This study was conducted in Alzzazah area which lies approximately 25 km East of El-Dmazein city, the capital of the Blue Nile State, Sudan. This study was carried out at the end of the autumn 2015. The aim of the study was to evaluate the impacts of continuous grazing on the rangeland of the study area. To determine this effect, two range sites were selected to represent the rangeland in the s...

The terrestrial ecosystems of Victoria Land, Antarctica are characteristically simple in terms of biological diversity and ecological functioning. Nematodes are the most commonly encountered and abundant metazoans of Victoria Land soils, yet little is known of their diversity and distribution. Herein we present a summary of the geographic distribution, habitats and ecology of the terrestrial ne...

Global climate change may increase biological invasions in part because invasive species may have greater phenotypic plasticity than native species. This may be especially important for abiotic stresses such as salt inundation related to increased hurricane activity or sea level rise. If invasive species indeed have greater plasticity, this may reflect genetic differences between populations in...

The diversification of the tetrapod stem group occurred during the late Middle through the Late Devonian, that is from the Givetian to Famennian stages about 385-365 million years ago. The relationships between the known taxa representing this radiation have currently reached a reasonable consensus so that interpretations of the order of appearance of tetrapod characters is possible. The immedi...

The importance of managing land to optimize carbon sequestration for climate change mitigation is widely recognized, with grasslands being identified as having the potential to sequester additional carbon. However, most soil carbon inventories only consider surface soils, and most large-scale surveys group ecosystems into broad habitats without considering management intensity. Consequently, li...

Wetland soils contain some of the highest stores of soil carbon in the biosphere. However, there is little understanding of the quantity and distribution of carbon stored in our remaining wetlands or of the potential effects of human disturbance on these stocks. Here we use field data from the 2011 National Wetland Condition Assessment to provide unbiased estimates of soil carbon stocks for wet...

The Deciduous Complex that occurs in northern Minas Gerais State, Brazil, raises questions about the floristic affinities of these formations in relation to neighboring phytogeographical domains. Little is known about the identity of the seasonal forest formations that comprise this complex, or about its relationships to abiotic components, such as soils, topography and climate. This study aime...

State-and-transition models are increasingly being used to guide rangeland management. These models provide a relatively simple, management-oriented way to classify land condition (state) and to describe the factors that might cause a shift to another state (a transition). There are many formulations of state-and-transition models in the literature. The version we endorse does not adhere to any...

Sommer and Bossio (2014) model the potential soil organic carbon (SOC) sequestration in agricultural soils (croplands and grasslands) during the next 87 years, concluding that this process cannot be considered as a climate stabilization wedge. We argue, however, that the amounts of SOC potentially sequestered in both scenarios (pessimistic and optimistic) fulfil the requirements for being consi...

This photo shows a fi re in a spruce forest in the Innoko National Wildife Refuge. Scientists at SNRAS are studying the effects of fi re on carbon bioavailability in soils, boreal forest soil respiration, climate change, and the ecology of morel mushrooms. Other fi rerelated projects study the vulnerability of human populations to wildfi re, fuel loads in forests, and management methods that be...