The silky shark, Carcharhinus falciformis is one of the most heavily exploited sharks, being main by-catch species in both tuna longline and purse-seine fisheries tropical waters worldwide. Despite this severe exploitation, little known about species’ life history population status. Silky like many other exhibit slow growth low fecundity, indicating urgency developing assessment studies to aid ...

Recently disturbed and ‘control’ (i.e. less recently disturbed) soils in the Mojave Desert were compared for their vulnerability to wind erosion, using a wind tunnel, before and after being experimentally trampled. Before trampling, control sites had greater cyanobacterial biomass, soil surface stability, threshold friction velocities (TFV; i.e. the wind speed required to move soil particles), ...

The US Department of Agriculture Forest Service’s focus on hazardous fuels reduction has increased since the adoption of the National Fire Plan in 2001. However, appropriations for hazardous fuels reduction still lag behind wildfire suppression spending. Offsetting fuels treatment costs through biomass utilization or by using innovative administrative mechanisms such as stewardship contracting ...

ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS No-take marine reserves are often implemented to recover overfished stocks. The extent to which these reserves have met their objectives is unclear. Current methods for reserve evaluation are not standardized and rely solely on biological data, excluding the socioeconomic and governance dimensions. Existing frameworks do not provide a tool to perform the analysis. Existing fram...

While population declines can drive the loss of genetic diversity under some circumstances, it has been unclear whether this loss is a general consequence of overharvest in highly abundant marine fishes. We compiled data from 11 049 loci across 140 species and found that allelic richness was lower in overfished populations within 9 of 12 genera and families. A multiple linear regression showed ...

The choice of a specific microhabitat represents a compromise among a number of different factors organisms use to monitor habitat suitability. Grassland vegetation structure can vary widely along environmental gradients over a relatively small area. This vegetation structure can have a large influence on habitat selection by grasshoppers (Orthoptera). However, it is not clear which vegetation ...

Previous models of marine protected areas (MPAs) have generally assumed that there were no existing regulations on catch and have frequently shown that MPAs, by themselves, can be used to maintain both sustainable fish stocks and sustainable harvests. We explore the impact of implementing an MPA in a spatially structured model of a single-species fish stock that is regulated by total allowable ...

Over the past few decades, a large body of research has examined how biodiversity loss infl uences the functioning of ecosystems, as well as the cascading impacts on the goods and services ecosystems provide to humanity. Th e relationship between biodiversity and ecosystem functions quantifi ed in prior experiments suggests that initial losses of biodiversity have relatively small impacts on pr...

Selenium (Se) at high concentrations can cause toxic effects in plants, whereas at low concentrations it enhances resistance to certain abiotic stresses. The possible mechanisms of the Se-enhanced tolerance of plants to salinity stress remain elusive. In this work, effect of Se supplementation at 0, 0.1, 1 and 10 mg l-1 sodium selenate was studied in Lallemantia iberica plants subjected to salt...