Herbivory and fire are natural interacting forces contributing to the maintenance of rangeland ecosystems. Wildfires in the sagebrush dominated ecosystems of the Great Basin are becoming larger and more frequent, and may dramatically alter plant communities and habitat. This synthesis describes what is currently known about the cumulative impacts of historic livestock grazing patterns and short...

Termites are considered to be major ecosystem engineers in tropical environments. However, they are often neglected and under studied, especially in grassy systems. The interaction between termites and fire ecology is one example of this. Given the importance of both fires and termites in savanna systems, it is critical for an improved ecological understanding of savanna biodiversity that the i...

Fire is well recognized as a key Earth system process, but its causes and influences vary greatly across spatial and temporal scales. The controls of fire are often portrayed as a set of superimposed triangles, with processes ranging from oxygen to weather to climate, combustion to fuel to vegetation, and local to landscape to regional drivers over broadening spatial and lengthening temporal sc...

In a famous passage in the concluding chapter of The Origin of Species, Darwin (1859, 1964) invites the reader to “contemplate an entangled bank, clothed with many plants of many kinds, with birds singing on the bushes, with various insects flitting about, and with worms crawling through the damp earth” and “reflect that these elaborately constructed forms, so different from each other, and dep...

1. AUTHOR BIOGRAPHY Jacob LaCroix attended The University of Wisconsin at Stevens Point, WI were he got a BS degree studying Wildlife Management. He later attended Michigan Technological University, in Houghton, MI were he got an MS Degree in Ecology. His thesis was on stream ecology. He currently attends the University of Toledo in Toledo, Ohio, working on his PhD degree, studying Landscape Ec...

Fire is a potentially powerful tool for achieving desired conditions of forest ecosystems. From an ecological perspective, the use of fire requires affirmative answers to either of the following questions: (1) Does it increase ecosystem health and sustainability? and (2) Does it preserve or restore unique species or habitats? Health and sustainability can be measured and defined in terms of: (1...