Many grasslands around the world are affected by shrub encroachment. The essence of shrub encroachment into a grassland habitat is a change in the direction and intensity of shrub–grass interactions, which leads to an alteration in the grasslan...
Shrub encroachment in grasslands has a major impact on soil carbon storage (SOCS) and soil total nitrogen (STNS), which affects nutrient cycling and ecosystem processes. We explored the effects of shrub encroachment on SOCS and STNS in five grassland...
Shrubs tended to increase their abundance as climatic aridity and grazing intensity increased in the Inner Mongolian grassland. Increasing shrub abundance was believed to be due to enhanced reproduction. However, the effects of climatic aridity and g...
Shrub encroachment, which is the increase in shrubs or woody plants in grassland, is one of the important ecological problems facing grassland worldwide. The study was conducted in the ecotones between the forest and grassland of Inner Mongolia. Usin...
Shrub encroachment represents a widespread shift in vegetation structure, yet its influence on the relationship between vegetation greening and ecosystem productivity across global aridity gradients remains poorly understood. Focusing on global grass...
24 January 2019
Ulmus pumila-dominated temperate savanna is an important tree-grass complex ecosystem in the Otindag sand land, northern China. To date, few investigations have been undertaken on the spatial patterns and structure of this ecosystem and its driving f...
Shrub encroachment in alpine grasslands alters soil biogeochemical processes, but reported soil responses remain inconsistent and conflicting among studies. We performed a systematic review and meta-analysis to evaluate ten physical and chemical alon...
Shrub encroachment, i.e., shrub emergence or an increase in woody plant cover, has been widely observed in arid and semiarid grasslands and savannas worldwide since the 2000s. However, until now, there has been a clear division of opinion regarding i...
Factors such as climate change, fire, and overgrazing have been commonly considered the main causes of the global expansion of shrub invasion in grasslands over the past 160 years. Nevertheless, the influence of soil substrates on the progression of...
Due to the effects of global climate change and altered human land-use patterns, typical shrub encroachment in grasslands has become one of the most prominent ecological problems in grassland ecosystems. Shrub coverage can quantitatively indicate the...
Accurately extracting the spatial distribution of shrubs is an important basis for scientific diagnosis, rational prevention, and control of shrub-encroached grasslands (SGs). In SGs, the landscape exhibits a high degree of spatial intermingling amon...
Wildfire is a key factor in regulating ecological processes in grassland ecosystems; however, changes in land use/cover have modified the intensity and frequency of fires as they occurred naturally. Different factors have caused a rise in woody veget...
Worldwide, shrub cover is increasing across alpine and tundra landscapes in response to warming ambient temperatures and declines in snowpack. With a changing climate, shrub encroachment may rely on recruitment from seed occurring outside of the opti...
Shrub species have increased in density and cover in desertification areas, however, the role of sandy habitats in contributing to the expansion of shrubs is poorly understood. Although the effect of sandy habitats on plant growth and reproduction ha...
Mediterranean ecosystems are threatened by climate change and shrub encroachment. An increase in shrub cover can intensify the competition for water, aggravating the impacts of drought on ecosystem functioning. The effects of shrubs can be positive o...
Shrub encroachment in coastal wetlands alters vegetation–soil interactions, yet its impacts on north temperate coastal wetland ecosystems remain poorly quantified. This study investigated the effects of Tamarix chinensis-dominated shrub en...
Under global warming, vegetation composition changes induced by plant encroachment have a significant impact on the carbon balance of tundra ecosystems. The encroachment of herbaceous plants into indigenous shrub communities has changed the abovegrou...
The Pyrenean highlands hold the southernmost populations of some endemic and rare arvicoline species associated with grasslands. This area, as well as many other areas in the Mediterranean basin, has suffered from land abandonment due to socio-econom...
Peatlands store substantial amounts of carbon (C) in the form of peat, but are increasingly threatened by drought and shrub encroachment under climate warming. However, how peat decomposition and its temperature sensitivity (Q10) vary with depth and...
Soil nutrient stoichiometry plays a substantial role in terrestrial carbon and nutrient cycling. However, the changes in soil nutrient stoichiometry with shrub encroachment (SE) remain poorly understood, especially in subalpine areas. We examined the...
Shrub encroachment is a global ecological issue. The changes in growth dynamics between shrub seedlings and herbs are pivotal in determining shrub encroachment, yet their response to varying rainfall regimes remains unclear. We conducted a precipitat...
Caragana tibetica is a common species in the shrub-encroached desert grasslands of Inner Mongolia, China. Studying its distribution and factors can improve our grasp of shrub-encroached grassland dynamics and aid in regional biodiversity conservation...
This study evaluated the impacts of different grazing treatments (continuous (C) and rotational (R) grazing) on tallgrass prairie landscape, using high-spatial-resolution aerial imagery (1-m at RGB and near-infrared bands) of experimental C and R pas...
Due to the abandonment of former agricultural management practices such as mowing and grazing, an increasing amount of grassland is no longer being managed. This has resulted in increasing shrub encroachment, which poses a threat to a number of speci...
