Species diversity has declined in ecosystems worldwide as a result of habitat fragmentation, eutrophication, and land-use change. If such decline is to be halted ecological mechanisms that restore or maintain biodiversity are needed. Two long-term field experiments were performed in native grassland to assess the effects of fire, nitrogen addition, and grazing or mowing on plant species diversi...

To document trends in land use and herbaceous production, 71 field sites sampled among cropped fields, fallow fields and rangelands in the Fakara region (Niger) were monitored from 1994 to 2006. The overall trend in land use confirmed the historical increase of the cropped areas since mid 20th century, at an annual rate of 2% from 1994 to 2006. This trend is the result of changes in the relativ...

Fire can change the species composition, diversity, and structure of savanna vegetation, thus altering growth and mortality rates. Such changes in the woody vegetation of burned savanna forest were evaluated over four years in comparison to unburned savanna forest. All woody plants with a diameter at breast height > 10 cm were measured in 100 permanent plots. Six months later, 38 of these plots...

Knowledge of the relationships between biotic components of rangeland ecosystem i.e. herbivores and plants is important for range managers. In order to study herbivorse grazing intensity on plant species diversity, an experiment was conductef using fuor grazing treatments in darrehshar rangelands, Ilam province in 2015. Plant species data were taken based on a randomized-systematic sampling met...

Fire is a complex event that maintains many ecological systems. The Florida Sand Skink (Plestiodon reynoldsi) is precinctive to Florida Scrub, a habitat that is maintained by infrequent fire. We characterize the effect of fire on genetic diversity and genetic differentiation at eight microsatellite loci in the Florida Sand Skink (n=470) collected from 30 replicate sites over three 'time since l...

Rangelands are uncultivated lands that include grasslands, savannahs, steppes, shrub lands, deserts and tundra. The native vegetation on rangelands is predominantly grasses, forbs and shrubs (Kothmann, 1974). Rangelands cover 31 percent of the land surface area of the United States (Havstad et al., 2009), and up to half of the land surface area worldwide (Lund, 2007). Most land areas that are n...

Nomadic pastoralism has thrived in Asia’s rangelands for several millennia by tracking seasonal changes in forage productivity and coping with a harsh climate. This pastoralist lifestyle, however, has come under intense transformations in recent decades due to socio-political and land use changes. One example is of the high-altitude trans-Himalayan rangelands of the Jammu and Kashmir State in n...

PREMISE OF THE STUDY Serpentine soils have attracted the attention of evolutionary biologists for decades because of their high number of rare and endemic taxa, though less is known about the ecological factors that govern the diversity and composition of serpentine communities. Theory suggests that vegetation on these low-productivity soils will be relatively resilient to fire, the most common...