Species Richness and Range Size of the Terrestrial Mammals of the World: Biological Signal within Mathematical Constraints

We explore global spatial diversity patterns for terrestrial mammals using as a tool range-diversity plots. These plots display simultaneously information about the number of species in localities and their spatial covariance in composition. These are highly informative, as we show by linking range-diversity plots with maps and by highlighting the correspondences between well defined regions of the plots with geographical regions or with taxonomic groups. Range-diversity plots are mathematically constrained by the lines of maximum and minimum mean covariance in species composition. We show how regions in the range-diversity plot corresponding to the line of maximum covariance correspond to large continental masses, and regions near the lower limit of the range-diversity plot correspond to archipelagos and mountain ranges. We show how curves of constant covariance correspond to nested faunas. Finally, we show that the observed distribution of the covariance range has significantly longer tails than random, with clear geographic correspondences. At the scale of our data we found that range-diversity plots reveal biodiversity patterns that cannot be replicated by null models, and correspond to conspicuous terrain features and taxonomic groupings

Ethnobotany of the Himalayas: The Nepal, Bhutanese, and Tibetan Himalayas

Plant use in the Nepal Himalaya, recorded in the 6500-year-old text of the Rigveda, ranks among the earliest uses of medicinal plants (Malla and Shakya 1984). Another early account, the Saushrut Nighantu, is perhaps the oldest Nepali medicinal plant book, which was produced during the rule of the Great King Mandev in the fifth century, and records the uses of 278 Nepalese medicinal plants (Subedi and Tiwari 2000; Gewali and Awale 2008). Later compendia of herbal pharmacopoeias such as Chandra Nighantu and Nepali Nighantu published in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, respectively, described 750 plants and 971 articles (IUCN Nepal 2004)

Pillar Tombs and the City : Creating a Sense of Shared Identity in Swahili Urban Space

This paper reviews published research on Swahili pillar tombs, as a specific type of tombs built of stone, by summarising records on almost fifty sites on the east coast of Africa. Dated to the 13th–16th centuries AD, the pillar tombs represented a core component of Swahili urban space. By considering their spatial setting, characteristics and comparative case studies from Africa and the Indian Ocean world, the paper reconsiders how pillar tombs might have functioned as a type of material infrastructure for creating social ties and notions of shared identity in a society that has never formally united