introduction: soil organic matter is influenced strongly by vegetation cover and management, therefore it is proposed as the main indicator of soil quality and health. the changes in soil organic matter status occur much more rapidly in the labile pools than in organic c. thus, labile pools can be used as early indicators of changes in total organic matter that will become more obvious in the l...

I conducted small-mammal trapping surveys on a desert scrub restoration site in Palm Springs, California, to document concomitant recovery of the rodent community. These surveys were conducted following quantitative vegetation sampling efforts that indicated that a predefined successful restoration criterion of 15% total shrub cover had been met throughout most of the area. But shrub cover, nat...

ilona kickbusch’s thought provoking editorial is criticized in this commentary, partly because she fails to refer to previous critical work on the global conditions and policies that sustain inequality, poverty, poor health and damage to the biosphere and, as a result, she misreads global power and elides consideration of the fundamental historical structures of political and material power tha...

The contribution of understorey vegetation (UVEG) to forest ecosystem biomass and carbon (C) across diverse forest types has, to date, eluded quantification at regional and national scales. Efforts to quantify UVEG C have been limited to field-intensive studies or broad-scale modelling approaches lacking field measurements. Although large-scale inventories of UVEG C are not common, speciesand c...

Factors that may account for subarctic vegetation patterns that are not reconcilable with synoptic climate were sought by reference to data on local climate, soils, parent materials, vegetation, and topography. Where the forest-tundra lies climatically northward, the vegetation transition zone is relatively narrow, and the soils are nutrient-rich, fine-textured loamy Cryosols derived from sedim...

Since livestock production in Uzbekistan in arid and semi-arid zones is based on rangeland vegetation, contemporary studies have focused on improvement of low productive grazing lands and rehabilitation of degraded rangelands. Less interest has been given to the driving factors of land degradation and their interaction with other ecosystem components, e.g. response of vegetation to grazing indu...

Vegetation patterns arise from the interplay between intraspecific and interspecific biotic interactions and from different abiotic constraints and interacting driving forces and distributions. In this study, we constructed an ensemble learning model that, based on spatially distributed environmental variables, could model vegetation patterns at the local scale. The study site was an alluvial f...