INTERISLAND VARIABILITY OF DUNE PLANT COMMUNITY STRUCTURE ON VIRGINIA’S BARRIER ISLANDS Justin K. Shafer Old Dominion University, 2010 Director: Dr. Frank P. Day The barrier islands of the Virginia Coast Reserve LTER site provide an opportunity to study interisland variability of dune plant communities. My research focused on the variation in biomass and diversity of communities among islands a...

We present the calibration of a fast and non-destructive method to estimate aboveground plant biomass measuring vegetation cover. We double-sampled vegetation cover and aboveground biomass in the Patagonian steppe using 150 plots for shrubs and 50 plots for grasses. We performed simple linear regressions between vegetation cover and biomass for the dominant species and life forms (shrubs: Mulin...

This study investigated the relationship among plant diversity, production, stability, and susceptibility to invasion in restored northern tall grass prairies (United States). The experiment consisted of 50 species mixtures fertilized with N or P, at high or low levels. Results from the past 5 years were as follows: (1) aboveground biomass increased and year-to-year variability declined with in...

Soil fauna can be an important regulator of community parameters and ecosystem processes, but there have been few quantitative syntheses of the role of soil fauna in terrestrial soil communities and ecosystems. Here, we conducted a metaanalysis to investigate the impacts of invertebrate soil microand mesofauna (grazers and predators) on plant productivity and microbial biomass. Overall our resu...

BACKGROUND Carbon stocks and fluxes in tropical forests remain large sources of uncertainty in the global carbon budget. Airborne lidar remote sensing is a powerful tool for estimating aboveground biomass, provided that lidar measurements penetrate dense forest vegetation to generate accurate estimates of surface topography and canopy heights. Tropical forest areas with complex topography prese...

In the present study, the suitability of optical ASTER satellite data (with 9 spectral bands) for estimating the biomass of boreal forest stands in mineral soils was tested. The remote sensing data were analysed and tested together with standwise forest inventory data. Stand volume estimates were converted to aboveground tree biomass using biomass expansion factors, and the aboveground biomass ...

the models oryza2000, swap and wofost simulate the growth and development of rice under conditions of potential production and water limitation. the models were evaluated against a data set of field experiments. the study was laid out in rcbd with three replications for one traditional landrace, hashemi, carried out in 2005 at the rice research institute of iran in rasht. the irrigation managem...

There is an ongoing eutrophication process in the Ria de Aveiro coastal lagoon (Portugal), with progressive replacement of rooted primary producers for macroalgae. Taking advantage of a well-defined environmental contamination gradient, we studied mercury accumulation and distribution in the aboveground and the belowground biomass of several salt marsh plants, including the seagrass species Zos...

The clonal shrub Cornus drummondii C.A. Mey. is rapidly increasing in cover and displacing mesic grassland species in the central USA as a consequence of fire suppression. We assessed the impact of C. drummondii on carbon (C) and nitrogen (N) pools and C fluxes in a tallgrass prairie in eastern Kansas, USA, through a comparison of both burned and unburned C. drummondii islands with open grassla...

SCHWINTZER, C. R. 1983. Primary productivity and nitrogen, carbon, and biomass distribution in a dense My)-ica gale stand. Can. J. Bot. 61: 2943-2948. Aboveground vascular vegetation was harvested in twenty 0.25-m' plots at the end of the growing season in a weakly minerotrophic, central Massachusetts peatland. The materials were separated by species and component and the Myrica gale fractions ...