Montane meadow hydropedology, plant community, and herbivore dynamics

Montane meadow plant community response to livestock grazing.

We examined long-term (10 years) meadow plant community responses to (1) livestock grazing under riparian grazing utilization limits; (2) suspension of livestock grazing; and (3) meadow site wetness and precipitation on the Inyo National Forest, California. Observed trends in meadow plant species richness, diversity, and frequency of soil stabilizing species were not significantly different bet...

Dynamics of a discrete-time plant-herbivore model

Herbivore preference drives plant community composition.

Herbivores are important drivers of plant species coexistence and community assembly. However, detailed mechanistic information on how herbivores affect dominance hierarchies between plant species is scarce. Here, we used data of a multi-site herbivore exclusion experiment in grasslands to assess changes in the cover of 28 plant species in response to aboveground pesticide. application. Moreove...

Dynamics of a plant-herbivore model.

We formulate a simple host-parasite type model to study the interaction of certain plants and herbivores. Our two-dimensional discrete-time model utilizes leaf and herbivore biomass as state variables. The parameter space consists of the growth rate of the host population and a parameter describing the damage inflicted by herbivores. We present insightful bifurcation diagrams in that parameter ...

Montane meadow change during drought varies with background hydrologic regime and plant functional group.

Climate change models for many ecosystems predict more extreme climatic events in the future, including exacerbated drought conditions. Here we assess the effects of drought by quantifying temporal variation in community composition of a complex montane meadow landscape characterized by a hydrological gradient. The meadows occur in two regions of the Greater Yellowstone Ecosystem (Gallatin and ...