Figure 1. Map of the 2001 sample sites. Figure 2. Species richness at the south and east-central Sound sites over 3 years. Figure 3. Cumulative species-richness curves for 3 years at each of the sites sampled in 2001. Figure 4. Species-area curves for each area sampled in 1999 and 2001. Figure 5. Species richness at all sites sampled in 2001. Figure 6. Percentage of the number of taxa that show...

When predicting changes in plant populations, spatial interactions must be considered. Cellular automata are models incorporating both spatial and temporal dynamics. Vegetation data were sampled on a meadow over three years using the point-quadrat method and population dynamics of three single species were modeled with a cellular automaton using stochastic decision rules. Links with the theory ...

Identification of cancer clusters may have an important value to the study of disease etiology in cancer surveillance. We aimed to determine the spatial pattern of childhood cancer cases (CCCs) from 2007 to 2009 in Tehran, Iran. Records of 176 childhood cancer counts (children younger than 15 years old) for 2007-2009 were obtained from Iran’s Ministry of Health and Medical Education. Thereafter...

Permafrost on the Qinghai–Tibetan Plateau (QTP) has degraded over the last few decades. Its ecological effects have attracted great concern. Previous studies focused mostly at plot scale, and hypothesized that degradation of permafrost would cause lowering of the water table and drying of shallow soil and then degradation of alpine grassland. However, none has been done to test the hypothesis a...

Diversity estimates play a key role in ecological assessments. Species richness and abundance are commonly used to generate complex diversity indices that are dependent on the quality of these estimates. As such, there is a long-standing interest in the development of monitoring techniques, their ability to adequately assess species diversity, and the implications for generated indices. To dete...

Soil microbial biomass plays an important role in nutrient transformation in terrestrial ecosystems. Microbial biomass is also an early indicator of changes in total soil organic carbon. Thus, the main objective of this study was to identify and quantify the present status of soil microbial biomass carbon and nitrogen with various management practices in Himalayan rangeland. To meet the aforeme...

In this paper we consider the problem of estimating the intensity of a spatial homogeneous Poisson process if a part of the observations [quadrat counts] is censored. The actual problem has occurred during a court case when one of the authors was a referee for the defense. TYPE I CENSORING; SPATIAL POISSON PROCESS; INTENSITY ESTIMATION AMS CLASSIFICATION: PRIMARY: 62F12; SECONDARY: 62N25, 90B25

We consider the problem of estimating the number of species (denoted by S) of a biological community located in a region divided into n quadrats. To address this question, different hierarchical parametric approaches have been recently developed. Despite a detailed modeling of the underlying biological processes, they all have some limitations. Indeed, some assume that n is theoretically infini...

Given the increasing number of rare and listed plant species, and decreasing resources dedicated to monitoring such species, the need to implement powerful and efficient sampling designs has never been greater. Previous studies have examined statistical efficiencies of sampling designs; however, few studies have considered associated field efficiencies. We attempted to assess fairly the relativ...