Understanding global diversity patterns has benefitted from a focus on functional traits and how they relate to variation in environmental conditions among assemblages. Distant communities in similar environments often share characteristics, and for tropical forest mammals, this functional trait convergence has been demonstrated at coarse scales (110-200 km resolution), but less is known about how these patterns manifest at fine scales, where local processes (e.g., habitat features and anthropogenic activities) and biotic interactions occur. Here,...

1. Camera traps deployed in grids or stratified random designs are a well-established survey tool for wildlife but there has been little evaluation of study design parameters. 2. We used an empirical subsampling approach involving 2225 camera deployments run at 41 study areas around the world to evaluate three aspects of camera trap study design (number of sites, duration and season of sampling) and their influence on the estimation of three ecological metrics (species richness,...

The spatial aggregation of species pairs often increases with the ecological similarity of the species involved. However, the way in which environmental conditions and anthropogenic activity affect the relationship between spatial aggregation and ecological similarity remains unknown despite the potential for spatial associations to affect species interactions, ecosystem function, and extinction risk. Given that human disturbance has been shown to both increase and decrease spatial associations among species pairs, ecological similarity may have a role...

Opuntia plants grow naturally in areas where temperatures are extreme and highly variable in the day during the entire year. These plants survive through different adaptations to respond to adverse environmental conditions. Despite this capability, it is unknown how CAM photosynthetic activity and growth in Opuntia plantlets is affected by constant heat or cold. Therefore, the main objective of this research was to evaluate the short-term effect of high (40°C) and low (4°C) continuous temperatures...

The environmental variability at local scale results in different physiognomic types of mangrove forest. However, this variability has never been considered in studies of mangrove genetic variability. This study analyzed the genetic and morphological variability and structure of Rhizophora mangle at regional and local scales in the Yucatan Peninsula. Thirteen mangrove populations (eight scrub and five tall), located in seven sites, were sampled, and their morphological variability and relationship with the availability of phosphorus and...

Volcanic mass flows constitute an important trigger of tsunamis, resulting in more local, although sometimes larger, impacts comparable to earthquake-induced tsunamis. Bearing in mind the destructive potential of these phenomena, the tsunamigenic landslide that occurred on 30 December 2002 on the unstable NW slope of Stromboli volcano in Italy has been re-examined here, by means of unpublished helicopter-borne (visible and thermal) images, and slope stability analysis. The main result of this study is that the...

pp. 121-129 The article presents itself as a brief reflection on the discrepancies between José Gaos and Eduardo Nicol regarding the meaning of philosophizing. These are discrepancies that the two authors admit and that come to light on the occasion of a review written by José Gaos himself. The objective of the article is to try to link this conceptual distance with the existential event of exile, trying to show that, between the two positions,...

A variety of factors can affect the biodiversity of tropical mammal communities, but their relative importance and directionality remain uncertain. Previous global investigations of mammal functional diversity have relied on range maps instead of observational data to determine community composition. We test the effects of species pools, habitat heterogeneity, primary productivity and human disturbance on the functional diversity (dispersion and richness) of mammal communities using the largest standardized tropical forest camera trap monitoring system, the...

We explore the effect of roads in animal mortality within the Biodiversity Hotspot with the highest number of endemic species of vertebrates on Earth, the Tropical Andes. Our objectives were to know which species are killed on roads in this particularly biodiversity-rich area and how landscape composition and configuration influences roadkills. We systematically looked for roadkills along roads that border three protected areas in the Ecuadorian Andes. To evaluate our hypotheses, we used correlation, logistic...

Unsteady analyses of the flow between two egg-carton corrugated plates were performed. Geometry effects on the flow were as follows: “closed recirculations” shrank downstream the channel and became “open recirculations”. For the 180° egg-carton plates, recirculations were z-symmetric to the channel center. Reynolds number increments favored recirculation growth and flow detachment. Transient development effects were as follows: the steady state was reached faster in waves closer to the channel entrance. As time advanced, spatial flow...