Large-river floodplains have been subjected to profound human-caused alteration, but subsequent effects on landbirds in these habitats are largely unknown. To assess the extent to which landscape measures might serve as ecological indicators in these systems, we examined patterns of habitat use by forest birds along a 380-km stretch of the Wisconsin River, USA. We surveyed forest bird communiti...

The development of targets is foundational in conservation. Although progress has been made in setting targets, the diverse linkages among ecological and social components make target setting for coupled social-ecological systems extremely challenging. Developing integrated social-ecological targets is difficult because it forces policy makers to consider how management actions propagate throug...

Artificial neural networks (ANNs) represent a powerful analytical tool designed for predictive modeling. However the shortage of straightforward and reliable approaches for calculating variable importance and characterizing predictor–response relationships has likely hindered the broader use of ANNs in ecology. Two such metrics – product-of-connection-weights (PCW) and product-of-standardized-w...

Understanding the impacts of species extinctions on the functioning of food webs is a challenging task because of the complexity of ecological interactions. We report the impacts of experimental species extinctions on the functioning of two food webs of freshwater and marine systems. We used a linear model to partition the variance among the multiple components of the diversity effect (linear g...

This paper presents techniques to integrate the use of variable-latency units in a high-level synthesis (HLS) design methodology. Components used as building blocks (e.g., functional units) in conventional HLS techniques are assumed to have fixed latency values. Variable-latency units exhibit the property that the number of cycles taken to compute their outputs varies depending on the input val...

Ecology can be defined as the study of ecological systems. A system is any set of components, living or nonliving, that are tied together by regular interactions. An ecological system is made up of one or more organisms, together with the nonliving environment with which they interact. Ecological systems exist at several different levels of organization. An ecological system can be a single org...

Fitness results from an optimal balance between survival, mating success and fecundity. The interactions between these three components of fitness vary depending on the selective context, from positive covariation between them, to antagonistic pleiotropic relationships when fitness increases in one reduce the fitness of others. Therefore, elucidating the routes through which selection shapes li...

Intraspecific phenotypic variation is a significant component of biodiversity. Body size, for example, is variable and critical for structuring communities. We need to understand how homogenous and variably sized populations differ in their ecological responses or effects if we are to have a robust understanding of communities. We manipulated body size variation in consumer (tadpole) population...