Search results for "Spatial Ecology"
showing 10 items of 191 documents
Extreme dry spell detection and climatology over the Mediterranean Basin during the wet season
2016
The E-OBS precipitation gridded data set v.10.0 is used to detect very long dry spell (VLDS) events over the entire Mediterranean Basin for the 1957–2013 period, during the wet season (September to April). The main objective is to characterize these events as climatic objects, in terms of location, spatial extent, duration, and temporal variability. In this study, 76 VLDS events were detected in the Mediterranean Basin and grouped into four spatial patterns: scattered localized (with 25 events), northeast Mediterranean (11 events), West Mediterranean (15 events), and southeast Mediterranean (25 events). Each pattern shows seasonality in events. Most of the scattered localized, northeast, an…
Determinants of the distribution of nitrogen-cycling microbial communities at the landscape-scale
2010
Little information is available regarding the landscape-scale distribution of microbial communities and its environmental determinants. However, a landscape perspective is needed to understand the relative importance of local and regional factors and land management for the microbial communities. In this manuscript, we investigated the distribution of functional microbial communities involved in N-cycling and of the total bacterial and crenarchaeal communities over 107 sites using a grid with a 16 km lag distance within Burgundy, a 31 500 km2 region in France. After quantifying the abundances of the total bacterial, crenarchaeal, nitrate-reducing, denitrifying and ammonia-oxidizing communit…
Spatial distribution of ammonia-oxidizing bacteria and archaea across a 44-hectare farm related to ecosystem functioning
2011
Characterization of spatial patterns of functional microbial communities could facilitate the understanding of the relationships between the ecology of microbial communities, the biogeochemical processes they perform and the corresponding ecosystem functions. Because of the important role the ammonia-oxidizing bacteria (AOB) and archaea (AOA) have in nitrogen cycling and nitrate leaching, we explored the spatial distribution of their activity, abundance and community composition across a 44-ha large farm divided into an organic and an integrated farming system. The spatial patterns were mapped by geostatistical modeling and correlations to soil properties and ecosystem functioning in terms …
Economies d'agglomération et configurations spatiales dans les espaces ruraux
1997
The question to be addressed here is that of the agglomeration/dispersion forces that are likely to account for the location of people and jobs in rural areas and the way they explain spatial patterns in rural areas depending on urban influence. Economic geography models may provide suitable tools with which to investigate the organization of rural areas. We first review these models, focusing on dispersion forces, which rest basically on land consumption and transport costs. We suggest then a set of hypotheses concerning the main forces at work in rural areas. Intensity of agglomeration economies is hypothesized to be related to the urban size, which in turn induces increasing land rents a…
Reduction in site fidelity with smaller spatial scale may suggest scale-dependent information use
2014
Animals change the strategy that they use to select breeding sites at the spatial scales of habitat, patch, and microhabitat. In this regard, breeding site fidelity is expected to vary according to environmental predictability, which, in turn, is expected to differ between each spatial scale. However, whether or not animals change their degree of site fidelity at different spatial scales remains unclear. We captured and released males of the terrestrial frog Pseudophryne bibronii into alternative patches within a breeding habitat and determined the extent to which site fidelity influenced individual nest-site choice. We found that males tended to return to their original patch rather than r…
Methods for Modeling Ecosystem Services: A Review
2015
Abstract Modeling ecosystem services (ES) is an essential tool for the development of strategies that will ensure their future supply, provision and quantification. Given the rapid development in this area of research, a review of the different approaches used to model ES was performed, using an analytical framework based on five criteria for comparing the existing methodological approaches: the types of ES, availability of data sources, spatial scale, types of models used and the possible outcomes of the models. Regulating services were the most commonly modeled, followed by provisioning, cultural, and supporting services. The most frequently used data for modeling were secondary data (alr…
Seed dispersal, braeding system, tree density and the spatial pattern of trees – a simulation approach
2002
Summary Tropical tree populations with low densities and with clumped spatial distributions are at risk in the face of fragmentation. It is therefore important to understand factors driving spatial patterns of tree populations. An important set of factors which may influence the spatial pattern of plants, could be the spatial distribution of possible seed sources such as the breeding system (monoecious, dioecious), tree density and the spatial pattern of the parent population. Another set of important factors might be dispersal of seeds away from the parent plants characterised by the mean dispersal distance and by the distribution of dispersal distances (either negative exponential or logn…
Changes of effective gene dispersal distances by pollen and seeds across successive life stages in a tropical tree
2013
Pollen and seed dispersal are the two key processes in which plant genes move in space, mostly mediated by animal dispersal vectors in tropical forests. Due to the movement patterns of pollinators and seed dispersers and subsequent complex spatial patterns in the mortality of offspring, we have little knowledge of how pollinators and seed dispersers affect effective gene dispersal distances across successive recruitment stages. Using six highly polymorphic microsatellite loci and parentage analyses, we quantified pollen dispersal, seed dispersal, and effective paternal and maternal gene dispersal distances from pollen- and seed-donors to offspring across four recruitment stages within a pop…
Noise in ecosystems: a short review
2004
Noise, through its interaction with the nonlinearity of the living systems, can give rise to counter-intuitive phenomena such as stochastic resonance, noise-delayed extinction, temporal oscillations, and spatial patterns. In this paper we briefly review the noise-induced effects in three different ecosystems: (i) two competing species; (ii) three interacting species, one predator and two preys, and (iii) N-interacting species. The transient dynamics of these ecosystems are analyzed through generalized Lotka-Volterra equations in the presence of multiplicative noise, which models the interaction between the species and the environment. The interaction parameter between the species is random …
Spatial ecology of coastal Atlantic cod Gadus morhua associated with parasite load
2015
Acoustic tags and receivers were used to investigate the spatial ecology of coastal Atlantic cod Gadus morhua (n = 32, mean fork length: 50 cm, range: 33–80 cm) on the Norwegian Skagerrak coast in 2012. Monthly home ranges (HR), swimming activity and depth use varied considerably among individuals and through the months of June, July and August. HR sizes for the period ranged from 0·25 to 5·20 km2 (mean = 2·30 km2). Two thirds of the tagged G. morhua were infected with black spot disease Cryptocotyle lingua parasites; these fish had larger HRs and occupied deeper water compared with non-infected fish. The infected fish also tended to be more active in terms of horizontal swimming. From an e…