Mosquitofish (Gambusia affinis) is an example of a freshwater fish species whose remarkable diffusion outside its native range has led to it being placed on the list of the world's hundred worst invasive alien species (International Union for Conservation of Nature). Here, we investigate mosquitofish shoaling tendency using a dichotomous choice test in which computer-animated images of their co...

The upper coast of Texas has potential for onshore and offshore wind farm installations. Seabirds are important apex predators of estuarine and nearshore marine ecosystems and may be impacted by electricity-generating wind turbines. The area also is a crossroads for trans-Gulf and circum-Gulf of Mexico migrating land birds. Determination of avian density on land is facilitated by laser rangefin...

Hyperbolic conservation laws posed on manifolds arise in many applications to geophysical flows andgeneral relativity. Recentworkby the author and his collaborators attempts to set the foundations for a study of weak solutions defined on Riemannian or Lorentzian manifolds and includes an investigation of the existence and qualitative behavior of solutions. The metric on the manifold may either ...

The study of how population genetic structure is shaped by attributes of the environment is a central scientific pursuit in ecology and conservation. But limited resources may prohibit landscape genetics studies for many threatened species, particularly given the pace of current environmental change. Understanding the extent to which species' ecological strategies--their life histories, biology...

Because air-water and water-air interfaces are equally refractive, cloud droplets and microbubbles dispersed in bodies of water reflect sunlight in much the same way. The lifetime of sunlight-reflecting microbubbles, and hence the scale on which they may be applied, depends on Stokes Law and the influence of ambient or added surfactants. Small bubbles backscatter light more efficiently than lar...

The effect of conservation of integral invariants by finite-element discretization schemes of the shallow-water equations as a model for long-term integrations of atmospheric models is investigated. Two finite-element models are used. The first uses rectangular elements and conserves total energy using an intrinsic method. The second model uses triangular elements and a high-accuracy two-stage ...

Water is a finite resource that must be shared among multiple users and economic and conservation objectives can often be seen as being in conflict. We explored this perception by conducting an integrated bioeconomic analysis of irrigated agriculture and the conservation of freshwater attributes in an agricultural landscape, the Tasmanian Midlands. We constructed a simple bioeconomic model base...

Climate change, water supply limits, and continued population growth have intensified the search for measures to conserve water in irrigated agriculture, the world's largest water user. Policy measures that encourage adoption of water-conserving irrigation technologies are widely believed to make more water available for cities and the environment. However, little integrated analysis has been c...

The reproductive behavior and the seasonal occurrence of Psecas viridipurpureus were studied at the Estação Ecológica do Noroeste Paulista, a small conservation area in the northwest region of São Paulo State, Brazil (49 degrees 22'50"W and 20 degrees 48'36"S). P. viridipurpureus occurred on "gravatá", a bromeliaceous plant (Bromelia balansae, Bromeliaceae) which does not accumulate rain water....