Species diversity includes two aspects, the number of species (species richness) and the proportional abundances of the species (heterogeneity diversity). Species richness and heterogeneity diversity can be measured over different scales; a single point, samples, large scales, biogeographical provinces and in assemblages and habitats. In the literature, the terminology of these scales is confus...

Land planarians are an interesting group of free-living flatworms that can be useful as bioindicators because of their high sensitivity to environmental changes and low dispersal capacity. In this study, we describe and compare assemblages of land planarians from areas with different conservation degrees of the Interior Atlantic Forest (Misiones, Argentina), and assess factors that could be rel...

Effects of forest management on fungal diversity were investigated by sampling fruit bodies of polyporoid and corticioid fungi in forest stands that have different management histories. Fruit bodies were sampled in 15 northern hardwood stands in northern Wisconsin and the upper peninsula of Michigan. Sampling was conducted in five old-growth stands, five uneven-age stands, three even-age unthin...

A river lateral lake (Coqueiral Lake marginal to Paranapanema River in its mouth zone into Jurumirim Reservoir, São Paulo, Brazil) presented fragmentation into four small isolated bodies of water during a prolonged drought period, disrupting the link with the river. The aim of this work was to compare the temporal modifications on zooplankton community structure (total abundance, species richne...

Molecular surveys suggest that communities of microbial eukaryotes are remarkably rich, because even large clone libraries seem to capture only a minority of species. This provides a qualitative picture of protistan richness but does not measure its real extent either locally or globally. Statistical analysis can estimate a community's richness, but the specific methods used to date are not alw...

Increasing the density of natural reserves in the forest landscape may provide conservation benefits for biodiversity within and beyond reserve borders. We used 2 French data sets on saproxylic beetles and landscape cover of forest reserves (LCFR) to test this hypothesis: national standardized data derived from 252 assessment plots in managed and reserve stands in 9 lowland and 5 highland fores...

To characterize the change in frequency of infectious disease outbreaks over time worldwide, we encoded and analysed a novel 33-year dataset (1980-2013) of 12,102 outbreaks of 215 human infectious diseases, comprising more than 44 million cases occuring in 219 nations. We merged these records with ecological characteristics of the causal pathogens to examine global temporal trends in the total ...

Question: What are the responses of epiphytic lichens to the intensity of management along a large environmental gradient in Mediterranean Quercus forests? Location: Central Spain. Methods: This study was carried out on 4590 trees located in 306 forest stands dominated by Quercus faginea or Quercus ilex ssp. ballota. The effect of forest management and other predictor variables on several speci...

BACKGROUND Comparative analysis, which aims at investigating ecological and evolutionary patterns among species, may help at targeting reservoirs of zoonotic diseases particularly in countries presenting high biodiversity. Here, we developed a simple method to target rodent reservoirs using published studies screening microparasite infections. METHODS We compiled surveys of microparasites inv...

BACKGROUND Although plant diversity is postulated to resist invasion, studies have not provided consistent results, most of which were ascribed to the influences of other covariate environmental factors. METHODOLOGY/PRINCIPAL FINDINGS To explore the mechanisms by which plant diversity influences community invasibility, an experiment was conducted involving grassland sites varying in their spe...