Climate change and degradation of natural resources pose daunting challenges in arid semi-arid rangelands southern Mediterranean region. Overcoming these requires considerable man...

www.frontiersinecology.org © The Ecological Society of America R – including grasslands, shrublands, savannas, deserts, prairies, steppe, and tundra – comprise 30–40% of Earth’s ice-free terrestrial surface (depending on one’s definition and data sources; Asner et al. 2004) and account for 91% of the world’s grazing lands (Reid et al. 2008). Encompassing watersheds for vast downstream populatio...

BACKGROUND When solutions of multivitamin preparations (MVPs) are exposed to light, H(2)O(2) as well as organic peroxides are generated and the concentration of vitamin C decreases. The aim of this study was to determine, using mass spectrometry, whether the generation of oxidative byproducts of vitamin C, such as dehydroascorbate (DHA) and 2,3-diketogulonic acid (DKG), accounted for the report...

he undergrounding of energy transmission cables is widely recognized as a good means to provide reliable supplies of power at a low total cost [1], [2]. As utilities increasingly acknowledge this and install many more high voltage (HV) and extra high voltage (EHV) cables, they will face a major challenge: namely, sourcing the increased amount of high quality power cable with the cable manufactu...

In spite of their recognized ecological value, relatively little is known about the nutritional value of species-rich rangelands for herbivores. We investigated the sources of variation in dry matter digestibility (DMD), neutral detergent fibre content (NDF) and nitrogen concentration (NC) in plants from species-rich Mediterranean rangelands in southern France, and tested whether the dry matter...

A large fraction of the world grasslands and savannas are undergoing a rapid shift from herbaceous to woody-plant dominance. This land-cover change is expected to lead to a loss in livestock production (LP), but the impacts of woody-plant encroachment on this crucial ecosystem service have not been assessed. We evaluate how tree cover (TC) has affected LP at large spatial scales in rangelands o...

The present study describes the screening of different agroindustrial byproducts for enhanced production of alkaline protease by a wild and EMS induced mutant strain of Bacillus subtilis IH-72(EMS8). During submerged fermentation, different agro-industrial byproducts were tested which include defatted seed meals of rape, guar, sunflower, gluten, cotton, soybean, and gram. In addition to these m...