INTRODUCTION Biological communities present in soil are essential to sustainable and productive agricultural practices; however, an accurate determination of the ecological status of agricultural soils remains to date an elusive task. An ideal indicator should be pervasive, play a relevant role in the ecosystem, show a rapid and proportional answer to external perturbations and be easily and ec...

Ecological regime shifts are large, abrupt, long-lasting changes in ecosystems that often have considerable impacts on human economies and societies. Avoiding unintentional regime shifts is widely regarded as desirable, but prediction of ecological regime shifts is notoriously difficult. Recent research indicates that changes in ecological time series (e.g., increased variability and autocorrel...

rangeland ecosystems shift across dynamic thresholds between differentecological states in response to natural or human-induced factors. these differentecological states are the result of interactions among climate, soils, grazing history,and management practices. the notion of a single ‘‘pristine’’ final state is onlyconceptual in nature, and because of this, dynamic thresholds and the effects...

Rapid urbanization and intensification of human activities increases the risk disturbance ecological systems via multiple sources, with consequences for regional security health. Landscape assessment (LERA) is an effective way to identify allocate resources. We used north south Qinling Mountain area as a case study analyze spatial heterogeneity landscape using potential- connectedness-resilienc...

Most modeling and statistical approaches encourage simplicity, yet ecological processes are often complex, as they are influenced by numerous dynamic environmental and biological factors. Pacific salmon abundance has been highly variable over the last few decades and most forecasting models have proven inadequate, primarily because of a lack of understanding of the processes affecting variabili...