Native forests are shrinking worldwide, causing a loss of biological diversity. Our ability to prioritize forest conservation actions is hampered by a lack of information about the relative impacts of different types of forest loss on biodiversity. In particular, we lack rigorous comparisons of the effects of clearing forests for tree plantations and for human settlements, two leading causes of...

Background: Clearing is an important step in the preparation of histological sections, that removes alcohol and other dehydrants from tissues prior to infiltration of the embedding material (usually paraffin wax).Different types of clearing agents are chloroform, Xylene, Toluene, Paraffin, Methyl benzoate and methyl salicylate & Citrus fruit oils.The commonly used clearing agent is xylene that ...

Clearing tropical forests of the Amazon Basin for pasture alters rates of soil nitrogen cycling. Previous studies have shown that rates of soil net N mineralization and net nitri®cation are lower in established pastures than in forests. We compared soil inorganic N concentrations, rates of net and gross mineralization and net and gross nitri®cation in a chronosequence and an experimental slash-...

Lissotes menalcas (the Mt Mangana Stag Beetle) is an obligate beetle and is presently classified as vulnerable under the Tasmanian Threatened Species Protection Act 1995. The distribution, habitat and conservation status of this species were Inv"esturated through a combination of collation of known locations and searches for the in decaying logs across likely areas of occurrence. L. menalcaswas...

R a week goes by without a news report sounding the alarm of the continued destruction of tropical forests and the concomitant loss of biodiversity and ecosystem services, such as water retention, erosion control and carbon storage. Much of tropical deforestation, particularly in Latin America, is a result of land clearing for pasture and other agricultural uses1. Increasingly, these lands are ...

Because the stability of the anaerobic conditions in littoral environments has been favorable to the conservation of wood, vegetal fibers, seeds, and pollen, these locations today provide us with almost unequalled data for the study of the history of relations between agricultural communities and their transformations of the environment through the repercussions of repeated forest clearing. Sta...