the study of soil seed bank provides useful information on management and restoration of natural ecosystems. in the arid environments, some perennial plants may cause accumulation of seed bank under their canopy, thereby protecting them against the livestock herbivory and the other environmental factors. this study was conducted with objective to investigate effect of perennial plants on densit...

Semi-steppe rangelands are a complex, highly dynamic and often multi-layered mosaic of grassland, shrubland, and intermediate communities. A few recent studies have explicitly or implicitly developed synthetic hypotheses about how interactive effects of human made disturbances initiate dynamic changes in plant community composition to cause a shifting mosaic of vegetation pattern across the lan...

Semi-steppe rangelands are a complex, highly dynamic and often multi-layered mosaic of grassland, shrubland, and intermediate communities. A few recent studies have explicitly or implicitly developed synthetic hypotheses about how interactive effects of human made disturbances initiate dynamic changes in plant community composition to cause a shifting mosaic of vegetation pattern across the lan...

Rangeland degradation has been identified as a serious concern in alpine regions of western China on the Qinghai-Tibetan plateau (QTP). Numerous government-sponsored programs have been initiated, including many that feature long-term grazing prohibitions and some that call for eliminating pastoralism altogether. As well, government programs have long favored eliminating plateau pikas (Ochotona ...

www.frontiersinecology.org © The Ecological Society of America R – including grasslands, shrublands, savannas, deserts, prairies, steppe, and tundra – comprise 30–40% of Earth’s ice-free terrestrial surface (depending on one’s definition and data sources; Asner et al. 2004) and account for 91% of the world’s grazing lands (Reid et al. 2008). Encompassing watersheds for vast downstream populatio...

Remote sensing technology is very useful in getting synoptic estimates of grass bio-parameters which is important for rangeland monitoring . The retrieval of bio-parameters is usually realized by developing empirical regression formula. However, it is less convincing if the regression line is built on limited observations from one growth stage . In this research, three field surveys were carrie...

The transition of nomadic pastoralism to more sessile forms of rangeland utilization and increased stocking rates can result in the degradation of pasture. After political changes in the 1990s in Mongolia, population growth and missing alternative livelihoods intensified the grazing pressure on pastures, and further decreased the condition of the fragile arid ecosystems. To learn more about the...