Ecosystem responses to climate change can exert positive or negative feedbacks on climate, mediated in part by slow-moving factors such as shifts in vegetation community composition. Long-term experimental manipulations can be used to examine such ecosystem responses, but they also present another opportunity: inferring the extent to which contemporary climate change is responsible for slow cha...

In this Appendix, we summarize some basic properties of the three classes of functional diversity measures: (1) functional Hill number ) (Q D q which quantifies the effective number of equally abundant and equally distinct species in an assemblage with a constant species pairwise distance Q, where Q denotes Rao’s quadratic entropy; (2) mean functional diversity MD(Q) = Q Q D q × )] ( [ which qu...

Biodiversity conservation and ecosystem-service provision will increasingly depend on the existence of secondary vegetation. Our success in achieving these goals will be determined by our ability to accurately estimate the structure and diversity of such communities at broad geographic scales. We examined whether the texture (the spatial variation of the image elements) of very high-resolution ...

The likelihood of encountering a predator influences prey behavior and spatial distribution such that non-consumptive effects can outweigh the influence of direct predation. Prey species are thought to filter information on perceived predator encounter rates in physical landscapes into a landscape of fear defined by spatially explicit heterogeneity in predation risk. The presence of multiple pr...

The recent development of lightweight GPS collars has enabled medium-to-small sized animals to be tracked via GPS telemetry. Evaluation of the performance and accuracy of GPS collars is largely confined to devices designed for large animals for deployment in natural environments. This study aimed to assess the performance of lightweight GPS collars within a suburban environment, which may be di...

The turn of the new millennium was accompanied by a particularly diverse group of burned area datasets from different sensors in the Canadian boreal forests, brought together in a year of low global fire activity. This paper provides an assessment of spatial and temporal accuracy, by means of a fire-by-fire comparison of the following: two burned area datasets obtained from SPOT-VEGETATION (VGT...

OBJECTIVE To determine the present status of plant communities and their possible association with the habitat in Malam Jabba, Swat, Pakistan. METHODS A study on the phytoecology was conducted in various ecologically important sites of Malam Jabba, Swat, Pakistan from 2002 to 2004. The altitude of these sites ranged from 1 200 m to 3 200 m. Quadrat method was used for evaluation of plants com...

There is a public perception that large high-severity wildfires decrease biodiversity and increase fire hazard by homogenizing vegetation composition and increasing the cover of mid-story vegetation. But a growing literature suggests that vegetation responses are nuanced. LiDAR technology provides a promising remote sensing tool to test hypotheses about post-fire vegetation regrowth because veg...

We present results of opinion dynamics simulations based on the emotion/information/opinion (E/I/O) model, applied to a strongly polarized society. Under certain conditions the model leads to metastable coexistence of two subcommunities (supporting each of the opinions) of comparable size – which corresponds to bipartisan split found in many real world communities. Spurred by the recent breakdo...

The purpose of this paper is to present two agents’ societies responsible for group formation (sub-communities) in CV-Muzar (Augusto Ruschi Zoobotanical Museum Virtual Community of the University of Passo Fundo). The first is a static society that intends to investigate the groups in the CV-Muzar. The second is a dynamical society that will analyze the existing groups and look for participants ...