The abiotic and biotic gradients on mountains have enormous potential to improve our understanding of species distributions, species richness patterns and conservation. Here we describe how abiotic factors change with elevation, how flora and fauna respond to these changes and how elevational species richness patterns have been studied to uncover drivers of biodiversity. There are four main tre...

1. The shallow ponds of the nature reserve ‘De Maten’ form a metacommunity, in which individual ponds are highly interconnected via a system of overflows and rivulets. This study reports on the relations between cladoceran species richness and (a) connectivity patterns and (b) local environmental variables. 2. No relation was found between local species richness and three connectivity variables...

The dictionary construction project at tile Japan Flectronic Dictionary Research Institute, Ltd. (El)R) in Tokyo began in 1986 and is ahnost certainly the largest lexicon construction project for computational purposes it] tile world. This paper describes some aspects of the construction of the English language dictionary, in particular a project to verify and enh,'mce information on noun phras...

Question: What are the qualitative and quantitative long-term changes in the vascular epiphyte assemblage on a particular host tree species? Location: Lowland rain forest of the San Lorenzo Crane Plot, Republic of Panama. Methods: We followed the fate of the vascular epiphyte assemblage on 99 individuals of the palm Socratea exorrhiza by three censuses over the course of five years. Results: Th...

Results The differences in thermal physiology between ectotherms and endotherms result in geographically disparate macrophysiological constraints. Field metabolic rate (FMR) is stable or decreases slightly with temperature for endotherms, while it generally increases for ectotherms, leading to opposing latitudinal gradients of expected FMR. Potential activity time is a greater constraint on the...

Learning of recursive functions refutably informally means that for every recursive function, the learning machine has either to learn this function or to refute it, that is to signal that it is not able to learn it. Three modi of making precise the notion of refuting are considered. We show that the corresponding types of learning refutably are of strictly increasing power, where already the m...

By studying Bartonella prevalence in rodent communities from 23 geographic sites in the western United States and one site in northern Mexico, the present study focused on the effects of rodent community diversity (measured by richness and Shannon index) and composition on prevalence of Bartonella infections. The analysis showed negative correlations of Bartonella prevalence with rodent richnes...