Malaria is the leading cause of death in Kenya highlands. Malaria is a vector-borne disease and mosquito is the vector that transmits the parasites from infected people to others. Controlling mosquito larval habitats is important in eradicating malaria. Modeling the spatially distributed mosquito larval habitats is challenging. This study explores a mosquito habitat modeling approach, which int...

Safeguarding biodiversity has been one of the most important issues on the environmental and forest policies agenda since the 1990's. The problem remains in terms of decisions and knowledge on where to set appropriate conservation targets. Hence, we need detailed and reliable information about habitat structure and composition and methods for estimating this information over the whole spatial d...

Variance partitioning methods, which are built upon multivariate statistics, have been widely applied in different taxa and habitats in community ecology. Here, I performed a literature review on the development and application of the methods, and then discussed the limitation of available methods and the difficulties involved in sampling schemes. The central goal of the work is then to propose...

Methods We compared co-occurrence-based distributions of habitat specialization of tree species in two geographic regions that are ecologically similar but differ in species pool size. We applied two methods. First, we used a rank-ordering of species along a gradient of estimated niche breadth that is based solely on species co-occurrence information derived from vegetation databases from each ...

This special collection, which is split between the May and July issues, originated from the workshop ‘Niche Theory and Speciation’ (http://nichews.elte.hu). The meeting took place at Keszthely (Lake Balaton) in Hungary in August 2011, and was organized by Géza Meszéna, Åke Brännström, Ulf Dieckmann, Gabriella Magyar, Liz Pásztor, and András Szilágyi. Funding was provided by the European Scienc...

An environment is in first approximation a volume of space; it is a specific habitat, location, or site that is suitable or adequate for given purposes (of foraging, resting, hunting, breeding, nesting, grooming) in the life of an organism or group of organisms. This spatial notion of environment can be drawn closer to biological and ecological science by taking account of the pertinent physica...

—Environmental niche parameters of breeding ranges for two subspecies in the Orchard Oriole complex (Icterus spurius spurius and I. s. fuertesi) were characterized via ecological niche modeling. Niche models formulated from museum specimen collections largely agree with published breeding ranges of both taxa. Furthermore, our findings identify likely suitable habitat of migratory double breedin...

Understanding woolly mammoth ecology is key to understanding Pleistocene community dynamics and evaluating the roles of human hunting and climate change in late Quaternary megafaunal extinctions. Previous isotopic studies of mammoths' diet and physiology have been hampered by the 'mammoth conundrum': woolly mammoths have anomalously high collagen δ(15)N values, which are more similar to coeval ...

Species may, in principle, respond to environmental change in several different ways (Pease et al. 1989; Holt 1990). Some species may track environmental states to which they are already well adapted and so shift in abundance and distribution. Other species may not evolve at all and so become extinct. Some species may evolve adaptively in ways that facilitate their persistence in changed enviro...

The taxonomic composition of environmental communities is an important indicator of their ecology and function. We used a set of protein-coding marker genes, extracted from large-scale environmental shotgun sequencing data, to provide a more direct, quantitative, and accurate picture of community composition than that provided by traditional ribosomal RNA-based approaches depending on the polym...