Download or read book The Influence of Multiple Interacting Global Changes on the Structure and Function of a California Annual Grassland Ecosystem written by Elsa Eleanor Cleland and published by . This book was released on 2005 with total page 204 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:
Download or read book Effects of Global Change on a California Annual Grassland written by Lisa A. Moore and published by . This book was released on 2005 with total page 238 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:
Download or read book California Grasslands written by Mark R. Stromberg and published by Univ of California Press. This book was released on 2007-12-03 with total page 416 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: "This highly synthetic and scholarly work brings together new and important scientific contributions by leading experts on a rich diversity of topics concerning the history, ecology, and conservation of California's endangered grasslands. The editors and authors have succeeded admirably in drawing from a great wealth of recent research to produce a widely accessible and compelling, state-of-the-art treatment of this fascinating subject. Anyone interested in Californian biodiversity or grassland ecosystems in general will find this book to be an invaluable resource and a major inspiration for further research, management, and restoration efforts."—Bruce G. Baldwin, W. L. Jepson Professor and Curator, UC Berkeley "Grasses and grasslands are among the most important elements of the California landscape. This is their book, embodying the kind of integrated view needed for all ecological communities in California. Approaches ranging across an incredibly broad spectrum -- paleontology and human history; basic science and practical management techniques; systematics, community ecology, physiology, and genetics; physical factors such as water, soil nutrients, atmospherics, and fire; biological factors such as competition, symbiosis, and grazing -- are nicely tied together due to careful editorial work. This is an indispensable reference for everyone interested in the California environment."—Brent Mishler, Director of the University & Jepson Herbaria and Professor of Integrative Biology, UC Berkeley "The structure and function of California grasslands have intrigued ecologists for decades. The editors of this volume have assembled a comprehensive set of reviews by a group of outstanding authors on the natural history, structure, management, and restoration of this economically and ecologically important ecosystem."—Scott L. Collins, Professor of Biology, University of New Mexico
Download or read book Grassland structure and function written by L.F. Huenneke and published by Springer Science & Business Media. This book was released on 2012-12-06 with total page 224 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The chapters in this volume are based on a opportumtles for studying the links between symposium, "California grasslands: structure abiotic and biotic components. and productivity", supported by the National The contributions in this volume illustrate Science Foundation. The primary objective of the links between population-level processes this symposium was to integrate the current and system-level phenomena in a well-studied understanding of controls on ecosystem struc community. Unfortunately, some areas of cur ture and function with the approaches of popu rent research (e.g., nutrient cycling) are under lation biology. The annual grasslands are represented in this volume. For other topics eminently suitable for experimental and manip (particularly the role of invertebrate con sumers), the lack of data from the annual grass ulative studies of ecosystem processes. The short lives and small stature of the component land brought a broader grassland perspective. plant species make experimental work far more Together, however, the contributions illustrate practical than in forests or even in perennial the importance of different ecological ap dominated prairies. The system's small-scale proaches in studying the controls on structure patchiness, and the obvious importance of and function of a complex system. the region's mediterranean climate in the life cycle of the annual vegetation, afford many L.F. Huenneke and H.A. Mooney Huenneke, L.F. and Mooney, H. (eds) Grassland Structure and Function: California Annual Grassland.
Download or read book Threshold Responses to Interacting Global Changes in a California Grassland Ecosystem written by and published by . This book was released on 2015 with total page 7 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Building on the history and infrastructure of the Jasper Ridge Global Change Experiment, we conducted experiments to explore the potential for single and combined global changes to stimulate fundamental type changes in ecosystems that start the experiment as California annual grassland. Using a carefully orchestrated set of seedling introductions, followed by careful study and later removal, the grassland was poised to enable two major kinds of transitions that occur in real life and that have major implications for ecosystem structure, function, and services. These are transitions from grassland to shrubland/forest and grassland to thistle patch. The experiment took place in the context of 4 global change factors - warming, elevated CO2, N deposition, and increased precipitation - in a full-factorial array, present as all possible 1, 2, 3, and 4-factor combinations, with each combination replicated 8 times.
Download or read book Ecosystems of California written by Harold Mooney and published by Univ of California Press. This book was released on 2016-01-19 with total page 1009 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This long-anticipated reference and sourcebook for California’s remarkable ecological abundance provides an integrated assessment of each major ecosystem type—its distribution, structure, function, and management. A comprehensive synthesis of our knowledge about this biologically diverse state, Ecosystems of California covers the state from oceans to mountaintops using multiple lenses: past and present, flora and fauna, aquatic and terrestrial, natural and managed. Each chapter evaluates natural processes for a specific ecosystem, describes drivers of change, and discusses how that ecosystem may be altered in the future. This book also explores the drivers of California’s ecological patterns and the history of the state’s various ecosystems, outlining how the challenges of climate change and invasive species and opportunities for regulation and stewardship could potentially affect the state’s ecosystems. The text explicitly incorporates both human impacts and conservation and restoration efforts and shows how ecosystems support human well-being. Edited by two esteemed ecosystem ecologists and with overviews by leading experts on each ecosystem, this definitive work will be indispensable for natural resource management and conservation professionals as well as for undergraduate or graduate students of California’s environment and curious naturalists.
