How is online social media activity structured in the geographical space? Recent studies have shown that in spite of earlier visions about the “death of distance”, physical proximity is still a major factor in social tie formation and maintenance in virtual social networks. Yet, it is unclear, what are the characteristics of the distance dependence in online social networks. In order to explore this issue the complete network of the former major Hungarian online social...

Modelling the relationship between biomass and diversity in phytoplankton assemblages provides new insights into the mechanisms responsible for the coexistence of species, even in terrestrial ecosystems. We tested the biomass–diversity relationship in lake phytoplankton along a wide biomass gradient using functional species groups. We hypothesized that changes in the taxonomic diversity of the phytoplankton along a biomass gradient are associated with altered functional diversity. For the analyses, in total 768 samples were collected from 30...

A crucial problem for every organism is how to allocate energy between competing life-history components. The optimal allocation decision is often state-dependent and mediated by hormones. Here, we investigated how age, a major state variable affects individuals' hormonal response to a standardized stressor: a trait that may reflect allocation between self-maintenance and reproduction. We caught free-living house sparrows and measured their hormonal (corticosterone) response to capture stress in consecutive years. Using a long-term ringing dataset,...