Open Access. Powered by Scholars. Published by Universities.®
Articles 1 - 4 of 4
Full-Text Articles in Life Sciences
Functional And Comparative Morphology Of The Nasal Cavity In Phyllostomid Bats, Thomas P. Eiting
Functional And Comparative Morphology Of The Nasal Cavity In Phyllostomid Bats, Thomas P. Eiting
Doctoral Dissertations
The functional morphology and evolution of the nasal cavity is poorly understood. The New World Leaf-nosed bats of the family Phyllostomidae are an excellent group of mammals in which to study the evolution of the nose and nasal cavity. Phyllostomids span a wide dietary diversity, which is correlated both with the shape of the rostrum as well as with reliance on olfaction, one of the key functions mediated by the nose and the focus of my dissertation. How does dietary diversity relate to differences in the olfactory anatomy of phyllostomids? I examined three neurological features thought to relate to olfactory …
The Economic Costs And Ecological Benefits Of Protected Areas For Biodiversity Conservation, Gwenllian D. Iacona
The Economic Costs And Ecological Benefits Of Protected Areas For Biodiversity Conservation, Gwenllian D. Iacona
Doctoral Dissertations
Conservation science acknowledges that economic cost and ecological benefit information is important for effective biodiversity conservation decision making. Obtaining this information for protected areas has proven difficult, however. This dissertation explores various aspects of obtaining information on the costs and benefits of protected areas in an effort to support applied conservation. Here I present a set of studies that 1) examine the threat and cost of plant invasion on protected areas, both for cumulative invasion and 2) across species that differ in their management priority, 3) provide a method for measuring the benefit of forest conservation, and 4) describe the …
New Remote Sensing Methods For Detecting And Quantifying Forest Disturbance And Regeneration In The Eastern United States, Michael Joseph Hughes
New Remote Sensing Methods For Detecting And Quantifying Forest Disturbance And Regeneration In The Eastern United States, Michael Joseph Hughes
Doctoral Dissertations
Forest disturbances, such as wildfires, the southern pine beetle, and the hemlock woolly adelgid, affect millions of hectares of forest in North America with significant implications for forest health and management. This dissertation presents new methods to quantify and monitor disturbance through time in the forests of the eastern United States using remotely sensed imagery from the Landsat family of satellites, detect clouds and cloud-shadow in imagery, generate composite images from the clear-sky regions of multiple images acquired at different times, delineate the extents of disturbance events, identify the years in which they occur, and label those events with an …
Biogeographical Patterns, Ecological Drivers, And Evolutionary Mechanisms Of Plant Invasions, Rafael Dudeque Zenni
Biogeographical Patterns, Ecological Drivers, And Evolutionary Mechanisms Of Plant Invasions, Rafael Dudeque Zenni
Doctoral Dissertations
Understanding and predicting organisms’ responses to novel environments is a key issue for global change biology. In this dissertation, I study biogeographical patterns of plant invasions in Brazil, explore some of their ecological drivers, and disentangle the gene-level mechanisms that cause introduced organisms to become successful or failed invaders. I found that, for the invasive flora of Brazil, species were not introduced to new regions at random and that a species’ reason for introduction and continent of origin were associated. Asian ornamental and African forage plants are overrepresented, and two families (Poaceae and Fabaceae) dominate the invasive flora of Brazil. …