BACKGROUND The Fynbos (FB) and Succulent Karoo biomes (SKB) have high regional plant diversity despite relatively low productivity. Local diversity in the region varies but is moderate. For insects, previous work suggests that strict phytophages, but not other taxa, may have high regional richness. However, what has yet to be investigated is whether the local insect species richness of FB and S...

Soil characteristics, disturbance histories, and species richness among distinct groups of plants and animals may be useful predictors of important conservation areas when data are limited. We used multivariate analysis of covariance to test the hypothesis that the species richness of plants, arthropods, herpetofauna, and breeding birds are correlated and increase with soil fertility (silt and ...

autocorrelation and congruence in the distribution of language and mammal richness: a reply to Cardillo et al. Our paper on the relationship between the spatial distribution of language richness and mammal species richness recently argued that little congruence exists between the distribution of threatened languages and threatened mammals in New Guinea, despite high overlap between areas of hig...

The current trend of declining epiphytic richness caused by human activities (forest fragmentation, logging , agriculture, and livestock grazing) and the greater efforts required to sample and identify the most inconspicuous species have necessitated the use of indicators of the species richness. In this study, we examined the potential of predicting epiphytic lichen richness based on the richn...

SUMMARY There is increasing world-wide concern about the impact of the introduction of exotic species on ecological communities. Since many exotic plants depend on native pollinators to successfully establish, it is of paramount importance that we understand precisely how exotic species integrate into existing plant-pollinator communities. In this manuscript, we have studied a global data base ...

In recent years, ecological research has suggested several mechanisms by which biodiversity might affect the risk of acquiring infectious diseases (i.e., the decoy, dilution or amplification effects), but the topic remains controversial. While many experimental studies suggest a negative relationship between biodiversity and disease, this relationship is inherently complex, and might be negativ...

Descriptions of 247 forest stands at Waipoua Forest, Northland, were used to explore relationships between species richness (alpha-diversity) of the vascular flora and stand environmental characteristics, both in terms of total flora and within a number of the component synusiae. The Waipoua forests, with an average of 52 species per forest stand, are comparatively species-rich compared to othe...

This paper proposes a model for the structure and content of a university World Wide Web site, by a process of: (1) identifying who the site is serving and the information needs of these individuals or groups; (2) identifying institutional information needs; (3) relating this data to the content provided; (4) presenting the content in a manner suited to the characteristics and information needs...