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JournalISSN: 0006-3231

Biological Reviews 

Wiley
About: Biological Reviews is an academic journal published by Wiley. The journal publishes majorly in the area(s): Population & Medicine. It has an ISSN identifier of 0006-3231. Over the lifetime, 2045 publications have been published receiving 270879 citations. The journal is also known as: Biological reviews of the Cambridge Philosophical Society & Biological reviews of the Cambridge Philosophical Society (Print. 1998).
Topics: Population, Medicine, Biology, Ecology, Biodiversity


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Journal ArticleDOI
TL;DR: This article explores the special features of freshwater habitats and the biodiversity they support that makes them especially vulnerable to human activities and advocates continuing attempts to check species loss but urges adoption of a compromise position of management for biodiversity conservation, ecosystem functioning and resilience, and human livelihoods.
Abstract: Freshwater biodiversity is the over-riding conservation priority during the International Decade for Action - 'Water for Life' - 2005 to 2015. Fresh water makes up only 0.01% of the World's water and approximately 0.8% of the Earth's surface, yet this tiny fraction of global water supports at least 100000 species out of approximately 1.8 million - almost 6% of all described species. Inland waters and freshwater biodiversity constitute a valuable natural resource, in economic, cultural, aesthetic, scientific and educational terms. Their conservation and management are critical to the interests of all humans, nations and governments. Yet this precious heritage is in crisis. Fresh waters are experiencing declines in biodiversity far greater than those in the most affected terrestrial ecosystems, and if trends in human demands for water remain unaltered and species losses continue at current rates, the opportunity to conserve much of the remaining biodiversity in fresh water will vanish before the 'Water for Life' decade ends in 2015. Why is this so, and what is being done about it? This article explores the special features of freshwater habitats and the biodiversity they support that makes them especially vulnerable to human activities. We document threats to global freshwater biodiversity under five headings: overexploitation; water pollution; flow modification; destruction or degradation of habitat; and invasion by exotic species. Their combined and interacting influences have resulted in population declines and range reduction of freshwater biodiversity worldwide. Conservation of biodiversity is complicated by the landscape position of rivers and wetlands as 'receivers' of land-use effluents, and the problems posed by endemism and thus non-substitutability. In addition, in many parts of the world, fresh water is subject to severe competition among multiple human stakeholders. Protection of freshwater biodiversity is perhaps the ultimate conservation challenge because it is influenced by the upstream drainage network, the surrounding land, the riparian zone, and - in the case of migrating aquatic fauna - downstream reaches. Such prerequisites are hardly ever met. Immediate action is needed where opportunities exist to set aside intact lake and river ecosystems within large protected areas. For most of the global land surface, trade-offs between conservation of freshwater biodiversity and human use of ecosystem goods and services are necessary. We advocate continuing attempts to check species loss but, in many situations, urge adoption of a compromise position of management for biodiversity conservation, ecosystem functioning and resilience, and human livelihoods in order to provide a viable long-term basis for freshwater conservation. Recognition of this need will require adoption of a new paradigm for biodiversity protection and freshwater ecosystem management - one that has been appropriately termed 'reconciliation ecology'.

5,857 citations

Journal ArticleDOI
TL;DR: It is shown that when an individual dies, it may or may not be replaced by an individual of the same species, which is all‐important to the argument presented.
Abstract: SUMMARY 1According to ‘Gause's hypothesis’ a corollary of the process of evolution by natural selection is that in a community at equilibrium every species must occupy a different niche. Many botanists have found this idea improbable because they have ignored the processes of regeneration in plant communities. 2Most plant communities are longer-lived than their constituent individual plants. When an individual dies, it may or may not be replaced by an individual of the same species. It is this replacement stage which is all-important to the argument presented. 3Several mechanisms not involving regeneration also contribute to the maintenance of species-richness: (a). differences in life-form coupled with the inability of larger plants to exhaust or cut off all resources, also the development of dependence-relationships, (b) differences in phenology coupled with tolerance of suppression, (c) fluctuations in the environment coupled with relatively small differences in competitive ability between many species, (d) the ability of certain species-pairs to form stable mixtures because of a balance of intraspecific competition against interspecific competition, (e) the production of substances more toxic to the producer-species than to the other species, (f) differences in the primary limiting mineral nutrients or pore-sizes in the soil for neighbouring plants of different soecies, and (g) differences in the competitive abilities of species dependent on their physiological age coupled with the uneven-age structure of many populations. 4The mechanisms listed above do not go far to explain the indefinite persistence in mixture of the many species in the most species-rich communities known. 5In contrast there seem to be almost limitless possibilities for differences between species in their requirements for regeneration, i.e. the replacement of the individual plants of one generation by those of the next. This idea is illustrated for tree species and it is emphasized that foresters were the first by a wide margin to appreciate its importance. 6The processes involved in the successful invasion of a gap by a given plant species and some characters of the gap that may be important are summarized in Table 2. 7The definition of a plant's niche requires recognition of four components: (a) the habitat niche, (b) the life-form niche, (c) the phenological niche, and (d) the regeneration niche. 8A brief account is given of the patterns of regeneration in different kinds of plant community to provide a background for studies of differentiation in the regeneration niche. 9All stages in the regeneration-cycle are potentially important and examples of differentiation between species are given for each of the following stages: (a) Production of viable seed (including the sub-stages of flowering, pollination and seed-set), (b) dispersal, in space and time, (c) germination, (d) establishment, and (e) further development of the immature plant. 10In the concluding discussion emphasis is placed on the following themes: (a) the kinds of work needed in future to prove or disprove that differentiation in the regeneration niche is the major explanation of the maintenance of species-richness in plant communities, (b) the relation of the present thesis to published ideas on the origin of phenological spread, (c) the relevance of the present thesis to the discussion on the presence of continua in vegetation, (d) the co-incidence of the present thesis and the emerging ideas of evolutionists about differentiation of angiosperm taxa, and (e) the importance of regeneration-studies for conservation.

