Evapotranspiration (store and release) soil covers have been proposed as a means to limit acid mine drainage. Soil water balance models, like UNSATH are commonly used to assess the effectiveness of store and release covers. Plant-related attributes are required as inputs to these models. In particular, UNSAT-H requires leaf area index (LAI) and root length density (RLD) inputs. Published LAI an...

Paliurus spina-christi Mill. (Rhamnaceae), also known as Christ's thorn, is a perennial thorny shrub of widespread distribution in dry and rocky places in the Mediterranean region and Asia. In Croatia, this plant grows along the Adriatic coast and on the islands (Polunin and Huxley, 1981). Christ's thorn is used as a diuretic, against diarrhoea and rheumatism in traditional Croatian herbal medi...

The Sahel is an ecologically vulnerable region where increasing populations with a concurrent increase in agricultural intensity has degraded soils. Agroforestry offers approach to remediate these landscapes. A largely unrecognized agroforestry resource the are native shrubs, Piliostigma reticulatum , and Guiera senegalensis that varying degrees already coexist row crops. These shrubs improve s...

Woody encroachment has dramatically changed land cover patterns in arid and semiarid systems (drylands) worldwide over the past 150 years. This change is known to influence bulk soil carbon (C) pools, but the implications for dynamics and stability of these pools are not well understood. Working in a Chihuahuan Desert C4 grassland encroached by C3 creosote bush (Larrea tridentata), we used two ...

Biogeographic models predict that marginal populations should be more geographically isolated and smaller than central populations, linked to more stressful conditions and likely also to a reduction in density of individuals, individual growth, survival and reproductive output. This variation in population features could have important consequences for different aspects of plant ecology such as...

Drylands comprise 40% of Earth's land mass and are critical to food security, carbon sequestration, and threatened and endangered wildlife. Exotic weed invasions, overgrazing, energy extraction, and other factors have degraded many drylands, and this has placed an increased emphasis on dryland restoration. The increased restoration focus has generated a wealth of experience, innovations and emp...

Recent characterization [9] of those graphs for which coloured MSO2 model checking is fast raised the interest in the graph invariant called tree-depth. Looking for a similar characterization for (coloured) MSO1, we introduce the notion of shrub-depth of a graph class. To prove that MSO1 model checking is fast for classes of bounded shrub-depth, we show that shrub-depth exactly characterizes th...

Shrub encroachment into grass-dominated biomes is occurring globally due to a variety of anthropogenic activities, but the consequences for carbon (C) inputs, storage and cycling remain unclear. We studied eight North American graminoid-dominated ecosystems invaded by shrubs, from arctic tundra to Atlantic coastal dunes, to quantify patterns and controls of C inputs via aboveground net primary ...