There is increasing interest in developing better predictive tools and a broader conceptual framework to guide the restoration of degraded land. Traditionally, restoration efforts have focused on re-establishing historical disturbance regimes or abiotic conditions, relying on successional processes to guide the recovery of biotic communities. However, strong feedbacks between biotic factors and...

Despite the recent renewal of debate and speculation (May, 1990; Erwin, 1983, 1991; Gaston, 1991a; Ødegaard, 2000), biologists seem far from providing an acceptable answer to the basic question of how many species there are on the Earth. Knowledge of the richness and composition of the world’s biota is fundamental for both theoretical and practical reasons. Departamento de Biologı́a, Universidad...

The oldest-known air-breathing land animal is the millipede Pneumodesmus newmani, found in the Cowie Harbour Fish Bed at Stonehaven, Scotland. Here we report the youngest, most concordant 238U-206Pb zircon age from ash below the fish bed of 413.7±4.4 Ma (±2σ), whereas the youngest age from a tuffaceous sandstone above the fish bed is statistically indistinguishable at 414.3±7.1 Ma. The Cowie Ha...

The widespread replacement of native species with cosmopolitan, nonnative species is homogenizing the global fauna and flora. While the empirical study of biotic homogenization is substantial and growing, theoretical aspects have yet to be explored. Consequently, the breadth of possible ecological mechanisms that can shape current and future patterns and rates of homogenization remain largely u...

Many hypotheses have been proposed to explain the presence of Gondwanan lineages in tropical Asia including, the out-of-India hypothesis, the Eurasian route hypothesis, long-distance transoceanic dispersal and the boreotropical hypothesis. Recent molecular studies support an out-of-India Gondwanan origin of some tropical Asian taxa. Specifically these studies suggest that ancient Gondwanan line...

Human activities have reorganized the earth's biota resulting in spatially disparate locales becoming more or less similar in species composition over time through the processes of biotic homogenization and biotic differentiation, respectively. Despite mounting evidence suggesting that this process may be widespread in both aquatic and terrestrial systems, past studies have predominantly focuse...

Because of the high management relevance, commercial fish related aspects have often been central in marine ecosystem investigations. The iterative shiftogram method was applied to detect occurrence, type and timing of shifts in the single and multivariate time series linked to the spring spawning herring larvae in the Gulf of Riga (Baltic Sea). Altogether nineteen larval herring and related en...