Deer support high tick intensities, perpetuating tick populations, but they do not support tick-borne pathogen transmission, so are dilution hosts. We test the hypothesis that absence of deer (loss of a dilution host) will result in either an increase or a reduction in tick density, and that the outcome is scale dependent. We use a complementary methodological approach starting with meta-analys...

Different species-specific traits of woody plant species, feeding preferences herbivores together with resulting effects on competition are expected to translate into different community structures and expressions biodiversity. We studied the diversity species (trees shrubs) structural forest trees, using a 30-year an 18-year dataset ungulate exclosure-control plot pairs in mixed alpine Austria...

soil salinity is one of the important factors which can influence the growth anddistribution of plant species. saline and alkaline rangelands of golestan province, iran withlow-deep underground water level are considered as a halophyte plant species growing area.attempts have been made to determine soil salinity and its relationship with frankenia hirsutal. in order to determine the electrical ...

In Ethiopia, deforestation rates remain high and the gap between demand and domestic supply of forest products is expanding, even though government-initiated re-greening efforts began over a century ago. Today, over 3 million hectares (ha) of degraded forest land are under area exclosure; smallholder plantations cover 0.8 million ha; and state-owned industrial plantations stagnate at under 0.25...

Birds are often considered seed predators of less importance when compared to rodents or granivorous ants in studies of seed predation using selective exclosures. However, it is possible that the role of granivorous birds interacting with seeds on the floor of Neotropical forests is being underestimated, if the selective exclosures designed to allow exclusive access to small rodents do not work...

Spiders were sampled at Mpala Research Centre, Laikipia, Kenya by pitfall-trapping and sweep-netting from May 2001 to July 2002, at a Kenyan Long-term Exclosure Experiment. The aim was to establish species composition, checklist and examine spider responses to disturbances caused by cattle, megaherbivores (giraffe and elephants) and mesoherbivores (other ungulates) by looking at three levels of...

this study investigates monthly and seasonal variations of carbon emission from the soil at different grazing intensities. three areas of exclosure, low and high grazing intensities were selected in ghoosheh region of semnan province. carbon emission was measured monthly, in each treatment applying alkali traps (csc) during a year. emission and grazing data were analyzed, using a factorial expe...

assessment of rangeland ecological characteristics have been proposed as an important factor in reviewing and monitoring the effects of various management measures and it demands different tools for quantifying and offering a reasonable criterion for comparison of different managements. for this purpose, the landscape function analysis (lfa) method is capable of displaying the structural and fu...

1. Overwinter mass loss can reduce energetic requirements in mammals (Dehnel's phenomenon). Alternatively, mass loss can result from food limitation or high predation risk. 2. We use data from fertilizer, food-supplementation and predator-exclusion experiments in the Yukon during a population cycle from 1986 to 1996 to test the causes of overwinter mass loss by snowshoe hares (Lepus americanus)...