Ecologically based management must incorporate components that consider how individuals associate temporally and spatially to environments that provide specific habitat requirements. Recent research has assessed how environments could be classified based on potential to provide deer (Odocoileus virginianus) habitat components. If habitat potential (HP; i.e., capability of habitat types to provi...

The continuous reef tract on the semi-exposed side of Lizard Island, northern Great Barrier Reef, can be divided into 6 habitat zones, which are distinctly different in terms of their physical (depth, slope and wave exposure) and biological characteristics (percentage of living cover, percentage cover of each substratum type, substratum diversity and complexity). Sixty-four labrid species were ...

We compared the uses and definitions of habitat-related terms in 50 articles from 1980 to 1994 to operational definitions we derived from the literature. Only 9 (18%) of the articles we reviewed defined and used habitat-related terms consistently and according to our definitions of the terms. Forty-seven articles used the term "habitat;" however, it was only defined and used consistent with our...

Common species are fundamental to the structure and function of their communities and may enhance community stability through intraspecific functional diversity (iFD). We measured among-habitat and within-habitat iFD (i.e., among- and within-plant community types) of two common small mammal species using stable isotopes and functional trait dendrograms, determined whether iFD was related to sho...

Juvenile winter flounder utilize a wide variety of habitats, including those that are structurally complex. We investigated the habitat preferences of age-0 winter flounder in sand and cobble of varying complexity in the laboratory. Fish were observed every half hour for six hours in tanks with four cobble treatments; bare sand, sand with low complexity cobble, sand with intermediate complexity...

The generally higher biodiversity on organic farms may be influenced by management features such as no synthetic pesticide and fertilizer inputs and/or by differences in uncropped habitat at the site and landscape scale. We analysed bird and habitat data collected on 48 paired organic and conventional farms over two winters to determine the extent to which broad-scale habitat differences betwee...

The influence of predation in structuring ecological communities can be informed by examining the shape and magnitude of the functional response of predators towards prey. We derived functional responses of the ubiquitous intertidal amphipod Echinogammarus marinus towards one of its preferred prey species, the isopod Jaera nordmanni. First, we examined the form of the functional response where ...

Habitat stability and predation pressure are thought to be major drivers in the evolutionary maintenance of behavioural syndromes, with trait covariance only occurring within specific habitats. However, animals also exhibit behavioural plasticity, often through memory formation. Memory formation across traits may be linked, with covariance in memory traits (memory syndromes) selected under part...

A major goal of landscape genetics is to understand how landscapes structure genetic variation in natural populations. However, landscape genetics still lacks a framework for quantifying the effects of landscape features, such as habitat type, on realized gene flow. Here, we present a methodology for identifying the costs of dispersal through different habitats for the California tiger salamand...