The tall-grass prairies, wetlands and forests that dominated the Iowa landscape have been replaced by annual row-crops and grass pastures that occupy more than 90 % of the landscape today. Because of these changes water reaches the streams and gullies much faster and has led to incised streams and an extensive growth of gully networks. Stream and gully banks are major contributors of the nonpoi...

Tropical pastures present multiple barriers to tree regeneration and restoration. Relict trees serve as "regeneration foci" because they ameliorate the soil microclimate and serve as safe spots for dispersers. Here, we describe another mechanism by which remnant trees may facilitate pasture regeneration: the presence of seed banks in the canopy soil that accumulates from decomposing epiphytes w...

We studied nitrous oxide (N2O) fluxes and soil nitrogen (N) cycling following forest conversion to pasture in the central Amazon near Santarém, Pará, Brazil. Two undisturbed forest sites and 27 pasture sites of 0.5 to 60 years were sampled once each during wet and dry seasons. In addition to soil-atmosphere fluxes of N2O we measured 27 soil chemical, soil microbiological and soil physical varia...

As tropical regions are converted to agriculture, conservation of biodiversity will depend not only on the maintenance of protected forest areas, but also on the scope for conservation within the agricultural matrix in which they are embedded. Tree cover typically retained in agricultural landscapes in the neotropics may provide resources and habitats for animals, but little is known about the ...

Tropical forests undergo continuous transformation to other land uses, resulting in landscapes typified by forest fragments surrounded by anthropogenic habitats. Small forest fragments, specifically strip-shaped remnants flanking streams (referred to as riparian remnants), can be particularly important for the maintenance and conservation of biodiversity within highly fragmented forests. We com...

The depletion of forest in developing countries due to extended pastures, agricultural land, fuel wood and etc. is a serious concern. Therefore planting trees for reforestation and extended forest area is a essential assignment. Forest plantation with a basic criterion affects to understory plant diversity. This effects may make some species absent or appear. The objective of this study is to a...

Land use change in the Amazon rainforest alters the taxonomic structure of soil microbial communities, but whether it alters their functional gene composition is unknown. We used the highly parallel microarray technology GeoChip 4.0, which contains 83,992 probes specific for genes linked nutrient cycling and other processes, to evaluate how the diversity, abundance and similarity of the targete...

Planting seedlings is a common technique for abandoned pastures restoration in the tropics, supposedly by increasing the seedling recruitment and accelerating succession. In this study we evaluated the role of a young restored forest (one year old) in enhancing seedling establishment from two sources (seed rain and seed bank), in the Atlantic Rainforest region in Southern Brazil. We compared ab...

Point counts and mist-net surveys were employed to study the winter distri­ bution of nearctic migratory landbirds in Mexico’s Yucatan Peninsula. Overwintering mi­ grants comprised 42 regularly occurring species, and accounted for 30-58% (mean = 41%) of the individual birds encountered in surveys of a wide range of natural and disturbed habitats. Some migratory species were encountered most fre...