—Disturbance in riparian areas of semiarid ecosystems involves complex interactions of pulsed hydrologic flows, herbivory, fire, climatic effects, and anthropogenic influences. We resampled riparian vegetation within ten 10-m × 100-m plots that were initially sampled in 1992 in 4 watersheds of the Snake Range, east central Nevada. Our finding of significantly lower coverage of grasses, forbs, a...

Climatic warming is likely to exacerbate nutritional stress and reduce weight gain in large mammalian herbivores by reducing plant nutritional quality. Yet accurate predictions of the effects of climatic warming on herbivores are limited by a poor understanding of how herbivore diet varies along climate gradients. We utilized DNA metabarcoding to reconstruct seasonal variation in the diet of No...

The rangeland in the Khangai mountain region in Mongolia has degraded for the last decades mainly because of overgrazing and climate change. Livestock production is important part of the economy and is based on natural rangeland. In this research we seek to elucidate the influence of five years (2004-2009) of protection from grazing on vegetation cover of different degradation levels of Fes...

Questions Livestock management in rangelands depends on the production of plant biomass. Biomass is driven by temporal and spatial variability precipitation, but our understanding how precipitation mediates grazing effects biomass still fragmented. Along a 600-km gradient we extracted data to ask questions: (a) what are intensity production; (b) does interact with species richness affect (c) do...

Managing vast federal public lands governed by multiple land use policies creates challenges when demographic data on at-risk species are lacking. The U.S. Bureau of Land Management Cedar City Field Office used this project in the Black Mountains (Utah) to inform vegetation management supporting greater sage-grouse and Utah prairie dog planning. Ecological systems were mapped from satellite rem...

Abstract Invasive species may act as a functional filter on native communities by differentially affecting with different trait values. Across environments, invasive plants typically display traits associated high resource acquisition and fast growth. Conversely, plants, especially those in water-limited tend to adopt one of two strategies: growth during availability avoid stress (resource-acqu...

In the mixed C3/C4 grassland of southern Great Plains, United States, invasive woody legume, honey mesquite (Prosopis glandulosa), affects grass production and composition differently beneath canopy (subcanopy) than in spaces between trees (intercanopy) due part to dominant presence C3 Texas wintergrass (Nassella leucotricha) soil enrichment from N-fixation by mesquite. This arrangement, unlike...