Long-term ecological research (LTER) sites need a periodic assessment of the state of their ecosystems and services in order to monitor trends and prevent irreversible changes. The ecological integrity (EI) framework opens the door to evaluate any ecosystem in a comparable way, by measuring indicators on ecosystem structure and processes. Such an approach also allows to gauge the sustainability of conservation management actions in the case of protected areas. Remote sensing (RS), provided by...

Social networks are the result of interactions between individuals at different temporal scales. Thus, sporadic intergroup encounters and individual forays play a central role in defining the dynamics of populations in social species. The rate of intergroup encounters was assessed for three western lowland gorilla Gorilla gorilla gorilla groups with daily observations over 5 years, and non-invasively genotyped a larger population over four months.

Although many climate research experiments are providing valuable data, long-term measurements are not always affordable. In the last decades, several facilities have secured long-term experiments, but few studies have incorporated spatial and scale effects. Most of them have been implemented in experimental agricultural fields but none for ecological studies. Scale effects can be assessed using remote sensing images from space or airborne platforms. Unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs) are...

Cysteine plays essential biological roles, but excessive amounts produce cellular oxidative stress. Cysteine metabolism is mainly mediated by the enzymes cysteine dioxygenase and ?-glutamylcysteine synthetase, respectively coded by the genes CDO1 and GCLC. Here a new hypothesis is tested posing that the synthesis of the pigment pheomelanin also contributes to cysteine homeostasis in melanocytes, where cysteine can enter the pheomelanogenesis pathway.

The high relevance of host–switching for the diversification of highly host–specific symbionts (i.e., those commonly inhabiting a single host species) demands a better understanding of host–switching dynamics at an ecological scale. Here, DNA metabarcoding was used to study feather mites on passerine birds in Spain, sequencing mtDNA (COI) for 25,540 individual mites (representing 64 species) from 1,130 birds (representing 71 species).