In this problem, two types of data will be available. The first type of data we will have is called presence records. Presence records are pixels on the grid map where the species of concern was observed. The same pixel may be present multiple times if the species was observed more than one time within that pixel. The second type of data we will have is called environmental variables. Each envi...

Community assembly is driven by multiple factors, including resource availability and habitat requirements. Litter nesting ants respond to food and nest site availability, and adding food and nests may increase ant species richness and abundance. However, litter decomposers share food resources with ants, and increasing food availability may speed decomposition processes, eliminating twigs and ...

Community assembly and the factors that influence it have long been a topic of interest to ecologists, but theory has yet to produce unequivocal evidence that communities assemble in predictable ways. The goal of this study was to document the relationship between ant communities and environmental variation between four habitat types. To accomplish this, ant communities and 16 environmental var...

The monitoring of ecosystems alterations has become a crucial task in order to develop valuable habitats for rare and threatened species. The information extracted from hyperspectral remote sensing data enables the generation of highly spatially resolved analyses of such species’ habitats. In our study we combine information from a species ordination with hyperspectral reflectance signatures to...

Habitat loss and fragmentation have been identified as important factors in the decline of grassland bird populations. However, population declines are apparent even in prairie ecosystems that remain relatively intact suggesting that additional factors are involved. The degradation of breeding habitat may be one such factor, but few studies have examined habitatspecific demography of grassland ...

Avian bills are iconic structures for the study of ecology and evolution, with hypotheses about the morphological structure of bills dating back to Darwin. Several ecological and physiological hypotheses have been developed to explain the evolution of the morphology of bill shape. Here, we test some of these hypotheses such as the role of habitat, ambient temperature, body size, intraspecific c...