What is the relationship with environmental factors of phytoplankton community dynamics in saline lakes? We analyzed a data set of phytoplankton community and environmental parameters in seasonal periods (i.e., summer and autumn) in order to describe seasonal variations within the phytoplankton community and its relationship with environmental variables in Chagan Nur Lake on the Ordos Plateau i...

We compared aquatic invertebrate diversity in paddy fields under traditional and modern management practices. We also examined the general factors that may be related to diversity within each paddy field. The Kitadan area was farmed with traditional management practices, with much longer periods of irrigations compared with the Kahoku area, which was farmed with modern agricultural practices us...

Ecological restoration of mining areas has mainly focused on the succession dynamics of vegetation and the fate of microbial communities remains poorly understood. We examined changes in soil characteristics and plant and microbial communities with increasing reclamation period in an open coal mine. Bacterial, archaeal and fungal communities were assessed by tag-encoded 454 pyrosequencing. At t...

Land cover has been evaluated and classified on the basis of general features using reflectance or digital levels of photographic or satellite data. One of the most common methodologies based on CORINE land cover (Coordination of Information on the Environment) data, which classifies natural cover according to a small number of categories. This method produces generalizations about the inventor...

Background: The objective of this study was to determine the relationship between soil environmental factors and halophyte distribution in the west coast of South Korea. Soils of our study sites were categorized into two groups: salt marsh and estuary marsh. Results: Salinity was higher in the salt marsh group than that in the estuary marsh group. However, total nitrogen, silt, and clay content...

Fluctuations in environmental conditions have been shown to alter the productivity of the marine ecosystem off the west coast of Vancouver Island, but it is unclear how individual groundfish species respond to changing seas, in part because the distributions of these species along environmental gradients are unknown. The recent global declines in stock biomass, biodiversity, and mean trophic le...

In grasslands under restoration succession, the effect of nutrient impoverishment on the vegetation has been intensively studied. The invertebrate soil animal community has, however, rarely been studied under such conditions. We hypothesised that a plant community in nutrient-poor grasslands supports fewer macro-invertebrate individuals than richer grasslands. We also hypothesised that the comp...

The development of land for modern agriculture has resulted in losses of native prairie habitat. The small, isolated patches of prairie habitat that remain are threatened by fire suppression, overgrazing, and invasion by non-native species. We evaluated the effects of three restoration practices (grazing only, burning only, and burning and grazing) on the vegetation characteristics and butterfl...

A new multivariate analysis technique, developed to relate community composition to known variation in the environment, is described. The technique is an extension of correspondence analysis (reciprocal averaging), a popular ordination technique that extracts continuous axes of vari? ation from species occurrence or abundance data. Such ordination axes are typically interpreted with the help of...

The integration between vegetation data, human disturbance factors, and geo-spatial data (Digital Elevation Model (DEM) and image data) is a particular challenge for vegetation mapping in mountainous areas. The present study aimed to incorporate the relationships between species distribution (or vegetation spatial distribution pattern) and topography and human disturbance factors with remote se...