Soil nematodes are important contributors to soil biodiversity. Nonetheless, the distribution patterns and environmental drivers of nematode communities poorly understood, especially at large scale, where multiple variables covary. We collected 520 samples from 104 sites representing alpine meadow steppe ecosystems. First, we explored community characteristics compared between Then, examined co...

BACKGROUND AND AIMS Intraspecific genome size variability of Festuca pallens occurring on relict rocky steppes in Central Europe was studied on two ploidy levels and three geographical scales: (1) local scale of 24 populations, (2) landscape scale of three transects in river canyons or hill systems, and (3) global scale of 160 samples covering the whole distribution area. METHODS DAPI flow cy...

The Tibetan Plateau is an essential area to study the potential feedback effects of soils to climate change due to the rapid rise in its air temperature in the past several decades and the large amounts of soil organic carbon (SOC) stocks, particularly in the permafrost. Yet it is one of the most under-investigated regions in soil respiration (Rs) studies. Here, Rs rates were measured at 42 sit...

Methodologies based on indicators occupy a prevalent place when assessing ecosystem functioning and monitoring desertification processes because they are affordable yet do not compromise accuracy. The landscape function analysis (LFA), developed in Australia by David Tongway (CSIRO), uses soil surface indicators to assess the condition of a given ecosystem by producing three numerical indices (...

Grasshoppers can greatly interfere with agriculture and husbandry, they will breed grow rapidly in suitable habitats. Therefore, it is necessary to extract the distribution of grasshopper potential habitat (GPH), analyze spatial-temporal characteristics GPH, detect different effects key environmental factors meadow typical steppe. To achieve goal, this study took two steppe types Xilingol (the ...

Abstract Changes in land use and climate are the main drivers of change soil organic matter contents. We investigated impact largest policy-induced conversion to arable land, Virgin Lands Campaign (VLC), from 1954 1963, massive cropland abandonment after 1990 on carbon (SOC) stocks steppes Russia Kazakhstan. simulated budgets pre-VLC period (1900) until 2100 using a dynamic vegetation model ass...