Apricot (Prunus armeniaca L.) flowers at the end of the winter but flower bud differentiation occurs the previous summer. During the winter, the flower bud enters dormancy and resumes growth prior to flowering. The time the flower bud remains dormant is genetically and also environmentally controlled and is a major factor determining the adaptation of particular cultivars to particular ecologic...

Human population growth and the consequent increase in use of natural resources place enormous stress on ecosystems. Road building, urbanization and agriculture are among the main human activities that break up natural areas, often with disastrous consequences for wildlife. Concern about threats to biodiversity is reflected in the continuous increase in the number and size of protected areas wo...

Recent models of community assembly, structure, and dynamics have incorporated, to varying degrees, three mechanistic processes: resource limitation and interspecific competition, niche requirements of species, and exchanges between a local community and a regional species pool. Synthesizing 30 years of data from an intensively studied desert rodent community, we show that all of these processe...

Preserves, especially in Hawai!, must be protectable and manageable. Elements in preserve design include defining objectives, determining minimal area requirements, identifying external threats, and identifying management activities to be conducted. Biological, economic, and social priorities must be considered. There is no substitute for detailed ecological knowledge and practical experience, ...

Disease and health outcomes occur within a complex socio-ecological context characterized by feedback loops across space and time, self-organization, holarchies, and sudden changes in organization when thresholds are reached. Disease control programs, even if they are successful, may undermine health; conversely, programs in agriculture and economic development designed to improve health may si...

While tropical land clearing in the Brazilian Amazon provides for the livelihoods of Brazilians from a variety of socio-economic backgrounds, it also contributes to changes in climatological and ecological processes at a variety of scales. To develop sustainable approaches that balance the needs of forest users with ecological requirements, further study is needed to investigate the root causes...

Prediction errors in time series forecasting tasks are usually attributed to the use of heuristics. These heuristics are described as irrational because they do not take into account all the information available. However, ecological rationality theory suggests that the rational standard should not be absolute, but rather defined in relation to environmental constraints. According to this view ...

The concept of green hydropower needs an evaluation procedure for the ecological upgrading of hydropower plants based on scientific criteria [1]. For the planning and evaluation of riverrestoration programs, concepts like “ecosystem integrity” or “river health” have been proposed and empirically tested. Computer programs have been developed, which allow the testing of alternative restoration co...

To determine the optimal anti-herbivore defence allocation of a plant, a modelling approach is inevitable. However, models have too often been detached from field experiments and aloof of ecological knowledge. Here I present the case for combining the two approaches. Two preconditions for a simple model have to be fulfilled: 1. the investigated species should show no inducible resistance, a phe...

Cryptic species are phylogenetically diverged taxa that are morphologically indistinguishable and may differ in their ecological and behavioral requirements. This may have important implications for ecosystem services and conservation of biodiversity. We investigated whether two ecologically important cryptic species of the freshwater amphipod Gammarus fossarum (types A and B) are associated wi...