Amphibian diversity: Decimation by disease

Amphibian diversity: decimation by disease.

D isease emergence and biodiversity loss are among the most pervasive environmental problems confronting science and society. Widespread and dramatic losses of amphibian populations and species represent the deadly intersection between these issues (1), as illustrated by the work of Lips et al. (2) in this issue of PNAS. Amphibians are one of the most imperiled groups of vertebrates, with nearl...

Rapid assessments of amphibian diversity

More than 6400 amphibian species are known worldwide, with more than 50 new species being described in just the fi rst half of 2008 (AmphibiaWeb 2008). Many of these species are threatened or declining and more than 150 may have recently become extinct (IUCN 2006). Such rates of species loss are far greater than the historic background extinction rate for amphibians (e.g. McCallum 2007; Roelant...

Amphibian Diversity and Natural History: An Overview

Historical Legacies in World Amphibian Diversity Revealed by the Turnover and Nestedness Components of Beta Diversity

Historic processes are expected to influence present diversity patterns in combination with contemporary environmental factors. We hypothesise that the joint use of beta diversity partitioning methods and a threshold-based approach may help reveal the effect of large-scale historic processes on present biodiversity. We partitioned intra-regional beta diversity into its turnover (differences in ...

Surface Decimation by Scene Contents

Today, there is a wide variety of devices ranging from PC’s, game consoles, up to smartphones and tablets. These computing devices have major differences in performance and make mesh decimation still active in the field of research. One of the latest topics in the area has been to create simplification algorithms considering visual similarity. However, the full potential of most visual simplifi...