This paper presents a high-resolution ice-core pollen record from the Sajama Ice Cap, Bolivia, that spans the last 400 yr. The pollen record corroborates the oxygen isotopic and ice accumulation records from the Quelccaya Ice Cap and supports the scenario that the Little Ice Age (LIA) consisted of two distinct phases—a wet period from AD 1500 to 1700, and a dry period from AD 1700 to 1880. Duri...

The golden-winged warbler (Vermivora chrysoptera) is a neotropical migrant songbird that winters in portions of Central and South America and breeds in the northern Great Lakes regions of the United States and Canada, and at higher elevations of the central and southern Appalachian Mountains (Confer et al. 2011). The species is experiencing steep population declines throughout its Appalachian M...

Aim Fire regimes are shifting globally due to climate change, land management practices and population growth, putting species at risk if they unable adapt more frequent or severe wildfires. While many fire-adapted may be able accommodate some amount of change in fire regimes, fire-sensitive late-successional that colonize fire-prone ecosystems between wildfires especially vulnerable fires. Her...

Patchiness of above-ground vegetation, such as that in semi-arid grasslands and shrublands, can pose problems in sampling plant cover, biomass and productivity. We present a method of measuring above-ground plant biomass and production that can be applied consistently among vegetation types and that generates seasonal, spatially-explicit results. Results from 15 sites within the Jornada Basin (...

Historical perspective of fire and grazing Human applications of fire to benefit grazing animals is not a new concept. Historical evidence indicates that aboriginal people in North America (Anderson 2006), Australia (Murphy and Bowman 2007), and Africa (Archibald et al. 2005) frequently burned rangelands and forested lands to attract wildlife, remove standing dead plant biomass, to stimulate ne...

The short-toed eagle (Circaetus gallicus) is a trophic specialist with a diet based almost exclusively on ophidians. In this work, the distribution of this eagle in southeastern Spain taken from national atlases, is analysed in relation to environmental variables. The results show that the short-toed eagle is distributed primarily in shrublands, probably because there it can easily locate and c...