Yellow ground squirrel & fire, grazing in Kazakhstan

<p>We aimed to understand the effects of changed grazing intensity and fire frequency on a key ecosystem engineer, the Yellow Ground Squirrel <em>Spermophilus fulvus</em> in Kazakhstan. Ground squirrels were surveyed in an area of ca. 100,000 ha in the dry steppe of central Kazakhstan, using hierarchical distance sampling at more than 200 random points, stratified by fire frequency and livestock grazing intensity. We modeled abundance as a function of different variables, grouped at the landscape scale (fire and grazing), mesoscale (soil and vegetation structure), and at burrow scale (plant traits such as palatability, digestibility, and nutrient content).</p>