Anthropogenic impacts on North American grasslands, a highly endangered ecosystem, have led to declines of prairie dogs, a keystone species, over 98% of their historical range. While impacts of this loss on maintenance of grassland biodiversity have been widely documented, much less is known about the consequences on the supply of ecosystem services. Here we assessed the effect of prairie dogs ...

Prescribed burning is a commonly advocated and historical practice for control of woody species encroachment into grasslands on all continents. However, desert grasslands of the southwestern United States often lack needed herbaceous fuel loads for effective prescriptions, dominant perennial graminoids may have poor fire tolerance, and some systems contain fire-tolerant invasive species. We exa...

bottomland by the now well-entrenched exotic sa1tcedar (Tamarix chinenses). First recorded in Arizona in the late 1800's, sa1tcedar was not an important species until after 1910 (Robinson 1965). Nevertheless, it is now present in pure communities or mixed with virtually all riparian community types, being absent only from a few stands of honey mesquite. Knowledge concerning those avian species ...