background and objectives: cold stress is one of the most important limiting factor for growth and development of grasses in temperate regions. freezing tolerance is highly different between plant species and between regions. the importance of grasses is due to widespread application in lawn beautifying, animal feeding, and erosion control. there are many differences between grass species in re...

In grasses such as rice or maize, the distribution of genic GC content is well known to be bimodal. It is mainly driven by GC content at third codon positions (GC3 for short). This feature is thought to be specific to grasses as closely related species like banana have a unimodal GC3 distribution. GC3 is associated with numerous genomics features and uncovering the origin of this peculiar distr...

The ability of warm-grown leaves to acclimate their photosynthetic machinery to low, non-freezing temperature was compared for contrasting species of grasses and trees. All trees (Betula pubescens, Salix sp. and Picea abies), and young plants of one of the grasses (Hordeum vulgare) showed acclimation of photosynthesis while the other two grasses (Phalaris arundinacea and Festuca ovina) did not....

With an increase in the frequency and intensity of extreme heat events, plants are likely to reach their thermal limits and show slower growth or increased mortality. We investigated differences amongst coastal native and invasive shrubs and grasses to investigate if particular species might be more at risk in the future. Using an ecologically relevant experimental set of heat waves over a mont...

Native grasses are increasingly popular and valuable tools for revegetation, erosion control, and wildlife habitat improvement. Many have unique features and benefits that make them advantageous over certain exotic and introduced grasses. In the field of ecological restoration, they are a critical and required component of the target plant community, ecosystem, or natural habitat. A number of n...

Most studies examining endophytic fungi associated with grasses (Poaceae) have focused on agronomically important species in managed ecosystems or on wild grasses in subtropical, temperate and boreal grasslands. However grasses first arose in tropical forests, where they remain a significant and diverse component of understory and forest-edge communities. To provide a broader context for unders...

Almost all that is known about the transition to flowering in grasses is based on studies of agronomic species. The grain produced by two tropically derived grasses, maize (Zea mays) and rice (Oryza sativa), and a temperate origin grass, wheat (Triticum aestivum), provides most of the world’s food. Other grasses, such as barley (Hordeum vulgare), ryegrass species (Lolium spp.), sorghum (Sorghum...

Ungulate herbivores play a prominent role in maintaining the tree-grass balance in African savannas. Their top-down role through selective feeding on either trees or grasses is well studied, but their bottom-up role through deposition of nutrients in dung and urine has been overlooked. Here, we propose a novel concept of savanna ecosystem functioning in which the balance between trees and grass...

The Collared Crescentchest (Melanopareia torquata) is a small insectivore endemic to the Cerrado. We examine the habitat use of this bird in a preserved Cerrado area in southeastern Brazil. Despite its occurrence in grassland with shrubs, the species used these areas less frequently than expected. The Collared Crescentchest mainly used areas of campo cerrado, but it was not recorded in a distur...

The grasses, members of the family Gramineae or Poaceae, are represented by over 10,000 species (Kellogg and Birchler 1993). Three of the domesticated grasses, rice, wheat, and maize, account for about half of total world food production. Although the oldest known grass fossils have been found in paleocene-eocene deposits that are ∼50–60 million years old (Crepet and Feldman 1991), morphologica...