Download or read book Grassland structure and function written by L.F. Huenneke and published by Springer. This book was released on 1989-02-28 with total page 0 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The chapters in this volume are based on a opportumtles for studying the links between symposium, "California grasslands: structure abiotic and biotic components. and productivity", supported by the National The contributions in this volume illustrate Science Foundation. The primary objective of the links between population-level processes this symposium was to integrate the current and system-level phenomena in a well-studied understanding of controls on ecosystem struc community. Unfortunately, some areas of cur ture and function with the approaches of popu rent research (e.g., nutrient cycling) are under lation biology. The annual grasslands are represented in this volume. For other topics eminently suitable for experimental and manip (particularly the role of invertebrate con sumers), the lack of data from the annual grass ulative studies of ecosystem processes. The short lives and small stature of the component land brought a broader grassland perspective. plant species make experimental work far more Together, however, the contributions illustrate practical than in forests or even in perennial the importance of different ecological ap dominated prairies. The system's small-scale proaches in studying the controls on structure patchiness, and the obvious importance of and function of a complex system. the region's mediterranean climate in the life cycle of the annual vegetation, afford many L.F. Huenneke and H.A. Mooney Huenneke, L.F. and Mooney, H. (eds) Grassland Structure and Function: California Annual Grassland.
Download or read book Terrestrial Ecosystems in a Changing World written by Josep G. Canadell and published by Springer Science & Business Media. This book was released on 2007-01-10 with total page 344 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This book examines the impacts of global change on terrestrial ecosystems. Emphasis is placed on impacts of atmospheric, climate and land use change, and the book discusses the future challenges and the scientific frameworks to address them. Finally, the book explores fundamental new research developments and the need for stronger integration of natural and human dimensions in addressing the challenge of global change.
Download or read book Grassland Responses to Global Change written by Evan Elliot Batzer and published by . This book was released on 2020 with total page 0 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The recent history of the Earth's biosphere -- the Anthropocene -- is characterized by human activity. Increasingly, industrialization, land use change, fossil fuel combustion, and other drivers have altered key biological processes that govern the composition and function of natural communities. Among the two most impactful stressors are increased concentrations of limiting soil nutrients and shifting patterns of temperature and precipitation through climate change. Grasslands, like many plant ecosystems, are highly sensitive to these changes. Their widespread distribution and importance to both conservation and human enterprise underscores the need to understand how these global changes operate in grassland systems. However, climate change and nutrient deposition are known to produce complex effects on plant community structure; to effectively predict vegetation change, studies must integrate across multiple stressors, mechanisms, and scales of interest. This dissertation contributes to a deeper understanding of these complexities through a synthesis of large-scale experimentation and novel statistical methodology. Chapter 1 uses data from a global experimental cooperative -- the Nutrient Network -- to test contrasting hypotheses about compositional change driven by soil nutrient enrichment. While traditional perspectives on resource competition suggest that nutrient enrichment controls plant species abundances through increasing limitation by light, experimental evidence indicates that other mechanisms related to trade-offs in the use of specific soil resources may also be an important driver. Across 49 experimental sites, there was strong support for a "neutral" model, where plants respond similarly to the increased availability of soil nitrogen, phosphorous, or potassium. However, I also find that responses to treatments were more varied in sites characterized by higher average productivity and pre-treatment light limitation. Together, these findings indicate that grassland responses to fertilization tend to be driven by a trade-off between belowground and aboveground resource use, yet the predictability of these effects will depend on the inherent productivity and community structure of a given site. Chapters 2 and 3 focus on California grasslands. Chapter 2 explores the effects of nitrogen enrichment on plant community diversity at multiple scales of organization, highlighting how shifts in community structure and distribution shape observed diversity loss at different sampling areas. Most nutrient addition studies have utilized small-scale plots (1m2), though it has been shown that the area sampled can have significant impacts on the direction or magnitude of observed results. While a few studies have demonstrated scale-dependence in effects on species richness, I expand upon these findings by relating effects across scales to impacts on total community richness, community evenness, and spatial organization of vegetation. I find that nitrogen enrichment rarely produces large-scale species extirpation, but effects on evenness are nearly constant across sampling areas. While large-scale coexistence processes may facilitate species persistence at large spatial extents, fertilization also prompts increases in individual spatial aggregation, which may produce species extirpation in the long term. In Chapter 3, I evaluate changes in California grassland community composition in response to interannual variation in temperature and precipitation. In Mediterranean systems, the quantity and timing of rainfall is hypothesized to control turnover between