We conducted a 5-year study on the impact of nutrients, depending on stream and season. grazing on stream-channel bare ground and erosion, and a © CSA 3-year study of cattle-trail erosion on intermittent stream channels draining grazed oak (Quercus)-woodland 450. Correlations of stocking with the cryptogamic soil watersheds. These studies were conducted on the San crust of a semi-arid rangeland...

Seed predation is an important biotic filter that can influence abundance and spatial distributions of native species through differential effects on recruitment. This filter may also influence the relative abundance of nonnative plants within habitats and the communities' susceptibility to invasion via differences in granivore identity, abundance, and food preference. We evaluated the effect o...

Land use change and grassland degradation are two of the most critical problems ubiquitously found in arid and semi-arid areas in Northern China. Energy fluxes, including net radiation (Rn), latent heat flux (LE), sensible heat flux (H) and soil heat flux (G), were examined over an entire year (December 2005 to November 2006) in different steppe ecosystems – the steppe and cropland in Duolun an...

Nature reserves are an important component of the strategy to halt biodiversity loss caused by habitat fragmentation and loss, climate change and other anthropogenic factors. In the past decades, 184 nature reserves were designed for biodiversity conservation in Inner Mongolia. However, no studies have quantified the general condition of these reserves. In this paper, we summarized the history,...

The Hengduan Mountains, with a distinct altitudinal differentiation and strong vertical vegetation zonation, occupy an important position in southwestern China as a global hotspot of biodiversity. Pollen analysis of lake sediments sampled along an altitudinal gradient in this region helps us to understand how this vegetation zonation arose and how it has responded to climate change and human im...

By comparing the sex-specifically inheritedX chromosome to the autosomes in ancient genetic samples,we (1) studied sex-specific admixture for two prehistoric migrations. For each migration we used several admixture estimation procedures—including ADMIXTURE model-based clustering (2)—to compare X-chromosomal and autosomal ancestry in contemporaneous Central Europeans and we interpreted greater a...

Grassland biomass is essential for maintaining grassland ecosystems. Moreover, biomass is an important characteristic of grassland. In this study, we combined field sampling with remote sensing data and calculated five vegetation indices (VIs). Using this combined information, we quantified a remote sensing estimation model and estimated biomass in a temperate grassland of northern China. We al...