Land suitability analysis is a prerequisite to achieving optimum utilization of the available land resources. Lack of knowledge on best combination of factors that suit production of rice has contributed to the low production. The aim of this study was to develop a suitability map for rice crop based on physical and climatic factors of production using a Multi-Criteria Evaluation (MCE) & GIS ap...

The mobility of chemicals released into the environment governs their bioavailability to organisms and their partitioning between environmental compartments, and thus represents a direct link between environmental pollution and ecotoxicity. The microand mesoscale transport processes involved are related to the properties of the chemicals themselves, but also to environmental compartments. Thus,...

Recurrent deposition of organic-rich sediment layers (sapropels) in the eastern Mediterranean Sea is caused by complex interactions between climatic and biogeochemical processes. Disentangling these influences is therefore important for Mediterranean palaeo-studies in particular, and for understanding ocean feedback processes in general. Crucially, sapropels are diagnostic of anoxic deep-water ...

The Tropical Andes are an important global biodiversity hotspot, harbouring extraordinarily high richness and endemism. Although elevational richness and speciation have been studied independently in some Andean groups, the evolutionary and ecological processes that explain elevational richness patterns in the Andes have not been analysed together. Herein, we elucidate the processes underlying ...

Phenotypes, DNA, and measures of ecological differences are widely used in species delimitation. Although rarely defined in such studies, ecological divergence is almost always approximated using multivariate climatic data associated with sets of specimens (i.e., the "climatic niche"); the justification for this approach is that species-specific climatic envelopes act as surrogates for physiolo...

The record drought of 2012 brought the issue of climatic vulnerability to the agricultural enterprise front and center. The swings in the temperature patterns associated with higher frost and freeze risks, as well as the midseason heat stress and heavy rain/severe weather risks have brought about potentially newer climatic regimens to light. Several associated shifts are apparent in regional gr...

Glacier National Park served as a test site for ecosystem analyses that involved a suite of integrated models embedded within a geographic information system. The goal of the exercise was to provide managers with maps that could illustrate probable shifts in vegetation, net primary production (NPP), and hydrologic responses associated with two selected climatic scenarios. The climatic scenarios...

Although difficult to estimate for prehistoric hunter-gatherer populations, demographic variables-population size, density, and the connectedness of demes-are critical for a better understanding of the processes of material culture change, especially in deep prehistory. Demography is the middle-range link between climatic changes and both biological and cultural evolutionary trajectories of hum...

Dryland alluvial rivers vary considerably in character. In terms of processes, high energy, sediment-laden flash floods in upland rivers contrast dramatically with the low sediment loads and languid flows of their lowland counterparts while from a form perspective, the unstable wide, shallow and sandy braid plains of piedmont rivers are quite different from the relatively stable, narrow, deep a...

The relative influences of density-dependent and -independent processes on vital rates and population dynamics have been debated in ecology for over half a century, yet it is only recently that both processes have been shown to operate within the same population. However, generalizations on the role of each process across species are rare. Using a process-orientated generalized linear modelling...