Oceanic protist grazing at mesopelagic and bathypelagic depths, and their subsequent effects on trophic links between eukaryotes and prokaryotes, are not well constrained. Recent studies show evidence of higher than expected grazing activity by protists down to mesopelagic depths. This study provides the first exploration of protist grazing in the bathypelagic North Atlantic Deep Water (NADW). ...

Fire and grazing, key determinants of structure and function of savanna grasslands worldwide, have been extensively altered by humans. We used existing long-term manipulations of fire and grazing in North American and South African mesic savanna grasslands, as well as new experiments, to determine whether the impacts of fire and grazing by large herbivores differed between these systems. We fou...

Different grazing strategies impact grassland plant production and may also regulate the soil carbon formation. For a site in semiarid temperate steppe, we studied the effect of combinations of rest, high and moderate grazing pressure over three stages of the growing season, on the process involved in soil carbon sequestration. Results show that constant moderate grazing (MMM) exhibited the hig...

Abundant evidence has shown that grazing alters plant functional traits, community structure and ecosystem functioning of grasslands. Few studies, however, have tested how plant responses to grazing are mediated by resource availability and plant functional group identity. We examined the effects of grazing on functional traits across a broad range of species along a soil moisture gradient in I...

Tolerance of alfalfa (Medicago sativa L.) to animal grazing varies widely within the species. However, the molecular mechanisms influencing the grazing tolerant phenotype remain uncharacterized. The objective of this study was to identify genes and pathways that control grazing response in alfalfa. We analyzed whole-plant de novo transcriptomes from grazing tolerant and intolerant populations o...

Livestock grazing is a dominant land use across North America and although the effects of grazing on birds have been studied in grassland, shrubland, and riparian habitats, studies of the effects in forests are rare. We investigated the effects of cattle grazing in forests on vegetation, the relationships between vegetation characteristics and the abundance of foraging and nesting guilds of bir...

In northern China, the recent eco-environment protective policies played a very important role in the ecological environment protection and rehabilitation. To better understand the quantitative effect of the prohibiting grazing policy on grassland desertification reversal process, in this paper, Yanchi County was selected as a case study to conduct a quantitative research on the effect of prohi...

The interaction of resource availability and disturbance can strongly affect plant species richness and the spread of exotic plants. Several ecological theories posit that disturbance mediates the richness-reducing effects of increased competition as resource levels rise. In the low-nutrient serpentine grasslands of the San Francisco Bay Area, the fertilizing effects of atmospheric nitrogen (N)...

Grazing can cause changes in soil carbon (C) level. This study aimed to elucidate the response of soil labile organic carbon (SLOC) under four different grazing intensities: non grazing (NG), 0 sheep·ha(-1); light grazing (LG), 0.91 sheep·ha(-1); moderate grazing (MG), 1.82 sheep·ha(-1), and heavy grazing (HG), 2.73 sheep·ha(-1). Results showed that there was no significant difference in total ...