Assessing model performance is a continuous challenge for modelers of land use change. Comparing land use models with two neutral models, including the random constraint match model (RCM) and growing cluster model (GrC) that consider the initial land use patterns using a variety of evaluation metrics, provides a new way to evaluate the accuracy of land use models. However, using only two neutra...

Understanding the influence of habitat alteration on population structure and persistence is critical for effective conservation strategies. Timber harvest and wildfire are two of the most prevalent disturbances across temperate forests, yet the long-term effects of these two forces on population connectivity have rarely been studied. We studied populations of the Rocky Mountain tailed frog (As...

Mountain ecosystems provide a broad range of ecosystem services (ES). Trade-offs between different ES are an important aspect in the assessment of future sustainable land-use. Management of ES in mountain regions must confront the challenges of spatial and temporal heterogeneity, and interaction with structural changes in agriculture and forestry. Using a social-ecological modeling framework, w...

1. Climate change and extreme events, such as drought, threaten ecosystems worldwide and in particular mountain ecosystems, where species often live at their environmental tolerance limits. In the European Alps, plant communities are also influenced by land-use abandonment leading to woody encroachment of subalpine and alpine grasslands. 2. In this study, we explored how the forest-grassland ec...

a r t i c l e i n f o Global climate models predict that ice will be deposited in tropical regions during obliquity excursions from the current mean obliquity of ~25° to ~35°, but no geological evidence for such deposits has been reported. We document the presence of very small (decameter scale) pedestal craters in the tropics of Mars (the Daedalia Planum– Tharsis region) that are superposed on...

BRIAN H. HILL* , FRANK H. M CCORMICK , BRET C. HARVEY , SHERRI L. JOHNSON , MELVIN L. WARREN AND COLLEEN M. ELONEN* *U. S. Environmental Protection Agency, Mid-Continent Ecology Division, Duluth, MN, U.S.A. U. S. Forest Service, Rocky Mountain Research Station, Boise, ID, U.S.A. U. S. Forest Service, Pacific Southwest Research Station, Arcata, CA, U.S.A. U. S. Forest Service, Forestry Sciences ...

BACKGROUND Adaptive radiation in Mediterranean plants is poorly understood. The white-flowered Cistus lineage consists of 12 species primarily distributed in Mediterranean habitats and is herein subject to analysis. METHODOLOGY/PRINCIPAL FINDINGS We conducted a "total evidence" analysis combining nuclear (ncpGS, ITS) and plastid (trnL-trnF, trnK-matK, trnS-trnG, rbcL) DNA sequences and using ...