937 Results Found

Grasshoppers mainly threaten natural grassland vegetation and crops. Therefore, it is of great significance to understand the relationship between environmental factors and grasshopper occurrence. This paper studies the spatial distribution and key f...

The frequency of extreme climate events has increased resulting in major changes to vegetation in arid and semi-arid areas. We selected 12 extreme climate indices and used trend analysis and multiple linear regression models to analyze extreme climat...

Steppe is an indispensable component for terrestrial ecosystems and it is of great significance to systematically analyze steppe sustainability and its driving forces. In this study, we propose a steppe dynamics ranking method based on Pauta criterio...

The composition, architecture, and plant traits of temperate steppe communities are intricately associated with environmental factors. However, most studies primarily focus on aboveground observations, often overlooking the critical role of belowgrou...

Climate change poses a considerable threat to the forest-steppe ecotone in arid mountain areas. However, it remains unclear how the forest-steppe ecotone responds to climate change due to the limitation of the traditional pollen assemblages, which gr...

The Eurasian steppe (EAS) is the largest contiguous grassland worldwide. Quantitative evaluations of the relative impacts of climate change and human activities on grasslands are significant for understanding grassland degradation mechanisms and cont...

The thousands of kilometers of forest steppes in Eurasia belong to the most threatened ecosystems thanks to habitat loss. We have limited knowledge on the recolonization ability of forest steppe species to date, which is the reason we examined the te...

Under the combined effects of climate change, overexploitation, and intense grazing, temperate steppe in northern China is experiencing increasing deterioration, which is typified by a shift from structural degradation to functional disruption. Accur...

The inland waters of Northern Kazakhstan are important components of the ecosystems of this region and have unique characteristics. Endorheic steppe lakes are important ecosystems with significant ecological value. They play an important role in main...

Precipitation changes have significant impacts on biodiversity and ecosystem productivity. However, the effects of precipitation changes on species diversity have been the focus of most previous studies. Little is known about the contributions of dif...

This article challenges historiographical interpretations that emphasize tsarist sponsorship of Muslim religious institutions on the nineteenth-century Kazakh steppe. Drawing on both tsarist archival records and local Muslim sources, it highlights th...

The ecological status of the semi-arid steppes in China is fragile. Under the long-term and high-intensity development of mining, the ecological integrity and biodiversity of steppe landscapes have been destroyed, causing soil pollution, grassland de...

The desert steppe in Ningxia is the largest natural steppe type in the region, characterized by a fragile ecological environment and low carrying capacity. Gravel–sand mulching, a local agricultural practice, involves using a sand and gravel co...

Accurate estimation of actual evapotranspiration (ET) is critical for understanding hydrothermal cycles and ecosystem functioning in arid regions, where water scarcity governs ecological resilience. To address persistent gaps in ET quantification, th...

Steppe pastures are characteristic of the Armenian landscape and play an important role in supporting livelihoods and biodiversity conservation. The productivity and biodiversity of steppe pastures depend on grazing management, soil types, and climat...

This study addresses the critical interplay between sustainable living and thermal comfort within residential buildings in subtropical steppe (BSh) climates, particularly in Northern Iraq. With the global imperative to enhance energy efficiency and o...

Grassland, as a key component of the carbon cycle in terrestrial ecosystems, is vital in confronting global climate change. Characterising the carbon density of grassland ecosystems in the Longzhong Loess Plateau is important for accurately assessing...

Water resources are severely scarce in desert steppes, and precipitation rarely collects in rivers or is transformed into groundwater. Evapotranspiration (ET) is the primary “export” of precipitation conversion and is the main mechanism f...

Research Highlights: Answering how tree hydraulic strategies explain the interspecific associations of co-occurring trees in forest–steppe ecotone is an approach to link plant physiology to forest dynamics, and is helpful to predict forest comp...

Ground penetrating radar (GPR) is a new technique of rapid soil moisture measurement, which is an important approach to measure soil moisture at the intermediate scale. To test the applicability of GPR method for soil moisture in desert steppe, we us...

Soil enzymes secreted by microorganisms play a key role in carbon (C), nitrogen (N), and phosphorus (P) metabolism in soil organic matter. As major drivers of climate change, warming and nitrogen addition affect soil physicochemical properties and en...

Alpine meadow and alpine steppe are the two most widely distributed nonzonal vegetation types in the Qinghai-Tibet Plateau. In the context of global climate change, the differences in spatial-temporal variation trends and their responses to climate c...

To investigate the effects of seasonal grazing on ground-dwelling insect communities in desert steppe, this study conducted a controlled experiment in the desert steppe of Yanchi County, Ningxia, during 2022–2023. Five grazing regimes were esta...

Desert steppe ecosystems, characterized by water limitation and high sensitivity to global climate change and anthropogenic disturbance drivers, experience profound alterations in carbon (C) cycling processes driven by the multiplicative interactions...

The Relief Degree of Land Surface (RDLS) is an important index to evaluate regional environment. It has a significant effect on the local climate, geologic hazards, the path and speed of fire spreading, the migrations of wild animals, and the runoff...

