A new genus and species of hipposiderid bat is described from an early Miocene cave deposit (Bitesantennary Site) in the Riversleigh World Heritage fossil property, northern Australia. Eight hipposiderid genera are now recorded from Riversleigh’s Miocene sediments: Hipposideros, Brachipposideros, Rhinonycteris, Riversleigha, Xenorhinos, Miophyllorhina, Archerops and Brevipalatus gen. nov. The n...

Bacteria are essential for many ecosystem services but our understanding of factors controlling their functioning is incomplete. While biodiversity has been identified as an important driver of ecosystem processes in macrobiotic communities, we know much less about bacterial communities. Due to the high diversity of bacterial communities, high functional redundancy is commonly proposed as expla...

The Cretaceous-Paleogene boundary marks a critical event in mammalian evolution. Using a database of 4769 mammalian specimens from the Hell Creek and lower Fort Union formations of Garfi eld County, northeastern Montana, I quantifi ed temporal patterns of diversity and community structure to evaluate faunal dynamics during the last ~1.9 m.y. of the Cretaceous, the Cretaceous-Paleogene extinctio...

Methods We digitized the ranges of fiddler crabs (Decapoda, Ocypodidae, genus Uca) and calculated standing diversity as a function of latitude in the Indowest-Pacific, eastern-Pacific Americas and western Atlantic regions. We examined correlations between diversity and summer sea surface temperature, water column primary productivity, and also investigated the contribution of spatial autocorrel...

In P2P and volunteer computing environments, resources are not always available from the beginning to the end, getting incorporated into the experiment at any moment. Determining the best way of using these resources so that the exploration/exploitation balance is kept and used to its best effect is an important issue. The Intermediate Disturbance Hypothesis states that a moderate population di...

When one examines typical survey data question-by-question, it is common to find that respondents converge fairly strongly in their answers to some questions, but show considerable diversity with respect to others. Indeed, in light of the range of responses for virtually every question, one might well ask whether there is common cultural understanding of the topic under investigation. To what e...

Pregnant women are infected by specific variants of Plasmodium falciparum that adhere and accumulate in the placenta. Using serological and molecular approaches, we assessed the global antigenic diversity of surface antigens expressed by placenta-binding isolates to better understand immunity to malaria in pregnancy and evolution of polymorphisms and to inform vaccine development. We found that...

In many areas across Siberia, the reindeer herding economy of the native people went into a deep recession during the post-Soviet transition of the 1990s. However, as a larger cross-section of data indicates, the reindeer stock decline is not a universal phenomenon. Nor is the present-day crisis in native Siberian herding economies an unprecedented event, as pastoralists did suffer tremendously...

Aim North America harbours the most diverse freshwater mussel fauna on Earth. This fauna has high endemism at the continental scale and within individual river systems. Previous faunal classifications for North America were based on intuitive, subjective assessments of species distributions, primarily the occurrence of endemic species, and do not portray continent-wide patterns of faunal simila...

We live in a world of diminished ecological diversity. We extract energy, materials, and organisms from nature and modify landscapes at rates that cannot be sustained. These activities have resulted in accelerated rates of extinction, degradation, and loss of ecosystems, and disruption of the natural systems in which our cultures are embedded. The Society for Conservation Biology (SCB) believes...