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Full-Text Articles in Population Biology

Effect Of The 2013-2015 California Drought On Small Mammal Abundance And Diversity In Chaparral, Oak Woodland And Riparian Habitats, Nicole Desideri Jun 2016

Effect Of The 2013-2015 California Drought On Small Mammal Abundance And Diversity In Chaparral, Oak Woodland And Riparian Habitats, Nicole Desideri

Biological Sciences

Long-term biodiversity surveys are a useful tool for assessing the impacts of stochastic events on wildlife and their communities. A recent stochastic event to affect the state of California is the historic 2013-2015 drought. This drought, described as a one-in-one-thousand year event, brought precipitation to a historic low; the statewide rainfall reaching 34% below average (Swain et al. 2014). While humans are feeling the impact of this water shortage, the effects on native ecosystems and wildlife populations are poorly documented. Baseline small mammal biodiversity data collected in 2011, before the drought, allows us the opportunity to study the impacts of …


Tropical Trees As Islands: Diversity Accumulation Of Armored Scale Insects (Hemiptera: Diaspididae) On Trees As A Function Of Forest Age, Hannah Shapiro May 2016

Tropical Trees As Islands: Diversity Accumulation Of Armored Scale Insects (Hemiptera: Diaspididae) On Trees As A Function Of Forest Age, Hannah Shapiro

Undergraduate Honors Theses

Armored scale insects (Hemiptera: Diaspididae) are some of the most invasive insects in the world. These cryptic plant parasites are most often encountered in managed agricultural ecosystems, but very little is known about their distribution, abundance, and diversity in tropical rainforest canopies, where they are likely to have their highest diversity. Because these ubiquitous insects are extreme generalists with undirected dispersal, their diversity (alpha and beta) accumulation can conceivably be modeled according to tenets derived from island biogeography theory. For example, one expectation is that older established trees should boast a higher species diversity and abundance than younger ones. Other …