1. Mobility and emigration were investigated for the wolf spider Pardosa monticola in grey dune fragments from two high-density and one low-density population, where population density was related to patch quality. Pitfall trapping was applied in combination with absolute density estimates by means of quadrat sampling. Orientation behaviour was additionally observed in the highand low-density p...

Conservation biological control (CBC) is an environmentally sound potential alternative to the use of chemical insecticides. It involves modifications of the environment to promote natural enemy activity on pests. Despite many CBC studies increasing abundance of natural enemies, there are far fewer demonstrations of reduced pest density and very little work has been conducted in olive crops. In...

Ground cover vegetation is often added or allowed to generate to promote conservation biological control, especially in perennial crops. Nevertheless, there is inconsistent evidence of its effectiveness, with studies reporting positive, nil or negative effects on pest control. This might arise from differences between studies at the local scale (e.g. orchard management and land use history), th...

Recent research has shown that landscape-level changes, namely habitat loss and fragmentation, can play an important role in determining the distribution of species across a variety of ecological systems. However, the influence of these large-scale factors in relation to small-scale factors, such as local vegetation structure or composition, is poorly understood. We used Bachman’s Sparrow (Peuc...

We propose here to interpret and model peculiar plant morphologies (cushions and tussocks) observed in the Andean Altiplano as localized structures. Such structures resulting in a patchy, aperiodic aspect of the vegetation cover are hypothesized to self-organize thanks to the interplay between facilitation and competition processes occurring at the scale of basic plant components biologically r...

Edge effects are increasingly important in British Columbia forests, as cutblocks become smaller and harvesting options with retention patches are more commonly used. This note summarizes edge effects for  ecosystem variables, including microclimate, soil chemistry, snow depth, windthrow, regeneration, vegetation, and animals, at the Sicamous Creek Silvicultural Systems project in a high-elev...

Due to land use change mainly for induced agriculture, Tamaulipan thornscrubin northeast Mexico has been cleared and transformed into small patches of vegetation as small as isolated trees surrounded by agricultural fields. In this study, we explored how tree isolation or growing inside a fragment of remnant vegetation influence diversity of coleopterans in two plant species (Prosopis laevigata...