Conceptually, plant functional types represent a classification scheme between species and
broad vegetation types. Historically, these were based on physiological, structural and/or …

Freshwater ecosystems constitute only a small fraction of the planet's water resources, yet
support much of its diversity, with freshwater fish accounting for more species than birds …

While most efforts at biodiversity conservation have focused primarily on protected areas
and reserves, the unprotected lands surrounding those area—the" matrix"—are equally …

Ecological conservation monitoring programmes abound at various organisational and
spatial levels from species to ecosystem. Many of them suffer, however, from the lack of …

Databases on the distribution of species can be used to describe the geographic patterns of
biodiversity. Nevertheless, they have limitations. We studied three of these limitations:(1) …

Ecological research produces a tremendous amount of data, but the diversity in scales and
topics covered and the ways in which studies are carried out result in large numbers of …

Abstract e-Science promises to increase the pace of science via fast, distributed access to
computational resources, analytical tools, and digital libraries.“Big science” fields such as …

Bioinformatics, the application of computational tools to the management and analysis of
biological data, has stimulated rapid research advances in genomics through the …

An important set of challenges for eScience initiatives and digital libraries concern the need
to provide scientists with the ability to access data from multiple sources. This paper argues …

Widespread concern over the state of the environment and the impacts of anthropogenic
activities on ecosystem services and functions has highlighted the need for high-quality …