In recent years, ecological research has suggested several mechanisms by which biodiversity might affect the risk of acquiring infectious diseases (i.e., the decoy, dilution or amplification effects), but the topic remains controversial. While many experimental studies suggest a negative relationship between biodiversity and disease, this relationship is inherently complex, and might be negativ...

Human activity has altered natural landscape patterns and ecosystem functioning to varying degrees over the course of recorded history (Turner 1990). Even the act of “preserving” a wilderness landscape results from a societal decision based on the value placed on that landscape. Such acts, as with many ecosystem uses, rarely happen by accident. Therefore, in order to assess ecosystem function a...

pollination and pest control are perhaps the best-known ecological services performed by hover flies. the species diversity and their abundance have an influential impact on the ecological services provided by this family. to find out species diversity of adult flower flies associated with agroecosystems in kerman province, a biodiversity survey using insect net and color water traps was conduc...

Biogeography and metacommunity ecology provide two different perspectives on species diversity. Both are spatial in nature but their spatial scales do not necessarily match. With recent boom of metacommunity studies, we see an increasing need for clear discrimination of spatial scales relevant for both perspectives. This discrimination is a necessary prerequisite for improved understanding of e...

Ecological communities are structured by processes operating at multiple spatial scales, which results in an often daunting complexity. Here we present a simple graphical theory to study the interaction of two fundamental community processes: resource competition at the local scale and dispersal at the regional scale. We consider a metacommunity model with two habitat patches in which consumer ...

Navigation designs in virtual environments often draw on research findings on human navigation behaviors in the real world, in particular the landmark-route-survey spatial knowledge model. Geographers and cognitive psychologists have argued that this model is insufficient to capture the complexity of spatial cognition related to navigation. They have suggested that new theories are needed to un...

BACKGROUND Seagrass species in the tropics occur in multispecies meadows. How these meadows are maintained through species co-existence and what their ecological drivers may be has been an overarching question in seagrass biogeography. In this study, we quantify the spatial structure of four co-existing species and infer potential ecological processes from these structures. METHODS AND RESULT...

Landscape-scale ecological networks (ENs) are interconnected conservation corridors of high-quality habitat used to mitigate the adverse effects of landscape fragmentation and to connect with protected areas. The effectiveness of ENs for biodiversity conservation and ecosystem function has been challenged. Here we show how an extensive system of ENs of remnant historic land was put in place at ...