Orthopterans are important grassland herbivores and therefore affect plant diversity. They are in turn consumed by many other animals that depend on them for survival. If a significant proportion of these orthopterans are being parasitized it could drastically change the grassland habitat. If certain species of orthopterans have high infection rates or are parasitized by particularly deadly par...

Globalization of trade has dramatic socioeconomic effects, and, intuitively, significant ecological effects should follow. However, few quantitative examples exist of the interrelationship of globalization, socioeconomics, and ecological patterns. We present a striking illustration of a cascade in which bovine spongiform encephalopathy (BSE; "mad cow disease") outbreaks in Europe exerted pressu...

Extensive data used to quantify broad soil C changes (without information about causation), coupled with intensive data used for attribution of changes to specific management practices, could form the basis of an efficient national grassland soil C monitoring network. Based on variability of extensive (USDA/NRCS pedon database) and intensive field-level soil C data, we evaluated the efficacy of...

The Central Plains of Western Canada comprise the Prairies Ecozone and the Boreal Plains Ecozone. The former has the most grasslands and is divided into seven ecoregions: Mixed Grassland, Cypress Upland, Moist Mixed Grassland, and Fescue Grassland in southern Alberta and Saskatchewan; Aspen Parkland, which extends in an arc from central Alberta and Saskatchewan southeast to southwestern Manitob...

Arthropods are an important component of grassland systems, contributing significantly to biodiversity and ecosystem structure and function. Climate, fire, and grazing by large herbivores are important drivers in grasslands worldwide. Arthropod responses to these drivers are highly variable and clear patterns are difficult to find, but responses are largely indirect with respect to changes in r...

Human activities have increased the availability of nutrients in terrestrial and aquatic ecosystems. In grasslands, this eutrophication causes loss of plant species diversity, but the mechanism of this loss has been difficult to determine. Using experimental grassland plant communities, we found that addition of light to the grassland understory prevented the loss of biodiversity caused by eutr...

BACKGROUND The redundancy hypothesis predicts that the species redundancy in a plant community enhances community stability. However, numerous studies in recent years questioned the positive correlation between redundancy and stability. METHODOLOGY We explored the relationship between the species redundancy, functional redundancy and community stability in typical steppe grassland in Northern...

Grassland habitat covers about one-quarter of the Earth’s land surface, providing significant contribution to the world’s total agricultural production, plant biodiversity, and carbon sequestration. The advent of hyperspectral remote sensing and the future launch of planned spaceborne hyperspectral missions will open up new possibilities over conventional multispectral RS to better quantify gra...

SOC sequestration on cropland and grassland is an important mitigation option with potentially significant cobenefits for food security. At a carbon price of 20 $/tCO2eq, Paustian et al. (2016) identified a technical mitigation potential of 3-8 GtCO2eq/yr related to improved cropland and grassland management, biochar application, enhanced root phenotypes, and restoration of degraded lands and o...

Excessive water is used by farm field in Tarim river basin, it is very important to deep study on the relation between area of farm field and natural vegetation in recent 50 years. Collecting and processing various decades of remote sensing data, and got area of farm field, grass, forest, town and non-serviceable field. These results indict that: Because of the high flow period between 1950 and...