Conservation organizations in the northeastern United States (US) recommend forest clearcutting to create shrubland habitat, which is required by many wildlife species with declining populations. The planning of habitat management programs is hampered by a lack of information on the current extent of shrubland habitat and the current rate of forest clearcutting that creates shrubland habitat. W...

The loss of shrubland habitat is linked to population declines formanywildlife species, including several bird species of conservation concern. Conservation agencies in the northeastern United States encourage private landowners to clearcut patches of forest to create shrubland habitat. Many private landowners are only willing to create small clearcuts; therefore, it is important to understand ...

We used count surveys and mist-net captures to compare habitat associations, relative abundance, species richness, and community similarity of migrant landbirds among four major habitats in the Boise Foothills of southwestern Idaho. Count surveys were conducted from August through October 1997–2000 in conifer forest, mountain shrubland, shrubsteppe, and riparian shrubland. We compared bird dete...

Analyzing the dynamics of soil particle-size distributions (PSDs), soil nutrients, and erodibility are very important for understanding the changes of soil structure and quality after long-term land-use conversion. We applied multifractal Rényi spectra (Dq) and singularity spectra (f(α)) to characterize PSDs 35 years after conversions from cropland to shrubland with Caragana microphylla (shrubl...

Shrubs have been reported to expand into grassland and polar regions in the world, which causes complex changes in ecosystem carbon, nutrients, and resilience. Given the projected global drying trend, shrubs with their superior drought resistance and tolerance may play more important roles in global ecosystem function. Shrubland exists in all of the climate zones in China, from subtropical to t...

Afforestation plays an important role in soil protection and ecological restoration. The objective of this study is to understand the effect of afforestation on soil carbon and soil microbial communities in the Loess Plateau of China. We measured two chemically-separated carbon fractions (i.e., humic acid, HA, and fulvic acid, FA) and soil microbial communities within shrublands (18-year-old Ca...

Species diversity, richness and biomasses (aboveground biomass) and their relationships are the key variables of ecosystems. This study was conducted to determine the relationship of Species Diversity (SD) and Species Richness (SR) with Above-Ground Biomass (AGB) at a local scale at 5 different habitats (shrubland, forbland, grassland, shrub-forbland and forb-shrubland) in Zagros mountains in w...

Redistribution of soil, nutrients, and contaminants is often driven by wind erosion in semiarid shrublands. Wind erosion depends on wind velocity (particularly during episodic, high-velocity winds) and on vegetation, which is generally sparse and spatially heterogeneous in semiarid ecosystems. Further, the vegetation cover can be rapidly and greatly altered due to disturbances, particularly fir...

The grassland and shrubland are two major landscapes of the Tibetan alpine meadow, a region very sensitive to the impact of global warming and anthropogenic perturbation. Herein, we report a study showing that a majority of differences in soil microbial community functional structures, measured by a functional gene array named GeoChip 4.0, in two adjacent shrubland and grassland areas, were exp...

USDA Forest Service Proceedings RMRS-P-52. 2008 In: Kitchen, Stanley G.; Pendleton, Rosemary L.; Monaco, Thomas A.; Vernon, Jason, comps. 2008. Proceedings—Shrublands under fire: disturbance and recovery in a changing world; 2006 June 6–8; Cedar City, UT. Proc. RMRS-P-52. Fort Collins, CO: U.S. Department of Agriculture, Forest Service, Rocky Mountain Research Station. Rosemary L. Pendleton and...