This study examined whether the diversity and relative abundance of ground-dwelling invertebrates changed in relation to type of vegetation cover. Invertebrate taxon diversity and relative abundance were assessed with pitfall traps placed under the native shrubs Olearia bullata and Coprosma propinqua, and in surrounding patches of exotic pasture. A total of 1935 invertebrates and at least 152 i...

Humans are both fertilizing the world and depleting its soils, decreasing the diversity of aquatic ecosystems and terrestrial plants in the process. We know less about how nutrients shape the abundance and diversity of the prokaryotes, fungi, and invertebrates of Earth's soils. Here we explore this question in the soils of a Panama forest subject to a 13-yr fertilization with factorial combinat...

RECENT INVESTIGATIONS HAVE SHOWN THAT TWO COMPONENTS OF COMMUNITY TRAIT COMPOSITION ARE IMPORTANT FOR KEY ECOSYSTEM PROCESSES: (i) the community-weighted mean trait value (CWM), related to the mass ratio hypothesis and dominant trait values in the community, and (ii) functional diversity (FD), related to the complementarity hypothesis and the divergence of trait values. However, no experiments ...

Many wetlands of the Great Lakes region are increasingly dominated by species of cattails, including the native Typha latifolia, the introduced Typha angustifolia, and their hybrid Typha glauca. Cattails are observed to form dense stands of live and dead biomass that may reduce plant diversity and compromise wetland habitat value. Cattail expansion has been used as an indicator of environmental...

Attempts to restore degraded highlands by tree planting are common in East Africa. However, up till now, little attention has been given effects of species choice on litter decomposition and nutrient recycling. In this study, three indigenous two exotic were selected for a study. The objective was identify optimal combinations diversity levels the restoration land via enhanced turnover. Litterb...

Tropical montane ecosystems of the Andes are critically threatened by a rapid land-use change which can potentially affect stream variables, aquatic communities, and ecosystem processes such as leaf litter breakdown. However, these effects have not been sufficiently investigated in the Andean region and at high altitude locations in general. Here, we studied the influence of land use (forest-pa...

Grazing lands and rangelands are increasingly recognized as an important alternative to other developed land uses for sustaining ecological communities in Florida, the rest of the southeastern United States, and other regions. It is important to understand factors that in uence ecological communities on private grazing lands, especially in areas with abundant wetlands, which are often sensitiv...

Invertebrates do not display the level of sophistication in immune reactivity characteristic of mammals and other 'higher' vertebrates. Their great number and diversity of forms, however, reflect their evolutionary success and hence they must have effective mechanisms of defence to deal with parasites and pathogens and altered self tissues. Inflammation appears to be an important first line def...