introduction development of studies on the urban, environment and conservation of natural resources, due to increase of urbanization as common lifestyles of citizens, has improved the sustainable urbanization approach that tries to improve  human interaction with nature for sound behavior. cities are the origins of consumerism and consequently irregular use of natural resources and energies. th...

Aim A near universal truth in North America is that species richness increases from the Arctic Circle to the Central American tropics. Latitude is regarded as a major explanatory variable in species density, although it is only a surrogate for underlying ecological variables. I aimed to elucidate those underlying ecological variables that are associated with variation in bat species richness ac...

Ecological bias is sometimes attributed to confounding by the group variable (ie the variable used to define the ecological groups), or to risk factors associated with the group variable. We show that the group variable need not be a confounder (in the strict epidemiological sense) for ecological bias to occur: effect modification can lead to profound ecological bias, whether or not the group v...

In the causal modeling literature, it is well known that ill-defined variables may give rise to ambiguous manipulations. Here, we illustrate how also induce mistakes in inference when standard search methods are applied. To address problem, introduce a representation framework, which exploits an independent component of data, and demonstrate its potential for detecting avoiding mistaken inferen...

organismal, ecological and evolutionary levels continue to develop rapidly. Increasingly, biologists need to confront organised complexity, of which living systems are the paramount example. Both spontaneous emergence of order and the maintenance of stability in complex systems in the face of highly variable environments need to be researched further. Complex structures are generated and mainta...

Paul Robeson Park in Los Angeles County was often the designated location for Eid al-Fitr, the obligatory group prayer and celebration following Ramadan, the Islamic month of fasting. Families, predominantly African American, would begin arriving around 7:00 am dressed in their best Eid clothing. Well before the crowd began to trickle in, plastic tarps would be positioned in straight rows so th...