Wyoming's Green Mountain Common Allotment is public land providing livestock forage, wildlife habitat, and unfenced solitude, amid other ecological services. It is also the center of ongoing debate over USDI Bureau of Land Management's (BLM) adjudication of land uses. Monitoring resource use is a BLM responsibility, but conventional monitoring is inadequate for the vast areas encompassed in thi...

[1] An unprecedented collection of 2161 geolocated, irregularly spaced field observations of land cover spanning 10 km throughout West Siberia suggests that currently available land cover classification products are remarkably poor indicators of vegetation type and water body extent in this northern wetland environment. The ground-truth data are compared with (1) the Global Land Cover Character...

Desertification is often characterized by the replacement of mesophytic grasses with xerophytic shrubs. Livestock grazing is considered a key driver of shrub encroachment, although most evidence is anecdotal or confounded by other factors. Mapping of velvet mesquite (Prosopis velutina) shrubs in and out of exclosures in 1932, 1948, and 2006 in semiarid grasslands of southeastern Arizona, USA, a...

This study was initiated owing to concern that removal of the invasive ground cover weed Tradescantia fluminensis may adversely effect the rare giant predatory land snail Powelliphanta traversi. From field trials using hand removal and herbicide spraying, it was considered that graduated control of Tradescantia with concomitant replacement of native ground cover could be of benefit to P. traver...

Herbivores can often control plant dynamics by mediating positive feedbacks in plant species’ influence on nutrient cycling. In a 7-yr field experiment in a nitrogenlimited Minnesota oak savanna, we tested whether herbivores accelerated or decelerated nitrogen (N) cycling through their effects on plants. We measured effects of excluding insect (primarily Orthoptera and Homoptera) and mammalian ...

Habitat-specialist species may be restricted to a narrower range of microhabitats than habitat-generalist species. We addressed this hypothesis by comparing microhabitats of two pairs of congeners that differ in habitat specificity and co-occur in one distinct habitat type, Florida rosemary scrub. We characterized microhabitats of rosemary scrub specialists, Polygonella basiramia and Lechea cer...

Although clouds are the most recognisable and defining feature of tropical montane cloud forests, little research has focussed on how clouds affect plant functioning. We used satellite and ground-based observations to study cloud and leaf wetting patterns in contrasting tropical montane and pre-montane cloud forests. We then studied the consequences of leaf wetting for the direct uptake of wate...