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With the worries about Goodman on the table, this chapter introduces an alternative set of conditions: a modified form of Goodman’s relative repleteness, syntactic sensitivity, and semantic richness. These three are necessary for a representational system to be pictorial and they make no reference to the perception of pictures, but they are not sufficient for a representational system to be pictorial. They accommodate digital pictures comfortably, but are much too broad to capture what makes pictures pictures.

A single case of Lyme disease involves at least six species: the human patient, the bacterial pathogen, the tick vector, and a vertebrate host for each of the three blood-feeding life stages of the tick. Each of these six species potentially interacts with one another and with other species within their communities. Disease systems also involve a larger network of species that play indirect but critical roles in determining disease risk. Both mammal species richness and species composition are critical to the prevalence of Lyme disease in northeastern US forests, and the functional roles of particular species often depends on the composition of the remaining community.

This chapter integrates the major conclusions from the book. It focuses on how much is known about variation in insect physiology from the phylogenetic and geographic perspectives, raising the issue of the extent of work done on non-model organisms and a dearth of studies in the southern hemisphere, despite likely differences in broad-scale patterns among hemispheres. The significance of body size and of cross-resistance are further explored in the context of poor reporting, such as of body size in studies of development rate. The chapter concludes by identifying the significant areas in which physiological ecology has a role to play in promoting an understanding how insects will respond to global climate change, including both temperature change and the effects of global change-type drought.

The chapter focuses on the design and methods of bird survey programmes. It deals with issues such as survey design and selection of study areas, effect of time of day and time of year on counts, how to find and count different kinds of birds, standardizing census efforts in time and space, and problems of bird detectability and survey comparability in different habitats. Mapping or ‘atlas’ methodology, based on grid cells, is also discussed, as well as methods of estimating species richness and diversity, and the storage and accessibility of data. The key points in designing bird surveys are listed. No survey method is perfect; the method chosen should be suited to both purpose and resources, in terms of money, manpower, and skill levels.

While traditionally ecology textbooks only discuss the short term carbon cycle, the role of life has been crucial in the geological long term carbon cycle through processes such as silicate weathering. Arguments have been put forward for the co-evolution of CO₂ levels and terrestrial plants — with adaptations to lower CO₂ levels allowing large leaves to evolve. It seems clear that on Earth without the effect of life our planet would currently have a temperature which would rule out he survival of eukaryotic life. This suggests that carbon sequestration has a positive Gaian effect. However, this is probably a local conclusion which cannot be generalized to all other planets. More generally, these ideas illustrate the importance of biomass as a key feature of global ecologies. The effects of vegetation (or plankton) on carbon cycles are more directly linked to available biomass than species richness.

This chapter describes methods that can be used to characterize communities of tree species based on a field survey, focusing on the methods that are most commonly used today. Information is also provided on techniques for estimating the species richness and diversity of forest communities, which has received increasing attention in the wake of the Convention on Biological Diversity.

Given the ecological importance of ants, effective conservation of this taxon is critical. Particular efforts are needed to protect ants that are endemic, threatened, habitat specialists, dependent on associations with other organisms, phylogenetically important, charismatic, or have major ecological impacts. Conservation action should start with incorporating ants into broader conservation efforts using existing data, identifying and monitoring current threats to ants, and promoting education and awareness of ant conservation. Longer‐term actions must include compiling current data and collecting new data on ant species, assessing the status and biology of ant species, developing targeted ant conservation plans, and modelling future scenarios for ant conservation. Active involvement from the myrmecological community is needed to ensure that ants are at the centre of conservation efforts.

