The resource island hypothesis predicts that soil resources such as nitrogen, phosphorus, and water will be distributed evenly in grasslands but have a patchy distribution focused around plants in shrublands. This hypothesis predicts that microorganism numbers will follow resources and be (i) evenly distributed in grasslands, (ii) concentrated around individual plants in shrublands, and (iii) h...

BACKGROUND The changes in land use and land cover have a strong effect on the total soil organic carbon, its fractions and its overall soil health. This study carried out in Olesharo Catchment, Kenya, was to quantify the differences in total organic carbon (TOC), particulate organic carbon (POC), mineral organic carbon (MOC) and carbon management index (CMI) among four land use types: grassland...

The majority of the 60 native terrestrial mammal species that reside in the northeastern United States (US) utilize resources from several habitats on a seasonal basis. However, as many as 20 species demonstrate some preference for early-successional forests, shrublands, or old-field habitats. A few of these (e.g. lagomorphs) can be considered obligate users of these habitats, and the specialis...

In this study, the transitions of land use that occurred in the urban and peripheral areas of Chihuahua City, Mexico, were determined for the period 1989–2014. Landsat TM and OLI scenes, as well as the method of Markov Chains (MC) were used. Grasslands and Shrublands were the land uses that experienced the highest pressures for land use. Grasslands occupied 23.5% of the area in 1989, decreasing...

Dryland communities may mitigate the loss of limited resources by exchanging nutrients through subterranean fungal connections, termed loops. In arid grasslands, loops can influence community composition and primary productivity, yet their ecological significance across dryland systems remains unexplored. We investigated functional role in nutrient translocation a North American shrubland ecosy...

To study the response of runoff to extreme changes in land use, Soil and Water Assessment Tool (SWAT) model was used construct historical, extreme, future scenarios for several major landscape types a permafrost region northeastern China. The results show that SWAT is applicable Tahe River Basin; forestlands, shrublands, wetlands, grasslands are main land-use this basin, transfers among them fr...

Knowledge of how rainfall seasonality affects land surface phenology has important implications on understanding ecosystem resilience to future climate change in the Congo Basin. We studied the impacts of land cover on the response of the canopy greenness cycle (CGC) to the rainy season in the Congo Basin on a yearly basis during 2006–2013. Specifically, we retrieved CGC from the time series of...

[1] Given increasing demands on finite water supplies, accurate estimates of evapotranspiration (LE) from arid shrublands of the Southwestern United States are needed to develop or refine basin water budgets. In this work, a novel approach to estimating the equilibrium (or wet environment) surface temperature (Te) and LE from regionally extensive phreatophyte shrublands is tested using compleme...

There are only five mediterranean-climate regions (MCRs) on Earth – the Mediterranean Basin, most of California, central Chile, southern South Africa, and south-central and south-western Australia. They all have cool, or cold, and relatively wet winters alternating with long, hot, and dry summers. Spring and autumn seasons are ephemeral in comparison, and highly variable. During much of the yea...