Recent expansion of the scale of human activities poses severe threats to Earth's life-support systems. Increasingly, protected areas (PAs) are expected to serve dual goals: protect biodiversity and secure ecosystem services. We report a nationwide assessment for China, quantifying the provision of threatened species habitat and four key regulating services-water retention, soil retention, sand...

Habitat overlap can increase the risks of anthroponotic and zoonotic pathogen transmission between humans, livestock, and wild apes. We collected Escherichia coli bacteria from humans, livestock, and mountain gorillas (Gorilla gorilla beringei) in Bwindi Impenetrable National Park, Uganda, from May to August 2005 to examine whether habitat overlap influences rates and patterns of pathogen trans...

The Human Microbiome Project provided a census of bacterial populations in healthy individuals, but an understanding of the biomedical significance of this census has been hindered by limited taxonomic resolution. A high-resolution method termed oligotyping overcomes this limitation by evaluating individual nucleotide positions using Shannon entropy to identify the most information-rich nucleot...

Understanding how animals react to human-induced changes in their environment is a key question in conservation biology. Owing to their potential correlation with fitness, several physiological parameters are commonly used to assess the effect of habitat disturbance on animals' general health status. Here, we studied how two lemur species, the fat-tailed dwarf lemur (Cheirogaleus medius) and th...

Habitat destruction is the most important factor determining species extinction; hence, the management of wildlife populations necessitates the management of habitats. Habitat suitability modeling is one of the best tools used for habitat management. There are several methods for habitat suitability modeling, with each of having  some different advantages and disadvantages. In this study, we us...

Traditional approaches to studying human–environment interactions often ignore individual-level information, do not account for complexities, or fail to integrate cross-scale or cross-discipline data and methods, thus, in many situations, resulting in a great loss in predictive or explanatory power. This article reports on the development, implementation, validation, and results of an agent-bas...

Human-altered environments often challenge native species with a complex spatial distribution of resources. Hostile landscape features can inhibit animal movement (i.e., genetic exchange), while other landscape attributes facilitate gene flow. The genetic attributes of organisms inhabiting such complex environments can reveal the legacy of their movements through the landscape. Thus, by evaluat...

Protected areas form a quintessential component of the global strategy to perpetuate tropical biodiversity within relatively undisturbed wildlands, but they are becoming increasingly isolated by rapid agricultural encroachment. Here we consider a network of 788 forest protected areas (PAs) in the world's largest tropical country to examine the degree to which they remain intact, and their respo...

To evaluate the role of wildlife in the resurgence and perenisation of human African trypanosomiasis (HAT), we investigated the influence of habitat and seasonal variations on the diversity and spatial distribution of wild mammals, with special reference to those recognised as potential host-reservoirs of Trypanosoma brucei gambiense in Bipindi (southwestern Cameroon). To achieve this, we carri...

Phragmites australis (common reed) is widespread in North America, with native and non-native haplotypes. Many ecologists and wetland managers have considered P. australis a weed with little value to the native biota or human society. I document important ecosystem services of Phragmites including support for many common and rare species of plants and animals. This paper is based on an extensiv...