Global warming can affect all levels of biological complexity, though we currently understand least about its potential impact on communities and ecosystems. At the ecosystem level, warming has the capacity to alter the structure of communities and the rates of key ecosystem processes they mediate. Here we assessed the effects of a 4°C rise in temperature on the size structure and taxonomic com...

It has been observed that languages with huge numbers of speakers tend to be structurally simple while small communities can sometimes develop languages with great structural complexity. Paradoxically, an apparent opposite pattern appears to be observed in relation to non-structural properties of language such as number of content words. These apparent contradictory patterns pose a challenge fo...

The endemicity of infectious diseases is investigated from a deterministic viewpoint. Sustained oscillation of infectives is often due to seasonal effects which may be related to climatic changes. For example the transmission of the measles virus by droplets is enhanced in cooler, more humid seasons. In many countries the onset of cooler, more humid weather coincides with the increased aggregat...

Brood care, including the carrying of eggs or juveniles, is a form of parental care, which, like other parental traits [1], enhances offspring fitness with variable costs and benefits to the parents [2]. Attempts to understand why and how parental care evolved independently in numerous animal groups often emphasize the role of environmental pressures such as predation, ephemeral resources, and,...

Using output made with the National Center for Atmospheric Research (NCAR) Community Climate Model Version 1 (CCM1), the characteristics of blocking events over the Northern Hemisphere in a ten-year present day control simulation with a CO 2 concentration of 330 ppm were compared to those in a previously analyzed observational three-year climatology. The characteristics of blocking events in a ...

Body size is recognized as a major factor in evolutionary processes mediating sympatric diversification and community structuring. Life-history types with distinct body sizes can result from two fundamental mechanisms, size-dependent competition and size-dependent mortality. While previous theoretical studies investigated these two processes in separation, the model analyzed here allows both se...