Divergent selection on traits involved in both local adaptation and the production of mating signals can strongly facilitate population differentiation. Because of its links to foraging morphologies and cultural inheritance song of birds can contribute particularly strongly to maintenance of local adaptations. In two adjacent habitats--native Sonoran desert and urban areas--house finches (Carpo...

Pakistan is among the countries that have already crossed water scarcity line, and situation worsened due to recent pandemic. This because major budget of country shifted primary healthcare activities from other development projects included treatment transportation infrastructure. Consequently, water-borne diseases increased drastically in past few months. Therefore, there a dire need address ...

Despite many areas of progress in recent years, desert locust surveillance and control is impaired by obstacles, the most intractable which insecurity. Insecurity involves rebellions, insurgencies, civil international war, banditry, terrorism, minefields. Obstruction operations breeding ongoing armed conflict landmines constitutes “direct” “Indirect” insecurity, although less obvious, arguably ...

Terrestrial vegetation dynamics are closely influenced by both climate and by both climate and by land use and/or land cover change (LULCC) caused by human activities. Both can change over time in a monotonic way and it can be difficult to separate the effects of climate change from LULCC on vegetation. Here we attempt to attribute trends in the fractional green vegetation cover to climate vari...

soil surfaces in arid and semi-arid lands often lack photoautotrophic life but are covered by communities of soil surface covering organisms able to tolerate dehydration, and thus adapted to aridity. one important objective of multi-spectral remote sensing instruments is the detection of the optical characteristics of the earth’s surface using high spectral resolution bands. in this study aster...

We explored the relationship between lipids of the stratum corneum (SC), the barrier to water-vapor diffusion of the skin, and cutaneous water loss (CWL) of species of free-living larks along a temperature-moisture gradient. Our results showed that free fatty acids, cholesterol, and ceramides were the major constituents of SC in larks from different environments including the Netherlands, a mes...

The Atacama Desert of northern Chile is one of the driest regions on Earth, with areas that exclude plants and where soils have extremely low microbial biomass. However, in the driest parts of the desert there are microorganisms that colonize the interior of halite nodules in fossil continental evaporites, where they are sustained by condensation of atmospheric water triggered by the salt subst...