distinct species groups. A key challenge to the evaluation of these species-climate relationships, however, is historical contingency in vegetation composition - non-independence between species abundances in a given year and the year previous, caused by local seed pools, plant-soil feedbacks, and other priority effects. To quantify how climate and prior community composition interact, I employ a novel application of multi-state modeling to a long-term dataset. This approach expands on traditional methods, which qualitatively describe variation among a priori species groups, to directly quantify the number of discrete vegetation states within a system and the probability of transition between them. When applied to ten years of community observation across a range of climatic conditions, this method produced a revised partitioning of vegetation states: one "classic" species group was split into two separate states based on performance under extreme drought. In turn, climate patterns interacted with the emergent properties of each vegetation state to control which community types were most likely to dominate. Invasive species, for example, were unlikely to persist under drought; yet low precipitation only tended to favor vegetation transitions to a native dominated state when these species were previously seeded. It is increasingly understood that integration across interacting sets of processes is needed to effectively understand the effects of global change on the diversity and composition of plant communities. Together, these three chapters highlight how local environmental characteristics, the scale of observation, and prior vegetation type combine to structure grassland responses to environmental changes. In doing so, my work contributes to a more complete understanding of ecological dynamics that is needed to better conserve and manage ecosystems in a rapidly changing world.
Download or read book Ecosystems of California written by Harold Mooney and published by Univ of California Press. This book was released on 2016-01-19 with total page 1008 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This long-anticipated reference and sourcebook for CaliforniaÕs remarkable ecological abundance provides an integrated assessment of each major ecosystem typeÑits distribution, structure, function, and management. A comprehensive synthesis of our knowledge about this biologically diverse state, Ecosystems of California covers the state from oceans to mountaintops using multiple lenses: past and present, flora and fauna, aquatic and terrestrial, natural and managed. Each chapter evaluates natural processes for a specific ecosystem, describes drivers of change, and discusses how that ecosystem may be altered in the future. This book also explores the drivers of CaliforniaÕs ecological patterns and the history of the stateÕs various ecosystems, outlining how the challenges of climate change and invasive species and opportunities for regulation and stewardship could potentially affect the stateÕs ecosystems. The text explicitly incorporates both human impacts and conservation and restoration efforts and shows how ecosystems support human well-being. Edited by two esteemed ecosystem ecologists and with overviews by leading experts on each ecosystem, this definitive work will be indispensable for natural resource management and conservation professionals as well as for undergraduate or graduate students of CaliforniaÕs environment and curious naturalists.
Download or read book What are the Roles of Local Interactions and Dispersal in Community Assembly in California Grasslands Across a Soil Nitrogen Gradient written by Rebecca Aicher and published by . This book was released on 2010 with total page 180 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Across the globe, the environment is changing at unprecedented rates in multiple directions due to changes in climate, land use, disturbance regimes, nitrogen (N) deposition and invasive species. In order to understand how these factors are affecting ecosystems, there has been a renewed interest in determining the contribution of local interactions, abiotic conditions, and regional processes in determining species abundance and diversity at multiple scales. Furthermore, in order to successfully restore native ecosystems, it is crucial to understand how local and regional processes affect community assembly. My dissertation aims to explore the role of local interactions and dispersal on the community assembly of California annual grassland communities along a soil N gradient. Results from this dissertation show that annual species within a community have different recruitment functions due to differences in the relative importance of seed limitation and establishment limitation. Furthermore, the recruitment functions scaled up to community level processes to affect local scale diversity patterns. I found that beta-diversity exhibited a complex pattern of increases and decreases over time in California annual grassland communities. After two growing seasons beta-diversity was higher in a low N soil environment due to increased heterogeneity in soil N and slowed competitive exclusion. Multiple processes were acting throughout the growing season that influenced species abundance, alpha- and beta-diversity, and these processes differed based on the soil N environment. In addition, I found that local interactions, environmental conditions and dispersal structure experimental California annual grasslands communities. As predicted, initial community composition, local interactions, environmental conditions and dispersal act simultaneously to determine local species abundances and diversity at multiple scales. Future studies in natural areas with intact vegetation are needed to better understand the community's response to N enrichment, but my dissertation work shows that in order to understand and predict community assembly in California grasslands, local interactions and dispersal need to be considered. In addition, results from this dissertation suggest that in order to restore California grasslands, restoration ecologists need to consider the effect of local and regional scale processes on diversity at multiple scales.
