Global or regional environmental changes in climate or land use have been increasingly implied in shifts in boundaries (ecotones) between adjacent ecosystems such as beech or oak-dominated forests and forest-steppe ecotones that frequently co-occur near the southern range limits of deciduous forest biome in Europe. Yet, our ability to detect changes in biological communities across these ecosys...

Time series of rainfall data and normalized difference vegetation index (NDVI) were used to evaluate land cover performance in Senegal, Africa, for the period 1982–1997, including analysis of woodland/forest, agriculture, savanna, and steppe land cover types. A strong relationship exists between annual rainfall and season-integrated NDVI for all of Senegal (r 1⁄4 0:74 to 0.90). For agriculture,...

The annual cycles of soil moisture and NO2 have been analysed across the climate zones of West Africa using two satellite data sets (OMI on AURA and ASCAT on MetOp-A). Exploring the sources and sinks for NO2 it is clear that the densely populated urban cities including Lagos and Abuja had the highest mean NO2 concentrations (>1.8 × 10 15 molecules cm -2 ) indicative of the anthropogenic urban e...

The paper is aimed to assess the effect of anthropogenic fragmentation on biodiversity plants in northern meadow steppes located southeast Nizhny Novgorod region. were chosen as a model group. A quantitative analysis dependence number species area habitats was carried out according data collected at 158 sites and steppe meadows with total 10752 ha. For each surveyed, area, proportion, covered c...

AIM Understanding and predicting ecosystem functioning such as biomass accumulation requires an accurate assessment of large-scale patterns of biomass distribution and partitioning in relation to climatic and soil environments. METHODS We sampled above- and belowground biomass from 26 sites spanning 1500 km in Inner Mongolian grasslands, compared the difference in aboveground, belowground bio...

The latest reform of the European Common Agricultural Policy (CAP) raised concerns regarding the future of low-productivity farming systems, which are often those most worthy of environmental conservation. In Spain, the conservation of the cereal-steppe avifauna, a community of European importance, relies on the continuity of low-intensity cereal systems and traditional cultivation patterns. In...

To account for the vastness of the northern arid steppes during Glacial episodes, I propose the proximate key variable was simply frequent clear skies. This hitherto under-emphasized point is the hub which best explains many questions. Low maritime cloud cover best accounts for today's tundra, and in a related way, the cloudy Polar Front accounts for the whole of the taiga. Even during Glacial ...

Despite the abundance of fossil remains for the extinct steppe bison (Bison priscus), an animal that was painted and engraved in numerous European Paleolithic caves, a complete mitochondrial genome sequence has never been obtained for this species. In the present study we collected bone samples from a sector of the Trois-Frères Paleolithic cave (Ariège, France) that formerly functioned as a pit...

BELARUS IS SITUATED AT A CROSSROAD OF NATURAL BORDERS OF SPECIES DISTRIBUTIONS: the NE part is situated in a taiga zone, whereas the other part of terrain is in the European forest zone. The distance of Belarus to the steppe zone is about 330 kilometers. This geographical position and the extensive knowledge of its fauna can be used to monitor changes in the distribution of different species. A...