Grassland bird habitat has declined substantially in the United States. Remaining grasslands are increasingly fragmented, mostly privately owned, and vary greatly in terms of habitat quality and protection status. A coordinated strategic response for grassland bird conservation is difficult, largely due to the scope and complexity of the problem, further compounded by biological, sociological, ...

Prairie dogs (Cynomys spp.) have been eliminated from over 95% of their historic range in large part from direct eradication campaigns to reduce their purported competition with cattle for forage. Despite the longstanding importance of this issue to grassland management and conservation, the ecological interactions between cattle and prairie dogs have not been well examined. We address this iss...

Net primary productivity (NPP) is an important indicator for grassland resource management and sustainable development. In this paper, the NPP of Sichuan grasslands was estimated by the Carnegie-Ames-Stanford Approach (CASA) model. The results were validated with in situ data. The overall precision reached 70%; alpine meadow had the highest precision at greater than 75%, among the three types o...

Grassland bird species have experienced substantial declines in North America. These declines have been largely attributed to habitat loss and degradation, especially from agricultural practices and intensification (the habitat-availability hypothesis). A recent analysis of North American Breeding Bird Survey (BBS) "grassland breeding" bird trends reported the surprising conclusion that insecti...

Spatial patterns and temporal dynamics of light distribution were investigated using lacunarity analysis, a multi-scale measure of spatial heterogeneity, in three mesic grasslands with different disturbance regimes. Frequency distributions of relative light intensity (RLI) were similar for the two non-disturbed grasslands, despite different composition (forbs vs. caespitose grass) resulting fro...

Soil bacteria provide a large range of ecosystem services such as nutrient cycling. Despite their important role in soil systems, compositional and functional responses of bacterial communities to different land use and management regimes are not fully understood. Here, we assessed soil bacterial communities in 150 forest and 150 grassland soils derived from three German regions by pyrotag sequ...

Against the background of increasing nutrient concentrations in Irish water bodies, this study set out to gain information on the potential of agricultural grassland to lose nutrients to water. Overland flow, flow from artificial subsurface drains and stream flow were gauged and sampled during heavy rainfall events. Dissolved reactive phosphorus (DRP), potassium (K), total ammonia (TA), and tot...

Population sizes and movement patterns of ungulate grazers and their predators have fluctuated dramatically over the past few centuries, largely owing to overharvesting, land-use change and historic management. We used δ(13)C and δ(15)N values measured from bone collagen of historic and recent gray wolves and their potential primary prey from Yellowstone National Park to gain insight into the t...

Early and intense grazing of semi-natural grasslands replacing traditional mowing and late grazing has been identified as a threat to grassland biodiversity. We compared fruit production, fruit set attributes (e.g. plant size or phenology of reproduction), and differences in potentially negative effects (accumulation of ungrazed vegetation) in continuous grazing from May through September, with...

Kline et al. (1) pose a series of “what-if” scenarios intended to cast doubt on our (2) findings. These scenarios arise from a critical misreading of our paper and misinterpretation of the US Department of Agriculture’s Cropland Data Layer (CDL). First, we did not include alfalfa (Medicago sativa), a perennial cultivated-hay legume, in our definition of grassland (2), contrary to Kline et al.’s...