In this chapter, Corey J. A. Bradshaw and Barry W. Brook, discuss measures of biodiversity patterns followed by an overview of experimental design and associated statistical paradigms. Conservation biology is a highly multidisciplinary science employing methods from ecology, Earth systems science, genetics, physiology, veterinary science, medicine, mathematics, climatology, anthropology, psychology, sociology, environmental policy, geography, political science, and resource management. Here we focus primarily on ecological methods and experimental design. It is impossible to census all species in an ecosystem, so many different measures exist to compare biodiversity: these include indices such as species richness, Simpson's diversity, Shannon's index and Brouillin's index. Many variants of these indices exist. The scale of biodiversity patterns is important to consider for biodiversity comparisons: α (local), β (between‐site), and γ (regional or continental) diversity. Often surrogate species ‐ the number, distribution or pattern of species in a particular taxon in a particular area thought to indicate a much wider array of taxa ‐ are required to simplify biodiversity assessments. Many similarity, dissimilarity, clustering, and multivariate techniques are available to compare biodiversity indices among sites. Conservation biology rarely uses completely manipulative experimental designs (although there are exceptions), with mensurative (based on existing environmental gradients) and observational studies dominating. Two main statistical paradigms exist for comparing biodiversity: null hypothesis testing and multiple working hypotheses – the latter paradigm is more consistent with the constraints typical of conservation data and so should be invoked when possible. Bayesian inferential methods generally provide more certainty when prior data exist. Large sample sizes, appropriate replication and randomization are cornerstone concepts in all conservation experiments. Simple relative abundance time series (sequential counts of individuals) can be used to infer more complex ecological mechanisms that permit the estimation of extinction risk, population trends, and intrinsic feedbacks. The risk of a species going extinct or becoming invasive can be predicted using cross‐taxonomic comparisons of life history traits. Population viability analyses are essential tools to estimate extinction risk over defined periods and under particular management interventions. Many methods exist to implement these, including count‐based, demographic, metapopulation, and genetic. Many tools exist to examine how genetics affects extinction risk, of which perhaps the measurement of inbreeding depression, gene flow among populations, and the loss of genetic diversity with habitat degradation are the most important.

This chapter reviews the influence of the recipient location on the probability of establishment success in exotic birds. This subject is another that has a long history within invasion ecology research but that has, in general, produced no clear consensus on what makes a site more or less invasible. This confusion has reigned in the study of avian invasions too, and heated arguments over the role of competition in determining establishment success may be recalled. The chapter reviews and updates this argument. It also considers the array of other biotic interactions that can influence establishment success such as predation, parasitism, and mutualistic interactions. Beyond the influence of species interactions, there is a clear role for the biophysical environment in determining the success of exotic bird introductions, which is also reviewed in this chapter.

This chapter considers how exotic birds interact with native species, and how they serve to re-shape global biodiversity patterns. Both exotic and native species are distributed unevenly across the environment, such that some areas house more species, and other areas house fewer. The origins of these distributions for exotic and native bird species are undoubtedly very different, yet they share several common features, such as species-area relationships on islands, and latitudinal gradients. The chapter examines whether the same processes produce the same patterns in each set of species, and what this says about the causes of distribution patterns in native species, and also in exotics. It then considers the associations that exotic species forge in their recipient communities through their biotic interactions with native species, including native birds.

This chapter defends an argument for the unity thesis the centrepiece of which is the introspectively based claim to the effect that all of one's current experiences are unified. This claim is dubbed the unity judgment. The first half of the chapter defends the tenability of the unity judgment in the face of three objections: that introspection is unreliable, that it cannot take introspectively inaccessible experiences into account, and that there need be no subject contrast between phenomenal unity on the one hand and phenomenal disunity on the other. The second half of this chapter examines two gaps between the unity judgment and the unity thesis, and argues that both gaps can be plugged.

There is a variety of epistemic roles to which photographs are better suited than non‐photographic pictures. Photographs provide more compelling evidence of the existence of the scenes they depict than non‐photographic pictures. They are also better sources of information about features of those scenes that are easily overlooked. This chapter examines several different attempts to explain the distinctive epistemic value of photographs, and argues that none is adequate. It then proposes an alternative explanation of their epistemic value. The chapter argues that photographs play the epistemic roles they do because they are typically rich sources of depictively encoded information about the scenes they depict, and reliable depictive representations of those scenes. It then explains why photographs differ from non‐photographic pictures in both respects.

Goes back to first principles and explores the role of accounting in society. An analysis is made of the ontological basis of accounting, and the implications for research on the politics of accounting are highlighting. The four sections are as follows: (1) Preliminary remarks; (2) Politics of accounting: Shaping accounting as a societal institution; (3) The ontology of accounting as a societal institution – accounting as a thought construct (‘Denkmuster’), meaning through functionality, collective intentionality, the institutional richness of the accounting environment, normative and casual foundations of the existence of accounting; and (4) Implications of the ontology of accounting for political research.

