We investigated the impact of pastoral management on birds in subtropical grassy eucalypt woodland in southeastern Queensland, Australia, where the patterns of land management have made it possible to disentangle the effects of livestock grazing from those of tree clearing. We recorded changes in bird species composition, density, and relative abundance across two woodland habitat types (ripari...

Rebecca Turner Late Quaternary fire histories in the Eastern Mediterranean region from lake sedimentary micro-charcoals. The Eastern Mediterranean has a long history of human occupation, which spans the transition from hunter-gatherers to the establishment of early agro-pastoralist communities, coinciding with the Last Glacial: Interglacial transition. Over the same timeframe a delay in postgla...

We investigated the effects of fragmentation due to urbanisation on the species composition and functional roles of ants, beetles, spiders, flies and wasps. The study was conducted in 21 fragments of heath and woodland in south-eastern Australia classed as either ‘small’ (4 4 km) or ‘large’ (5 80 km). Arthropods were pitfall-trapped and identified to family or genus and morphospecies and microh...

Climate change is now one of the greatest global challenges, and research is underway to establish the likely impacts on all aspects of the environment. Forestry Commission Scotland has commissioned Forest Research to determine how forests and forestry in Scotland will be affected by climate change. This Research Note provides an initial synopsis of the likely impacts, with preliminary recommen...

Composite fingerprinting represents an effective method of reconstructing sediment-source changes in remote areas where long-term hydrological and sediment accretion records do not exist. A ca. 50-year record of sediment deposition was determined for a small catchment at Shudu, situated in northwest Yunnan Province, China. Woodland, pasture, shrubland and channel bank material are identified as...

Multi-scale resource selection modeling is used to identify factors that limit species distributions across scales of space and time. This multi-scale nature of habitat suitability complicates the translation of inferences to single, spatial depictions of habitat required for conservation of species. We estimated resource selection functions (RSFs) across three scales for a threatened ungulate,...

Polylepis woodlands, the dominant high-elevation woodland species of the Andes of South America, are an increasingly important focus of conservation and restoration efforts as a buffer to the regional effects of climate change. However, the natural extent of these woodlands before the arrival of human populations is still debated. One significant approach to this question is an assessment of th...

We introduce the concept of dynamical phase coexistence to provide a simple solution for a long-standing problem in theoretical ecology, the so-called "savanna problem". The challenge is to understand why in savanna ecosystems trees and grasses coexist in a robust way with large spatiotemporal variability. We propose a simple model, a variant of the contact process (CP), which includes two key ...

Conservation Reserve Program Conservation Practice 33 (CP33: Conservation Buffers for Upland Birds) provides habitat for grassland birds in agriculture-dominated landscapes. However, landscape context and adjacency of other land covers may influence colonization, occupancy, and reproductive performance of breeding grassland birds in buffers. Our objective was to determine how edge effects influ...

Naturally occurring radioactive isotopes of 210Pb and 7Be in the atmosphere, plant material and soil have been used to investigate the transport and removal of atmospheric aerosols from the atmosphere by precipitation and turbulent deposition to natural surfaces. Concentrations of 210Pb and 7Be contained in aerosols in surface air were measured using a high volume sampler at the King’s Building...