Both habitat partitioning and dispersal limitation influence the compositional structure of forest communities, but little is known about the relative contributions of these two processes, or the roles of different types of environmental variation. I used variation partitioning based on canonical redundancy analysis to decompose community compositional variation within eight large (24-50 ha) tr...

background: scorpions’ stings and their own mortalities place them among the most important health and medical problems. the dreadful features and especially their poisonous stings are considered a major cause of human stress and abhorrence/phobia. the current study aimed to study the scorpion fauna of ilam province, south western iran in order to manage scorpionism related problems. methods: i...

According to the last report of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, human activities are the main responsible for global warming due to the increase in the atmospheric concentration of greenhouse gases. This process is already causing changes in the geographical distribution of species as well as alterations in phenology. With this background, it is interesting to study the expected ...

The use of ecological niche modeling (ENM) to estimate the geographic ranges of species is widely employed with modern fauna and is becoming more widespread in paleontology. Herein, field validation is utilized to assess the predictive accuracy of ENM methods for Paleozoic brachiopod species. This study represents the first field validation analysis of ENM methods in the fossil record. Previous...

Modelling and mapping of hooded warbler (Wilsonia citrina) nesting habitat in forests of southern Ontario were conducted using Ikonos and Landsat data. The study began with an analysis of skyward hemispherical photography to determine canopy characteristics associated with nest sites. It showed that nest sites had significantly less overhead canopy cover and larger maximum gap size than in non-...

Evolutionary ecology is a theoretical framework that has been widely applied to problems in human evolution and prehistory. Because the approach often focuses on how behavioral adjustments to changing socio-ecological conditions create novel selective pressures that in turn drive other changes in morphology and behavior, it draws on the same evolutionary logic that underlies niche construction ...

The range of resources that a species uses (i.e. its niche breadth) might determine the geographical area it can occupy, but consensus on whether a niche breadth-range size relationship generally exists among species has been slow to emerge. The validity of this hypothesis is a key question in ecology in that it proposes a mechanism for commonness and rarity, and if true, may help predict speci...

Landscape connectivity describes how the movement of animals relates to landscape structure. The way in which movement among populations is affected by environmental conditions is important for predicting the effects of habitat fragmentation, and for defining conservation corridors. One approach has been to map resistance surfaces to characterize how environmental variables affect animal moveme...

Aim The emergence of large-scale patterns animal body size is the central expectation a wide range (macro)ecological and evolutionary hypotheses. drivers shaping these include climate (e.g. Bergmann's rule), resource availability ‘resource rule’), biogeographic settings niche partitioning adaptive radiation). However, hypotheses often make opposing predictions about trajectories evolution. Ther...

this study aims at comparing the performance of logistic regression, maximum entropy, and multilayer perceptron techniques in preparing the predictive habitat distribution map of amygdalus scoparia in rangelands of qom province. for this purpose, vegetation sampling was done using random systematic methods after identifying pure habitats of this species. for soil sampling, eight profiles were e...