the aim of this investigation was to study the planktonic shrimp-like communities density and diversity in artificial reefs of khuzestan coasts, bahrakan waters (the persian gulf). sampling was conducted for one year from may 2011 to april 2012, monthly. zooplankton were collected with plankton tows using 300 μm mesh net. totally, two superfamily, penaeoidea, sergestoidea and one suborder carid...

abstract information about the spatial patterns of soil biodiversity is limited though required, e.g. for understanding effects of biodiversity on ecosystem processes. this study was conducted to determine whether soil macrofauna biodiversity parameters display spatial patterns in the riparian forest landscape of karkhe. soil macrofauna were sampled using 200 sampling point along parallel trans...

sustainability of productions in agricultural ecosystems depends on conservation and amplification of biodiversity. this study was conducted to determine the planting area, species richness, species evenness and biodiversity of different agronomical, horticultural and livestock productions in kerman province. for this purpose, information about planting area of agronomical and horticultural pla...

considering the importance of biodiversity conservation and protection assessment activities, the present filed study was conducted with aim to compare vegetation diversity of two areas with different levels of protection including ghorkhod protected area with seasonal grazing and golestan national park without grazing, during spring and summer of 2011. four replications were selected in each a...

The climbing habit is an evolutionary key innovation in plants because it is associated with enhanced clade diversification. We tested whether patterns of species divergence and variation of three ecophysiological traits that are fundamental for plant adaptation to light environments (maximum photosynthetic rate [A(max)], dark respiration rate [R(d)], and specific leaf area [SLA]) are consisten...

Understanding diversity through time in the fossil record has primarily relied on the raw count of species within a given time interval, or species richness. These estimates are often derived from published fossil data, and standardized for sample size or geographic area. However, most methods that standardize richness by sample size are sensitive to changes in evenness, which introduces a pote...

Woody plant encroachment is a worldwide phenomenon in grassland and savanna systems whose consequence is often the development of an alternate woodland state. Theoretically, an alternate state may be associated with changes in system state variables (e.g., species composition) or abiotic parameter shifts (e.g., nutrient availability). When state-variable changes are cumulative, such as in woody...

Diet guidelines recommend increasing dietary diversity. Yet, metrics for dietary diversity have neither been well-defined nor evaluated for impact on metabolic health. Also, whether diversity has effects independent of diet quality is unknown. We characterized and evaluated associations of diet diversity and quality with abdominal obesity and type II diabetes (T2D) in the Multi-Ethnic Study of ...

Latent space models (LSMs) provide a principled and effective way to extract hidden patterns from observed data. To cope with two challenges in LSMs: (1) how to capture infrequent patterns when pattern frequency is imbalanced and (2) how to reduce model size without sacrificing their expressiveness, several studies have been proposed to “diversify” LSMs, which design regularizers to encourage t...