For comparison, stands with similar soil depth and woody density (DL-Fallow, DH-Fallow and SL-Fallow) were selected at the protected Biological Reserve in the Calabozo region.
Despite these differences in vegetation and soil characteristics, there were no significant differences in species diversity (richness, evenness) or vegetation structure (woody density, frequency, basal area) as a function of distance to forest (two-way ANOVA: P>0.05), most likely due to seed inputs from surrounding early successional habitats.
On average across the Amazon, the exclusion of wood density (K DH) leads to a small reduction in predicted AGB compared to K DH ρ, but this reduction is bigger when considering only the Guiana Shield (known to have high wood density), and is reversed in SW Amazonia (known to have lower woody density) (Fig. 4, Table 1).
Because understory herbaceous cover and woody densities were strongly negatively related to overstory canopy cover in LNF, management aimed at decreasing forest overstory to increase woody and herbaceous understories (forage quantity), preferably in conjunction with prescribed burns (to increase forage quality), could have strong effects in altering herbivore use of LNF landscapes.
Both understory species richness and evenness responded to treatments, but understory woody plant density did not respond to either treatment.
This finding indicated that grass diversity is negatively correlated with woody plant density which is in accordance with Abule et al. ([2007]).
Number of shrubs (2 5 m), woody plant density, and area of lawn and hedge influenced beetle richness, diversity and community structure, but explained <30% of variation between gardens.
Gaps were higher in herb cover, coarse woody debris density and volume as well as pit and mound micro topography than controls.
Multi-response permutation procedures (MRPPs) indicated that species composition (woody species density, herbaceous species cover) differed significantly among all treatments (woody: P=0.006; herbaceous: P=0.0001) and between distance classes (woody: P=0.03; herbaceous: P=0.002).
We sampled bird communities with point counts and measured visual obstruction, pine tree height, woody stem density, and vegetation structure and coverage by growth form (e.g., forb, fern, grass, legume, pine, sedge and rush, woody non-pine, vine).
NFI compilation routines utilize algorithms for line intercept sampling to determine plot level volume and a lookup table of woody debris density values by species and decay class to determine mass.
