Search results for "Behavior and Systematics"
showing 10 items of 6517 documents
Climate change fosters the decline of epiphytic Lobaria species in Italy
2016
Similarly to other Mediterranean regions, Italy is expected to experience dramatic climatic changes in the coming decades. Do to their poikilohydric nature, lichens are among the most sensitive organisms to climate change and species requiring temperate-humid conditions may rapidly decline in Italy, such in the case of the epiphytic Lobaria species that are confined to humid forests. Our study, based on ecological niche modelling of occurrence data of three Lobaria species, revealed that in the next decades climate change will impact their distribution range across Italy, predicting a steep gradient of increasing range loss across time slices. Lobaria species are therefore facing a high ext…
Invasion of Eragrostis albensis in Central Europe: distribution patterns, taxonomy and phylogenetic insight into the Eragrostis pilosa complex
2021
AbstractThe Eragrostis pilosa complex (Poaceae) comprises five widely distributed and regionally invasive species—E. albensis, E. amurensis, E. imberbis, E. multicaulis, and E. pilosa, distinguished by tiny and variable morphological characters and with so far unknown phylogenetic relationships. Recently, some doubts have been raised about the status of an invasive glandular morphotype occurring in Central Europe assigned either to E. amurensis or to E. albensis. Here, we addressed this issue by analysing morphology, internal transcribed spacers of nuclear ribosomal DNA, and five inter-simple sequence repeat markers. The genetic evidence supported closer relationship of this glandular morph…
Nest Insulation in the European Robin (Erithacus Rubecula): Effects of Latitude and Construction Materials
2016
The various roles that birds’ nests play are widely discussed and there is increasing interest in developing a better understanding of how they achieve these roles. The insulatory properties of nests have been investigated in a variety of songbird species and can vary with temperature and latitude. However, data are only available for a limited number of species. Here, we study the variations of the insulatory properties of European Robin ( Erithacus rubecula) nests in conjunction with the morphology of the nests and composition of the materials used in construction. As well as quantifying the materials used to construct these nests for the first time, we test the hypothesis that there is …
Reproductive timing and individual fitness
2002
Estimation of individual fitness – i.e. description of the extent to which an individual's genes are represented in future generations – is a feature central to most evolutionary studies. Lifetime reproductive success (LRS) is a commonly used estimate of individual fitness, but because it is rate-insensitive (i.e. timing of reproductive events is not incorporated), it may give a biased estimate of fitness when reproductive timing is an important component of fitness. A review of all empirical studies which have used a recently derived, rate-sensitive estimate of individual fitness, λind revealed that λind ranks the fitness of phenotypes differently from LRS, and that this difference may lea…
Factors affecting population dynamics of Eurasian woodcocks wintering in France: assessing the efficiency of a hunting-free reserve
2005
International audience; The Eurasian woodcock Scolopax rusticola is a migratory bird of major importance for hunting, which is susceptible to habitat loss and the stochastic effects of severe winter weather. Conservation issues mostly concerned regulation of hunting, but the efficiency of hunting-free reserves has never been investigated. We studied causes of mortality and survival probabilities of 98 radio-tagged woodcocks in a reserve with no hunting and in an adjoining hunting area in Brittany (France). Predation, mostly by mammalian predators on fields at night, was similar among adults and yearlings, while hunting mortality was more important in yearlings. Overall winter survival proba…
Management strategy analysis for multispecies fisheries, including technical interactions and human behavior in modelling management decisions and fi…
2018
A multispecies fishery management strategy evaluation (MSE) framework based on the example of the groundfish fishery in the Bering Sea and Aleutian Islands region of Alaska was used to examine the interplay between a bycatch species and three groundfish species. The study introduces a framework for a realistic multispecies fishery MSE by accounting for fleet dynamics, multispecies fishery quota allocation, and the temporal dynamics of technical interactions. The quota allocation and the fleet dynamics models were implemented using linear programming, and regression approaches were used to make a realistic projection of future users’ behavioral response to changes in the fishery. The models…
Macrophyte assessment in European lakes: Diverse approaches but convergent views of ‘good’ ecological status
2018
Graphical abstract
Modularity as a source of new morphological variation in the mandible of hybrid mice.
2012
Abstract Background Hybridization is often seen as a process dampening phenotypic differences accumulated between diverging evolutionary units. For a complex trait comprising several relatively independent modules, hybridization may however simply generate new phenotypes, by combining into a new mosaic modules inherited from each parental groups and parts intermediate with respect to the parental groups. We tested this hypothesis by studying mandible size and shape in a set of first and second generation hybrids resulting from inbred wild-derived laboratory strains documenting two subspecies of house mice, Musmusculus domesticus and Musmusculus musculus. Phenotypic variation of the mandible…
Enforced monoandry over generations induces a reduction of female investment into reproduction in a promiscuous bird.
2021
Abstract While uncovering the costs and benefits of polyandry has attracted considerable attention, assessing the net effect of sexual selection on population fitness requires the experimental manipulation of female mating over generations, which is usually only achievable in laboratory populations of arthropods. However, knowing if sexual selection improves or impairs the expression of life‐history traits is key for the management of captive populations of endangered species, which are mostly long‐lived birds and mammals. It might therefore be questionable to extrapolate the results gathered on laboratory populations of insects to infer the net effect of sexual selection on populations of …
Early ontogeny defines the diversification of primary vascular bundle systems in angiosperms
2020
AbstractUnderstanding vascular bundle systems in angiosperms is a challenge. On the one hand, the vascular tissue is extremely important in reconstructing the evolution and survivability of plants, but on the other hand, it forms a complicated three-dimensional system of controversially discussed phylogenetic and ontogenetic origin. To increase clarity, in this paper we briefly summarize histological, phylogenetic and molecular aspects of primary vascular bundle formation in angiosperms, adding histological data on early stages of vascular bundle formation, proposing a concept combining the different views and providing simplified illustrations to improve the understanding of primary vascul…