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Full-Text Articles in Life Sciences

Local Engagements With Urban Bushland: Moving Beyond Bounded Practice For Urban Biodiversity Management, Nicholas J. Gill, Gordon R. Waitt, Lesley M. Head Aug 2011

Local Engagements With Urban Bushland: Moving Beyond Bounded Practice For Urban Biodiversity Management, Nicholas J. Gill, Gordon R. Waitt, Lesley M. Head

Lesley Head

Management of ecologically significant urban green space is likely to be increasingly governed by biodiversity policy frameworks. These frameworks tend to reproduce bounded thinking and strategies that separate green space from its context and characterise people as a disturbance. Like many green spaces these ecologically significant areas are highly valued by visitors and nearby residents. Green space is important for engagement with nature, social interaction, and for respite from daily life: it is strongly connected to surrounding areas and to the lives of people who live there. The dissonance between bounded management thinking and the role of green space in …


Discontinuities: Predicting Invasions And Extinctions, Aaron Lotz Jul 2011

Discontinuities: Predicting Invasions And Extinctions, Aaron Lotz

School of Natural Resources: Dissertations, Theses, and Student Research

In this dissertation, I explore multiple tenets of the textural discontinuity hypothesis, which states that hierarchical landscape structures with scale-specific pattern entrain attributes of animals inhabiting the landscape. Landscapes form hierarchies that are structured by vegetative, geomorphological and contagious disturbance processes. The spatial and temporal patterns inherent in landscapes reflect numerous processes, interacting on distinct scales, which shape the assembly of animal communities. Analysis of body mass patterns and functional group distributions has been suggested as methods to provide insight about these underlying hierarchical processes. Scientists have posited that species at the edges of body mass aggregations may be exposed …


Global Human Footprint On The Linkage Between Biodiversity And Ecosystem Functioning In Reef Fishes, Camilo Mora, Octavio Aburto-Oropeza, Arturo Ayala Bocos, Paula M. Ayotte, Stuart Banks, Andrew G. Bauman, Maria Beger, Sandra Bessudo, David J. Booth, Eran Brokovich, Andrew Brooks, Pascale Chabanet, Josh Eli Cinner, Jorge Cortes, Juan J. Cruz-Motta, Amilcar Cupul Magaña, Edward E. Demartini, Graham J. Edgar, David A. Feary, Sebastian C. A. Ferse, Alan M. Friedlander, Kevin J. Gaston, Charlotte Gough, Nicholas A. J. Graham, Alison Green, Hector M. Guzman, Marah Hardt, Michel Kulbicki, Yves Letourneur, Andres López Pérez, Michel Loreau, Yossi Loya, Camilo Martinez, Ismael Mascareñas-Osorio, Tau Morove, Marc-Olivier Nadon, Yohei Nakamura, Gustavo Paredes, Nicholas V.C. Polunin, Morgan S. Pratchett, Hector Reyes Bonilla, Fernando Rivera, Enric Sala, Stuart A. Sandin, German Soler, Rick Stuart-Smith, Emmanuel Tessier, Derek P. Tittensor, Mark Tupper, Paolo Usseglio, Laurent Vigliola, Laurent Wantiez, Ivor D. Williams, Shaun K. Wilson, Fernando A. Zapata Apr 2011

Global Human Footprint On The Linkage Between Biodiversity And Ecosystem Functioning In Reef Fishes, Camilo Mora, Octavio Aburto-Oropeza, Arturo Ayala Bocos, Paula M. Ayotte, Stuart Banks, Andrew G. Bauman, Maria Beger, Sandra Bessudo, David J. Booth, Eran Brokovich, Andrew Brooks, Pascale Chabanet, Josh Eli Cinner, Jorge Cortes, Juan J. Cruz-Motta, Amilcar Cupul Magaña, Edward E. Demartini, Graham J. Edgar, David A. Feary, Sebastian C. A. Ferse, Alan M. Friedlander, Kevin J. Gaston, Charlotte Gough, Nicholas A. J. Graham, Alison Green, Hector M. Guzman, Marah Hardt, Michel Kulbicki, Yves Letourneur, Andres López Pérez, Michel Loreau, Yossi Loya, Camilo Martinez, Ismael Mascareñas-Osorio, Tau Morove, Marc-Olivier Nadon, Yohei Nakamura, Gustavo Paredes, Nicholas V.C. Polunin, Morgan S. Pratchett, Hector Reyes Bonilla, Fernando Rivera, Enric Sala, Stuart A. Sandin, German Soler, Rick Stuart-Smith, Emmanuel Tessier, Derek P. Tittensor, Mark Tupper, Paolo Usseglio, Laurent Vigliola, Laurent Wantiez, Ivor D. Williams, Shaun K. Wilson, Fernando A. Zapata

Marine & Environmental Sciences Faculty Articles

Difficulties in scaling up theoretical and experimental results have raised controversy over the consequences of biodiversity loss for the functioning of natural ecosystems. Using a global survey of reef fish assemblages, we show that in contrast to previous theoretical and experimental studies, ecosystem functioning (as measured by standing biomass) scales in a non-saturating manner with biodiversity (as measured by species and functional richness) in this ecosystem. Our field study also shows a significant and negative interaction between human population density and biodiversity on ecosystem functioning (i.e., for the same human density there were larger reductions in standing biomass at more …


Current Status Of Lichen Diversity In Iowa, James T. Colbert Jan 2011

Current Status Of Lichen Diversity In Iowa, James T. Colbert

Journal of the Iowa Academy of Science: JIAS

No abstract provided.