THE GEOGRAPHIC area inhabited by a species is constrained by its ecological niche, the multidimensional set of environmental variables that determines where members of a species can survive and maintain viable populations (Grinnell 1917). Individual organisms have the physiological capacity to inhabit any geographic location characterised by physical parameters within the constraints of the spe...

A central theoretical goal of epidemiology is the construction of spatial models of disease prevalence and risk, including maps for the potential spread of infectious disease. We provide three continent-wide maps representing the relative risk of malaria in Africa based on ecological niche models of vector species and risk analysis at a spatial resolution of 1 arc-minute (9 185 275 cells of app...

The current range of ecological habitats occupied by a species reflects a combination of the ecological tolerance of the species, dispersal limitation, and competition. Whether the current distribution of a species accurately reflects its niche has important consequences for the role of ecological niche modeling in predicting changes in species ranges as the result of biological invasions and c...

The role of ecology in the origin of species has been the subject of long-standing interest to evolutionary biologists. New sources of spatially explicit ecological data allow for large-scale tests of whether speciation is associated with niche divergence or whether closely related species tend to be similar ecologically (niche conservatism). Because of the confounding effects of spatial autoco...

The archaeological record shows that typically human cultural traits emerged at different times, in different parts of the world, and among different hominin taxa. This pattern suggests that their emergence is the outcome of complex and nonlinear evolutionary trajectories, influenced by environmental, demographic, and social factors, that need to be understood and traced at regional scales. The...

Niche construction means that all organisms modify their environments, also known as ecosystem engineering. Organism– environmental relations induced by niche construction profoundly influence the dynamics, competition, and diversity of metapopulations. Single-species model shows a positive feedback between metapopulation and environmental resources, which leads to threshold phenomena in dynami...

Uncertainty is a common problem in spatial modeling and geographical information systems (GIS). Furthermore, urban gain (UGM) contains various dimensions components of uncertainties. Data sampling important UGM, may cause the results models to contain many uncertainties as well affects their precision accuracy. A poorly sampled or biased dataset can lead inaccurate predictions decreased perform...

The geographic distribution of arboviruses has received considerable attention after several dramatic emergence events around the world. Bluetongue virus (BTV) is classified among category "A" diseases notifiable to the World Organization of Animal Health (OIE), and is transmitted among ruminants by biting midges of the genus Culicoides. Here, we developed a comprehensive occurrence data set to...

As increasing importance of symbiosis and cooperation among mobile communication industries, the mobile ecosystem has been especially highlighted in academia and practice. The structure of mobile ecosystem is quite complex and the ecological role of actors is important to understand that structure. In this respect, this study aims to explore structure of mobile ecosystem in the case of Korea us...

wild boar is distributed throughout iran except highly arid areas. in recent years, however, population size of wild boar has increased primarily because of reduction in population size of natural predators such as leopard. conversely, changes in land-use practices and increase in foraging of livestock in natural habitats has led to reduction of food resources and consequently, has forced the s...