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The relationship between species diversity and components of ecosystem stability has been extensively studied, whilst the influence of the genetic component of biodiversity remains poorly understood. Here we m...
The marine-terrestrial transfer of salmon (Oncorhynchus spp.) provides a substantial pulse of nutrients to receiving ecosystems along the Pacific coast of North America and has been shown to enhance productivity ...
The influence of introduction history and post-introduction dynamics on genetic diversity and structure has been a major research focus in invasion biology. However, genetic diversity and structure in the inva...
Partial migration, where one portion of a population conducts seasonal migrations while the other remains on a single range, is common in wild ungulate populations. However the relative costs and benefits asso...
Landscape complexity can mitigate or facilitate host dispersal, influencing patterns of pathogen transmission. Spatial transmission of pathogens through landscapes, therefore, presents an important but not ful...
Building reference libraries of DNA barcodes is relatively straightforward when specifically designed primers are available to amplify the COI-5P region from a relatively narrow taxonomic group (e.g. single cl...
Adaptive behavioural strategies promoting co-occurrence of competing species are known to result from a sympatric evolutionary past. Strategies should be different for indirect resource competition (exploitati...
The important greenhouse gas (GHG) methane is produced naturally in anaerobic wetland soils. By affecting the production, oxidation and transport of methane to the atmosphere, plants have a major influence upo...
Individual body growth is controlled in large part by the spatial and temporal heterogeneity of, and competition for, resources. Grizzly bears (Ursus arctos L.) are an excellent species for studying the effects o...
Pathogens and parasites can have major impacts on host population dynamics, both through direct mortality and via indirect effects. Both types of effect may be stronger in species whose populations are already...
Resource availability and predation are believed to affect community dynamics and composition. Although the effects of resource availability and predation on prey communities are usually studied in isolation, ...
Ecologists recognize that plants capture nitrogen in many chemical forms that include amino acids. Access to multiple nitrogen types in plant communities has been argued to enhance plant performance, access to...
Batrachochytrium dendrobatidis (Bd), the causative agent of chytridiomycosis, is decimating amphibians worldwide. Unsurprisingly, the majority of studies have therefore concentrated on documenting morbidity and m...
The recent declines in managed honey bee populations are of scientific, ecological and economic concern, and are partially attributed to honey bee parasites and related disease. McDonnell et al. investigate be...
Exclusion from a social group is an effective way to avoid parasite transmission. This type of social removal has also been proposed as a form of collective defense, or social immunity, in eusocial insect grou...
Conservation of biological diversity and economical utilization of natural resources form an almost inevitable confrontation between the two. In practice, however, a balance between the two ought to be found, ...
Japanese black bears, a large-bodied omnivore, frequently create small gaps in the tree crown during fruit foraging. However, there are no previous reports of black bear-created canopy gaps. To characterize ph...
Developing a quick and reliable technique to estimate floral cover in deserts will assist in monitoring and management. The present attempt was to estimate plant cover in the UAE desert using both digital phot...
Rising temperatures and other environmental factors influenced by global climate change can cause increased physiological stress for many species and lead to range shifts or regional population extinctions. To...
Biodiversity loss and species invasions are among the most important human-induced global changes. Moreover, these two processes are interlinked as ecosystem invasibility is considered to increase with decreas...
Both competitive and facilitative interactions between species play a fundamental role in shaping natural communities. A recent study showed that competitive interactions between plants can be mediated by some...
Environmental temperature has profound consequences for early amphibian development and many field and laboratory studies have examined this. Most laboratory studies that have characterized the influence of te...
Animal colour patterns offer good model systems for studies of biodiversity and evolution of local adaptations. An increasingly popular approach to study the role of selection for camouflage for evolutionary t...
Biodiversity informatics plays a central enabling role in the research community's efforts to address scientific conservation and sustainability issues. Great strides have been made in the past decade establis...
Avian malaria (Plasmodium sp.) is globally widespread, but considerable variation exists in infection (presence/absence) patterns at small spatial scales. This variation can be driven by variation in ecology, dem...
