The plant community in the Patagonian steppe is arranged in two structural patch types: scattered grasses and shrubs, which are often surrounded by a ring of grasses. Previous studies suggested that this pattern results from a cyclical succession driven by plant interactions. Although there is a good understanding of the factors affecting the formation of the grass rings encircling the shrubs, ...

QUESTIONS Molecular phylogenies are being increasingly used to better understand the mechanisms structuring natural communities. The prevalent theory is that environmental factors and biotic interactions promote the phylogenetic clustering and overdispersion of plant communities, respectively. However, both environmental filtering and biotic interactions are very likely to interact in most natu...

Climate change often induces shifts in plant functional traits. However, knowledge related to sensitivity of different functional traits and sensitive indicator representing plant growth under hydrothermal change remains unclear. Inner Mongolia grassland is predicted to be one of the terrestrial ecosystems which are most vulnerable to climate change. In this study, we analyzed the response of f...

The rangelands, as one of the largest dynamic biomes in the world, have very capabilities. Regulation of greenhouse gases in the Earth's atmosphere, particularly carbon dioxide as the main these gases, is one of these cases. The attention to rangeland, as cheep and reachable resources to sequestrate the carbon dioxide, increases after the Industrial Revolution. Rangelands comprise the large par...

Feedbacks between plants and soil biota are increasingly identified as key determinants of species abundance patterns within plant communities. However, our understanding of how plant-soil feedbacks (PSFs) may contribute to invasions is limited by our understanding of how feedbacks may shift in the light of other ecological processes. Here we assess how the strength of PSFs may shift as soil mi...

Stipa robusta (= Stipa vaseyi) is a perennial grass found in certain areas of the southwestern United States. It is commonly known as sleepygrass, as horses that ingest this grass may become profoundly somnolent or stuporous for periods of time lasting up to several days. In an attempt to determine the active principle(s), fractionation of a methanolic extract of sleepygrass infected with an Ac...

Plants depend upon both genetic differences and phenotypic plasticity to cope with environmental variation over different timescales. The spatial variation in foliar δ(13)C levels along a moisture gradient represents an overlay of genetic and plastic responses. We hypothesized that such a spatial variation would be more obvious than the variation arising purely from a plastic response to moistu...

An understanding of the factors controlling plant community composition will allow improved prediction of the responses of plant communities to natural and anthropogenic environmental change. Using monitoring data from 1980 to 2009, we quantified the changes in community composition in Leymus chinensis and Stipa grandis dominated grasslands in Inner Mongolia under long-term grazing-exclusion an...