The mechanisms driving the spatial patterns of species richness and composition are essential to the understanding of biodiversity. Numerous studies separately identify the contributions of the environment (niche process) and space (neutral process) to the species richness or composition at different scales, but few studies have investigated the contributions of both types of processes in the t...

Plant species composition, species abundances, and species richness were strongly recruitment limited in a 4-yr experiment in which seeds of up to 54 species were added to patches of native grassland. Four field seasons after a one-time addition of seed, many added species were still present and reproducing, with plots seeded at the highest rate having species richness that was 83% greater and ...

Tagetes minuta L. belongs to Asteracea family it is an annual species native of South American, although it has become widespread throughout the world. This species is especially well adapted to disturbed habitats. Tagetes minuta oil found a good market in perfumery and flavour industry. Many studies on Tagetes minuta have reported that the composition of exteracted volatile components varied a...

 Background: The use of natural products as anticancer and antioxidant agents has a long history. Several drugs currently used in chemotherapy were isolated from plant species. Objective: The aim of this study was to evaluate cytotoxicity and antioxidant activity as well as phenol and flavonoid contents of five plant species of Solanaceae family. Methods: Five plant species of Solanace...

Background & Aim: Different species from mint family (Lamiaceae) are used as spices and fragrance in food or as medicine against viral or microbial diseases in many countries for generation. Lamiaceae family contains 46 genus and 410 species. One of the valuable and medicinal species of this family is Ziziphora clinopodioides Lam. This species contains the essential o...

We investigated soil streptomycete communities associated with four host plant species (two warm season C4 grasses: Andropogon gerardii, Schizachyrium scoparium and two legumes: Lespedeza capitata, Lupinus perennis), grown in plant communities varying in species richness. We used actinobacteria-selective PCR coupled with pyrosequencing to characterize streptomycete community composition and str...

In North America, it has been shown that cattle in warmer, drier grasslands have lower quality diets than those cattle grazing cooler, wetter grasslands, which suggests warming will increase nutritional stress and reduce weight gain. Yet, little is known about how the plant species that comprise cattle diets change across these gradients and whether these shifts in dietary quality coincide with...

To examine the relationship between plant species composition and microbial community diversity and structure, we carried out a molecular analysis of microbial community structure and diversity in two field experiments. In the first experiment, we examined bacterial community structure in bulk and rhizosphere soils in fields exposed to different plant diversity treatments, via a 16S rRNA gene c...

Biological invasions can have strong ecological effects on native communities by altering ecosystem functions, species interactions, and community composition. Even though these ecological effects frequently impact the population dynamics and fitness of native species, the evolutionary consequences of biological invasions have received relatively little attention. Here, I show that invasions im...

To evaluate the efficacy of passive restoration on soil seed bank and vegetation recovery, we measured the species composition and density of the soil seed bank, as well as the species composition, density, coverage, and height of the extant vegetation in sites passively restored for 0, 4, 7, and 12 years (S0, S4, S7, and S12) in a degraded grassland in desert land. Compared with S0, three more...