Free-ranging domestic cats are a detriment to wildlife and humans by preying on native species transmitting disease. As result, removing free-ranging from the landscape has become conservation public health priority. Estimating cat population size with an unbiased sampling design, however, especially in human-dominated areas, is logistically challenging rarely done. The lack of robust limits ou...

Article history: Received 9 July 2007 Received in revised form 2 January 2008 Accepted 10 January 2008 Ecotones are zones of transition between two adjacent ecological systems and are characterized by a high rate of change compared to these adjacent areas. They are dynamic entities with both a spatial and temporal property, reflected in an ecotone width and location, which vary across time duri...

Studies of shallow-water hydrothermal vents have been lagging behind their deep-sea counterparts. Hence, the importance of these systems and their contribution to the local and regional diversity and biogeochemistry is unclear. This study analyzes the bacterial community along a transect at the shallow-water hydrothermal vent system of Milos island, Greece. The abundance and biomass of the prok...

Cultivated land resources are an important basis of regional sustainability; thus, it is important to determine the distribution of the cultivated land in the Northeast Asia trans-boundary area of China, Russia and Mongolia, which has a continuous geographic and ecological environment and an uneven population distribution. Extracting information about the cultivated land and determining the spa...

Line transect surveying is a relatively rapid and efficient procedure for the assessment of primate populations; although the reliability of the resulting density estimates is affected by a number of factors, including habitat configuration. In this study, primate populations were surveyed at a highly fragmented site in northeastern Brazil, where the resident species include the endangered Coim...

Groundwater plays an important role in coastal regions by delivering freshwater and nutrients to near shore and salt marsh environments. To quantify groundwater flow, salinity, temperature and pressure, sensors were installed in shallow piezometers along a transect behind Blackbeard Island, GA. Located approximately 90 m from the nearest tidal creek, the transect reaches from a back barrier isl...

Coarsewoody debris (CWD)may be defined as dead and down trees of a certainminimum size that are an important forest ecosystem component (e.g., wildlife habitat, carbon stocks, and fuels). Due to field efficiency concerns, some natural resource inventories onlymeasure the attributes of CWDpieces at their point of intersection with a sampling transect (e.g., transect diameter) although measuremen...

Distance sampling is a technique for estimating the abundance of animals or other objects in a region, allowing for imperfect detection. This paper evaluates the statistical efficiency of the method when its assumptions are met, both theoretically and by simulation. The theoretical component of the paper is a derivation of the asymptotic variance penalty for the distance sampling estimator aris...

Precise measurements of snow structural parameters and stratigraphy are essential to understand and model snow physical processes, in particular with respect to avalanche formation. However, most snow measurements are limited in spatial resolution and by extensive measurement times, and therefore lack practicability for avalanche professionals. The snow micro-penetrometer (SMP), a portable, hig...

Leaf caloric value (LCV) is a useful index to represent the conversion efficiency of leaves for solar energy. We investigated the spatial pattern of LCV and explored the factors (phylogeny, climate, and soil) that influence them at a large scale by determining LCV standardized by leaf area in 920 plant species from nine forest communities along the 3700 km North-South Transect of Eastern China....