Herbivore coexistence on the Late Cretaceous island continent of Laramidia has been a topic of great interest, stemming from the paradoxically high diversity and biomass of these animals in relation to the rel...
Biodiversity surveys have long depended on traditional methods of taxonomy to inform sampling protocols and to determine when a representative sample of a given species pool of interest has been obtained. Ques...
Invasive pest species have large impacts on agricultural crop yields, and understanding their population dynamics is important for ensuring food security. The oriental fruit moth Grapholita molesta is a cosmopoli...
Gastrointestinal bacteria play a central role in the health of animals. The bacteria that individuals acquire as they age may therefore have profound consequences for their future fitness. However, changes in ...
Fragmentation of plant populations may affect mating patterns and female and male reproductive success. To improve understanding of fragmentation effects on plant reproduction, we investigated the pollen flow ...
BMC Ecology announces the winning entries in its inaugural Ecology Image Competition, open to anyone affiliated with a research institute. The competition, which received more than 200 entries from international ...
Sampling expeditions to Churchill in the Canadian subarctic were completed with the aim of compiling a molecular-assisted survey of the macroalgal flora (seaweeds) for comparison to published accounts for this...
With high quantity and quality data production and low cost, next generation sequencing has the potential to provide new opportunities for plant phylogeographic studies on single and multiple species. Here we ...
The algal endosymbionts (genus Symbiodinium) associated with scleractinian corals (and other reef invertebrates) have received a lot of research attention in the past decade, particularly as certain host-symbiont...
The North American Trichoptera larvae are poorly known at the species level, despite their importance in the understanding of freshwater fauna and critical use in biomonitoring. This study focused on morpholog...
The editors of BMC Ecology would like to thank all of our reviewers who have contributed to the journal in volume 12 (2012).
Information on the age structure within populations of an endangered species can facilitate effective management. The Blue Mountains Water Skink (Eulamprus leuraensis) is a viviparous scincid lizard that is restr...
Insect diversity typically declines with increasing latitude, but previous studies have shown conflicting latitude-richness gradients for some hymenopteran parasitoids. However, historical estimates of insect ...
Limitations in the ability of organisms to tolerate environmental stressors affect their fundamental ecological niche and constrain their distribution to specific habitats. Evolution of tolerance, therefore, c...
Characterizing biodiversity in a habitat or in targeted taxonomically or socioeconomically important groups remains a challenge. Standard DNA-based biodiversity identification tools such as DNA barcoding coupl...
A multi-faceted approach was used to investigate the wintertime ecophysiology and behavioral patterns of the raccoon dog, Nyctereutes procyonoides, a suitable model for winter sleep studies. By utilizing GPS trac...
Kin selection is a driving force in the evolution of mammalian social complexity. Recognition of paternal kin using vocalizations occurs in taxa with cohesive, complex social groups. This is the first investig...
Because arctic plant communities are highly vulnerable to climate change, shifts in their composition require rapid, accurate identifications, often for specimens that lack diagnostic floral characters. The pr...
Various methods have been proposed to assign unknown specimens to known species using their DNA barcodes, while others have focused on using genetic divergence thresholds to estimate “species” diversity for a ...
Previous work has shown that leaf-cutting ants prefer to cut leaf material with relatively low fungal endophyte content. This preference suggests that fungal endophytes exact a cost on the ants or on the devel...
Biodiversity databases serve the important role of highlighting species-level diversity from defined geographical regions. Databases that are specially designed to accommodate the types of data gathered during...
Using phylogenies in community ecology is now commonplace, but typically, studies assume and test for a single common phylogenetic signal for all species in a community, at a given scale. A possibility that re...
David Pimentel is a professor of ecology and agricultural sciences at Cornell University, Ithaca, NY 14853–0901. His Ph.D. is from Cornell University and had postdoctoral research at the University of Chicago,...
Knowledge of the factors that drive species distributions provides a fundamental baseline for several areas of research including biogeography, phylogeography and biodiversity conservation. Data from 148 minim...
Organisms modify their environment and in doing so change the quantity and possibly the quality of available resources. Due to the two-way relationship between organisms and their resource environment, and the...
