The feeding rate, food size, energy intake and nutrient intake were studied for nestlings of the Varied Tit (Parus varius) and the Great Tit (Parus major) living in evergreen broad-leaved forest in Minamata, southern Kyushu, Japan. The frequency of daily feeding visit was around 100 times for both species. The diets of the two species were similar in general; feeding on lepidopteran larvae, mot...

Leaves are most vulnerable to herbivory during expansion. We hypothesised that one factor favouring small leaves could be that smaller-leaved species have shorter expansion times and are therefore exposed to high levels of herbivory for a shorter period than large leaves. In order to test this hypothesis, leaf expansion time and leaf area loss were measured for 51 species from Sydney, Australia...

Population densities of wildlife species tend to be correlated with resource productivity of habitats. However, wildlife density has been greatly modified by increasing human influences. For effective conservation, we must first identify the significant factors that affect wildlife density, and then determine the extent of the areas in which the factors should be managed. Here, we propose a pro...

Because of the prolonged history of disturbance caused by intense human activities, restoration in China has been a major task facing many ecologists and land managers. There are six major forest types in China: cold temperate coniferous forest, temperate coniferous and broad-leaved mixed forest, warm temperate deciduous broad-leaved forest, subtropical evergreen broad-leaved forest, tropical r...

Abstract Aquatic ecosystems provide vital services, and macrophytes play a critical role in their functioning. Conceptual models indicate that shallow lakes, plants with different growth strategies are expected to inhabit contrasting habitats. For peat characterized by incohesive sediments, roles of forms, life-history environmental factors determining the occurrence aquatic vegetation remain u...

doi: 10.1111/j.1399-3054.2006.00699.x Through identifying and understanding ecologically important dimensions of plant trait variation we gain insight into why particular trait combinations are favoured and into the implications of trait differences among species. Here, we describe relationships among several poorly understood leaf and stem traits across species from several Australian vegetati...

With the aim of elaborating a mobile application, accessible to anyone and with educational purposes, we present a method for tree species identification that relies on dedicated algorithms and explicit botany-inspired descriptors. Focusing on the analysis of leaves, we developed a working process to help recognize species, starting from a picture of a leaf in a complex natural background. A tw...