Lycium species is a popular medicinal plant in the traditional Chinese medicine and Lycium ruthenicum is a native medicinal plant of Iran. Lycium genus has several biologically important properties too. Investigation of chemical composition of ethyl acetate extract of this plant is the goal of this study. Two coumarins (Scopoletin and Sculetin) and Methyl-2-hydroxy-4-undecanoxy-trans-cinamate w...

BACKGROUND Variation in the behavioural repertoire of animals is acquired by learning in a range of animal species. In nest-building birds, the assemblage of nest materials in an appropriate structure is often typical of a bird genus or species. Yet plasticity in the selection of nest materials may be beneficial because the nature and abundance of nest materials vary across habitats. Such plast...

Humans are modifying both the identities and numbers of species in ecosystems, but the impacts of such changes on ecosystem processes are controversial. Plant species diversity, functional diversity, and functional composition were experimentally varied in grassland plots. Each factor by itself had significant effects on many ecosystem processes, but functional composition and functional divers...

BACKGROUND AND AIMS Variation in the composition of floral nectar reflects intrinsic plant characteristics as well as the action of extrinsic factors. Micro-organisms, particularly yeasts, represent one extrinsic factor that inhabit the nectar of animal-pollinated flowers worldwide. In this study a 'microbial imprint hypothesis' is formulated and tested, in which it is proposed that natural com...

Effects of roads on plant communities are not well known in cold-climate mountain ecosystems, where road building and development are expected to increase in future decades. Knowledge of the sensitivity of mountain plant communities to disturbance by roads is however important for future conservation purposes. We investigate the effects of roads on species richness and composition, including th...

Plant roots are known to harbor large and diverse communities of bacteria. It has been suggested that plant identity can structure these root-associated communities, but few studies have specifically assessed how the composition of root microbiota varies within and between plant species growing under natural conditions. We assessed the community composition of endophytic and epiphytic bacteria ...

palatability includes plants physical and chemical property that encourages an animal selecta plant for grazing. this study is an attempt for intruducing an indicator for determining thepalatability of rangeland plants. to do this, the relationship between palatability and foragequality of rangeland plants in karsanak rangelands of the chaharmahal-va-bakhtiari provincewas studied. first, plant ...

Because the quantity, quality, and heterogeneity of resources should affect the diversity of consumers, plant productivity, plant composition, and plant diversity may influence the diversity of trophic levels higher up the food chain (‘‘bottom-up’’ control of diversity). Increasing plant productivity may increase herbivore diversity by: increasing the abundance of rare resources (‘‘resource rar...