Question: How does habitat degradation affect recruitment limitation and its components (seed limitation versus establishment limitation) of woody plant communities in a Mediterranean landscape? Location: 1600-1900m a.s.l. in the Sierra Nevada National Park, southern Spain. The landscape is a mosaic composed of native forest and two degraded landscape units: reforestation stands and shrubland. ...

Tropical timber plantations provide a variety of environmental services, including recovery of biodiversity on degraded lands. For example, plantations can speed forest successional processes by improving microsite conditions and attracting seed dispersers, thus promoting woody regeneration. Timber species have been hypothesized to differ in understory recruitment success. In the present resear...

Landscape pattern metrics are widely used for predicting habitat and species diversity. However, the relationship between landscape pattern and species diversity is typically measured at a single spatial scale, even though both landscape pattern, and species occurrence and community composition are scale-dependent. While the eff ects of scale on landscape pattern are well documented, the eff ec...

The aluminum (Al) cation Al(3) (+) is highly rhizotoxic and is a major stress factor to plants on acid soils, which cover large areas of tropical and boreal regions. Many woody plant species are native to acid soils and are well adapted to high Al(3) (+) conditions. In tropical regions, both woody Al accumulator and non-Al accumulator plants occur, whereas in boreal regions woody plants are non...

Degradation of communal grazing land vegetation is a widespread problem throughout sub Saharan Africa and its restoration is a challenge for the management of many semi-arid areas. This study assessed the effectiveness of different age (young versus old) exclosures on species composition and diversity, biomass production and woody structure in northern Ethiopia. The species composition and dive...

AIM The global spread of woody plants into grasslands is predicted to increase over the coming century. While there is general agreement regarding the anthropogenic causes of this phenomenon, its ecological consequences are less certain. We analyzed how woody vegetation of differing cover affects plant diversity (richness and evenness) and multiple ecosystem functions (multifunctionality) in gl...

1. Understanding ecological strategies of invasive species relative to the entire native community is important in understanding and managing both the mechanisms and the potential impacts of invasion, but few studies have taken this approach. 2. We utilize advances in plant ecology to compare functional traits of an invasive shrub species, autumn-olive Elaeagnus umbellata, to those of the under...

The woody flora of the Soviet Far East is rich and diverse when compared to dendrofloras at similar latitudes of the world. The bulk of this region lies north oflatitude 46 degrees. This area includes the northernmost stations in eastern Asia for many genera, e.g., Abelia, Acer, Aralia, Carpinus, Corylus, Fraxinus, Hydrangea, Ilex, Juglans, Magnolia, Morus, Quercus, Phellodendron, Sasa, Schizop...

Gray wolves (Canis lupus) were extirpated from Yellowstone National Park in the 1920s. The ensuing seven decades marked a period when wild ungulates, principally Elk (Cervus elaphus), extensively used woody browse species in the upper Gallatin and northern winter ranges, thus limiting the capability of establishing plants to grow more than 100 cm in height. Following the reintroduction of wolve...