4,057 citations

Journal ArticleDOI
TL;DR: In this article, Simpson et al. describe a method to solve the problem of homonymity in Bee W l d 34, 14) and show that it works well in beekeeping.
Abstract: by M. Simpson in Bee W l d 34, 14).

3,892 citations

Journal ArticleDOI
TL;DR: The end result of the coupling between the flows through the o/r and h/d pathways in oxidative phosphorylation in mitochondria is that, for the equivalent of each pair of electrons traversing the respiratory chain, up to 3 anhydro-bond equivalents may normally traverse the h/D pathway from adenosine diphosphate plus inorganic phosphate (ADP +Pi) to water.
Abstract: 50 years ago Peter Mitchell proposed the chemiosmotic hypothesis for which he was awarded the Nobel Prize for Chemistry in 1978. His comprehensive review on chemiosmotic coupling known as the first "Grey Book", has been reprinted here with permission, to offer an electronic record and easy access to this important contribution to the biochemical literature. This remarkable account of Peter Mitchell's ideas originally published in 1966 is a landmark and must-read publication for any scientist in the field of bioenergetics. As far as was possible, the wording and format of the original publication have been retained. Some changes were required for consistency with BBA formats though these do not affect scientific meaning. A scanned version of the original publication is also provided as a downloadable file in Supplementary Information and can be found online at doi:10.1016/j.bbabio.2011.09.018. See also Editorial in this issue by Peter R. Rich. Original title: CHEMIOSMOTIC COUPLING IN OXIDATIVE AND PHOTOSYNTHETIC PHOSPHORYLATION, by Peter Mitchell, Glynn Research Laboratories, Bodmin, Cornwall, England.

3,225 citations

Journal ArticleDOI
TL;DR: This article extensively discusses two dimensionless (and thus standardised) classes of effect size statistics: d statistics (standardised mean difference) and r statistics (correlation coefficient), because these can be calculated from almost all study designs and also because their calculations are essential for meta‐analysis.
Abstract: Null hypothesis significance testing (NHST) is the dominant statistical approach in biology, although it has many, frequently unappreciated, problems. Most importantly, NHST does not provide us with two crucial pieces of information: (1) the magnitude of an effect of interest, and (2) the precision of the estimate of the magnitude of that effect. All biologists should be ultimately interested in biological importance, which may be assessed using the magnitude of an effect, but not its statistical significance. Therefore, we advocate presentation of measures of the magnitude of effects (i.e. effect size statistics) and their confidence intervals (CIs) in all biological journals. Combined use of an effect size and its CIs enables one to assess the relationships within data more effectively than the use of p values, regardless of statistical significance. In addition, routine presentation of effect sizes will encourage researchers to view their results in the context of previous research and facilitate the incorporation of results into future meta-analysis, which has been increasingly used as the standard method of quantitative review in biology. In this article, we extensively discuss two dimensionless (and thus standardised) classes of effect size statistics: d statistics (standardised mean difference) and r statistics (correlation coefficient), because these can be calculated from almost all study designs and also because their calculations are essential for meta-analysis. However, our focus on these standardised effect size statistics does not mean unstandardised effect size statistics (e.g. mean difference and regression coefficient) are less important. We provide potential solutions for four main technical problems researchers may encounter when calculating effect size and CIs: (1) when covariates exist, (2) when bias in estimating effect size is possible, (3) when data have non-normal error structure and/or variances, and (4) when data are non-independent. Although interpretations of effect sizes are often difficult, we provide some pointers to help researchers. This paper serves both as a beginner’s instruction manual and a stimulus for changing statistical practice for the better in the biological sciences.

3,041 citations

Performance
Metrics
No. of papers from the Journal in previous years
YearPapers
202362
2022104
202163
202064
201953
201864