Current paradigms generally assume that increased plant nitrogen (N) should enhance herbivore performance by relieving protein limitation, increasing herbivorous insect populations. We show, in contrast to this scenario, that host plant N enrichment and high-protein artificial diets decreased the size and viability of Oedaleus asiaticus, a dominant locust of north Asian grasslands. This locust preferred plants with low N content and artificial diets with low protein and high carbohydrate content.

Multi-channel analysis of surface waves (MASW) and micrometer array measurements (MAM) have been carried out in the flood-prone areas of Selimpaşa, Kavakli, Ortakoy and Kadikoy in Turkey to understand several soil problems, especially soil amplification during earthquakes.

Wetlands are among the most productive and economically valuable ecosystems in the world. However, because of human activities, over half of the wetland ecosystems existing in North America, Europe, Australia, and China in the early 20th century have been lost. Ecological restoration to recover critical ecosystem services has been widely attempted, but the degree of actual recovery of ecosystem functioning and structure from these efforts remains uncertain.

How is the biodiversity within an ecosystem related to the ecosystem's function? Quantifying and understanding this relationship—the biodiversity-ecosystem function (BEF) —is important because socio-economic development is almost always accompanied by the loss of natural habitat and species. Short-term economic gains may thus trump longer-term benefits for human society, creating vulnerabilities that could be avoided or corrected with enough knowledge about the role of biodiversity.

Experiments suggest that biodiversity enhances the ability of ecosystems to maintain multiple functions, such as carbon storage, productivity, and the buildup of nutrient pools (multifunctionality). However, the relationship between biodiversity and multifunctionality has never been assessed globally in natural ecosystems. We report here on a global empirical study relating plant species richness and abiotic factors to multifunctionality in drylands, which collectively cover 41% of Earth’s land surface and support over 38% of the human population.

We show in climate model experiments that large-scale afforestation in northern mid-latitudes warms the Northern Hemisphere and alters global circulation patterns. An expansion of dark forests increases the absorption of solar energy and increases surface temperature, particularly in regions where the land surface is unable to compensate with latent heat flux due to water limitation.

Traditional ecological knowledge has been established to have a bearing on natural resource management by the indigenous communities living in biodiversity rich North eastern hill region. The present study correlates the indigenous knowledge and scientific knowledge in assessing the nutrient availability status of the agricultural soil as practiced by the ‘Nyishi’ tribes who use visual properties such as colour, texture and topographic positioning of land/terrain.

Global food demand is increasing rapidly, as are the environmental impacts of agricultural expansion. Here, we project global
demand for crop production in 2050 and evaluate the environmental impacts of alternative ways that this demand might be
met. We find that per capita demand for crops, when measured as caloric or protein content of all crops combined, has been a
similarly increasing function of per capita real income since 1960. This relationship forecasts a 100–110% increase in global crop demand from 2005 to 2050.

China possesses large areas of plantation forests which take up great quantities of carbon. However, studies on soil respiration in these plantation forests are rather scarce and their soil carbon flux remains an uncertainty. In this study, we used an automatic chamber system to measure soil surface flux of a 50-year-old mature plantation of Platycladus orientalis at Jiufeng Mountain, Beijing, China.