Ecosystem services (ESs) provided by dryland regions are very vulnerable to environmental dynamics and management transformation, and it is still unclear how these services will be affected by the combined effects of accelerated climate variability a...

Carbon-use efficiency (CUE) is the proportion of gross primary production converted to net primary production. Changes to CUE strongly influence ecosystem carbon budgets and turnover. Little is known about the response of ecosystem CUE to human-induc...

Dissolved organic matter (DOM) is generally the dominant carbon pool in freshwater lakes and plays a vital role in the regional or even global carbon cycle. In recent years, steppe lakes have been subject to two stressors: eutrophication and abnormal...

This paper shows the results of a study on the ecological structure and spatial distribution of communities of the protected steppe ground beetle Carabus hungaricus Fabricius, 1792 (Coleoptera: Carabidae), in Bulgaria. It also points some phenologica...

Vegetation phenology serves as a sensitive indicator of climate change. However, the mechanism of the hydrothermal role in vegetation phenology changes is still controversial. Utilizing the data on the Fraction of Absorbed Photosynthetically Active R...

Grazing affects nutrient cycling processes in grasslands, but little is known by researchers about effects on the nutrient stoichiometry of plant–soil–microbe systems. In this study, the influence of grazing intensity (0, 0.23, 0.34, 0.46...

This study examines the influence of grazing intensity on soil microbial communities in a desert steppe ecosystem. Soil samples were collected from three depths (0–10 cm, 10–20 cm, and 20–30 cm) under varying grazing intensities: co...

Semi-natural forests and dry grasslands are highly fragmented and influenced by human activity. Despite the small area, they serve as the refuge for habitat-specific species and enhance agrolandscape biodiversity. We studied spiders in Velykoburlutsk...

Plant photosynthesis has a non-negligible influence on forage quality and ecosystem carbon sequestration. However, the influence of long-term warming, increasing precipitation, and their interactions on the photosynthesis of dominant species in deser...

Important land surfaces from hill and mountain areas from the northern hemisphere formerly used for cropping were abandoned. Often, the abandoned land evolved by natural succession to grassland, shrubland or even to forest. The main goal of this pape...

The taxonomic composition and structure of invertebrate assemblages in five lakes from the Kulunda steppe, located in an arid region of southwestern Siberia (Russia), were studied. The lakes varied greatly in their total salinity (5 to 304 g L⁻...

As decision-making tools helping to improve the understanding of soil quality, soil quality assessment and heavy metal pollution assessment are very important for the remediation of heavy metal soil pollution. In the past, soil quality and heavy meta...

This study investigates the effects of grazing intensity and spatial scale on the important values, interspecific relationships, and community stability of desert steppe plant communities in Siziwang Banner, Inner Mongolia, China. Using vegetation da...

To examine the effect of litter on ANPP and species composition (using ground cover) in a Desert Steppe community by removing or adding litter, during plant dormancy, in a single event in either fall or spring. Litter was removed or added in three in...

Against the backdrop of global climate change, climate warming and increasing nitrogen addition are profoundly altering carbon (C) and nitrogen (N) cycling in terrestrial ecosystems. Short-term observations are critical for capturing the initial resp...

Single-season legume green manuring is widely promoted for soil fertility restoration in degraded agricultural lands, yet its effectiveness in alkaline semi-arid soils remains poorly understood. This study investigated the impact of first-year sweet...

Uncovering the complex periodic variations in soil moisture can provide a significant reference for climate prediction and hydrological process simulation. We used wavelet analysis to quantify and identify the multi-scale periodic variations of soil...

Grazing is one of the most common causes of grassland degradation, therefore, an assessment of soil physicochemical properties and plant nutrients under grazing is important for understanding its influences on ecosystem nutrient cycling and for formu...

The net primary productivity (NPP) dynamics in arid and semi-arid ecosystems are critical for regional carbon management. Our study applied a light-utilization-efficiency model (CASA: Carnegie–Ames–Stanford Approach) to evaluate the veget...

The stable carbon (C) isotope of soil CO₂ efflux (δ¹³CO_2e) is closely associated with soil C dynamics, which have a complex feedback relationship with climate. Three levels of warming (T0: ambient temperature (15.7 °C); T1: T0 + 2 °C; T...

Microclimate and vegetation architecture are interdependent. Little information is available, however, about the fine-scale spatio-temporal relationship between the microclimate and herb layer of forest-steppe mosaics. In 2018 a three-season-long veg...

Soil moisture is an important variable affecting land surface and climate interactions. This study used cross-wavelet and wavelet coherence methods to analyze the relationship between soil moisture and climatic factors in the study area based on the...

This paper explores the application of conceptual hydrological models in optimizing the operation of hydroelectric power plants (HPPs) in steppe regions, a crucial aspect of promoting low-carbon energy solutions. The study aims to identify the most s...

The aim of the work is to analyze the survival strategy of Taxus baccata L., one of the promising plants for landscaping and the creation of woodlands, in the changing ecological conditions of the steppe zone of the Donetsk ridge. In order to achieve...

Soil loss prevention is an important ecosystem service for protecting human and environmental health. Using spatiotemporal climate and environmental data of the Eastern Gobi Steppe, a region missing from previous studies of Mongolian wind-based soil...