Conservational management practices in grasslands have been considered one of the efficient options to enhance the soil organic carbon (SOC) accumulation. However, the SOC changes after the conservational management practices vary significantly under different grassland vegetation types and the environmental conditions. At present, it is not clear how the SOC accumulation changes along the soil...

Grasslands are the dominant landscape in China, accounting for 40% of the national land area. Research concerning China's grassland ecosystems can be chronologically summarized into four periods: (i) pre-1950s, preliminary research and survey of grassland vegetation and plant species by Russians, Japanese and Western Europeans, (ii) 1950-1975, exploration and survey of vegetation, soils and top...

Habitat restoration projects are often conducted when prior use or extraction of natural resources results in land degradation. The success of restoration programmes, however, is variable, and studies that provide evidence of long term outcomes are valuable for evaluation purposes. This study focused on the restoration of vegetation within a limestone quarry in Dorset, UK between 1997 and 2014....

BACKGROUND Soil bacteria are important drivers for nearly all biogeochemical cycles in terrestrial ecosystems and participate in most nutrient transformations in soil. In contrast to the importance of soil bacteria for ecosystem functioning, we understand little how different management types affect the soil bacterial community composition. METHODOLOGY/PRINCIPAL FINDINGS We used pyrosequencin...

Market and policy incentives that encourage agricultural intensification, such as incentives for bioenergy, may contribute to biodiversity decline when they encourage a large-scale conversion of native and seminatural ecosystems to production fields. In order to appreciate the impact of these incentives on biodiversity, it is imperative to better understand how native and semi-natural ecosystem...

In biodiversity experiments based on seeded experimental communities, species richness and species composition exert a strong influence on canopy structure and can lead to an improved use of aboveground resources. In this study, we want to explore whether these findings are applicable to agriculturally managed permanent grassland. Vertical layered profiles of biomass, leaf area (LA) and light i...

Land use practices greatly influence soil carbon stocks, which in turn influences the potential for soils to store carbon. With a growing interest in the use of a carbon credit system to decrease atmospheric carbon dioxide, there is increasing interest in development of cost effective methods for identifying land cover types and land use practices that maximize carbon storage potential. This st...

Globally, grasslands and the wildlife that inhabit them are widely imperiled. Encroachment by shrubs and trees has widely impacted grasslands in the past 150 years. In North America, most grassland birds avoid nesting near woody vegetation. Because woody vegetation fragments grasslands and potential nest predator diversity and abundance is often greater along wooded edge and grassland transitio...

Agricultural practices have strong impacts on soil microbes including both the indices related to biomass and activity as well as those related to community composition. In a grassland restoration project in California, where native perennial bunchgrasses were introduced into non-native annual grassland after a period of intensive tillage, weeding, and herbicide use to reduce the annual seed ba...

To examine the effect of vegetation type and grassland management regimen on the distribution of humus-degrading microorganisms, populations of humic acid-degrading (HAD) bacteria and fungi at three Andosol sites were investigated using the dilution plate method. Each site had three different vegetation types (Eulalia grassland, bamboo grassland, and coniferous plantations). Among the six grass...