In herbaceous ecosystems worldwide, biodiversity has been negatively impacted by changed grazing regimes and nutrient enrichment. Altered disturbance regimes are thought to favour invasive species that have a high phenotypic plasticity, although most studies measure plasticity under controlled conditions in the greenhouse and then assume plasticity is an advantage in the field. Here, we compare...

Recent studies indicate that species richness can enhance the ability of plant assemblages to support multiple ecosystem functions. To understand how and when ecosystem services depend on biodiversity, it is valuable to expand beyond experimental grasslands. We examined whether plant diversity improves the capacity of agroecosystems to sustain multiple ecosystem services-production of wood and ...

UNLABELLED Fire, herbivory and their interaction influence plant community dynamics. However, little is known about the influence of prefire herbivory on postfire plant community response, particularly long-term resistance to postfire exotic plant invasion in areas that historically experienced limited large herbivore pressure and infrequent, periodic fires.We investigated the long-term postfir...

warm-season bunch grass native to the eastern United States and is still often found east of Kansas and Oklahoma. This highly productive grass is best adapted to wet habitats; and remnant colonies are commonly found in flood plains and along stream banks. Eastern gamagrass is a relative of field corn (Zea mays) and is characterized by numerous short, well-developed rhizomes. Lower culm internod...

Pihlgren, A. 2007. Small-scale structures and grazing intensity in semi-natural pastures effects on plants and insects. Doctor’s dissertation. ISSN 1652-6880, ISBN 91-576-7312-1. Semi-natural grasslands characterized by nutrient poor soils are among the most species-rich habitats in Europe and they harbour many red-listed species. The area of semi-natural grasslands has decreased drastically du...

A 3-yr experiment was conducted with cows and their calves to evaluate resource inputs, animal performance, and carcass characteristics of two production systems. In the control system, cows (CON; n = 99/yr) grazed pasture and were fed hay during the winter, and CON steer calves were finished in the feedlot for 211 d after weaning. In the treatment system (TRT; n = 100/yr), cows grazed pasture ...

After oxygen, sulfate is the most important oxidant for the oxidation of organic matter in mangrove forest soils. As sulfate reducers are poor competitors for common electron donors, their relative success depends mostly on the surplus of carbon that is left by aerobic organisms due to oxygen depletion. We therefore hypothesized that sulfate-cycling in mangrove soils is influenced by the size o...

Grazing is one of the most important factors influencing community structure and productivity in natural grasslands. Understanding why and how grazing pressure changes species diversity is essential for the preservation and restoration of biodiversity in grasslands. We use heavily grazed subalpine meadows in the Qinghai-Tibetan Plateau to test the hypothesis that grazer exclusion alters plant d...