the aim of this study was to develop a methodology to identify suitable habitat of the eurasian nuthatch (sitta europea) at kheyrood forest, northern alborz, iran. this study was carried out during spring to summer 2008. with attention to the area and topographic condition of kheyrood forest, patom, namkhane, gorazbon, cheler and baharbon were selected as data collecting series. the present stu...

Understanding spatial physical habitat selection driven by competition and/or predator-prey interactions of mobile marine species is a fundamental goal of spatial ecology. However, spatial counts or density data for highly mobile animals often (1) include excess zeros, (2) have spatial correlation, and (3) have highly nonlinear relationships with physical habitat variables, which results in the...

The Fraenkel-Mostowski permutation model of set theory with atoms (FM-sets) can serve as the semantic basis of meta-logics for specifying and reasoning about formal systems involving name binding, -conversion, capture avoiding substitution, and so on. We show that in FM-set theory one can express statements quantifying over ‘fresh’ names and we use this to give a novel set-theoretic interpretat...

The relevé method, a standardized, floristically based vegetation sampling technique developed in Europe, has become a vegetation measurement method used worldwide. Although the relevé method was developed by plant ecologists to classify vegetation, ornithologists have begun to use the method for bird-habitat studies, sometimes including modifications to better sample structural features of a h...

Proxies are adopted to represent biodiversity patterns due to inadequate information for all taxa. Despite the wide use of proxies, their efficacy remains unclear. Previous analyses focused on overall species richness for fewer groups, affecting the generality and depth of inference. Biological taxa often exhibit very different habitat preferences. Habitat groupings may be an appropriate approa...

Density-dependent (DD) and density-independent (DI) habitat selection is strongly linked to a species' evolutionary history. Determining the relative importance of each is necessary because declining populations are not always the result of altered DI mechanisms but can often be the result of DD via a reduced carrying capacity. We developed spatially and temporally explicit models throughout th...

Community assembly and the factors that influence it have long been a topic of interest to ecologists, but theory has yet to produce unequivocal evidence that communities assemble in predictable ways. The goal of this study was to document the relationship between ant communities and environmental variation between four habitat types. To accomplish this, ant communities and 16 environmental var...

In the present study, classification trees (CTs-J48 algorithm) were used to study the occurrence of roach in rivers in Flanders (Belgium). The presence/absence of roach was modelled based on a set of river characteristics. The predictive performance of the CTs models was assessed based on the percentage of Correctly Classified Instances (CCI) and Cohen's kappa statistics. To find the best model...