Ecological dissimilarity among land-use/land-cover types improves a heterogeneity index for predicting biodiversity in agricultural landscapes.

Land-use/land-cover heterogeneity is among the most important factors influencing biodiversity in agricultural landscapes and is the key to the conservation of multi-habitat dwellers that use both terrestrial and aquatic habitats. Heterogeneity indices based on land-use/land-cover maps typically do not integrate ecological dissimilarity between land-use/land-cover types. Here, we applied the concept of functional diversity to an existing land-use/land-cover diversity index (Satoyama index) to incorporate ecological dissimilarity and proposed a new index called the dissimilarity-based Satoyama index (DSI).

Estimating species - area relationships by modeling abundance and frequency subject to incomplete sampling.

Models and data used to describe species-area relationships confound sampling with ecological process as they fail to acknowledge that estimates of species richness arise due to sampling. This compromises our ability to make ecological inferences from and about species-area relationships. We develop and illustrate hierarchical community models of abundance and frequency to estimate species richness.

Pollinators and Other Flying Insects inside and outside the Fukushima Evacuation Zone.

Following the accident at the Fukushima Daiichi nuclear power plants in 2011, a large evacuation zone was imposed in an area where residents had historically managed forests and farmlands. Thus, the human activities that had maintained biodiversity and ecosystem services in the zone were discontinued. Such change can affect insects, a biodiversity component that is relatively tolerant to radiation exposure.

The dawn of surgery in Japan, with special reference to the German society for surgery.

During Japan's period of isolation, Philipp Franz von Siebold came to Nagasaki as a doctor with a Dutch trading company in 1823. He used many kinds of apparatus to examine patients and taught practices such as paracentesis and tumor resection. After the Meiji Restoration, the Japanese government elected to establish a medical educational system based on the German system, and to invite two prominent German doctors to teach in 1869.