Local neighborhood affects stem rehydration under drought: evidence from mixtures of European beech with two different conifers.

Mixed-species forests are, for multiple reasons, promising options for forest management in Central Europe. However, the extent to which interspecific competition affects tree hydrological processes is not clear. High-resolution dendrometers capture subdaily variations in stem diameter; they can simultaneously monitor stem growth (irreversible changes in diameter) and water status (reversible changes) of individual trees.

Non-random host tree infestation by the Neotropical liana .

The question whether or not tropical lianas infest host trees randomly or they exert host selection has implications for the structure and dynamics of tropical rainforests, particularly if colonization by lianas impacts host fitness. In this study, we present evidence that the Neotropical liana (Marcgraviaceae) infests host trees non-randomly. We identified host trees to species or genus level for 87 of the 100 individuals found in the study area of the Estación Biológica Quebrada Blanco (EBQB) in north-eastern Peruvian Amazonia.

Social interactions and activity patterns of old Barbary macaques: Further insights into the foundations of social selectivity.

Human aging is accompanied by a decrease in social activity and a narrowing in social networks. Studies in nonhuman primates may provide valuable comparative insights in which way aging impacts social life, in the absence of cultural conventions and an awareness of a limited lifetime. For female Barbary macaques at "La Forêt des Singes" in Rocamadour, France, we previously reported an age-associated decrease in active grooming time and network size.

Estimation of baboon daily travel distances by means of point sampling - the magnitude of underestimation.

Daily travel distance (DTD), the distance an animal moves over the course of the day, is an important metric in movement ecology. It provides data with which to test hypotheses related to energetics and behaviour, e.g.

Associated motivational salience impacts early sensory processing of human faces.

Facial expressions of emotion have an undeniable processing advantage over neutral faces, discernible both at behavioral level and in emotion-related modulations of several event-related potentials (ERPs). Recently it was proposed that also inherently neutral stimuli might gain salience through associative learning mechanisms. The present study investigated whether acquired motivational salience leads to processing advantages similar to biologically determined origins of inherent emotional salience by applying an associative learning paradigm to human face processing.

Motivational Shifts in Aging Monkeys and the Origins of Social Selectivity.

As humans age, they become more selective regarding their personal goals [1] and social partners [2]. Whereas the selectivity in goals has been attributed to losses in resources (e.g.

Structured fusion lasso penalized multi-state models.

Multi-state models generalize survival or duration time analysis to the estimation of transition-specific hazard rate functions for multiple transitions. When each of the transition-specific risk functions is parametrized with several distinct covariate effect coefficients, this leads to a model of potentially high dimension. To decrease the parameter space dimensionality and to work out a clear image of the underlying multi-state model structure, one can either aim at setting some coefficients to zero or to make coefficients for the same covariate but two different transitions equal.

Do monkeys compare themselves to others?

Social comparisons are a fundamental characteristic of human behaviour, yet relatively little is known about their evolutionary foundations. Adapting the co-acting paradigm from human research (Seta in J Pers Soc Psychol 42:281-291, 1982. doi: 10.