Published in Oecologia
The relevance of interspecific resource competition in the context of community assembly by herbivorous insects is a well-known topic in ecology. Most previous studies focused on local species assemblies that shared host plants. Few studies evaluated species pairs within a single taxon when investigating the effects of host plant sharing at the reg...
The water-soluble fraction (WSF) of an oil contains different classes of petroleum hydrocarbons and, despite their low potential for bioaccumulation, these can be highly toxic to biota. Nematodes are usually the most abundant and species-rich group of metazoans in marine and freshwater sediments as well as terrestrial soils and have been proposed a...
Published in Journal of Insect Conservation
Alpine pastures are typical examples of “high nature value farmlands”, representing important habitats harbouring unique biological communities. Disturbance induced by overgrazing influences significantly ecosystem processes, in which invertebrates play a major role. To develop new models of sustainable management of pastures, more knowledge is nee...
Published in Environmental Science and Pollution Research
IntroductionCiliated protozoa play important roles in aquatic ecosystems especially regarding their functions in micro-food web and have many advantages in environmental assessment compared with most other eukaryotic organisms. The aims of this study were focused on analyzing the application of an indicator based on taxonomic relatedness of ciliate...
Published in Encyclopedia of Ecology, Five-Volume Set
Taxonomic relatedness of the individuals or species in a sample is the key concept on which taxonomic diversity and distinctness measures of biodiversity are based. It is well known that in impacted assemblages of organisms the taxonomic spread of species is reduced, and in extreme cases they may be sibling species belonging to the same genus, or a...
Published in Aquatic Ecology
Taxonomic distinctness combines species richness and phylogenetic diversity to detect changes in taxonomic structure. Most studies have reported on changes due to marine impacts, with little emphasis on habitat influences or freshwater systems. The composition and organizational structure of aquatic Coleoptera assemblages are susceptible to local i...
Published in Oecologia
Evolutionary comparative methods taking into account the potential effects of relatedness reveal that, among 202 species of animal-dispersed tropical woody angiosperms from Peru, large seeds may be an adaptation to: (1) dispersal by mammals rather than by birds and (2) greater plant height. Using the most powerful techniques currently available, ap...
Published in Oecologia
Within a multi-species study, species do not necessarily represent independent data points. The data set used by Foster and Janson (1985) to look at the relationship between seed size and establishment conditions for naturally occurring tropical trees was re-analyzed, to take into account the effect of relatedness among species. The re-analysis sho...