Increasing woody cover and overgrazing in semi-arid ecosystems are known to be the major factors driving land degradation. This study focuses on mapping the distribution of the slangbos shrub (Seriphium plumosum) in a test region in the Free State Pr...
Changes in the extent of woody vegetation represent a major conservation question in many savannah systems around the globe. To address the problem of the current lack of broad-scale cost-effective tools for land cover monitoring in complex savannah...
Grasslands are one of the most threatened terrestrial biomes leading to a loss of grassland biodiversity, including birds. Here, we studied the wintering grassland bird diversity and community structure in two private livestock ranches in the Chihuah...
Anthropogenic interventions in natural and semi-natural ecosystems often lead to substantial changes in their functioning and may ultimately threaten ecosystem service provision. It is, therefore, necessary to monitor these changes in order to unders...
This study investigates the scale-dependent alpha and beta diversity patterns in the subalpine grasslands of the Central Balkan Mountains following decades of reduced grazing. We examined two distinct vegetation patches: pure grasslands (N-type) and...
Harvesting is a common method in grassland management. With shrub encroachment into grassland, special hydrological and physiological dynamics probably occur in the shrub-grass coexisted ecosystem after harvesting, which remains largely unclear. Ther...
Evapotranspiration is a key variable of the hydrological cycle but poorly studied in Alpine ecosystems. The current study aimed to characterise the impact of topography and temporal variability on actual evapotranspiration (ETa) and its environmental...
The Qinghai-Tibet Plateau (QTP) is among the most sensitive ecosystems to changes in global climate and human activities, and quantifying its consequent change in land-cover land-use (LCLU) is vital for assessing the responses and feedbacks of alpine...
Recently, the increasing shrub-encroached grassland in the Mongolian Plateau partly indicates grassland quality decline and degradation. Accurate shrub identification and regional difference analysis in shrub-encroached grassland are significant for...
Euryops floribundus is an encroaching shrub species that poses a threat to grassland diversity and productivity in the Eastern Cape region of South Africa. This shrub inhibits understory herbaceous plant recruitment and establishment, thereby exposin...
Shrub encroachment of grassland and woodland ecosystems can alter wildfire behaviour and threaten ecological values. Australian fire managers are using mechanical mastication to reduce the fire risk in encroached ecosystems but are yet to evaluate it...
This study had two primary objectives: (1) to determine relative differences in soil infiltration capacity between native grasslands and thicketized oak woodlands and (2) to compare the effectiveness of three infiltration measurement techniques&mdash...
Coastal dune habitats have been declining globally over the last several decades due to rapid urbanization. Within remaining dune systems, dune fixation has resulted in further losses of mobile dunes with negative impacts on their associated species....
Seed banks are important for understanding vegetation dynamics and habitat regeneration potential. Biancana badlands are vanishing landscapes where recurring and non-recurring management has been advocated to restore vegetation. Here, we investigated...
Namibia is a very arid country, which has experienced significant bush encroachment and associated decreased livestock productivity. Therefore, it is essential to monitor bush encroachment and widespread debushing activities, including selective bush...
Mechanical mastication is a fuel management strategy that modifies vegetation structure to reduce the impact of wildfire. Although past research has quantified immediate changes to fuel post-mastication, few studies consider longer-term fuel trajecto...
Rhododendron capitatum community expansion is a major threat to alpine meadow. Allelopathy is an important mediator in managing relationships between plants in natural ecosystems. However, allelopathy and specific allelochemicals of R. capitatum have...
Mediterranean ecosystems face threats from both climate change and shrub invasion. As shrub cover increases, competition for water intensifies, exacerbating the negative effects of drought on ecosystem functioning. However, research into the combined...
In times of global environmental change, the sustainability of human–environment systems is only possible through a better understanding of ecosystem processes. An assessment of anthropogenic environmental impacts depends upon monitoring natural ecos...
The greening in the Senegalese Sahel has been linked to an increase in net primary productivity, with significant long-term trends being closely related to the woody strata. This study investigates woody plant growth and mortality within greening are...
Wildfires are prevalent in grasslands and shrublands. The objective of this study is to provide land managers with a general overview, by assessing the main impacts of wildfire, including those on plant communities (e.g., secondary succession and spe...
Woody plant encroachment (WPE), the expansion of native and non-native trees and shrubs into grasslands, is a less studied factor that leads to declines in grassland ecosystem health. With the increasing application of remote sensing in grassland mon...
Environmental conditions can control the structure and composition of plant communities by changing the direction and intensity of plant–plant interactions. In extreme arid regions, accompanied by water and soil nutrient limitation, positive sh...
Woody plant encroachment (WPE), the expansion of native and non-native trees and shrubs into grasslands, has led to degradation worldwide. In the Canadian prairies, western snowberry and wolfwillow shrubs are common encroachers, whose cover is curren...
Tree/shrub encroachment into drylands is a geographically widespread vegetation change that often modifies soil organic carbon (SOC) storage and dynamics, and represents an important yet uncertain aspect of the global carbon (C) cycle. We quantified...
Cattle grazing is particularly important to natural and semi-natural ecosystems, having often replaced grazing by smaller domestic ruminants such as goats and sheep. While cattle are mainly considered grazers rather than browsers, the pressures, dire...
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