Human activities modulate reciprocal effects of a subterranean ecological engineer rodent, , on Afroalpine vegetation cover.

Human activities, directly and indirectly, impact ecological engineering activities of subterranean rodents. As engineering activities of burrowing rodents are affected by, and reciprocally affect vegetation cover via feeding, burrowing and mound building, human influence such as settlements and livestock grazing, could have cascading effects on biodiversity and ecosystem processes such as bioturbation. However, there is limited understanding of the relationship between human activities and burrowing rodents.

Modeling the extinction risk of European butterflies and odonates.

Insect populations have become increasingly threatened during the last decades due to climate change and landuse intensification. Species characteristics driving these threats remain poorly understood. Trait-based analyses provide a straight-forward approach to gain a mechanistic understanding of species' extinction risk, guiding the development of conservation strategies.

Accounting for predator species identity reveals variable relationships between nest predation rate and habitat in a temperate forest songbird.

Nest predation is the primary cause of nest failure in most ground-nesting bird species. Investigations of relationships between nest predation rate and habitat usually pool different predator species. However, such relationships likely depend on the specific predator involved, partly because habitat requirements vary among predator species.

Phylogeny of spiny frogs (Anura: Dicroglossidae) supports a Tibetan origin of a Himalayan species group.

Recent advances in the understanding of the evolution of the Asian continent challenge the long-held belief of a faunal immigration into the Himalaya. Spiny frogs of the genus are a characteristic faunal group of the Himalaya-Tibet orogen (HTO). We examine the phylogeny of these frogs to explore alternative biogeographic scenarios for their origin in the Greater Himalaya, namely, immigration, South Tibetan origin, strict vicariance.

Estimating seed dispersal distance: A comparison of methods using animal movement and plant genetic data on two primate-dispersed Neotropical plant species.

Seed dispersal distance (SDD) critically influences the survival of seedlings, spatial patterns of genetic diversity within plant populations, and gene flow among plant populations. In animal-dispersed species, foraging behavior and movement patterns determine SDD. Direct observations of seed dispersal events by animals in natural plant populations are mostly constrained by the high mobility and low visibility of seed dispersers.

Responses of a legume to inbreeding and the intensity of novel and familiar stresses.

It is often assumed that the negative effects of inbreeding on fitness (inbreeding depression, ID) are particularly strong under stressful conditions. However, ID may be relatively mild under types of stress that plant populations have experienced for a long time, because environment-specific deleterious alleles may already have been purged. We examined the performance of open- and self-pollinated progeny of the short-lived calcareous grassland plant under three intensities of each of five types of stress.

Detection of somatic epigenetic variation in Norway spruce via targeted bisulfite sequencing.

Epigenetic mechanisms represent a possible mechanism for achieving a rapid response of long-lived trees to changing environmental conditions. However, our knowledge on plant epigenetics is largely limited to a few model species. With increasing availability of genomic resources for many tree species, it is now possible to adopt approaches from model species that permit to obtain single-base pair resolution data on methylation at a reasonable cost.

Comparisons of photosynthesis-related traits of 27 abundant or subordinate bryophyte species in a subalpine old-growth fir forest.

Bryophyte communities can exhibit similar structural and taxonomic diversity as vascular plant communities, just at a smaller scale. Whether the physiological diversity can be similarly diverse, and whether it can explain local abundance patterns is unknown, due to a lack of community-wide studies of physiological traits. This study re-analyzed data on photosynthesis-related traits (including the nitrogen, phosphorus and chlorophyll concentrations, photosynthetic capacities, and photosynthetic nutrient use efficiencies) of 27 bryophyte species in a subalpine old-growth fir forest on the eastern Tibetan Plateau.

The database of the PREDICTS (Projecting Responses of Ecological Diversity In Changing Terrestrial Systems) project.

The PREDICTS project-Projecting Responses of Ecological Diversity In Changing Terrestrial Systems (www.predicts.org.