Before European settlement of the interior west of the United States, coniferous forests of this region were influenced by many disturbance regimes, primarily fires, insects, diseases, and herbivory, which maintained a diversity of successional stages and vegetative types across landscapes. Activities after settlement, such as fire suppression, grazing, and logging significantly altered these d...

Ecological restoration attempts to recover the structure and function of ecosystems that have been degraded by human activities. A crucial test of ecosystem recovery would be to determine whether individuals in restored environments are as healthy as those in conserved environments. However, the impact of restoration on physiology of terrestrial animals has never been tested. Here, we evaluated...

ABRAMS, MARC D. AND VANESSA L. W. HAYES (School of Forest Resources, Forest Resources Building, Penn State University, University Park, PA 16802). Impacts of contrasting land-use history on composition, soils, and development of mixed-oak, coastal plain forests on Shelter Island, New York. J. Torrey Bot. Soc. 135: 37–52. 2008.—The Mashomack Preserve on Shelter Island, New York contains one of t...

We reconstructed the history of Chatthin Wildlife Sanctuary (CWS) to understand how social and economic events, and policy changes affected the sanctuary's condition. We surveyed 25 villages surrounding CWS to evaluate past and present ecological conditions, compare the results with historical accounts and identify causal relationships. During the first half of the 20th century, the primary thr...

The loss of biodiversity caused by human activity is assumed to alter ecosystem functioning. However our understanding of the magnitude of the effect of these changes on functional diversity and their impact on the dynamics of ecological processes is still limited. We analyzed the functional diversity of copro-necrophagous beetles under different conditions of land use in three Mexican biospher...