We studied vegetation change on 142 permanently marked transects spread throughout tussock grasslands of Otago and Canterbury, in areas subject to both pastoral and conservation management. The transects were established between 1982 and 1986 and re-measured between 1993 and 1999, providing a record of vegetation change at each site over an interval varying from 10 to 15 years. Each transect co...

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Blogging is a form of social communication that facilitates human interaction. The cultural orientations of individualism and collectivism, which relate to basic beliefs about human relationships and interactions, should be determinants of blogging. This study explores the impacts of individualism-collectivism orientation on perceived self-efficacy in blogging, along with blogging and attitudes...

It is increasingly clear that the public, native tribes, and governmental agencies are interested in assessing the well-being of natural resources and ecosystems. This may take the form of understanding species presence, monitoring population status and trends, measuring behavior, or quantifying physiology, biological stresses, or chemical/radiological exposure through biomarkers. Often there i...

Forest soils are shaped by various processes, like runoff, erosion, sedimentation and bioturbation. A better understanding of the interactions between abiotic biotic soil-forming including wild boar (Sus scrofa) rooting (i.e., subsurface foraging), enhances adequate management forest ecosystems. We hypothesized that intense soil influences occurrence boars modify outcome process redistributing ...

Ecoregion classification systems are increasingly used for policy and management decisions, particularly among conservation and natural resource managers. A number of ecoregion classification systems are currently available, with each system defining ecoregions using different classification methods and different types of data. As a result, each classification system describes a unique set of e...

Montane habitats are characterized by predictably rapid heterogeneity along elevational gradients and are useful for investigating the consequences of environmental heterogeneity for local adaptation and population genetic structure. Food-caching mountain chickadees inhabit a continuous elevation gradient in the Sierra Nevada, and birds living at harsher, high elevations have better spatial mem...

The ability to manage weed infestations in a spatially precise manner will rely on the availability of efficient methods of mapping weed distributions. We have conducted a study designed to compare four different ground based methods for collecting georeferenced information on sterile wild oat infestation in a winter barley crop. Sampling was done at harvest time (when wild oat panicles are mos...

Studies of a hybrid zone between two house mouse subspecies (Mus musculus musculus and M. m. domesticus) along with studies using laboratory crosses reveal a large role for the X chromosome and multiple autosomal regions in reproductive isolation as a consequence of disrupted epistasis in hybrids. One limitation of previous work has been that most of the identified genomic regions have been lar...

We assessed the effects of the elimination of livestock in riparian systems at Hart Mountain National Antelope Refuge in southeastern Oregon, 23 years after the removal of cattle grazing, using 64 photos taken before grazing was removed compared with later retake photos. Two methods were used for this assessment: (1) a qualitative visual method comparing seven cover types and processes and (2) ...