Cold-water corals (CWCs) form large mounds on the seafloor that are hotspots of biodiversity in the deep sea, but it remains enigmatic how CWCs can thrive in this food-limited environment. Here, we infer from model simulations that the interaction between tidal currents and CWC-formed mounds induces downwelling events of surface water that brings organic matter to 600-m deep CWCs. This positive...

Life histories of organisms may vary with latitude as they experience different thermal constraints and challenges. This geographic, intraspecific variation could be of significance for range dynamics under climate change beyond edge-core comparisons. In this study, we did a reciprocal transplant experiment between the temperature-regimes of two latitudes with an ectotherm insect, examining the...

The task of eParticipation is to empower people to be able through Information and Communication Technology to act in bottom-up decision making processes, thus allowing politicians to make informed decisions, while developing social and political responsibility. WAVE project deploys Debategraph (www.debategraph.org), an innovative argument visualization platform, in a multi-lingual, cross borde...

We model the development of an individual insect, a grasshopper, through its nymphal period as a function of a trade-off between prey vigilance and nutrient intake in a changing environment. Both temperature and food quality may be variable. We scale up to the population level using natural mortality and a predation risk that is mass, vigilance, and temperature dependent. Simulations reveal the...

In Kenya e where undernutrition rates are high and the population-environment balance is delicate e the risk of declining food availability has become increasingly concerning as indications of drying trends threaten current food systems. The purpose of this research is to determine if climate variables are related to rates of childhood stunting in Kenya. Specifically we use multi-level regressi...

Changes to animal movement in response to human-induced changes to the environment are of growing concern in conservation. Most research on this problem has focused on terrestrial endotherms, but changes to herpetofaunal movement are also of concern given their limited dispersal abilities and specialized thermophysiological requirements. Animals in the desert region of the southwestern United S...

A recent editorial by Naoki Ikegami has proposed three key lessons from Japan’s experience of achieving virtually universal coverage with primary healthcare services: the need to integrate the existing providers of primary healthcare services into the organised health system; the need to limit government commitments to finance hospital services and the need to empower providers of primary healt...

Establishing a direct link between climate change and fluctuations in animal populations through long-term monitoring is difficult given the paucity of baseline data. We hypothesized that social wasps are sensitive to climatic variations, and thus studied the impact of ENSO events on social wasp populations in French Guiana. We noted that during the 2000 La Niña year there was a 77.1% decrease ...