Diversity, biomass, and productivity, the three key community/ecosystem variables, are interrelated and pose reciprocal influences on each other. The relationships among the three variables have been a central focus in ecology and formed two schools of fundamentally different nature with two related applications: (1) management – how biomass manipulation (e.g., grazing, burning) affects diversi...

Planning riparian restoration to resemble historic reference conditions requires an understanding of both local and regional patterns of plant species diversity. Thus, understanding species distributions at multiple spatial scales is essential to improve restoration planting success, to enhance long-term ecosystem functioning, and to match restoration planting designs with historic biogeographi...

introduction agricultural biodiversity has spatial, temporal and scale dimensions especially at agro-ecosystem levels. these agro-ecosystems that are used for agriculture are determined by three sets of factors: the genetic resources (biodiversity), the physical environment and the human management practices. most agricultural areas can be returned to their natural landscape after subsequent ge...

United States energy policy mandates increased use of renewable fuels. Restoring grasslands could contribute to a portion of this requirement through biomass harvest for bioenergy use. We investigated which plant community characteristics are associated with differences in biomass yield from a range of realistic native prairie plantings (n = 11; i.e., conservation planting, restoration, and wil...

Soil nutrients and microbial communities are the two key factors in revegetation of barren environments. Ecological stoichiometry plays an important role in ecosystem function and limitation, but the relationships between above- and belowground stoichiometry and the bacterial communities in a typical karst region are poorly understood. We used pepino (Solanum muricatum) to examine the stoichiom...

the study was performed for assess the environmental factors affecting weed species diversity and composition of wheat (triticum aestivum l.) fields in jajarm, north-khorasan of iran, in 2009. the crop management (herbicide, amount of nitrogen applied and preceding crop type) and edaphic factors (ph, texture and content of phosphorus) of 16 fields were collected. shannon’s diversity index, spec...

Loss of habitat is one of the primary factors affecting population declines of grassland birds, and recovery efforts have focused on increasing the amount of grassland habitat in the landscape. Assessing the value of habitat restorations for grassland birds is an essential component of grassland bird conservation. We compared grassland bird habitat use, reproductive success, nestling growth rat...

Hihi (or stitchbird, Notiomystis cincta) is a rare honeyeater endemic to the North Island of New Zealand. Hihi were translocated from Little Barrier Island to Mokoia Island, Lake Rotorua, in 1994. Mokoia is a small (135 ha) island with secondary vegetation, so there was some doubt as to whether the island had sufficient diversity of fruit and nectar sources to support a hihi population. This pa...

The diversity of plant species and their distribution in space are both thought to have important effects on the function of wetland ecosystems. However, knowledge of the relationships between plant species and spatial diversity remains incomplete. In this study, we investigated relationships between spatial pattern and plant species diversity over a five year period following the initial resto...