Litter decomposition is a fundamental process for nutrient cycling but we have a limited understanding of this process in disturbed tropical forests. We studied litter decomposition over a 10-mo period in a seasonally dry Amazon forest in Mato Grosso, Brazil. The study plots (50 ha each) included unburned forest (UF), once-burned (BF1) and forest burned annually for 3 y (BF3). We measured under...

Semi-steppe rangelands are a complex, highly dynamic and often multi-layered mosaic of grassland, shrubland, and intermediate communities. A few recent studies have explicitly or implicitly developed synthetic hypotheses about how interactive effects of human made disturbances initiate dynamic changes in plant community composition to cause a shifting mosaic of vegetation pattern across the lan...

Semi-steppe rangelands are a complex, highly dynamic and often multi-layered mosaic of grassland, shrubland, and intermediate communities. A few recent studies have explicitly or implicitly developed synthetic hypotheses about how interactive effects of human made disturbances initiate dynamic changes in plant community composition to cause a shifting mosaic of vegetation pattern across the lan...

Zagros forests are one of the important natural ecosystems in Iran with high plant diversity and variety of plant communities. In recent decades, fire events have frequently occurred in some of these ecosystems. The purpose of this research is to investigate the composition and diversity of herbaceous species after nine years of fire occurrence in the forests of Zagros in western Iran. For this...

The Homogeneous Charge Compression Ignition (HCCI) combustion progress has been characterized by means of high-speed fuel tracer Planar Laser Induced Fluorescence (PLIF) combined with simultaneous chemiluminescence imaging. Imaging has been conducted using a high-speed laser and detector system. The system can acquire a sequence of eight images within less than one crank angle. The engine was r...

Very few multi-species or ecosystem comparisons of post-fire vertebrate herbivore activity and food preference exist to inform fire management conservation strategies. We inferred (1–3 years) native introduced attraction six diverse temperate vegetation communities (grassland rainforest) from scat counts. hypothesised that where reduced herbaceous grassy (‘fodder’), herbivores would decline, pr...

Global increases in the occurrence of large, severe wildfires in forested watersheds threaten drinking water supplies and aquatic ecology. Wildfire effects on water quality, particularly nutrient levels and forms, can be significant. The longevity and downstream propagation of these effects as well as the geochemical mechanisms regulating them remain largely undocumented at larger river basin s...

To investigate the underlying mechanisms that control long-term recovery of tundra carbon (C) and nutrients after fire, we employed the Multiple Element Limitation (MEL) model to simulate 200-yr post-fire changes in the biogeochemistry of three sites along a burn severity gradient in response to increases in air temperature, CO2 concentration, nitrogen (N) deposition, and phosphorus (P) weather...

Results Mean summer temperature across the study area decreased by 3 C per degree of increasing latitude (6 C across the study area). In the northern part of the study area, where seed viability was low, alder was less dominant than at southern sites where seed viability was high. The age structure of alder populations across the temperature gradient was highly variable, except in the northern ...

The genus Calosoma (Coleoptera: Carabidae) is a group of large, sometimes ornate beetles, which often voraciously attack caterpillars. Many studies have reported Calosoma beetles being highly conspicuous during defoliator outbreaks. Based on observations of individual beetle behavior, patterns of activity density and phenology we provide a hypothesis on how environmental cues may synchronize Ca...