THE GEOGRAPHIC area inhabited by a species is constrained by its ecological niche, the multidimensional set of environmental variables that determines where members of a species can survive and maintain viable populations (Grinnell 1917). Individual organisms have the physiological capacity to inhabit any geographic location characterised by physical parameters within the constraints of the spe...

Rabies was known to humans as a disease thousands of years ago. In America, insectivorous bats are natural reservoirs of rabies virus. The bat species Tadarida brasiliensis and Lasiurus cinereus, with their respective, host-specific rabies virus variants AgV4 and AgV6, are the principal rabies reservoirs in Chile. However, little is known about the roles of bat species in the ecology and geogra...

Ecological divergence and selection for novel adaptations to new habitats have been theoretically proposed to play important roles in promoting homoploid hybrid speciation (HHS). The successful establishment of Pinus densata on the Tibetan Plateau is one of the few known examples of HHS. In this study, we carried out extensive field expeditions to obtain representative coverage of occurrence si...

The archaeological record shows that typically human cultural traits emerged at different times, in different parts of the world, and among different hominin taxa. This pattern suggests that their emergence is the outcome of complex and nonlinear evolutionary trajectories, influenced by environmental, demographic, and social factors, that need to be understood and traced at regional scales. The...

Niche construction means that all organisms modify their environments, also known as ecosystem engineering. Organism– environmental relations induced by niche construction profoundly influence the dynamics, competition, and diversity of metapopulations. Single-species model shows a positive feedback between metapopulation and environmental resources, which leads to threshold phenomena in dynami...

Since the description of the Neotropical genus Vargasiella in 1952, its taxonomic position has remained unclear, mainly due to a lack of sufficient data. In this study, the taxonomic position of Vargasiella was revised based on the outcomes of macro- and micromorphological studies, analyses of selected molecular markers and ecological methods of niche distribution modeling. The phylogenetic rel...