Monitoring fish assemblages is needed to assess whether Marine Protected Areas (MPAs) are meeting their conservation and fisheries management goals, as it allows one to track the progress of recovery of exploited species and associated communities. Underwater Visual Census techniques (UVC) are used to monitor fish assemblages in MPAs. UVCs should be adapted to fish abundance, body-size and beha...

Methods for improving estimation of cetacean abundance from line transect and markrecapture surveys are proposed. Using either generalized linear or generalized additive models (GLMs or GAMs), two approaches are suggested which allow heterogeneity in the spatial distribution of cetaceans to be modelled from standard line transect data. In the rst approach, the transect lines are divided into sm...

BACKGROUND Despite being one of the first documented, there is little known of the causative agent or environmental stressors that promote white-band disease (WBD), a major disease of Caribbean Acropora palmata. Likewise, there is little known about the spatiality of outbreaks. We examined the spatial patterns of WBD during a 2004 outbreak at Buck Island Reef National Monument in the US Virgin ...

in this study, the role of soil properties in making difference between plant communitieswas examined. first, four plant types were identified, including pteropyrumaucheri-salsolarigida، astragalus gossypinus - acanthophyllum herateens، amygdalus scoparia – achilla millefolium and ephedra intermedia – erigon capestra, through randomized systematic sampling and field survey in representative are...

Cyanophages (viruses that infect cyanobacteria) are abundant in the marine environment and are thought to be a significant factor in determining the population dynamics of members of the unicellular phycoerythrin-containing cyanobacteria of the genus Synechococcus. In an effort to use molecular techniques to characterise cyanophage populations, a conserved region from the cyanophage genome was ...