Megaherbivores and small burrowing mammals commonly coexist and play important functional roles in grassland ecosystems worldwide. The interactive effects of these two functional groups of herbivores in shaping the structure and function of grassland ecosystems are poorly understood. In North America's central grasslands, domestic cattle (Bos taurus) have supplanted bison (Bison bison), and now...

Extensively managed pastures are of crucial importance in sustaining biodiversity both in local- and landscape-level. Thus, re-introduction of traditional grazing management is a crucial issue in grassland conservation actions worldwide. Traditional grazing with robust cattle breeds in low stocking rates is considered to be especially useful to mimic natural grazing regimes, but well documented...

As part of a programme of landscape-scale habitat surveillance in the United Kingdom (UK), the effect of grassland sampling intensity on the outcome of numerical classification was assessed. Sample quadrats from two regions of the UK were available for post priori analysis; a random sample from Great Britain (GB), with grasslands sampled in proportion to area, and an independent stratified rand...

Measuring the impact of livestock grazing on grassland above-ground net primary production (ANPP) is essential for grass yield estimation and pasture management. However, since there is a lack of accurate and repeatable techniques to obtain the details of grazing locations and stocking rates at the regional scale, it is an extremely challenging task to study the influence of regional grazing on...

The combined effects of vegetation and climate change on biosphere-atmosphere water vapor (H2 O) and carbon dioxide (CO2 ) exchanges are expected to vary depending, in part, on how biotic activity is controlled by and alters water availability. This is particularly important when a change in ecosystem composition alters the fractional covers of bare soil, grass, and woody plants so as to influe...

This study investigated the effects of grassland conversion to croplands on soil organic carbon (SOC) in a typical grassland-dominated basin of the Inner Mongolia using direct field samplings. The results indicated that SOC contents decreased usually with increasing soil depth, with significant differences between the upper horizons (0-30cm) and the underlying horizons (30-100cm). Also, SOC den...

BACKGROUND Major biological and cultural innovations in late Pliocene hominin evolution are frequently linked to the spread or fluctuating presence of C(4) grass in African ecosystems. Whereas the deep sea record of global climatic change provides indirect evidence for an increase in C(4) vegetation with a shift towards a cooler, drier and more variable global climatic regime beginning approxim...

Within the oak woodlands of California there is often a distinct shift in the botanical composition between the open grassland and the herbaceous understory beneath oak canopy. Botanical sampling at two woodland sites indicated that the annual grass Bromus diandrus was dominant under deciduous blue oak canopy, while a congener, Bromus hordeaceus, was dominant in open grassland. We examined the ...

A dynamical ecosystem model with three variables, living biomass, wilted biomass and available soil wetness, is developed to examine the vegetation–soil water interaction in semi-arid areas. The governing equations are based on the mass conservation law. The physical and biophysical processes are formulated with the parameters estimated from observational data. Both numerical results and qualit...

15 Organic soils in peatlands store a great proportion of the global soil carbon pool and can lose 16 carbon via the atmosphere due to degradation. In Germany, most of the greenhouse gas 17 (GHG) emissions from organic soils are attributed to sites managed as grassland. Here we 18 investigated a land use gradient from near-natural wetland (NW) to an extensively managed 19 (GE) to an intensively...