National Herbarium of the Netherlands, Netherlands Centre for Biodiversity Naturalis, Leiden University, PO Box 9514, Einsteinweg 2, 2300 RA Leiden, The Netherlands, Institute of Arctic Biology, University of Alaska Fairbanks, PO Box 757000, Fairbanks, AK 99775-7000, USA, School of Earth, Atmospheric and Environmental Sciences, The University of Manchester, Williamson Building, Oxford Road, Man...

Watershed land use in suburban areas can affect stream biota through degradation of instream habitat, water quality, and riparian vegetation. By monitoring stream biotic communities in various geographic regions, we can better understand and conserve our watershed ecosystems. The objective of this study was to examine the relationship between watershed land use and the integrity of benthic inve...

The introduction of invasive species represents a major threat to the integrity of stream-dwelling fish populations worldwide, and this issue is receiving increasing attention from scientists, in particular because of potential impact on biodiversity. In this study, we analysed the dispersal of an exotic loricariid fish the red fin dwarf pleco (Parotocinclus maculicauda) in a stream of the Atla...

1. Land-use studies are challenging because of the difficulty of finding catchments that can be used as replicates and because land-use effects may be obscured by sources of variance acting over spatial scales smaller than the catchment. To determine the extent to which land-use effects on stream ecosystems are scale dependent, we designed a wholecatchment study of six matched pairs (pasture ve...

Protected areas in mountains are regularly in the focus of international efforts to conserve the environment and enable sustainable development. The following article analyses the current extend of protection in mountainous versus non-mountainous areas, sheds light on the rationales behind the establishment of mountain protected areas, and proposes directions for future endeavours in protecting...

Effects of fragmentation on the ecology of organisms occupying dendritic ecological networks (DENs) have recently been described through both conceptual and mathematical models, but few hypotheses have been tested in complex, real-world ecosystems. Stream fishes provide a model system for assessing effects of fragmentation on the structure of communities occurring within DENs, including how fra...

We review the major conceptual developments that have occurred over the last 50 years concerning the factors that influence insect biodiversity in streams and examine how well empirical descriptions and theory match. Stream insects appear to respond to both spatial and temporal variation in physical heterogeneity. At all spatial scales, the data largely support the idea that physical complexity...

The breadth of biodiversity literature available through the Biodiversity Heritage Library (BHL) is potentially of great use to agricultural research. It provides access to literature drawn from across the world, and its archives document the Earth as it was one hundred years ago and more. However, this strength of BHL is also its weakness: the breadth of coverage of BHL can complicate finding ...