An inventory of the woodlice fauna of the former USSR yielded 190 species, 64 of them were recorded from the territory of Russia. According to the cartographic analysis, the limits of distribution of epigean terrestrial isopods over the area, excluding mountains, is explained by temperature. No woodlice records were found outside the isocline of 120 days a year with the mean daily air temperatu...

The Sagebrush Steppe Treatment Evaluation Project (SageSTEP) is a comprehensive, integrated, long-term study that evaluates the ecological effects of fire and fire surrogate treatments designed to reduce fuel and to restore sagebrush (Artemisia spp.) communities of the Great Basin and surrounding areas. SageSTEP has several features that make it ideal for testing hypotheses from state-and-trans...

The purpose of our investigation was to clarify the effects of agriculture on the process of loss of litter at the periphery of a farmland. This study revealed the generation process of an ecologically unusual phenomenon that is observed around cropland in semi-arid regions. We hypothesized that the vegetation around a farmland cannot supply plant litter to the ground surface because the ecolog...

Climate is a driver of terrestrial ecosystem carbon exchange, which is an important product of ecosystem function. The Qinghai-Tibetan Plateau has recently been subjected to a marked increase in temperature as a consequence of global warming. To explore the effects of warming on carbon exchange in grassland ecosystems, we conducted a whole-year warming experiment between 2012 and 2014 using ope...

Aim: We aimed to investigate the prevalence and molecular characterization of rabies virus (RABV) from wild and domestic animals in Mongolia during 2008-2010. Materials and Methods: Brain tissue samples were collected from 24 rabid animals in Zavkhan, Omnogovi, Tov, Dundgovi, Govi-Altai, Selenge, Ovorkhangai, and Khentii provinces in Mongolia. Herein, samples were included from 13 domestic anim...

The Patagonian steppe is an immense, cold, arid region, yet phylogeographically understudied. Nassauvia subgen. Strongyloma is a characteristic element of the steppe, exhibiting a continuum of morphological variation. This taxon provides a relevant phylogeographical model not only to understand how past environmental changes shaped the genetic structure of its populations, but also to explore p...

during last few years, three seasons of excavations at the ultan qalasi, one season of stratigraphy in nadir tepesi and a short season of survey in mughan steppe enriched our knowledge about the ancient landscape of the area. the mughan steppe is a geographically diverse region in the northwestern corner of the islamic republic of iran, defined at the north by the aras (araxes) river and includ...

Global nitrogen (N) deposition and climate change have been identified as two of the most important causes of current plant diversity loss. However, temporal patterns of species turnover underlying diversity changes in response to changing precipitation regimes and atmospheric N deposition have received inadequate attention. We carried out a manipulation experiment in a steppe and an old-field ...

Seed predation is an important biotic filter that can influence abundance and spatial distributions of native species through differential effects on recruitment. This filter may also influence the relative abundance of nonnative plants within habitats and the communities' susceptibility to invasion via differences in granivore identity, abundance, and food preference. We evaluated the effect o...

Land use change and grassland degradation are two of the most critical problems ubiquitously found in arid and semi-arid areas in Northern China. Energy fluxes, including net radiation (Rn), latent heat flux (LE), sensible heat flux (H) and soil heat flux (G), were examined over an entire year (December 2005 to November 2006) in different steppe ecosystems – the steppe and cropland in Duolun an...