Abstract:We herein present FactorsR, an RWizard application which provides tools for the identification of the most likely causal factors significantly correlated with species richness, and for depicting on a map the species richness predicted by a Support Vector Machine (SVM) model. As a demonstration of FactorsR, we used an assessment using a database incorporating all species of terrestrial carnivores, a total of 249 species, distributed across 12 families. The model performed with SVM explained 91.9% of the variance observed in the species richness of terrestrial carnivores. Species richness was higher in areas with both higher vegetation index and patch index, i.e., containing higher numbers of species whose range distribution is less fragmented. Lower species richness than expected was observed in Chile, Madagascar, Sumatra, Taiwan, and Sulawesi. OPEN ACCESSDiversity 2015, 7 386

Dynamic languages are becoming increasingly popular for different software development scenarios such as Web engineering, rapid prototyping, or the construction of applications that require runtime adaptiveness. These languages are built on the idea of supporting reasoning about (and customizing) program structure, behaviour and environment at runtime. The dynamism offered by dynamic languages is, however, counteracted by two main limitations: no early type error detection and fewer opportunities for compiler optimizations. To ob

a b s t r a c tIncreasing trends towards adaptive, distributed, generative and pervasive software have made object-oriented dynamically typed languages become increasingly popular. These languages offer dynamic software evolution by means of reflection, facilitating the development of dynamic systems. Unfortunately, this dynamism commonly imposes a runtime performance penalty. In this paper, we describe how to extend a production JITcompiler virtual machine to support runtime object-oriented structural reflection offered by many dynamic languages. Our approach improves runtime performance of dynamic languages running on statically typed virtual machines. At the same time, existing statically typed languages are still supported by the virtual machine.We have extended the .Net platform with runtime structural reflection adding prototype-based object-oriented semantics to the statically typed class-based model of .Net, supporting both kinds of programming languages. The assessment of runtime performance and memory consumption has revealed that a direct support of structural reflection in a production JIT-based virtual machine designed for statically typed languages provides a significant performance improvement for dynamically typed languages.

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The separation of concerns principle is aimed at the ability to modularize separately those different parts of software that are relevant to a particular concept, goal, task or purpose. Appropriate separation of application concerns reduces software complexity, improves comprehensibility, and facilitates concerns reuse. Considering persistence as a common application concern, its separation from program's main code implies that applications can be developed without taking persistence requirements into consideration. As a result, persistence aspects may be plugged in at a later stage. This separation offers the developer handle persistence software attributes regardless the application functionality. We have analyzed different approaches to accomplish a complete separation of persistent features, appreciating that computational reflection achieves an entire transparency of persistence concerns, offering an enormous adaptability level. We present the implementation of a research-oriented prototype that illustrates how computational reflection can be used in future persistence systems to completely separate and adapt application persistence attributes at runtime.