University of Memphis

About: University of Memphis is a education organization based out in Memphis, Tennessee, United States. It is known for research contribution in the topics: Population & Poison control. The organization has 7710 authors who have published 20082 publications receiving 611618 citations. The organization is also known as: U of M.

From supervenience to superdupervenience: Meeting the demands of a material world

Abstract: The concept of supervenience has been employed for a variety of purposes in philosophy, a rather dominant tendency since the early 1970’s has been to invoke it in efforts to articulate a broadly materialistic, or physicalistic, position in philosophy of mind or in metaphysics generally. British emergentism will be instructive to begin by considering supervenience in relation to an account of the special sciences that has been dubbed “British emergentism” in a splendid and fascinating paper, McLaughlin. The British emergentists were not substance-dualists; they held that all particulars are physical entities wholly constituted out of physical entities as their parts. But they were not full-fledged materialists either, because they denied that physics is a causally complete science. The term “supervenient” was employed by Morgan in contexts where synchronic inter-level relations among properties were under consideration.

Not seeing the ocean for the islands: the mediating influence of matrix-based processes on forest fragmentation effects.

Abstract: The pervasive influence of island biogeography theory on forest fragmentation research has often led to a misleading conceptualization of landscapes as areas of forest/habitat and ‘non-forest/non-habitat’ and an overriding focus on processes within forest remnants at the expense of research in the human-modified matrix. The matrix, however, may be neither uniformly unsuitable as habitat nor serve as a fully‐absorbing barrier to the dispersal of forest taxa. In this paper, we present a conceptual model that addresses how forest habitat loss and fragmentation affect biodiversity through reduction of the resource base, subdivision of populations, alterations of species interactions and disturbance regimes, modifications of microclimate and increases in the presence of invasive species and human pressures on remnants. While we acknowledge the importance of changes associated with the forest remnants themselves (e.g. decreased forest area and increased isolation of forest patches), we stress that the extent, intensity and permanence of alterations to the matrix will have an overriding influence on area and isolation effects and emphasize the potential roles of the matrix as not only a barrier but also as habitat, source and conduit. Our intention is to argue for shifting the examination of forest fragmentation effects away from a patch-based perspective focused on factors such as patch area and distance metrics to a landscape mosaic perspective that recognizes the importance of gradients in habitat conditions.