The Qinghai-Tibetan Plateau has been experiencing a distinct warming trend, and climate warming has a direct and quick impact on the alpine grassland ecosystem. We detected the greenness trend of the grasslands in the plateau using Moderate Resolution Imaging Spectroradiometer data from 2000 to 2009. Weather station data were used to explore the climatic drivers for vegetation greenness variati...

BACKGROUND AND AIMS While molecular approaches can often accurately reconstruct species relationships, taxa that are incompletely differentiated pose a challenge even with extensive data. Such taxa are functionally differentiated, but may be genetically differentiated only at small and/or patchy regions of the genome. This issue is considered here in Poa tussock grass species that dominate gras...

Climate warming is likely inducing carbon loss from soils of northern ecosystems, but little evidence comes from large-scale observations. Here we used data from a repeated soil survey and remote sensing vegetation index to explore changes in soil organic carbon (SOC) stock on the Tibetan Plateau during the past two decades. Our results showed that SOC stock in the top 30 cm depth in alpine gra...

High soil organic carbon content, extensive root biomass, and low nutrient availability make alpine grasslands an important ecosystem for assessing the influence of nutrient enrichment on soil respiration (SR). We conducted a four-year (2009-2012) field experiment in an alpine grassland on the Qinghai-Tibetan Plateau to examine the individual and combined effects of nitrogen (N, 100 kg ha-1year...

BACKGROUND Europe has warmed more than the global average (land and ocean) since pre-industrial times, and is also projected to continue to warm faster than the global average in the twenty-first century. According to the climate models ensemble projections for various climate scenarios, annual mean temperature of Europe for 2071-2100 is predicted to be 1-5.5 °C higher than that for 1971-2000. ...

The effect of plant species composition on soil microbial communities was studied at the multiregional level. We compared the soil microbial communities of alpine natural grasslands dominated by Carex curvula and anthropogenic subalpine pastures dominated by Nardus stricta. We conducted paired sampling across the Carpathians and the Alps and used Illumina sequencing to reveal the molecular dive...

Artificial grasslands play a role in carbon storage on the Qinghai-Tibetan Plateau. The artificial grasslands exhibit decreased proportions of graminate and increased species richness with age. However, the effect of the graminate proportions and species richness on ecosystem C stocks in artificial grasslands have not been elucidated. We conducted an in situ13C pulse-labeling experiment in Augu...

We investigate the temporal dynamics of shifts in phenological responses a range key stages growing season New Zealand’s three indigenous grassland types over last 16 years (2001–2016). A near-daily Normalized Difference Vegetation Index (NDVI) time series from MODerate Resolution Imaging Spectroradiometer (MODIS) was used to extract five annual growth phenology indices, namely Start, End, Leng...

In Switzerland, the traditional three-stage grassland farming system consists of grazed or cut grasslands along a gradient from lowland to alpine elevations. We measured carbon dioxide (CO2) fluxes at three grassland sites (400, 1000, 2000 m elevation) and estimated carbon sequestration for two years (2006 and 2007). Grasslands at higher elevations (>1000 m), managed at lower intensities, exhib...