a r t i c l e i n f o Keywords: Snowmelt metrics Depletion curves Western hemlock-true fir ecotone Generalized least squares regression Trend power analysis PDO/ENSO Pacific Northwest Snow cover pattern and persistence have important implications for planetary energy balance, climate sensitivity to forcings, and vegetation structure, function, and composition. Variability in snow cover within m...

1. Climate change and extreme events, such as drought, threaten ecosystems worldwide and in particular mountain ecosystems, where species often live at their environmental tolerance limits. In the European Alps, plant communities are also influenced by land-use abandonment leading to woody encroachment of subalpine and alpine grasslands. 2. In this study, we explored how the forest-grassland ec...

ecotones are zones of gradual changes from an ecological system to another.ecotones monitoring could be important to find out the reason for changes and limits. inthis research satellite data were used to analyze the ecotone boundary in fars steppicrangelands using irs liss iii and pan data of year 2006. the real vegetation map andecotones prepared through geo-eye images from google earth softw...

1. Distribution and abundance patterns are influenced by cellular responses to abiotic stressors. 2. The freshwater clam Sphaerium sp. inhabits swamp/stream systems in Uganda, in which dissolved O 2 (DO), pH and water transparency form ecotonal gradients along tributary streams. Along a swamp/stream transect, clam abundance was negatively related to DO, pH and transparency; clams were most abun...

Many sea level rise adaptation plans emphasize the protection of adjacent uplands to allow for inland salt marsh migration, but little empirical information exists on this process. Using aerial photos from 1930 and 2006 of Delaware Estuary coastal habitats in New Jersey, I documented the rate of coastal forest retreat and the rate of inland salt marsh migration across 101.1 km of undeveloped sa...

Soil properties are well known to affect vegetation, but the role of soil heterogeneity in the patterning of vegetation dynamics is poorly documented. We asked whether the location of an ecotone separating grass-dominated and sparsely vegetated areas reflected only historical variation in degradation or was related to variation in inherent soil properties. We then asked whether changes in the c...

Climate change is affecting every aspect of human activities, especially the agriculture. In China, extreme drought events caused by climate change have posed a great threat to food safety. In this work we aimed to study the drought risk of maize in the farming–pastoral ecotone in Northern China based on physical vulnerability assessment. The physical vulnerability curve was constructed from th...

The echolocation calls of the noctule bat Nyctalus noctula (Schreber, 1774) were recorded at night, from June to August 1991, using a QMC S200 bat detector, in 5 habitats (river, forest-meadow ecotone, village, coniferous forest, deciduous forest) of the Białowieża Primeval Forest (eastern Poland). Two main kinds of signals were identified: search calls and feeding buzzes. Acoustic activity was...

Although the ecological dynamics of the alpine treeline ecotone are influenced by climate, it is an imperfect indicator of climate change. Mechanistic processes that shape the ecotone-seed rain, seed germination, seedling establishment and subsequent tree growth form, or, conversely tree dieback-depend on microsite patterns. Growth forms affect wind and snow, and so develop positive and negativ...