With increasing coastal infrastructure and use of novel materials there is a need to investigate the colonisation of assemblages associated with new structures, how these differ to natural and other artificial habitats and their potential impact on regional biodiversity. The colonisation of Europe's first artificial surf reef (ASR) was investigated at Boscombe on the south coast of England (200...

Passive restoration depending on native shrubs is an attractive approach for restoring desertified landscapes in semi-arid sandy regions. We sought to understand the relationships between spatial patterns of native shrubs and their survival ability in sandy environments. Furthermore, we applied our results to better understand whether passive restoration is feasible for desertified landscapes i...

Source-sink systems are metapopulations of patches that can be of variable habitat quality. They can be seen as graphs, where vertices represent the patches, and the weighted oriented edges give the probability of dispersal from one patch to another. We consider either finite or source-transitive graphs, i.e., graphs that are identical when viewed from a(ny) source. We assume stochastic, indivi...

The way environmental variation shapes neutral and adaptive genetic variation in natural populations is a key issue in evolutionary biology. Genome scans allow the identification of the genetic basis of local adaptation without previous knowledge of genetic variation or traits under selection. Candidate loci for divergent adaptation are expected to show higher FST than neutral loci influenced s...

An investigation was carried out during April to December 2000 to study mosquito fauna and ecology in Guilan Province of northern Iran. The mosquito larvae were collected by dipping method and larval habitat characteristics recorded according to hydro-ecological features. In total, 3937 larvae of the genus Culex from 92 larval breeding sites were collected. Six species of the genus Culex; Cx. m...

Sublethal disturbance may lead to behavioral modifications that have detrimental consequences for the individual. Sublethal disturbance is an indirect effect of fishing that has seldom been examined. In summer 2003, we conducted surveys on the Caribbean spiny lobster Panulirus argus in the Florida Keys, USA, before and after a 2 d mini-season exclusively for recreational sportdivers to assess t...