determining the distribution of heavy metals in groundwater is important in developing appropriate management strategies at mine sites. in this paper, the application of artificial intelligence (ai) methods to data analysis,namely artificial neural network (ann), hybrid ann with biogeography-based optimization (ann-bbo), and multi-output adaptive neural fuzzy inference system (manfis) to estima...

although the southern caspian sea basin (scsb) fish fauna has been studied for more than 200 years, new species continue to be discovered, reported and renamed. here we take the opportunity to provide a new and updated checklist of the fishes of the southern caspian sea basin. the list is based on historical literature records and taxon occurrence data obtained from natural history collections ...

the plankton and semi-plankton samples examined from mizoram state of northeast india (nei) revealed speciose and diverse rotifera assemblage including a total richness (s) of 162 species belonging to 19 families and 35 genera. the reports of six species new to india, four species new to nei and 76 new records to mizoram merit biodiversity interest. the occurrence of one australasian, one orien...

many champions. Originally, in pre-evolutionary Europe, biogeography was unified by the common aim of uncovering the centre of origin, a concept derived from biblical texts. Organisms either were created in the places they were found or they moved there from elsewhere (Buffon, 1766; Sclater, 1858). Whether or not the organisms evolved was not an issue in biogeography. Organisms had a centre of ...

I n PNAS, Popp et al. (1) present a convincing molecular phylogenetic analysis of a small group of ericaceous flowering plants, Empetrum (the crowberries), which includes species distributed at high northern latitudes and high southern latitudes but nowhere in between—a so-called bipolar (or antitropical or, broadly speaking, amphitropical) disjunction (Fig. 1). They contend that the best expla...

The science of biogeography maps spatial patterns of biological diversity as a means of understanding the evolutionary and ecolog­ ical processes that structure life on this planet (Lomolino et al., 2006). Understanding spatial patterns of biodiversity has given rise to some of the most important discoveries in modern science. The unique composition of flora and fauna in different parts of the ...

| We review the biogeography of microorganisms in light of the biogeography of macroorganisms. A large body of research supports the idea that free-living microbial taxa exhibit biogeographic patterns. Current evidence confirms that, as proposed by the Baas-Becking hypothesis, ‘the environment selects’ and is, in part, responsible for spatial variation in microbial diversity. However, recent st...

SYNOPSIS. Cladistic biogeographic methods remain susceptible to the confounding effects of ‘‘pseudo-congruence’’ and ‘‘pseudo-incongruence’’ because they were not designed to incorporate information on the absolute timing of the diversification of lineages. Consequently, results from cladistic biogeographic studies are difficult to interpret and cannot be confidently attributed to any particula...

This papers analyses the causes behind Africa’s unfortunate transformation into the source of the world’s slaves over the early modern period. We discuss the economic and technological forces leading to it, and address questions such as why were most slave buyers Europeans and most slave sellers Africans. We then relate the discussion to the long-term determinants of African underdevelopment, a...