How to measure the impacts of antibiotic resistance and antibiotic development on empiric therapy: new composite indices.

Objectives: We aimed to construct widely useable summary measures of the net impact of antibiotic resistance on empiric therapy. Summary measures are needed to communicate the importance of resistance, plan and evaluate interventions, and direct policy and investment.

Design, Setting And Participants: As an example, we retrospectively summarised the 2011 cumulative antibiogram from a Toronto academic intensive care unit.

Effects of forest spatial structure on insect outbreaks: insights from a host-parasitoid model.

Understanding how cycles of forest-defoliating insects are affected by forest destruction is of major importance for forest management. Achieving such an understanding with data alone is difficult, however, because population cycles are typically driven by species interactions that are highly nonlinear. We therefore constructed a mathematical model to investigate the effects of forest destruction on defoliator cycles, focusing on defoliator cycles driven by parasitoids.

Ecology and the Evolution of Biphasic Life Cycles.

Sexual eukaryotes undergo an alternation between haploid and diploid nuclear phases. In some organisms, both the haploid and diploid phases undergo somatic development and exist as independent entities. Despite recent attention, the mechanisms by which such biphasic life cycles evolve and persist remain obscure.