Environmentally induced phenotypic plasticity is thought to play an important role in the adaption of plant populations to heterogeneous habitat conditions, and yet the importance of epigenetic variation as a mechanism of adaptive plasticity in natural plant populations still merits further research. In this study, we investigated populations of Vitex negundo var. heterophylla (Chinese chastetr...

Environmental conditions may affect individual physiological processes that influence short-term performance and ultimately growth, survival and reproduction. As such, habitats selected by animals must provide suitable and adequate resources. Ectothermic species are highly dependent on climatic conditions and ambient temperatures that dictate body temperature regulation and in turn physiologica...

Explaining the overwhelming success of sex among eukaryotes is difficult given the obvious costs of sex relative to asexuality. Different studies have shown that sex can provide benefits in spatially heterogeneous environments under specific conditions, but whether spatial heterogeneity commonly contributes to the maintenance of sex in natural populations remains unknown. We experimentally mani...

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...

Delimiting the habitat characteristics describing the environmental conditions required by a species has become a critical tool for predicting organismal responses to environmental change. Grinnell emphasized the effects of environmental factors on the ability of a population to maintain a positive growth rate, yet few studies have included demographic or reproductive data in analyses of the Gr...

Most agricultural pests are poikilothermic species expected to respond to climate change. Currently, they are a tremendous burden because of the high losses they inflict on crops and livestock. Smallholder farmers in developing countries of Africa are likely to suffer more under these changes than farmers in the developed world because more severe climatic changes are projected in these areas. ...

River flow regulations have great impact on the downstream aquatic ecosystem. It is important to investigate the response of target species to the changes in hydrological regimes so that we can explore possible remediation measures. Ecohydraulics models that integrate hydrodynamics processes and ecological processes have been shown to be efficient in achieving these objectives. This study devel...

—It has been suggested that Nearctic pikas (Ochotona spp.) are good biogeographic indicators of regions containing rocky, mesic, and cool habitat characterized by long winters and short summers. I examined whether populations of pikas inhabiting distinct low-elevation locales (121–255 m) are faithfully restricted to long-winter and shortsummer conditions by monitoring the climate associated wit...

Species distribution models (SDM) link species occurrence with a suite of environmental predictors and provide an estimate of habitat quality when the variable set captures the biological requirements of the species. SDMs are inherently more complex when they include components of a species' ecology such as conspecific attraction and behavioral flexibility to exploit resources that vary across ...