the main factors affecting environmental sensitivity to degradation are soil, vegetation, climate and management, through either their intrinsic characteristics or by their interaction on the landscape. different levels of degradation risks may be observed in response to particular combinations of the aforementioned factors. for instance, the combination of inappropriate management practices a...

Forest harvesting and wildfire were widespread in the upper Great Lakes region of North America during the early 20th century. We examined how long this legacy of disturbance constrains forest carbon (C) storage rates by quantifying C pools and fluxes after harvest and fire in a mixed deciduous forest chronosequence in northern lower Michigan, USA. Study plots ranged in age from 6 to 68 years a...

Potential carbon mineralization (Cmin) is a commonly used indicator of soil health, with greater Cmin values interpreted as healthier soil. While are typically in agricultural soils managed minimal physical disturbance, the mechanisms driving increases remain poorly understood. This study assessed bacterial and archaeal community structure potential microbial drivers maintained under various de...

BACKGROUND AND AIMS Undisturbed forest habitat can be relatively impenetrable to invasive, non-native species. Orchids are not commonly regarded as invasive, but some species have become invasive and these generally depend on habitat disturbance. One of the most aggressive orchids is Oeceoclades maculata, a terrestrial species with remarkable ecological amplitude. Originally from tropical Afric...

Recently tillage manufacturers have been promoting vertical tillage systems claiming that their use can overcome production limitations associated with no-till while maintaining sufficient residue cover to provide erosion protection. Vertical tillage refers to systems where soil disturbance is confined to soil movement mostly in the upward direction and/or confined to a slot or strip where the ...

Grazing and fire and are major forces shaping patterns of native and exotic species diversity in many grasslands, yet both of these disturbances have notoriously variable effects. Few studies have examined how landscape-level heterogeneity in grassland characteristics, such as soil-based variation in biomass and species composition, may contribute to variation in the effects of fire or grazing....

We conducted a 3-year study designed to examine the relationship between disturbance from military land use and stream physical and organic matter variables within 12 small (<5.5 km2) Southeastern Plains catchments at the Fort Benning Military Installation, Georgia, USA. Primary land-use categories were based on percentages of bare ground and road cover and nonforested land (grasslands, sparse ...

—We investigated the relationships of vegetation communities to environmental variables and compared the relative contribution of native and introduced species in extant forest communities on St. John, US Virgin Islands, using an island-wide forest vegetation inventory and monitoring network of permanent plots. We detected 2,415 individuals of 203 species, 5 percent of which were introduced. Cl...

Ecotones represent locations where vegetation change is likely to occur as a result of climate and other environmental changes. Using a model of an ecotone vulnerable to such future changes, we estimated the resilience of the ecotone to disturbances. The specific ecotone is that between two different vegetation types, salinity-tolerant and salinity-intolerant, along a gradient in groundwater sa...