the present study was conducted in the rangeland of glandrood watershed in the province of mazandaran. the objective of this study was to compare between the ecological amplitude of festuca ovina l., and poa bulbosa l., using the function hof along the gradient of the environmental variables. for this purpose 150 plots of 1m2 were established along the altitude gradient. the sampling method was...

The co-occurrence pattern of epiphytic lichen communities was evaluated relative to microenvironmental heterogeneity along an edge-interior forest gradient. We collected data on the occurrence of 57 epiphytic lichen species from 452 plots in a Mediterranean forest remnant. We used two realistic null models to test for non-randomness in the structure of epiphytic lichen communities and generaliz...

Large-river floodplains have been subjected to profound human-caused alteration, but subsequent effects on landbirds in these habitats are largely unknown. To assess the extent to which landscape measures might serve as ecological indicators in these systems, we examined patterns of habitat use by forest birds along a 380-km stretch of the Wisconsin River, USA. We surveyed forest bird communiti...

The distribution of Lutzomyia longipalpis is heterogeneous with a pattern of high abundance areas (HAAs) embedded in a matrix of low abundance areas (LAAs). The objective of this study was to describe the variability in the abundance of Lu. longipalpis at two different spatial levels and to analyse the relationship between the abundance and multiple environmental variables. Of the environmental...

BACKGROUND Conservation of phylogenetic diversity allows maximising evolutionary information preserved within fauna and flora. The "EDGE of Existence" programme is the first institutional conservation initiative that prioritises species based on phylogenetic information. Species are ranked in two ways: one according to their evolutionary distinctiveness (ED) and second, by including IUCN extinc...

BACKGROUND Aortic intima-media thickness measured by transabdominal ultrasound (aIMT) is an intermediate phenotype of cardiovascular risk. We aimed to (1) investigate the reproducibility of aIMT in a population-derived cohort of infants; (2) establish the distribution of aIMT in early infancy; (3) compare measurement by edge-detection software to that by manual sonographic calipers; and (4) ass...