The Carbon Copy Newsletter
The Carbon Copy is the Ecoss bi-monthly newsletter featuring news, publications, and comment from around the research center. Read past issues: February 2023 November 2022
Search Results for: sl
Lifestyles of the fast and slow (bacteria): In the wild, most live in the slow lane
A study led by Northern Arizona University offers new evidence that a common framework to sort bacteria into two lifestyles doesn’t easily apply to bacteria living in wild soil. The findings, published in The ISME Journal, show that rather than bacteria falling into two major lifestyle groups—one adapted to be competitive and […]
Soil Water Availability Drives Changes in Community Traits Along a Hydrothermal Gradient in Loess Plateau Grasslands
Plant functional traits can be used to predict ecosystem responses to climate gradients, yet precipitation explains very little variation for most traits. Soil water availability directly influences plant water uptake and thus may assist with the improvement of plant trait–water relationships. However, this promise remains poorly realized due to rare […]
Plant traits in influencing soil moisture in semiarid grasslands of the Loess Plateau, China
Large-scale vegetation restoration projects pose threats to water resource security in water-limited regions. Thus, the quantification of how vegetation cover affects soil moisture is of key importance to support effective restoration schemes in drylands. However, the current understanding of such effects remains poor. For this study, an in-situ vegetation-removal experiment […]
Edaphic and microbial determinants of the residence times of active and slow C pools on the Tibetan Plateau
One major source of uncertainties in the estimation of soil organic carbon (SOC) dynamics is carbon (C) residence time, an important parameter in terrestrial ecosystem C cycling models. To better predict terrestrial dynamics, C residence time and its controlling factors need to be well quantified and investigated. In this study, […]
Taxon-specific microbial growth and mortality patterns reveal distinct temporal population responses to rewetting in a California grassland soil
Microbial activity increases after rewetting dry soil, resulting in a pulse of carbon mineralization and nutrient availability. The biogeochemical responses to wet-up are reasonably well understood and known to be microbially mediated. Yet, the population level dynamics, and the resulting changes in microbial community patterns, are not well understood as […]
Soil water availability drives changes in community traits along a hydrothermal gradient in Loess Plateau Grasslands
Plant functional traits can be used to predict ecosystem responses to climate gradients, yet precipitation explains very little variation for most traits. Soil water availability directly influences plant water uptake and thus may assist with the improvement of plant trait–water relationships. However, this promise remains poorly realized due to rare […]
Larger, more frequent fires in boreal forest threaten previously protected carbon stores
Pools of old carbon in the soil of boreal forests historically safe from combustion are being released by more frequent and larger wildfires, an Ecoss team led by Xanthe Walker and Michelle Mack announced in Nature this week. As the climate of these forests in the Northwest Territories of Canada […]
Climate warming accelerates temporal scaling of grassland soil microbial biodiversity
Determining the temporal scaling of biodiversity, typically described as species–time relationships (STRs), in the face of global climate change is a central issue in ecology because it is fundamental to biodiversity preservation and ecosystem management. However, whether and how climate change affects microbial STRs remains unclear, mainly due to the […]
Long-term elevated CO2 shifts composition of soil microbial communities in a Californian annual grassland, reducing growth and N utilization potentials
The continuously increasing concentration of atmospheric CO2 has considerably altered ecosystem functioning. However, few studies have examined the long-term (i.e. over a decade) effect of elevated CO2 on soil microbial communities. Using 16S rRNA gene amplicons and a GeoChip microarray, we investigated soil microbial communities from a Californian annual grassland […]