaticus reevesii) is a threatened pheasant species endemic to China. The habitat use of territorial male birds was surveyed by the help of live decoys in a core area of Dongzhai National Nature Reserve. The breeding habitat selection of this pheasant was examined at two scales (115 m and 250 m scale, i.e. 4.15 hm(2 ) and 19.63 hm(2 ), respectively), including the character...

Positive correlations between diversity and stability have been reported for a number of ecosystems and are thought to be caused by a stabilizing effect of differential species’ responses to environmental perturbation. Empirical field studies in which investigators tested for diversity–stability relationships are lacking for some taxonomic groups and typically have not included tests of the imp...

Amphibians worldwide are facing rapid declines due to habitat loss and fragmentation, disease, and other causes. Where habitat alteration is implicated, there is a need for spatially explicit conservation plans. Models built with geographic information systems (GIS) are frequently used to inform such planning. We explored the potential for using GIS models of functional landscape connectivity a...

I analyzed a set of environmental and vegetation variables in order to characterize an intensification gradient for coffee production agroecosystems. I measured 14 habitat variables within 12 Colombian farms classified into four management systems at the Risaralda region of Colombia: Forests, Polygeneric Shaded coffee, Monogeneric Shaded coffee and Sun coffee plantations. The habitat variables ...