Human communities in the Intermountain West depend heavily on subalpine rangelands because of their importance in providing water for irrigation and forage for wildlife and livestock. In addition, many constituencies are looking to managed ecosystems to sequester carbon in plant biomass and soil C to reduce the impact of anthropogenic CO2 on climate. This work builds on a 90-year-old grazing ex...

Mountain environments are currently among the ecosystems least invaded by non-native species; however, mountains are increasingly under threat of non-native plant invasion. The slow pace of exotic plant invasions in mountain ecosystems is likely due to a combination of low anthropogenic disturbances, low propagule supply, and extreme/steep environmental gradients. The importance of any one of t...

Recent mountain pine beetle infestations have resulted in widespread tree mortality and the accumulation of dead woody fuels across the Rocky Mountain region, creating concerns over future forest stand conditions and fire behavior. We quantified how salvage logging influenced tree regeneration and fuel loads relative to nearby, uncut stands for 24 lodgepole pine forests in north-central Colorad...

Seed germination is a crucial stage in the life history of a species because it represents the pathway from adult to offspring, and it can affect the distribution and abundance of species in communities. In this study, we examined the effects of phylogenetic, life history and environmental factors on seed germination of 134 common species from an alpine/subalpine meadow on the eastern Tibetan P...

Different methods for estimating the total phosphorus (TP) reference conditions of lakes have rarely been compared. This work tests the uncertainty and accuracy of the most frequently used approaches (Morpho-edaphic index -MEI-, export coefficient, diatoms and pigment-inferred TP models) for 35 subalpine lakes. Furthermore, we propose a new process-based watershed approach that was tested on a ...

BACKGROUND Knowledge about how change the importance of soil seed bank and relationship between seed mass and abundance during vegetation succession is crucial for understanding vegetation dynamics. Many studies have been conducted, but their ecological mechanisms of community assembly are not fully understood. METHODOLOGY We examined the seasonal dynamics of the vegetation and soil seed bank...

We studied an Andean endemic group of species of the lichen-forming fungal genus Umbilicaria from the subalpine and low-alpine zone, with their biogeographic center in Bolivia and Peru. A number of species and varieties have been described from this element, but apparent instability in several morphological traits has made it difficult to precisely delimit taxa. Based on DNA sequences of nuclea...

Forests are being clearcut over extensive areas of western North America, but plant community response to harvesting and slashburning under varying climatic conditions in central British Columbia, Canada is still largely unknown. Evaluation of resilience is hampered by the short history of logging, lack of long-term experiments and methodological limitations. To test the effect of clearcut logg...

Climate change has caused shifts in species' ranges and extinctions of high-latitude and altitude species. Most cold-tolerant evergreen broadleaved woody plants (shortened to cold-evergreens below) are rare species occurring in a few sites in the alpine and subalpine zones in the Korean Peninsula. The aim of this research is to 1) identify climate factors controlling the range of cold-evergreen...

Longstanding observations suggest that dissolved materials are lost from fresh litter through leaching, but the role of soil fauna in controlling this process has been poorly documented. In this study, a litterbag experiment employing litterbags with different mesh sizes (3 mm to permit soil fauna access and 0.04 mm to exclude fauna access) was conducted in three habitats (arid valley, ecotone ...