Microbial interactions are important for ecosystem function, but occur at the microscale and so are difficult to observe. Previous studies in marine systems have shown significant shifts in microbial community abundance and composition over scales of micrometres to centimetres. This study investigates the microscale abundance distributions of virus-like particles (VLPs) and prokaryotes in the l...

Patchiness or spatial variability is ubiquitous in marine systems. With increasing anthropogenic impacts to coastal resources and coastal systems being disproportionately large contributors to ocean productivity, identifying the spatial scales of this patchiness, particularly in coastal waters, is of critical importance to understand coastal ecosystem dynamics. The current work focuses on fine ...

In addition to their importance to human and animal health, vector-borne diseases are fascinating systems to study. The involvement of multiple species whose biologies and life cycles cover differing space and time scales makes it extremely difficult to predict epidemics. A single environmental factor may have opposite impacts on the system at different points in time. Patchiness at different g...

Perturbations in ecosystems consist of a sequence of 2 events: the disturbance, marked by the application of the disturbing forces, and the response shown by the biota to the damage inflicted by the disturbance. The disturbance must be effectively characterized, without confounding it with the response, for progress to be made in the study of the disturbance ecology of streams. A disturbance ma...

The abundance and spatial dispersion of Diaphorina citri Kuwayama (Hemiptera: Psyllidae) were studied in 34 grapefruit (Citrus paradisi Macfad.) and six sweet orange [Citrus sinensis (L.) Osbeck] orchards from March to August 2006 when the pest is more abundant in southern Texas. Although flush shoot infestation levels did not vary with host plant species, densities of D. citri eggs, nymphs, an...

We develop techniques for studying characteristic length scales in DNA sequences and apply these to the analysis of long genomic sequences including all available human sequences longer than 100000 bp and the nine sequenced yeast chromosomes. We nd evidence suggesting the existence of a hierarchy of characteristic length scales in all the genomic DNA sequences analyzed. In particular, we nd sim...