The diversity of a community that cannot be fully counted must be inferred. The two preeminent inference methods are the MaxEnt method, which uses information in the form of constraints and Bayes’ rule which uses information in the form of data. It has been shown that these two methods are special cases of the method of Maximum (relative) Entropy (ME). We demonstrate how this method can be used...

Chloroplast microsatellites have been widely used in population genetic studies of conifers in recent years. However, their haplotype configurations suggest that they could have high levels of homoplasy, thus limiting the power of these molecular markers. A coalescent-based computer simulation was used to explore the influence of homoplasy on measures of genetic diversity based on chloroplast m...

During the past decade the relationship between biodiversity and human diversity has received increased attention, resulting in the identification of what the Declaration of Belém calls an ‘inextricable link’ between biological and cultural diversity. Although the term biocultural diversity, introduced to denote this link, is being used increasingly, there has been little critical reflection on...

A family of entropy indices constructed in the framework of Tsallis entropy formalism is used to investigate ecological diversity. It represents a new perspective in ecology because a simple equation can incorporate all aspects of α−diversity, from richness to dominance and can be also related to a measure of species rarity. In addition, a generalized Kullback-Leibler distance, constructed in t...

Introduction ..................................................................................................................... 359 I. Voting Rights Act, Section 2: Minority Voting Dilution and Protection of Communities of Common Interest ............................................................ 362 II. Democratic Inclusion and Demographic Diversity ..........................................

Factor analysis is widely used in many application areas. The first step, choosing the number of factors, remains a serious challenge. One of the most popular methods is parallel analysis (PA), which compares the observed factor strengths to simulated ones under a noise-only model. This paper presents a deterministic version of PA (DPA), which is faster and more reproducible than PA. We show th...

We live in a world of diminished ecological diversity. We extract energy, materials, and organisms from nature and modify landscapes at rates that cannot be sustained. These activities have resulted in accelerated rates of extinction, degradation, and loss of ecosystems, and disruption of the natural systems in which our cultures are embedded. The Society for Conservation Biology (SCB) believes...

A list of “ecologically informed values” of biodiversity is introduced. These aspects have rarely been the object of normative treatments. Ecologists introduced these scientific concepts as “values”, even though they are based on factual information only. Thus, ecological evaluation often remains implicit or personal. Besides diversity also complementarity, rarity, threat, irreplaceability, and...

genetic resources constitute the building blocks of crop improvement programs. these provide the basic raw material as well as reservoir of genes for breeding high-quality cultivars. characterization of germplasm is the prerequisite for subsequent utilization of the resources. in this study, suckers of twenty six damask rose genotypes (rosa damascena mill.) were collected from some of the most ...

introduction: to promote the processes of providing medical services, patient's rights and establishing uniformity in treatment policy, the evaluation quality indexes were communicated to all general hospitals in 2002. this study evaluates the implementation of managed care guideline before their communication as evaluation quality indexes of hospitals and their relationship with communication ...