1. Evaluating variation, or ‘conditionality’, in plant interactions is crucial to understanding their ecological importance and predicting where theymight be at play.Much is known about conditionality for competition, facilitation and herbivory, but not for allelopathy, which likely contributes to the equivocal nature of reports on this topic.Centaurea maculosa (spotted knapweed) is an invasive...

A central question linking ecology with evolutionary biology is how environmental heterogeneity can drive adaptive genetic divergence among populations. We examined adaptive divergence of four stream insects from six adjacent catchments in Japan by combining field measures of habitat and resource components with genome scans of non-neutral Amplified Fragment Length Polymorphism (AFLP) loci. Neu...

The pattern (space versus time) and scale (relative to the lifetime of individuals) of environmental variation is thought to play a central role in governing the evolution of the ecological niche and the maintenance of genetic variance in fitness. To evaluate this idea, we serially propagated an initially genetically uniform population of the bacterium Pseudomonas fluorescens for a few hundred ...

This paper describes information technology being developed to improve the quality, sophistication, accessibility, and pedagogical simplicity of ecological network data, analysis, and visualization. We present designs for a WWW demonstration/prototype web site that provides database, analysis, and visualization tools for research and education related to food web research. Our early experience ...

An ecological correlation is a correlation based on group averages. Ecological correlations as such can be misleading, because the variability in the underlying individual data is lost by using averages. In interpretation of the results, there is a danger of committing the ecological fallacy: data is analysed at one level and inferences are made to another level (Robinson 1950). In 2-level mode...

Information is a crucial currency for animals from both a behavioural and evolutionary perspective. Adaptive behaviour relies upon accurate estimation of relevant ecological parameters; the better informed an individual, the better it can develop and adjust its behaviour to meet the demands of a variable world. Here, we focus on the burgeoning interest in the impact of ecological uncertainty on...

This paper discusses the problem of motion processing and proposes the use of a mathematical model, which describes a motion signal as a path with variable harmonic components. We show that this model is quite suited to representing a motion path as a periodic part with additional motion texture (noise), as described in [18]. This provides a good mathematical formulation to the idea of “motion ...

Intelligence, expertise, ability and talent, as these terms have traditionally been used in education and psychology, are socially agreed upon labels that minimize the dynamic, evolving, and contextual nature of individual–environment relations. These hypothesized constructs can instead be described as functional relations distributed across whole persons and particular contexts through which i...

Numerous ecological studies use Principal Components Analysis (PCA) for exploratory analysis and data reduction. Determination of the number of components to retain is the most crucial problem confronting the researcher when using PCA. An incorrect choice may lead to the underextraction of components, but commonly results in overextraction. Of several methods proposed to determine the significa...