in the course of our survey on oribatid mite fauna of the orchards of the city of arak (markazi province), in 2005-2006, we identified the species tectoribates ornatus (schuster). this species belongs to the family tegoribatidae and is a new record for the iranian mite fauna.

The late Quaternary Kibish Formation of the Omo Valley, southwestern Ethiopia, preserves environments reflecting a history of fluctuations in the level of nearby Lake Turkana over the past 200,000 years. The Kibish Formation has yielded a diverse mammalian fauna (as well as birds and crocodiles), stone tools, and the oldest anatomically modern Homo sapiens. Fish, the most common vertebrate foss...

Reducing the fuel load in fire-prone landscapes is aimed at mitigating the risk of catastrophic wildfires but there are ecological consequences. Maintaining habitat for fauna of both sufficient extent and connectivity while fragmenting areas of high fuel loads presents land managers with seemingly contrasting objectives. Faced with this dichotomy, we propose a Mixed Integer Programming (MIP) mo...

Environmental disturbances seem to be increasing in frequency and impact, yet we have little understanding of the belowground impacts of these events. Soil fauna, while widely acknowledged to be important drivers of biogeochemical function, soil structure and sustainability, and trophic interactions, are understudied compared to other belowground organisms such as archaea, bacteria, and fungi. ...

Knowledge of the mayfly biodiversity in the Balkan Peninsula is still far from complete. Compared to the neighbouring countries, the mayfly fauna in Croatia is very poorly known. Situated at the crossroads of central and Mediterranean Europe and the Balkan Peninsula, Croatia is divided into two ecoregions: Dinaric western Balkan and Pannonian lowland. Mayflies were sampled between 2003 and 2013...

This study represents the first complete modern account of the Sphingidae of Pakistan and takes the form of an annotated checklist, based on several national collections and those of a number of individuals. Of the 60 species and subspecies found, 14 are new records to the fauna of Pakistan, namely Agnosia orneus, Langia zenzeroides subsp. zenzeroides, Polyptychus trilineatus subsp. trilineatus...

Plant leaf litter generally decomposes faster as a group of different species than when individual species decompose alone, but underlying mechanisms of these diversity effects remain poorly understood. Because resource C : N : P stoichiometry (i.e. the ratios of these key elements) exhibits strong control on consumers, we supposed that stoichiometric dissimilarity of litter mixtures (i.e. the ...

R. C. L. Perkins' influence on evolutionary research on the Hawaiian Drosophilidae is presented. His observations of the bizarre secondary sexual structures in this group led evolutionary biologists to focus research on the role of sexual selection in speciation and the evolutionary processes responsible for the proliferation of Drosophila species in the native Hawaiian fauna. A review of early...