Download or read book Global Change and Terrestrial Ecosystems written by Brian Harrison Walker and published by Cambridge University Press. This book was released on 1996-11-13 with total page 654 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This major new book presents a collection of essays by leading authorities who address the current state of knowledge. The chapters bring together the early results of an international scientific research program designed to address what will happen to our ability to produce food and fiber, and what effects there will be on biological diversity under rapid environmental change. This book addresses how these changes to terrestrial ecosystems will feed back to further environmental change. International in scope, this state-of-the-art assessment will interest policymakers, students and scientists interested in global change, climate change and biodiversity. Special features include descriptions of a dynamic global vegetation model, developing generic crop models and a special section on the emerging discipline of global ecology.
Download or read book Grassland Invertebrate Interactions Plant Productivity Resilience and Community Dynamics written by Ivan Hiltpold and published by Frontiers Media SA. This book was released on 2017-10-13 with total page 256 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Natural and anthropogenic grasslands such as prairies, meadows, rangelands, and pastures cover more than 40% of the planet’s surface and provide a wealth of ecological services. Grasslands alone store one third of the global carbon stocks and grass roots, through their specific architectures, ensure water cycling and prevent the erosion of fertile topsoil. In addition, grasslands are of vital importance for human food production as vast areas of rangelands and pastures provide feed for livestock. Pastoral legumes mobilize atmospheric nitrogen and improve fertility of arable soils. Not least, grasslands are an essential genetic resource. The three major crop species that feed half of the global population have been bred from wild grasses. Ancestors of our contemporary turf cultivars, common components of urban landscapes and recreation spaces, originated from wild grasslands. Although natural and managed grasslands represent pivotal ecosystems, many aspects of how they function are poorly understood. To date, most attention has focused on grassland primary producers (i.e. forage plants) and mammalian grazers but invertebrates are likely to play an equally, if not more important role in grassland ecosystem functioning. In Australian pastures, for example, the biomass of root-feeding scarab beetles can often exceed that of sheep and plant damage caused by invertebrates is sometimes equivalent to an average dairy cow’s grass consumption. Indeed, grasslands are one of the most densely populated ecosystems with invertebrates being probably the most important engineers that shape both plant communities and the grassland as a whole. In a rapidly changing world with increasing anthropogenic pressure on grasslands, this Research Topic focuses on: 1. How grassland habitats shape invertebrate biodiversity 2. Impacts of climate change on grassland-invertebrate interactions 3. Plant and invertebrate pest monitoring and management 4. Plant-mediated multitrophic interactions and biological control in grasslands 5. Land use and grassland invertebrates 6. Plant resistance to invertebrate pests Given the increasing demand for food and land for human habitation, unprecedented threats to grasslands are anticipated. Resilient to some extent, these key ecosystems need to be better comprehended to guarantee their sustainable management and ecosystem services.
Download or read book Cabi Invasives written by Thomas A. Monaco and published by CABI. This book was released on 2012-01-01 with total page 204 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Bringing together ecology and management of invasive plants within natural and agricultural ecosystems, this book bridges the knowledge gap between the processes operating within ecosystems and the practices used to prevent, contain, control and eradicate invasive plant species. The book targets key processes that can be managed, the impact of invasive plants on these ecosystem processes and illustrates how adopting ecologically based principles can influence the ecosystem and lead to effective land management. It is suitable for researchers, practitioners and students of ecology, invasive spe.
Download or read book Effects of nitrogen deposition on ecosystems above and belowground written by Hui Wang and published by Frontiers Media SA. This book was released on 2023-03-09 with total page 245 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:
Download or read book Aboveground Belowground Linkages written by Richard D. Bardgett and published by Oxford University Press. This book was released on 2010-07-29 with total page 312 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Aboveground-Belowground Linkages provides the most up-to-date and comprehensive synthesis of recent advances in our understanding of the roles that interactions between aboveground and belowground communities play in regulating the structure and function of terrestrial ecosystems, and their responses to global change. It charts the historical development of this field of ecology and evaluates what can be learned from the recent proliferation of studies on the ecological and biogeochemical significance of aboveground-belowground linkages. The book is structured around four key topics: biotic interactions in the soil; plant community effects; the role of aboveground consumers; and the influence of species gains and losses. A concluding chapter draws together this information and identifies a number of cross-cutting themes, including consideration of aboveground-belowground feedbacks that occur at different spatial and temporal scales, the consequences of these feedbacks for ecosystem processes, and how aboveground-belowground interactions link to human-induced global change.
