distribution and abundance of plants has been correlated with a variety of complex environmental gradients. environmental factors affect plants growth and need to be understood by ecosystem managers. this study was carried out to examine the relationships between site factors and different vascular and non-vascular plants in north of iran. for this purpose, vegetation and soil sampling was perf...

A key challenge in movement ecology is to understand how animals move in nature. Previous studies have predicted that animals should perform a special class of random walks, called Lévy walk, to obtain more targets. However, some empirical studies did not support this hypothesis, and the relationship between search strategy and ecological factors is still unclear. We focused on ecological facto...

BACKGROUND Obese black women enrolled in weight loss interventions experience 50% less weight reduction than obese white women. This suggests that current weight loss strategies may increase health disparities. OBJECTIVE We evaluated the feasibility of identifying daily contextual factors that may influence obesity. METHODS In-home interviews with 16 obese (body mass index ≥ 30) black and w...

Theoretical and empirical research indicates that sexual selection interacts with the ecological context in which mate choice occurs, suggesting that sexual and natural selection act together during the evolution of premating reproductive isolation. However, the relative importance of natural and sexual selection to speciation remains poorly understood. Here, we applied a recent conceptual fram...

It is critical to study factors that are important for origin and maintenance of biological diversity. A comparative approach involving a large number of populations is particularly useful. We use this approach to study the relationship between ecological factors and phenotypic diversity in Icelandic Arctic charr (Salvelinus alpinus). Numerous populations of small benthic charr have evolved in ...