Assessing the numbers and distribution of threatened species is a central challenge in conservation, often made difficult because the species of concern are rare and elusive. For some predators, this may be compounded by their being sparsely distributed over large areas. Such is the case with the cheetah The IUCN Red List process solicits comments, is democratic, transparent, widely-used, and has recently assessed the species.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFCounting animals to estimate their population sizes is often essential for their management and conservation. Since practitioners frequently rely on indirect observations of animals, it is important to better understand the relationship between such indirect indices and animal abundance. The Formozov-Malyshev-Pereleshin (FMP) formula provides a theoretical foundation for understanding the relationship between animal track counts and the true density of species.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFBackground: Birth weight is known to fluctuate with season of birth, however, there is little information about seasonal variation in neonatal anthropometric measures.
Aims: The aim of this study was to examine seasonal fluctuations in birth weight and selected anthropometric measures.
Study Design And Subjects: The birth weight of singletons born after at least 37 weeks gestation was extracted from a perinatal register in south-east Queensland (n=350,171).
Island populations are most informative in the study of the genetic structure of human aggregates. These populations are often of small size, thus violating the Hardy-Weinberg assumption of infinite size. Some geographically isolated island populations are further subdivided by religion, ethnicity, and socioeconomic factors, reducing their effective sizes and facilitating genetic changes due to stochastic processes.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFThe population structure of Fogo Island, Newfoundland is described using geography, religious affiliation, economic factors (such as the presence of a fish-packing plant), and genetic markers. Five different analytic methods, R-matrix analysis, r VS. mean per locus heterozygosity, predicted kinship (ϕ), mean first passage time, and Mantel matrix comparisons, were applied to the Fogo Island genetic and demographic data.
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