Dr. Michelle Mack will be discussing the future vulnerabilities to Alaskan ecosystems and tools for permafrost assessment during the next resource conservation and resiliency webinar that will be hosted on Thursday, June 29! The webinar is part of the SERDP and ESTCP webinar series, which was launched to promote the Read more…
How healthy will Earth’s ecosystems be in 2027, 2067 and beyond? It’s an important question to ask, especially on World Environment Day, June 5. To find answers, scientists affiliated with the National Science Foundation’s (NSF) Long-Term Ecological Research (LTER) network came together this spring at an NSF LTER mini-symposium. “Arctic Read more…
Permafrost, the “always-frozen” deep soil layers of the Arctic, naturally undergoes freeze-thaw cycles with the passage of the brief Arctic spring and summer, which thaws the uppermost layers and fosters a burst of tundra plant growth and pooling meltwater from thawed soil. For millennia, this cycle has re-frozen the Read more…
Biochar, a fine-grained carbon residue of charred plant material, has recently been promoted as a universal amendment to soil to improve moisture and nutrient content with the expectation of higher agricultural yields, fostering the rise of a large global biochar industry. In the original context of “terra preta,” the rich Read more…
Ecoss research demonstrated that grasslands with more diverse plant species pull down and store more carbon per acre: in this illustration, the same plot of soil from a diverse vs. depauperate grassland shows more belowground investment in deeper roots and denser storage of carbon in a diverse array of plants. Read more…
In a groundbreaking study, Ecoss research produced a monetary value for biodiversity by demonstrating that having more diverse plant species enables a grassland to draw down and store more carbon. This finding allows calculations of how much carbon storage is lost or gained per species added or lost from a Read more…
Measuring the growth rates of individual bacteria taxa within a mixed sample gives a powerful view of the moving parts of a living ecosystem, especially when that sample is soil, where so many ecological processes occur. Ecoss research pioneered “qSIP” — a new method for gathering many simultaneous bacterial growth Read more…
Native soil carbon (C) can be lost in response to fresh C inputs, via the “priming effect,” a phenomenon observed for decades yet still not understood. Using dual-stable isotope probing, Ecoss research showed that priming involves changes in the diversity and composition of two functional bacterial groups: a single-substrate pulse Read more…
The mass emergence of metamorphosed aquatic insect larvae as airborne adults provides an important seasonal pulse of prey biomass to many aquatic ecosystems. Ecoss research explored whether the type and quality of leaf litter on which these aquatic larvae feed makes a difference in the types and proportions of various Read more…
Pollution scenarios and anthropogenic warming are familiar examples of human-caused stress on the environment. But human-driven loss of biodiversity itself robs ecosystems of essential players and services, damaging ecosystem function. Ecoss research examined the effects of various environmental stressors on plant growth and decomposition, two crucial processes in any ecosystem. Read more…