Historical perspective of fire and grazing Human applications of fire to benefit grazing animals is not a new concept. Historical evidence indicates that aboriginal people in North America (Anderson 2006), Australia (Murphy and Bowman 2007), and Africa (Archibald et al. 2005) frequently burned rangelands and forested lands to attract wildlife, remove standing dead plant biomass, to stimulate ne...

semi-steppe rangelands are a complex, highly dynamic and often multi-layered mosaic of grassland, shrubland, and intermediate communities. a few recent studies have explicitly or implicitly developed synthetic hypotheses about how interactive effects of human made disturbances initiate dynamic changes in plant community composition to cause a shifting mosaic of vegetation pattern across the lan...

Fire management practices affect alien plant invasions in diverse ways. I considered the impact of six fire management practices on alien invasions: fire suppression, forest fuel reduction, prescription burning in crown-fire ecosystems, fuel breaks, targeting of noxious aliens, and postfire rehabilitation. Most western United States forests have had fire successfully excluded for unnaturally lo...

Wildfire is a fundamental disturbance process in many ecological communities, and is critical in maintaining the structure of some plant communities. In the past century, changes in global land use practices have led to changes in fire regimes that have radically altered the composition of many plant communities. As the severe biodiversity impacts of inappropriate fire management regimes are re...

Grassland fire, as an important ecological factor, is quite influential in determining the structural and functional stability of ecosystem. In this work, the fire-induced changes on the vegetation and soil microbial community were studied in alpine meadow. Microbial community composition was assessed by phospholipid fatty acid (PLFA) analysis, and functional diversity was determined by Biolog ...

Fire positively and negatively affects food webs across all trophic levels and guilds and influences a range of ecological processes that reinforce fire regimes, such as nutrient cycling and soil development, plant regeneration and growth, plant community assembly and dynamics, herbivory and predation. Thus we argue that rather than merely describing spatio-temporal patterns of fire regimes, py...