Climate change is likely to produce more frequent and longer droughts in the Mediterranean region, like that of 1994, which produced important changes in the Quercus ilex forests, with up to 76% of the trees showing complete canopy dieback. At the landscape level, a mosaic of responses to the drought was observed, linked to the distribution of lithological substrates. Damage to the dominant tre...

Abstract Microclimatic conditions affect seeds' survival, dormancy, and germination, which are determinants in vegetation succession recovery. The semiarid coastal scrublands of Yucatan, Mexico very important because the environmental services they provide thus, studies needed disturbed sites relation to seed viability microclimate. In this study, we characterized microclimate bank under Pithec...

Puccinia psidii, the cause of a disease today commonly referred to as Myrtle rust, is considered a high priority quarantine threat globally. It has a wide host range in the Myrtaceae and it is feared that it may result in significant damage to native ecosystems where these plants occur. The fungus is also of considerable concern to plantation forestry industries that propagate Australian Eucaly...

The canopy spiders of the floodplain forest in Leipzig have become a focus of ecological studies in recent years. In 2006 we sampled 30 tree canopies in the ‘Burgaue’ nature reserve with pyrethrum knock-down fogging, recording 502 adult spiders belonging to 48 species and 11 families. Based on these data and the results of a previous fogging study, the studied spider community was dominated by ...

As planted forests mature and are clearfelled in patches, second rotation tree crops (restocks) become available to black grouse, a species of conservation concern in the UK. Currently, only a limited amount is known about the resources provided by this habitat to black grouse and their broods. The aims of this study therefore, were to investigate the recovery of field-layer vegetation and the ...

A current paradigm in conservation biology is that forest harvest practices that better approximate natural disturbance processes are more likely to conserve biodiversity. We contrasted bird communities in three replicate stands in each of 1, 13–15, and 22–28 yr old forests following wildfire and harvest in north-central Alberta, Canada. Stands were chosen from old (.120 yr) boreal mixedwood fo...

The Arctic and sub-Arctic environments have seen a rapid growth of shrub vegetation at the expense of the Arctic tundra in recent decades. In order to develop better tools to assess and understand this phenomenon, the sensitivity of multi-polarized SAR backscattering at C and X band to shrub density and height is studied under various conditions. RADARSAT-2 and TerraSAR-X images were acquired f...

Wood-pastures are socio-ecological systems covering vast areas in Europe. Although used for grazing and production of various forest goods, wood-pastures harbour a rich biodiversity usually considered as High Nature Value Farmlands. However, socio-economic pressures driving the transformation these valuable landscapes from multi-functional, heterogeneous habitats to homogeneous through either i...