—Despite efforts by researchers worldwide to assess the biodiversity of plant groups, many locations on Earth remain poorly surveyed, resulting in inadequate or biased knowledge. Robust estimates of inventory completeness could help alleviate the problem. This study aimed to identify areas representing gaps in current knowledge of African palms, with a focus on Benin (West Africa). We assessed ...

This paper discusses a new approach to controlling for the environment when estimating efficiency. In response to the literature on the international comparison of bank efficiency, we draw the attention to a local dimension of comparison. By introducing geographical weights and estimating local frontiers for each US savings bank for the 2001-09 period, we find that the bank technical performanc...

Voronoi diagram on the earth surface is a powerful tool to study spatial proximity at continental or global scale. However, its computation remains challenging because geospatial features have complex shapes. This paper presents a raster-based algorithm to generate Voronoi diagrams on earth's surface. The algorithm approximates the exact point-to-point geographical distances using the cell-to-c...

The spatial autocorrelation of allelic frequencies and geographical distances were studied at a natural population of Codium fragile in Korea. Within the C. fragile population, a strong spatial structure was observed for allozyme markers, indicating a very low amount of migration among subpopulations. The species showed a significant positive spatial autocorrelation as measured by Moran's I. Ge...

In this paper we relate linguistic, geographic and social distances to each other in order to get a better understanding of the impact the DutchGerman state border has had on the linguistic characteristics of a sub-area of the Kleverlandish dialect area. This area used to be a perfect dialect continuum. We test three models for explaining today’s pattern of linguistic variation in the area. In ...

Several biogeographical studies have already been performed on the ascidians of the Antarctic region. However, new data obtained in the last few years have led us to a revision of the biogeography of this fauna. To examine the biogeographical structure of the Antarctic region, we divided it into 10 sectors, depending on the principal geographical features, and then applied cluster analysis and ...

We consider and compare four Internet distance metrics and analyze the predictive power of these metrics in selecting, from a given source, the lowest latency destination from among a candidate set. The four metrics are: IP path length; autonomous system (AS) path length; great circle geographic distance; and previously measured round trip time (RTT). We describe general properties of these fou...

The fossil software package is a collection of analytical tools to synthetically analyse ecological and geographical data sets. The software is designed to be used with the R Statistical Language and is under an Open Source license, making it free to download, use or modify. The package includes functions for estimating species richness, shared species/beta diversity, species area curves and ge...

Descriptions of the rich sponge faunas inhabiting mangrove roots at various Caribbean sites are unanimous in pointing out the heterogeneity of species distribution and abundance patterns at all scales, from different portions of a single root to geographic subregions. Abiotic factors have often been implicated by correlation, but ecological interactions, and the life history and morphological c...

References #ref-list-1 http://rsbl.royalsocietypublishing.org/content/early/2011/05/06/rsbl.2011.0295.full.html This article cites 18 articles, 2 of which can be accessed free P<P Published online 6 May 2011 in advance of the print journal. Subject collections (2348 articles) ecology • Articles on similar topics can be found in the following collections Email alerting service here right-hand c...