Abstract Fragmentation of natural areas alters the natural landscape, removing native vegetation and creating an anthropic matrix. In order to better understand the consequences of grazing in areas of campo rupestre and forest, the present study aimed to analyze changes in the vegetation of Cerrado and Atlantic Forest, in the Southern Espinhaço, be...
Deer are regarded to be a keystone species as they play a crucial role in the way an ecosystem functions. Most deer–forest interaction studies apply a single scale — process of analyzing ecological interactions by only taking into account one dependent variable — to understand how deer browsing behavior shapes different forest components, but they ...
Published in Frontiers in Microbiology
Microbes encompass tremendous biodiversity, provide support to all living forms, including humans, and play an important role in many ecosystem services. The rules that govern microorganism community assembly are increasingly revealed due to key advances in molecular and analytical methods but their understanding remain a key challenge in microbial...
Hedge density, structure, and function vary with primary production and slope gradient and are subject to other diverse factors. Hedgerows are emerging ecosystems with both above- and belowground components. Functions of hedges can be categorized as provisioning, regulating, cultural, and supporting ecosystem services; these functions include food ...
Published in Land
Land surface models (LSMs) predict how terrestrial fluxes of carbon, water, and energy change with abiotic drivers to inform the other components of Earth system models. Here, we focus on a single human-dominated watershed in southwestern Michigan, USA. We compare multiple processes in a commonly used LSM, the Community Land Model (CLM), to observa...
Published in Ecological applications : a publication of the Ecological Society of America
Plant functional diversity is strongly connected to photosynthetic carbon assimilation in terrestrial ecosystems. However, many of the plant functional traits that regulate photosynthetic capacity, including foliar nitrogen concentration and leaf mass per area, vary significantly between and within plant functional types and vertically through fore...
Trees are characterized by the large number of seeds they produce. Although most of those seeds will never germinate, plenty will. Of those which germinate, many die young, and eventually, only a minute fraction will grow to adult stage and reproduce. Is this just a random process? Do variations in germination and survival at very young stages rely...
Published in Emerging Topics in Life Sciences
Ecological restoration is increasingly implemented to reverse habitat loss and concomitant declines in biological diversity. Typically, restoration success is evaluated by measuring the abundance and/or diversity of a single taxon. However, for a restoration to be successful and persistent, critical ecosystem functions such as animal-mediated polli...
Published in Biometrical Letters
High Nature Value farmlands in Europe are of greatest importance in the conservation of biodiversity. Their environmental importance has been recognized for some time, and has been studied mostly in Western Europe. This article describes the results of multivariate statistical analyses performed on data (13 variables) collected from the latest Nati...
