Search results for "Scale"

Dynamics and Impacting Factors of Ice Regimes in Latvia Inland and Coastal Waters

2016

Abstract The sea ice regime is considered to be a sensitive indicator of climate change. This study investigates long-term changes in the ice regimes of the Gulf of Riga along the coast of Latvia in comparison with those of inland waters. The ice regime of the studied region indicates the impact of climate change related to increasing air and sea water temperatures. Ice cover duration on both the sea and inland waters has decreased during recent decades. In addition, long-term records on ice break in the studied region exhibit a pattern of periodic changes in the intensity of ice regime, while trends of the sea ice regime are not consistent between periods of time. Alternating mild and seve…

2017

The debate on the causes of conflict in human societies has deep roots. In particular, the extent of conflict in hunter-gatherer groups remains unclear. Some authors suggest that large-scale violen ...

Phenology of Emergence by Mediterranean Sympatric Cave-Dwelling Bats During Their Breeding Period

2017

The emergence of cave-dwelling bats can be influenced by multiple variables, such as diurnal predator evasion, energetic requirements, and prey abundance. This work aimed to determine emergence patterns of cave-dwelling bat species from roosts over the April–July 2013 period in the Valencian Community (East Spain) by infrared camera and acoustic recordings. We observed that Miniopterus schreibersii left earliest followed by the Myotis myotis/blythii group and Myotis capaccinii and finally Myotis escalerai. This pattern of emergence was observed in four roosts with no significant differences. Miniopterus schreibersii tended to display quicker flight in open areas, compared to the Myotis genu…

Contribución al conocimiento de los murciélagos (Mammalia, Chiroptera) del Parque Natural de Penyagolosa (provincia de Castellón)

2019

Se exponen los principales resultados obtenidos en los muestreos efectuados en agosto de 2004 en el Parque Natural de Penyagolosa. La comunidad de quirópteros del Parque Natural está integrada por al menos 14 especies. Diez de ellas fueron localizadas en los muestreos, siendo ocho nuevas citas tras ellos. La revisión de la bibliografía e informes técnicos más recientes permiten añadir las restantes cuatro especies. De entre las especies localizadas en los muestreos, destacan las forestales Plecotus auritus (Linnaeus, 1758) y Barbastella barbastellus (Schreber, 1774); las fisurícolas Pipistrellus pipistrellus (Schreber, 1774) y Eptesicus serotinus (Schreber, 1774) y la cavernícola Myotis esc…

Can biological structures be natural and sustainable capsules?

2015

Flavor and fragrance molecules are used in many industrial fields such as food, cosmetics, tissues, pharmacy, agriculture (pheromones) etc. As most actives have a specific target and are fragile molecules, encapsulation processes have been developed for their use. These technologies are efficient to avoid loss of actives, dissemination out of the target and subsequent pollution, and to protect molecules up to their target. Several processes have been developed responding to the numerous situations encountered (e.g., protection against air, temperature, light, pH; masking or revealing sensorial properties of the molecule; release during the process, in the plate, in the mouth, etc.). However…

Use of Inverse Spatial Conservation Prioritization to Avoid Biological Diversity Loss Outside Protected Areas

2013

Globally expanding human land use sets constantly increasing pressure for maintenance of biological diversity and functioning ecosystems. To fight the decline of biological diversity, conservation science has broken ground with methods such as the operational model of systematic conservation planning (SCP), which focuses on design and on-the-ground implementation of conservation areas. The most commonly used method in SCP is reserve selection that focuses on the spatial design of reserve networks and their expansion. We expanded these methods by introducing another form of spatial allocation of conservation effort relevant for land-use zoning at the landscape scale that avoids negative ecol…

Fine-scale population dynamics in a marine fish species inferred from dynamic state-space models

2017

1. Identifying the spatial scale of population structuring is critical for the conservation of natural populations and for drawing accurate ecological inferences. However, population studies often use spatially aggregated data to draw inferences about population trends and drivers, potentially masking ecologically relevant population sub‐structure and dynamics. 2. The goals of this study were to investigate how population dynamics models with and without spatial structure affect inferences on population trends and the identification of intrinsic drivers of population dynamics (e.g. density dependence). 3. Specifically, we developed dynamic, age‐structured, state‐space models to test differe…

Eco-geomorphological connectivity and coupling interactions at hillslope scale in drylands: Concepts and critical examples

2020

The diagnosis of land degradation requires a deep understanding of ecosystem functioning and evolution. In dryland systems, in particular, research efforts must address the redistribution of scarce resources for vegetation, in a context of high spatial heterogeneity and non-linear response. This fact explains the prevalence of eco-hydrological perspectives interested in runoff processes and, the more recent, focused on connectivity as an indicator of system resource optimisation. From a geomorphological perspective and reviewing the concepts of eco-hydro-geomorphological interactions operating in ecosystems, this paper explores the effects of erosion on vegetation configuration through two …

Quantifying and addressing the prevalence and bias of study designs in the environmental and social sciences

2020

Building trust in science and evidence-based decision-making depends heavily on the credibility of studies and their findings. Researchers employ many different study designs that vary in their risk of bias to evaluate the true effect of interventions or impacts. Here, we empirically quantify, on a large scale, the prevalence of different study designs and the magnitude of bias in their estimates. Randomised designs and controlled observational designs with pre-intervention sampling were used by just 23% of intervention studies in biodiversity conservation, and 36% of intervention studies in social science. We demonstrate, through pairwise within-study comparisons across 49 environmental da…

Can we generate robust species distribution models at the scale of the Southern Ocean?

2018

17 pages; International audience; AimSpecies distribution modelling (SDM) represents a valuable alternative to predict species distribution over vast and remote areas of the ocean. We tested whether reliable SDMs can be generated for benthic marine organisms at the scale of the Southern Ocean. We aimed at identifying the main large‐scale factors that determine the distribution of the selected species. The robustness of SDMs was tested with regards to sampling effort, species niche width and biogeography.LocationSouthern Ocean.MethodsThe impact of sampling effort was tested using two sets of data: one set with all presence‐only data available until 2005, and a second set using all data avail…