Human activities have increased the availability of nutrients in terrestrial and aquatic ecosystems. In grasslands, this eutrophication causes loss of plant species diversity, but the mechanism of this loss has been difficult to determine. Using experimental grassland plant communities, we found that addition of light to the grassland understory prevented the loss of biodiversity caused by eutr...

Plant Diversity conservation is a main objective in rangelandmanagement. Plant diversity is a suitable index for showing the changes ofvegetation in rangelands and has a high correlation with ecosystem parameters.Therefore, using this index it is possible to find the changes and manage theecosystem correctly. The current research was performed to determine the speciesdiversity in Fashandak rang...

Both plant diversity and vertebrate herbivores can impact plant fitness and ecosystem functioning, however their interactions have not been explicitly tested. We manipulated plant genotypic diversity of the native plant Oenothera biennis and monitored its survivorship and lifetime fitness with and without one of its major vertebrate consumers, white-tailed deer Odocoileus virginianus. Intense b...

Previous studies have revealed inconsistent correlations between fungal diversity and plant/soil properties from local to global scales. Here, we investigated the internal relationships between soil fungal diversity and plant/soil properties on the Loess Plateau following vegetation restoration, using Illumina sequencing of the internal transcribed spacer 2 (ITS2) region for fungal identificati...

Biodiversity plays a crucial role in stability and productivity of natural ecosystem. The main goal of this research was to classify ecological groups in steppe rangeland and investigate their relationships with plant diversity indices. Therefore, fifty different Land Unit Tracts (LUT) were identified in Khod-Neuk basin, Yazd province, Iran, in 2010. Vegetation and soil samples were taken in th...

Plant-feeding insects have undergone unparalleled diversification among different plant taxa, yet explanations for variation in their diversity lack a quantitative, predictive framework. Island biogeographic theory has been applied to spatially discrete habitats but not to habitats, such as host plants, separated by genetic distance. We show that relationships between the diversity of gall-indu...

IntraspeciWc diversity can inXuence the structure of associated communities, though whether litter-based and foliage-based arthropod communities respond to intraspeciWc diversity in similar ways remains unclear. In this study, we compared the eVects of host-plant genotype and genotypic diversity of the perennial plant, Solidago altissima, on the arthropod community associated with living plant ...

Invertebrate herbivores are ubiquitous in most terrestrial ecosystems, and theory predicts that their impact on plant community biomass should depend on diversity and productivity of the associated plant communities. To elucidate general patterns in the relationship between invertebrate herbivory, plant diversity, and productivity, we carried out a long-term herbivore exclusion experiment at mu...

This article presents an analysis of plant species richness and diversity, concerning some climatic variables along a 1500-m elevation gradient on the Binalood Mountain in Heydari Wildlife Refuge (HWR), northeastern Iran.  Two hundred and thirteen nested-sampling quadrats were established and the abundance of the plants was recorded. Vegetation sampling was carried out from 2014 till 2016, foll...

Change in diversity of fossil pollen through time is used as a surrogate for biodiversity history. However, there have been few studies to explore the sensitivity of the measured pollen diversity to vegetation changes and the relationship between pollen diversity and plant diversity. This paper presents results of a study to assess the relationship between pollen diversity and relative abundanc...