The last two centuries of industrialization, urbanization and changes in land use converting agricultural and natural areas to artificial surface have led to European plants being considered amongst the most threatened in the world. In some countries, more than two-thirds of the existing habitat types are considered endangered. Human activity is the primary cause of risk for 83% of endangered p...

The gopher tortoise, Gopherus polyphemus Daudin, is endemic to the southeastern US, where its populations are declining primarily due to habitat destruction. Tortoises are preyed upon by many species, including the red imported fire ant, Solenopsis invicta Buren, a destructive exotic species now common throughout the tortoises’ entire range. We surveyed ants using tuna bait at 154 G. polyphemus...

Climate change is already affecting species worldwide, yet existing methods of risk assessment have not considered interactions between demography and climate and their simultaneous effect on habitat distribution and population viability. To address this issue, an international workshop was held at the University of Adelaide in Australia, 25-29 May 2009, bringing leading species distribution an...

Quantifying the degree to which natural or protected areas are representative of a specified baseline provides critical information to conservation prioritization schemes. We report results on southeastern Vancouver Island, Canada, where we compared environmental conditions represented across the entire landscape, in oak savanna habitats prior to European settlement (<1850), and in both protect...

Habitat destruction and land use change are making the world in which natural populations live increasingly fragmented, often leading to local extinctions. Although local populations might undergo extinction, a metapopulation may still be viable as long as patches of suitable habitat are connected by dispersal, so that empty patches can be recolonized. Thus far, metapopulations models have eith...

Sex determination is ruled by haplodiploidy in Hymenoptera, with haploid males arising from unfertilized eggs and diploid females from fertilized eggs. However, diploid males with null fitness are produced under complementary sex determination (CSD), when individuals are homozygous for this locus. Diploid males are expected to be more frequent in genetically eroded populations (such as islands ...

The ecological niche concept has regained interest under environmental change (e.g., climate change, eutrophication, and habitat destruction), especially to study the impacts on niche shift and conservatism. Here, we propose the within outlying mean indexes (WitOMI), which refine the outlying mean index (OMI) analysis by using its properties in combination with the K-select analysis species mar...

Disturbance and habitat destruction due to human activities is a pervasive problem in near-shore marine ecosystems, and restoration is often used to mitigate losses. A common metric used to evaluate the success of restoration is the return of ecosystem services. Previous research has shown that biodiversity, including genetic diversity, is positively associated with the provision of ecosystem s...

More than one-third of the world’s crops require pollination to set seeds and fruits Dias et al. [1]. It is likely that wild bee community is sufficient to provide services for multiple crops, including some that are not serviced by honeybees Kremen et al. [2]. Under several situations non-Apis bees are better pollinators than Apis species because of efficient tripping, fast foraging rate, long...

In the past 1000 years New Zealand has experienced a major 'extinction event', losing 40-50% of the avifauna, at least 50% of the frog fauna, and unknown proportions of the lizard and invertebrate faunas. During this period, bird species became extinct at different times and rates depending on the particular aspects of their ecology and life history which made them vulnerable to habitat loss, h...