The objective of this analysis was to identify topographic and bioclimatic factors that predict occurrence of forest and grassland patches within tropical montane forest-grassland mosaics. We further investigated whether interactions between topography and bioclimate are important in determining vegetation pattern, and assessed the role of spatial scale in determining the relative importance of...

India is one of the 12 mega biodiversity countries of the world, which represents 11% of world's flora in about 2.4% of global land mass. Approximately 28% of the total Indian flora and 33% of angiosperms occurring in India are endemic. Higher human population density in biodiversity hotspots in India puts undue pressure on these sensitive eco-regions. In the present study, we predict the futur...

Species distribution models of stray cats were developed using two types of occurrence data: (i) a combined dataset of stray cats and cat colonies in Auckland and projected to the wider New Zealand area; and (ii) population density as an analogue for country-wide stray cat occurrence. These occurrence data, together with sets of environmental variables were used as input to the Maxent modelling...

Taxonomy has far-reaching effects throughout biology, and incorrect taxonomy can be detrimental in many ways. Polymorphic species complexes, many of which exist in the bee genus Anthophora Latreille, lend themselves to such difficulties. This study employs environmental niche mapping (ENM) and traditional morphological analyses to investigate the validity of the subjective synonymy of Anthophor...

Bioclimatic models aimed assessing a species’ sensitivity to climate change incorporate mean shifts in climate variables; however the more acute threat to the persistence of species may result from increased frequency of extreme climatic events, including increased duration and severity of droughts. Here we assess climate-change sensitivity using niche modeling that unlike bioclimatic modeling ...

It has long been considered sufficient a single method or only a descriptive diagnosis to propose a new species. Recently, many works have proposed new theoretical paradigms to consider multiple sources of evidence to support the hypothesis of new taxa within an integrative approach. Despite this, many new described species continue to be merely descriptive and without any reproducible statisti...

Species Distribution Models (SDMs) combine information on the geographic occurrence of species with environmental layers to estimate distributional ranges and have been extensively implemented to answer a wide array of applied ecological questions. Unfortunately, most global datasets available to parameterize SDMs consist of spatially interpolated climate surfaces obtained from ground weather s...

Outbreaks, epidemics and endemic conditions make dengue a disease that has emerged as a major threat in tropical and sub-tropical countries over the past 30 years. Dengue fever creates a growing burden for public health systems and has the potential to affect over 40% of the world population. The problem being investigated is to identify the highest and lowest areas of dengue risk. This paper p...

BACKGROUND The purpose of this study is to create distribution models of two sand fly species, Phlebotomus papatasi (Scopoli) and P. alexandri (Sinton), across the Middle East. Phlebotomus alexandri is a vector of visceral leishmaniasis, while P. papatasi is a vector of cutaneous leishmaniasis and sand fly fever. Collection records were obtained from literature reports from 1950 through 2007 an...