Throughout the eastern United States, plant species distributions and community patterns have developed in response to heterogeneous environmental conditions and a wide range of historical factors, including complex histories of natural and anthropogenic disturbance. Despite increased recognition of the importance of disturbance in determining forest composition and structure, few studies have ...

Agricultural land use imposes a major disturbance on ecosystems worldwide, thus greatly modifying the taxonomic and functional composition of plant communities. However, mechanisms of community assembly, as assessed by plant functional traits, are not well known for dryland ecosystems under agricultural disturbance. Here we investigated trait responses to disturbance intensity and availability ...

Disturbance is considered one of the main factors influencing plant species composition and diversity. We conducted a field study to address the plant community response in a coastal marsh to a major disturbance. In 1992, muskrats (Ondatra zibethicus L.) completely removed vegetation within a 450 ha area of intermediate coastal marsh in Texas, USA. We used vegetation data collected prior to the...

A variety of environmental processes, including topography, edaphic and disturbance factors can influence vegetation composition. The relative influence of these patterns has been known to vary with scale, however, few studies have focused on environmental drivers of composition at the mesoscale. This study examined the relative importance of topography, catchment flow and soil in influencing t...

Biological soil crusts (BSCs, or biocrusts) have important positive ecological functions such as erosion control and soil fertility improvement, and they may also have negative effects on soil moisture in some cases. Simultaneous discussions of the two-sided impacts of BSCs are key to the rational use of this resource. This study focused on the contribution of BSCs while combining with specific...

Disturbance affects most terrestrial ecosystems and has the potential to shape their responses to chronic environmental change. Scrub-oak vegetation regenerating from fire disturbance in subtropical Florida was exposed to experimentally elevated carbon dioxide (CO₂) concentration (+350 μl l(-1)) using open-top chambers for 11 yr, punctuated by hurricane disturbance in year 8. Here, we report th...

Vegetation change, whether it be of anthropogenic or climatic origin, can have dramatic effects on landscape form, processes and sediment yield. General conceptual models for relationships between climate, vegetation and sediment yield exist for whole landscapes, but no rigorous analysis of the effects of vegetation change on sediment transport, in the absence of overland flow, has been done fr...

Hickory plantations play an important role in improving local farmers’ economic conditions, but extreme drought in July–August 2013 seriously influenced hickory nut production. It is necessary to understand the extent and magnitude of this drought-induced hickory disturbance through mapping its spatial distribution using remote sensing data. This paper proposes a new approach to examine hickory...

Disturbance patterns strongly influence plant community structure. What remains less clear, particularly at a mechanistic level, is how changes in disturbance cycles alter successional outcomes in plant communities. There is evidence that fire suppression is resulting in longer fire return intervals in subalpine forests and that these lengthened intervals increase competitive interactions betwe...

Soil organic carbon (C) dynamics have been used to assess sustainable land managements in forest ecosystems. Impact, defined as intensive forms of land use that affect the soil function, can change C quantity and quality in soils, leading to a progressive degradation of the ecosystems. Soil CO2 effluxes were studied in five transects located at the Fort Benning military reservation in west-cent...