Medusahead (Taeniatherum caput-medusae (L.) Nevski) is an exotic annual grass invading rangelands in the western United States. Medusahead is a serious management concern because it decreases biodiversity, reduces livestock forage production, and degrades the ecological function of rangelands. Despite the obvious importance of ranchers as partners in preventing and managing medusahead in rangel...

INTRODUCTION Analyzing trends of land use systems and the changes occurred overtime is an effective way of assessing the impacts of land use/land cover (LULC) changes on ecosystem function. It provides important insights for understanding the spatial patterns of land use processes. The rangelands of southern Ethiopia are adversely affected by increased human population pressure, encroachment of...

the geometric morphometrics method was applied to study the morphological differences in 95 specimens of kura barbel (barbus lacerta, heckel 1834) collected from three riverine ecosystems of the sefidrud basin, viz. taleghan, totkabon and kloraz rivers.  for this purpose, the left sides of the specimens were photographed. then, 14 landmark-points were defined and digitized on 2d pictures using ...

today water supply issue in large cities seems to be a big problem. this becomes more important with population growth and urbanization extension. to cope with this problem lots of irrigation and drainage projects have been implemented and operated that subsequently many socio- economic and cultural effects have been brought to the areas . the objective of the present study is to survey the soc...

For most ecosystems, net ecosystem exchange of CO2 (NEE) varies within and among years in response to environmental change. We analyzed measurements of CO2 exchange from eight native rangeland ecosystems in the western United States (58 site-years of data) in order to determine the contributions of photosynthetic and respiratory (physiological) components of CO2 exchange to environmentally caus...

Nomadic pastoralism has thrived in Asia’s rangelands for several millennia by tracking seasonal changes in forage productivity and coping with a harsh climate. This pastoralist lifestyle, however, has come under intense transformations in recent decades due to socio-political and land use changes. One example is of the high-altitude trans-Himalayan rangelands of the Jammu and Kashmir State in n...

Soil characteristics and functions are critical determinants of rangeland systems and the ecosystem services that they provide. Rangeland soils are extremely diverse, but an emerging understanding is that paradigms developed in more mesic forest ecosystems may not be applicable. Vascular plants, biological soil crusts, and the soil microbial community are the three major functional groups of or...

People who interact with rangelands on a regular basis gain practical insights about how rangelands work by living on and working with them. This local knowledge is refi ned over time as individuals see the way the land responds to weather, management, and disturbances. Local knowledge (LK) is a type of knowledge “integrally linked with the lives of people, always produced in dynamic interactio...

In the central Great Plains, pastures and rangelands often are not economically competitive with grain crops. This has led to increases in acreages of row crops at the expense of rangelands, pastures, and hay crops on marginal lands resulting in severe erosion problems. The productivity of forages, pastures, and rangelands needs to be increased to levels that would make them economically compet...