Diversity, Volume 3, Issue 3

The remnants of old-growth cedar forests in Lebanon are currently protected since they are taken to represent relic ecosystems sheltering many endemic, rare and endangered species. However, it is not always obvious how “natural” these forest relics a...

Successfully addressing the multitude of stresses influencing forest catchments, their native biota, and the vital ecological services they provide humanity will require adapting an integrated view that incorporates the full range of natural and anth...

The maintenance of genetic diversity is a central goal of conservation. It is the raw material for evolutionary change and if lost, can accelerate extinction of species. According to theory, total genetic diversity should be less in species with rest...

A recent shift in the pattern of commercial harvest in the Keppel Island region of the southern inshore Great Barrier Reef raises concern about the depletion of a number of relatively rare restricted range taxa. The shift appears to be driven by dema...

Assessing biodiversity and the spatial structures of forest ecosystems are important for forestry and nature conservation. However, tropical forests of Bangladesh are only sparsely investigated. Here we determined biodiversity (alpha, beta and gamma)...

Adaptation of reef corals to climate change is an issue of much debate, and often viewed as too slow a process to be of relevance over decadal time scales. This notion is based on the long sexual generation times typical for some coral species. Howev...

Coral reef ecosystems are increasingly subject to severe, large-scale disturbances caused by climate change (e.g., coral bleaching) and other more direct anthropogenic impacts. Many of these disturbances cause coral loss and corresponding changes in...

Hairy prairie-clover [Dalea villosa (Nutt.) Spreng. var. villosa] is a threatened Canadian wildflower. To facilitate the efforts of conserving this threatened plant, amplified fragment length polymorphism (AFLP) technique was applied to assess geneti...

The co-occurrence of cryptic species of Hyalella amphipods is a challenge to our traditional views of how species assemble. Since these species have similar morphologies, it is not evident that they have developed phenotypic differences that would al...

Evaluation of the soil rhizosphere has been limited by the lack of robust assessments that can explore the vast complex structure and diversity of soil microbial communities. Our objective was to combine fatty acid methyl ester (FAME) and pyrosequenc...

In spite of the wealth of research on the Great Barrier Reef, few detailed biodiversity assessments of its inshore coral communities have been conducted. Effective conservation and management of marine ecosystems begins with fine-scale biophysical as...

Symbioses between microbes and higher organisms underpin high diversity in many ecosystems, including coral reefs, however mechanisms underlying the early establishment of symbioses remain unclear. Here we examine the roles of Symbiodinium type and c...

A comparison of the community structure of juvenile hermatypic corals of 2 to 37 m depth at the fringing reefs of Curaçao between 1975 and 2005 shows a decline of 54.7% in juvenile coral abundance and a shift in species composition. Agaricia species...