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Biocrusts are associations among drought-tolerant organisms and are crucial for maintaining the steady state of ecosystems subjected to high environmental stresses. The elaboration of sustainable plans for their preservation, restoration, and spreading is a recent strategy to combat land degradation and desertification. This review highlights the most relevant achievements and the critical points still open for the biotechnological application of cyanobacteria and mosses to soil restoration.

Understanding the carbon cycle is critical for designing effective policies to mitigate climate change. Herein, I synthesized the state of knowledge of the carbon cycle in tropical upland ecosystems. From the 135 documents found in databases, estimations of carbon stocks comprised three-fourths of the total studies, while the remaining fraction focused on carbon fluxes. It is necessary to obtain information on the main carbon fluxes and integrate it into climate change mitigation plans.

Despite frequent media references about the mass poisoning of vultures, this study shows that small but frequent poisoning events may be even worse. Using both mathematical and computer simulation approaches we show that a chain of small poisoning events is more likely to extirpate a newly established colony than a few massive ones with the same overall mortality. Survival also depends critically on the initial population size. These results are of great relevance for restocking initiatives.

Forest–steppe habitats have contrasting canopy structure with strong influence on the spatio-temporal variability of ecosystem functions. In our study, environmental and functional variables were evaluated in this transition zone. We found that topography and vegetation structure have co-varying effects on abiotic–biotic factors. Our observations are valuable for assessing the dynamics of functional and driving variables in this natural transition zone of the temperate vegetation.

In this work, we attempted to contrast three different modeling approaches to understand the population dynamics of immature bees, adult bees and the honey produced in the hive. From these three modeling approaches, we conclude that honey production is reduced due to the decrease in the total number of bees within the colony and due to an external stress factor, which could be climate variability, pesticides, parasites such as the Varroa mite, or habitat loss, among others.

Landscape ecologists often use virtual or imaginary landscapes to explore how landscapes can effect ecological processes. In a similar manner, procedural modelling algorithms are used in computer graphics for the creation of virtual or imaginary worlds used in movies and computer games. Perlin noise is a procedural modelling algorithm that could be very useful for landscape ecologists, and this work explains and translates Perlin noise for landscape ecologists.