BACKGROUND Conserving biodiversity in tropical landscapes is a major challenge to scientists and conservationists. Current rates of deforestation, fragmentation, and land use intensification are producing variegated landscapes with undetermined values for the conservation of biological communities and ecosystem functioning. Here, we investigate the importance of tropical variegated landscapes t...

Habitat loss is the main driver of the current biodiversity crisis, a landscape-scale process that affects the survival of spatially-structured populations. Although it is well-established that species responses to habitat loss can be abrupt, the existence of a biodiversity threshold is still the cause of much controversy in the literature and would require that most species respond similarly t...

The role of scenic landscapes in restoring human mental fatigue has begun to receive attention from landscape researchers. However, little is known about the positive role of visually-preferred landscapes on restorative environments and in improving the mental fatigue of people. This study attempted to determine the relationship between the predictors of preference and restorative components of...

Since their range expansion into eastern North America in the mid-1900s, coyotes (Canis latrans) have become the region's top predator. Although widespread across the region, coyote adaptation to eastern forests and use of the broader landscape are not well understood. We studied the distribution and abundance of coyotes by collecting coyote feces from 54 sites across a diversity of landscapes ...

Seed dispersal constitutes a pivotal process in an increasingly fragmented world, promoting population connectivity, colonization and range shifts in plants. Unveiling how multiple frugivore species disperse seeds through fragmented landscapes, operating as mobile links, has remained elusive owing to methodological constraints for monitoring seed dispersal events. We combine for the first time ...

Landscape corridors are commonly used to mitigate negative effects of habitat fragmentation, but concerns persist that they may facilitate the spread of invasive species. In a replicated landscape experiment of open habitat, we measured effects of corridors on the invasive fire ant, Solenopsis invicta, and native ants. Fire ants have two social forms: polygyne, which tend to disperse poorly but...

Determining connectivity within complex landscapes is difficult if habitats that facilitate dispersal differ from habitats where animals normally are found or enter. We addressed the question of how landscape features affect dispersal by quantifying two critical aspects of animal movement behavior that determine dispersal rates across complex landscapes: conductivity of major habitat types and ...

The paper presents the results of the project GISMO, which aimed on generating and interactively visualising a 3D urban landscape model of the city of Stuttgart, Germany. With respect to the desired flexibility to support walkthrough and flyover applications, a combined approach using continuous level of detail, the impostor technique and a method for generalizing 3D building models was used to...

A quantum control landscape is defined as the physical objective as a function of the control variables. In this paper the control landscapes for two-level open quantum systems, whose evolution is described by general completely positive trace preserving maps (i.e., Kraus maps), are investigated in details. The objective function, which is the expectation value of a target system operator, is d...