Abstract There are many ecological diversity measures, but their suitability for use with highly diverse bacterial communities is unclear and seldom considered. We assessed a range of species richness and evenness/dominance indices, and the use of species abundance models using samples of bacteria from zinc-contaminated and control soils. Bacteria were assigned to operational taxonomic units (O...

The increasing number of quantitative assessments of homogenization using citizen science data is particularly important in the Neotropics, given its high biodiversity and ecological peculiarity, and whose communities may react differently to landscape changes. We looked for evidence of taxonomic homogenization in terrestrial birds by investigating patterns of beta diversity along a gradient of...

The genus Phyllactinia is one of the members of Erysiphaceae (Erysiphales, Ascomycota) which parasitize several host plant families. This taxon is well characterized by having acicular appendages with bulbous swelling at the base and penicillate cells which are outgrowth of some ascoma wall cells. A number of challenges exist to distinguish species assigned to this taxon. This is because of a f...

Human-health relevant impacts on marine ecosystems are increasing on both spatial and temporal scales. Traditional indicators for environmental health monitoring and microbial risk assessment have relied primarily on single species analyses and have provided only limited spatial and temporal information. More high-throughput, broad-scale approaches to evaluate these impacts are therefore needed...

The impact of temperature on bacterial activity and community composition was investigated in arctic lakes and streams in northern Alaska. Aquatic bacterial communities incubated at different temperatures had different rates of production, as measured by (14)C-leucine uptake, indicating that populations within the communities had different temperature optima. Samples from Toolik Lake inlet and ...

As threats to species continue to increase, precise and unbiased measures of the impact these pressures are having on global biodiversity are urgently needed. Some existing indicators of the status and trends of biodiversity largely rely on publicly available data from the scientific and grey literature, and are therefore prone to biases introduced through over-representation of well-studied gr...

from any of the three federal Canadian funding agencies must be reviewed and approved in advance by a human research ethics board (REB). The Tri-Council Policy Statement: Ethical Conduct for Research Involving Humans (TCPS) requires that each institution be fully responsible for the ethics review of human research conducted under its auspices (Article 1.2). This provision has been interpreted t...

The world is currently undergoing an unprecedented decline in biodiversity, which is mainly attributable to human activities. For instance, nonnative species introduction, combined with the extirpation of native species, affects biodiversity patterns, notably by increasing the similarity among species assemblages. This biodiversity change, called taxonomic homogenization, has rarely been assess...