Can forest management based on natural disturbances maintain ecological resilience?

Given the increasingly global stresses on forests, many ecologists argue that managers must maintain ecological resilience: the capacity of ecosystems to absorb disturbances without undergoing fundamental change. In this review we ask: Can the emerging paradigm of natural-disturbance-based management (NDBM) maintain ecological resilience in managed forests? Applying resilience theory requires careful articulation of the ecosystem state under consideration, the disturbances and stresses that affect the persistence of possible alternative states, and the spatial and temporal scales of management relevance. Implementing NDBM while maintaining resilience means recognizing that (i) biodiversity is important for long-term ecosystem persistence, (ii) natural disturbances play a critical role as a generator of structural and compositional heterogeneity at multiple scales, and (iii) traditional management tends to produce forests more homogeneous than those disturbed naturally and increases the likelihood of unexpected catastrophic change by constraining variation of key environmental processes. NDBM may maintain resilience if silvicultural strategies retain the structures and processes that perpetuate desired states while reducing those that enhance resilience of undesirable states. Such strategies require an understanding of harvesting impacts on slow ecosystem processes, such as seed-bank or nutrient dynamics, which in the long term can lead to ecological surprises by altering the forest's capacity to reorganize after disturbance

Making Rules to Dispose of Manifestly Unfounded Assertions: An Exorcism of the Bogy of Non-Trans-Substantive Rules of Civil Procedure

Since the concept of universal design is already extending the boundary of disabilities, it is significant to include different aspects of information technology where universal design enabled efforts can contribute towards better designed systems, products and services. Sustainability is an important and growing public concern in today’s world. Nevertheless, attempts of designing IT system that can be called sustainable in nature are not so evident at present. In this paper we propose a framework originating from sustainable IT system design principles (also described in the paper). The universal design principles are used as a foundation upon which the resultant sustainable IT system design principles were derived. The concept of ‘sustainable IT system’ addressed in this research paper is beyond the common phenomenon of sustainability like green IT, CO2 emission etc. Rather, the framework proposed in this paper incorporates more user inclusion and increased user satisfaction together towards higher usability. And an IT system designed in this manner is a sustainable IT system according to the argument of this paper which can therefore be designed by following the proposed design principles and framework

Seed mix performance and cheatgrass suppression on arid rangelands

• The accidental and subsequent invasion of cheatgrass throughout millions of hectares of Intermountain West rangelands has truncated secondary succession by providing a fine-textured, early maturing fuel that has increased the chance, rate, spread, and season of wildfire. • The restoration or rehabilitation of degraded rangelands throughout the Intermountain West is very challenging due to annual invasive species that exhibit high growth rates and seed production. • The use of the pre-emergent herbicide, Imazapic, decreased cheatgrass densities >95% during the fallow year and before sowing seed the following fall during this study, which significantly reduced the cheatgrass competition for seedlings of seeded species. • Seed mix performances were significantly higher in herbicide-treated plots than control plots for both sites for both years. Native, introduced, and native/introduced seed mixes were significantly more successful in the treated plots at the Bedell Flat site compared with the Antelope site for both years. • Cheatgrass densities were significantly higher in the control plots at both sites for both years compared with herbicide/seed mix-treated plots. • Success and failure of establishing perennial grasses in restoration or rehabilitation practices is highly dependent on proper seed and seed mix selections, seeding methodologies, and rates as well as favorable precipitation. © 202