Biodiversity is thought to provide insurance for ecosystem functioning under heterogeneous environments; however, such insurance potential is under serious threat following unprecedented loss of biodiversity. One of the key mechanism underlying ecological insurance is that niche differentiation allows asynchronous responses to fluctuating environments, although the role of different ecological ...

Scale has emerged as a major issue in both ecology and geography in recent decades. Little effort has been made to compare these parallel debates, however, or to seek an integrated conception of scale across the two disciplines. This paper argues that such an integration is possible, even between ecology and human geography – the subfield of geography seemingly most removed from ecological conc...

Farming and exposure to livestock have been proposed as protective against the development of asthma in children. An ecological study was conducted to examine the support for these relationships in the USA. County-specific aggregate measures were used to examine the relationship between the prevalence of asthma and wheeze in 7th and 8th grade school children (aged 12-14 yrs) and selected measur...

Road-kill represents a major threat for butterflies and more generally pollinators. Here we report an observation of conspicuous aggregations mud-puddling on roadsides and, this reason, being massively road-killed by farm vehicles. While the reported itself may not entail significant to populations observed species, it provides opportunity discuss overlooked ecological trap, potentially affecti...

This study aims to investigate the concentration levels, pollution characteristics and the associated potential ecological risks of the heavy metals found in dust in the metropolitan area of Beijing, China during the winter. Dust samples were collected at 49 different spatial locations of Beijing's metropolitan area from November 2013 to January 2014, in which the concentration levels of Cd, Cr...