Biodiversity is of crucial importance for ecosystem functioning, sustainability and resilience, but the magnitude and organization of marine diversity at a range of spatial and taxonomic scales are undefined. In this paper, we use second-generation sequencing to unmask putatively diverse marine metazoan biodiversity in a Scottish temperate benthic ecosystem. We show that remarkable differences ...

While many differences in hippocampal anatomy have been described between species, it is typically not clear if they are specific to a particular species and related to functional requirements or if they are shared by species of larger taxonomic units. Without such information, it is difficult to infer how anatomical differences may impact on hippocampal function, because multiple taxonomic lev...

Informative conservation science is reliant on accurate, high quality and robust data. Floras and Faunas can often provide the baseline information which feeds into a wide variety of conservation decisions made at a national, regional and global level, particularly for species based conservation. Conservation priority-setting algorithms make increasing use of species distribution ranges and the...

Ontologies describe a conceptualization of a part of the world relevant to some application. What are the units of conceptualizations? Current ontologies often equate concepts with words from natural languages. Words are certainly not the smallest units of conceptualization, neither are the sets of synonyms of WordNet or other linguistically justified units. I suggest to take distinctions as ba...

A phylogenetic tree relates taxonomic units using their similarities over a set of characteristics. Given a set of taxonomic units and their characteristics, the phylogeny problem under the parsimony criterion consists in finding a phylogenetic tree with a minimum number of evolutionary steps. We developed a hybrid genetic algorithm for the problem of building a phylogenetic tree minimizing par...

The spatial dynamics of ecological diversity are studied in two regions (Sudbury, Canada and Harjavalta, Finland) damaged by air pollution from copper and nickel smelting. Perturbation from pollution is assumed to be most intense near the source and to decrease with distance. Monitoring sites were therefore selected to traverse these pollution gradients. Using Rhyi's generalized entropy as a me...