Although there is a common perception that deserts support few species, some deserts have high local diversity, largely because organisms are able to exploit patches of high productivity. This chapter differentiates between local species richness (also called α diversity), β diversity, which is also known as species turnover or the change in species among sites, and γ diversity, which is regional species diversity. Productivity-diversity relationships have been well studied in some deserts and have helped us understand the factors controlling ecosystem function at a large spatial scale. Studies of convergence of desert communities and consideration of the similarity of desert communities with neighbouring mesic communities are some of the best elucidated of this genre. The chapter also considers the major differences and similarities among desert taxa in the various deserts of the world, to draw inferences on the major biogeographic patterns.

This chapter provides a discussion of what has become known as media naturalness theory, a theory of communication media with a special focus on electronic communication, and developed based on human evolutionary principles. The theory is centered on the media naturalness hypothesis, which argues that, other things being equal, a decrease in the degree of naturalness of a communication medium (or its degree of similarity to the face-to-face medium) leads to the following effects in connection with a communication interaction: (a) increased cognitive effort, (b) increased communication ambiguity, and (c) decreased physiological arousal. It is argued here that the media naturalness hypothesis has important implications for the selection, use and deployment of e-communication tools in organizations. Unlike some previously proposed technology-centric theories, the media naturalness theory is compatible with social theories of behaviour toward electronic communication tools. Among other things, this chapter shows that the media naturalness theory is compatible with the notion that, regardless of the obstacles posed by low naturalness media, individuals using those media to perform collabourative tasks may achieve the same or better task-related outcomes than individuals using media with higher degrees of naturalness.

The sensorimotor approach to raw feel explains four mysteries: why there's something it's like to have a raw sensory feel (presence); why different raw feels feel different; why there is structure in the differences; and why raw feel is ineffable. Of these four mysteries, the one philosophers consider to be the most mysterious is the first one, namely the question of why there's “something it's like” to have an experience. If richness, bodiliness, insubordinateness, and grabbiness are the basis for the “what it's like” of sensory feels, then we can naturally ask whether these concepts can do more work for us. In particular we would like them to explain, in the case of other, nonsensory types of experiences, the extent to which people will claim these have a “something it's like.” This chapter shows how proprioception and the vestibular sense, despite being real sensory systems, possess little if any sensory presence. The chapter also considers the cases of emotions, hunger and thirst, and pain. It demonstrates that the low or intermediate values of richness, bodiliness, insubordinateness, and grabbiness possessed by such experiences explain why people will tend to say that these experiences only have intermediate values of sensory presence. The chapter focuses on bodiliness and grabbiness, which tend to be the critical factors. These are plotted on a “phenomenality plot.” This graph indicates on the x axis the amount of bodiliness a given type of mental or neural activity has, and on the y axis the amount of grabbiness that activity has.

Species diversity in the ocean changes along both latitude and longitude as well as with depth. The latitudinal diversity gradient (LDG), with high richness of species and higher taxa in the tropics and declining toward the poles, is considered to be one of the fundamental patterns of biological diversity on the planet. The presence of a latitudinal gradient in taxonomic richness is well established in groups such as marine mollusks, especially in the northern hemisphere, but the trend is less well documented for many other benthic invertebrates. This had led to the obvious question whether a tropical-polar cline in richness is a general pattern in the oceans, especially given the fact that several groups of benthic marine invertebrates show relatively high species richness in the higher latitudes of the southern ocean. It is known that the latitudinal cline in richness holds not just for well-studied invertebrate groups like mollusks but is also present in other groups ranging from crustaceans, bryozoans, epifaunal, invertebrates, and cephalopods to benthic foraminifera, gammaridean amphipods, and sabellid polychaetes.

This chapter discusses the measurement and meaning of nestedness in species-by-sites matrices (SSMs) and SSM analysis of assembly rules. Species occurrences over a range of sites are represented in the form of a species-by-sites matrix. SSM databases are the standard format for many sorts of ecological and biogeographical studies. If the sites are islands spanning a range of sizes, topographies, and positions relative to colonization sources, SSMs will rank islands by those properties associated with high species richness, namely, by decreasing size and elevation, and increasing isolation. Often, this process produces a matrix with most entries concentrated in the upper-left triangle, a property known as nestedness. Assembly rules are algorithms that use abiotic and biotic factors to predict accurately on which islands a given species, or assemblage of species, will occur.