Department of Cell Biology and Molecular Genetics, University of Maryland, College Park, Maryland 20817 (C.A.H., C.K., A.G., Z.L.); Department of Computer and Information Sciences, Towson University, Towson, Maryland 21252 (O.D., N.A.); and Soybean Genomics and Improvement (B.F.M.), and Genetic Improvement of Fruits and Vegetables (J.S.), United States Department of Agriculture-Agricultural Res...

We studied the effect of the general structure of the nest plant, especially the presence of thorns, and the structural homogeneity of the nest patch, on the vulnerability of nests to predation, using natural and artificial nests. Artificial nests placed in non-thorny plants had a significantly lower predation rate and higher daily survival rate than those in thorny plants. The addition of a ‘t...

Twenty-two chimpanzee hair samples collected from night nests at two different "savanna" sites were analyzed for carbon and nitrogen stable isotope ratios represented as delta13C and delta15N values. The first at Ugalla, Tanzania is a miombo woodland with grass groundcover and small patches of forest. The second at Ishasha, Democratic Republic of the Congo is a habitat composed of riverine gall...

Improving biodiversity conservation in fragmented agricultural landscapes has become an important global issue. Vegetation at the patch and landscape-scale is important for species occupancy and diversity, yet few previous studies have explored multi-scale associations between vegetation and community assemblages. Here, we investigated how patch and landscape-scale vegetation cover structure wo...

Estimation of vegetation water content (VWC) by optical remote sensing improves soil moisture retrievals from passive microwave radiometry. For a variety of vegetation types, the largest unknown for predicting VWC is stem water content, which is assumed to be allometrically related to the water content of the plant canopy. For maize and soybean, measured stem water contents were highly correlat...

BACKGROUND Past and current range or spatial expansions have important consequences on population genetic structure. Habitat-use expansion, i.e. changing habitat associations, may also influence genetic population parameters, but has been less studied. Here we examined the genetic population structure of a Palaeartic woodland butterfly Pararge aegeria (Nymphalidae) which has recently colonized ...

We have limited understanding of how tropical canopy foliage varies along environmental gradients, and how this may in turn affect forest processes and functions. Here, we analyse the relationships between canopy leaf area index (LAI) and above ground herbaceous biomass (AGBH) along environmental gradients in a moist forest and miombo woodland in Tanzania. We recorded canopy structure and herba...