kavir national park is an example of dry and desert ecosystem that is consisted of vast plains and numerous highlands. wild sheep is one of the iconic bovid in this area. understanding their habitat requirements and similarities is essential for their successful population management. we used ecological niche factor analysis approach to develop habitat suitability models for wild sheep in kavir...

We combine evolutionary biology and community ecology to test whether two species traits, body size and geographic range, explain long term variation in local scale freshwater stream fish assemblages. Body size and geographic range are expected to influence several aspects of fish ecology, via relationships with niche breadth, dispersal, and abundance. These traits are expected to scale inverse...

Ecomorphological differentiation is a key feature of adaptive radiations, with a general trend for specialization and niche expansion following divergence. Ecological opportunity afforded by invasion of a new habitat is thought to act as an ecological release, facilitating divergence, and speciation. Here, we investigate trophic adaptive morphology and ecology of an endemic clade of oreochromin...

The vegetation covering of a region has a direct correlation with climate. So if data is available for vegetation cover, the second variable (climate) can be easily predicted and in reverse. The dominant species in a region are indication of its climatic conditions and vice versa. Accordingly, this is of significance in the science of historical botany. Fortunately, from the first millennium A...

Species distribution models (SDMs) are a general suite of models that relate the frequency of species occurrences (presence only or presence/absence) to sets of environmental variables. These relationships can then be used to generate predictions of the geographic areas where the species are expected to occur, making SDMs powerful and widely used tools in conservation biology, biogeography and ...

BACKGROUND AND AIMS This study examined the adaptive association between seed germination ecology and specialization to either forest or open habitats across a range of evolutionary lineages of seed plants, in order to test the hypotheses that (1) species' specialization to open vs. shaded habitats is consistently accompanied by specialization in their regeneration niche; and (2) species are th...

Marine invasion ecology and management have progressed significantly over the last 30 years although many knowledge gaps and challenges remain. The kelp Undaria pinnatifida, or "Wakame," has a global non-native range and is considered one of the world's "worst" invasive species. Since its first recorded introduction in 1971, numerous studies have been conducted on its ecology, invasive characte...

The purpose of ecological niche modelling is to obtain a probabilistic species distribution based on species localization and environmental data. The problem is highly complex from the architectural viewpoint because its requirements include different distributed, interoperable and integration issues. Monolithic solutions were proposed and implemented but they were not able to achieve all requi...

Seascape ecology is an emerging pattern-oriented and integrative science conceptually linked to landscape ecology. It aims quantify multidimensional spatial structure in the sea reveal its ecological consequences. The seascape approach has made important advances shallow coastal environments, increasing exploration mapping of deep seabed provides opportunities for application ocean. We argue th...