BACKGROUND A critical aspect regarding the global dispersion of pathogenic microorganisms is associated with atmospheric movement of soil particles. Especially, desert dust storms can transport alien microorganisms over continental scales and can deposit them in sensitive sink habitats. In winter 2014, the largest ever recorded Saharan dust event in Italy was efficiently deposited on the Dolomi...

The genus Quercus is one of the most important clades of woody angiosperms in the northern hemisphere in terms of species diversity, ecological dominance, and economic value. Oaks are dominant members of a wide variety of habitats, including temperate deciduous forest, temperate and subtropical evergreen forest, subtropical and tropical savannah, subtropical woodland, oak-pine forest, oak-’piño...

Temperatures of inland aquatic habitats are increasing with climate change, and understanding how fishes respond physiologically to thermal stress will be crucial for identifying species most susceptible to these changes. Desert fishes may be particularly vulnerable to rising temperatures because many species occupy only a fraction of their historical range and occur in habitats with already hi...

Birds living in desert environments have been the preferred models for the study of physiological adaptations to water scarcity. Passerine birds living in marine coastal habitats face similar problems, yet physiological adaptations to water conservation in such species have been poorly documented. We measured total evaporative water loss (TEWL) and rates of oxygen consumption (VO2) in three spe...

The common spiny mouse Acomys cahirinus, of Ethiopian origin, has a widespread distribution across arid, semi-arid and Mediterranean parts of the Arabian sub-region. We compared the daily energy expenditure (DEE), water turnover (WTO) and sustained metabolic scope (SusMS=DEE/resting metabolic rate) of two adjacent populations during the winter. Mice were captured from North- and South- facing s...

Because certain indigenous peoples have lived in the same habitats for centuries, their languages often encode traditional ecological knowledge about interactions between plant and animal species that occur in those habitats. This local knowledge is sometimes complementary to more broadly derived knowledge accrued by academically trained field ecologists. In this analysis of recent ethnoecologi...

Amphibians are a globally distributed and diverse lineage, but much of our current understanding of their population genetic structure comes from studies in mesic temperate habitats. We characterize the population genetic structure of two sympatric explosive breeding amphibians in the southwestern deserts of the United States: the Great Plains toad (Anaxyrus cognatus) and Couch's spadefoot toad...

The butterfly fauna of the high-altitude desert of Northern Chile, though depauperate, shows high endemism, is poorly known and is of considerable conservation concern. This study surveys butterflies along the Andean slope between 2400 and 5000 m asl (prepuna, puna and Andean steppe habitats) as well as in high and low-altitude wetlands and in the neoriparian vegetation of agricultural sites. W...

Habitat fragmentation often arises from human-induced alterations to the matrix that reduce or eliminate dispersal between habitat patches. Elimination of dispersal increases local extinction and decreases recolonization. These phenomena were observed in the eastern collared lizard (Crotaphytus collaris collaris), which lives in the mid-continental highland region of the Ozarks (Missouri, USA) ...