Bird diversity and dissimilarity show contrasting patterns along heavy metal pollution gradients in the Urals, Russia.

The effects of industrial pollution on bird diversity have been widely studied using traditional diversity measures, which assume all species to be equivalent. We compared species richness and Shannon index with distance-based measures of taxonomic, functional, and phylogenetic diversity (the abundance-weighted mean nearest taxon distances), which describe within-community dissimilarity at terminal branches. Analysis of dissimilarity can shed light on the processes underlying community assembly, i.

Genetic variation and selfing rate in Lychnis flos-cuculi along an industrial pollution gradient.

We studied nine populations of a meadow mixed-mating plant Lychnis flos-cuculi growing in a gradient of copper smelter emissions. We hypothesize that metal tolerant populations in the polluted areas have experienced a loss of genetic variation and are more selfing than the populations from the unpolluted areas. One hundred and thirty-five parental plants and 1059 offspring were genotyped with six microsatellite markers.

European phylogeography of the epiphytic lichen fungus Lobaria pulmonaria and its green algal symbiont.

In lichen symbiosis, fungal and algal partners form close associations, often codispersed by vegetative propagules. Due to the particular interdependence, processes such as colonization, dispersal or genetic drift are expected to result in congruent patterns of genetic structure in the symbionts. To study the population structure of an obligate symbiotic system in Europe, we genotyped the fungal and algal symbionts of the epiphytic lichen Lobaria pulmonaria at eight and seven microsatellite loci, respectively, and analysed about 4300 L.