Fire is a key Earth system process, with 80% of annual fire activity taking place in grassland areas. However, past fire regimes in grassland systems have been difficult to quantify due to challenges in interpreting the charcoal signal in depositional environments. To improve reconstructions of grassland fire regimes, it is essential to assess two key traits: (1) charcoal count, and (2) charcoa...

Wildfires and alien grass invasion threaten dry tropical forests throughout Central America. Efforts to preserve and restore these forests will require a better understanding of how conversion to grassland changes key belowground processes and organisms such as soil organic matter, nutrient cycling, and mycorrhizae. We studied forest, edge, and grassland soils from five 60-m transects perpendic...

 Amount of grassland and CRP combined was significantly associated with lek density at multiple spatial scales. This association, however, was not in the predicted direction. Low -density lek points had more surrounding grassland and CRP than did high-density lek points or no lek points. Thus, amount of grassland and CRP alone may not be enough to conserve lesser prairie-chickens; condition of...

In the face of ongoing habitat fragmentation, species-area relationships (SARs) have gained renewed interest and are increasingly used to set conservation priorities. An important question is how large habitat areas need to be to optimize biodiversity conservation. The relationship between area and species richness is explained by colonization-extinction dynamics, whereby smaller sites harbor s...

Populations of many grassland birds in North America have declined significantly during the last 30 years (Knopf 1994, Peterjohn and Sauer 1999). Although population trends of many groups of breeding birds vary across geographic regions (James et al. 1992, Herkert 1995, Sauer et al. 1997), the declining trend for grassland birds is consistent across much of North America, including the Northeas...

In past decades, ecological services and functions of alpine grassland in the Three-River Headwater Region (TRHR), Qinghai-Tibetan Plateau, have been severely degraded due to overgrazing and overuse of yak dung as a fuel. Therefore, the eco-migration project has been implemented by the national government for improving eco-environmental quality in this region. This paper examines the carbon cyc...

A series of soil conservation measures have been carried out to reduce soil loss on the Loess Plateau of China since 1950s, and the biologic measures were implemented according to topographic factors such as slope and elevation; therefore, the changes in topographic factors of land use can indicate the effects of the biologic measures. The objectives of this study were to (i) analyze the land u...

A soil-phytolith analysis casts doubt on the widely-held belief that fragments of grassland in the East Bay hills of the San Francisco Bay Area, California, are the relictual remnants of formerly continuous perennial grassland, dominated by bunchgrass species

Background & Aim: Persian shallot (Allium hirtifolium Boiss) with common name of "Musir" is one of the endemic medicinal plants in Iran. Leaves and bulbs with antibacterial, antifungal, anticancer, anti-diabetes and anti-obesity effects are edible parts of this plant. The tissue culture is an influential method to multiply plant productions in order to meet demands of ...

Soil represents the largest terrestrial organic carbon pool. To address global climate change, it is essential to explore the soil organic carbon storage patterns and their controlling factors. We investigated the soil organic carbon density (SOCD) in 48 grassland sites along the Eurasian steppe eastern transect (ESET) region, which covers the Inner Mongolia grassland subregion and Mongolia gra...