Community assembly research has mostly focused on areas with single vegetation types; however, the abiotic and biotic factors affecting community act across regions. Integrating into “compound” habitats gained attention as an emerging strategy to analyze spatial temporal patterns of biodiversity. We used a compound habitat approach explore relative roles filtering, competition, stochastic proce...

Sclerotinia sclerotiorum populations from tropical agricultural zones have been suggested to be more variable compared to those from temperate zones. However, no data were available comparing populations from both zones using the same set of markers. In this study, we compared S. sclerotiorum populations from the United States of America (USA, temperate) and southeast Brazil (tropical) using th...

Iron (Fe) and copper (Cu) are essential cofactors for microbial metalloenzymes, but little is known about the metalloenyzme inventory of anaerobic marine microbial communities despite their importance to the nitrogen cycle. We compared dissolved O2, NO[Formula: see text], NO[Formula: see text], Fe and Cu concentrations with nucleic acid sequences encoding Fe and Cu-binding proteins in 21 metage...

The circulation of vector-borne zoonotic viruses is largely determined by the overlap in the geographical distributions of virus-competent vectors and reservoir hosts. What is less clear are the factors influencing the distribution of virus-specific lineages. Japanese encephalitis virus (JEV) is the most important etiologic agent of epidemic encephalitis worldwide, and is primarily maintained b...

The marine diatom Skeletonema costatum is commonly found in coastal and estuarine areas from the temperate zones to the tropical zones. Blooms caused by Skeletonema costatum have been reported in almost all the eastern coastal regions of China seas. Jiaozhou Bay, located at the middle of Yellow Sea of China, is a shallow semi-closed basin. Skeletonema costatum constitutes a major fraction of do...

Vibrio parahaemolyticus is a marine microorganism that can cause seafood-borne gastroenteritis in humans. The infection can be spread and has become a pandemic through the international trade of contaminated seafood. Strains carrying the tdh gene encoding the thermostable direct hemolysin (TDH) and/or the trh gene encoding the TDH-related hemolysin (TRH) are considered to be pathogenic with the...

Global climate change is driving species poleward and upward in high-latitude regions, but the extent to which the biodiverse tropics are similarly affected is poorly known due to a scarcity of historical records. In 1802, Alexander von Humboldt ascended the Chimborazo volcano in Ecuador. He recorded the distribution of plant species and vegetation zones along its slopes and in surrounding part...

Although the tropics harbor greater numbers of species than do temperate zones, it is not known whether the rates of speciation and extinction also follow a latitudinal gradient. By sampling birds and mammals, we found that the distribution of the evolutionary ages of sister species-pairs of species in which each is the other's closest relative-adheres to a latitudinal gradient. The time to div...

Large dead trees and other large forest detritus (collectively known as coarse woody debris, or CWD) play an important role in the global carbon cycle. In tropical systems, CWD stocks (necromass) have been found to constitute 5% to 33% of total biomass. Despite harboring the second largest rain forest on earth, in Central Africa there have been virtually no studies of coarse woody debris. In th...