Leaf litter provides an important nutrient subsidy to headwater streams, but little is known about how tree genetics influences energy pathways from litter to higher trophic levels. Despite the charge to quantify carbon (C) and nitrogen (N) pathways from decomposing litter, the relationship between litter decomposition and aquatic consumers remains […]
Soil carbon sequestration in agroecosystems could play a key role in climate change mitigation but will require accurate predictions of soil organic carbon (SOC) stocks over spatial scales relevant to land management. Spatial variation in underlying drivers of SOC, such as plant productivity and soil mineralogy, complicates these predictions. Recent […]
Bryophytes are dominant components of boreal forest understories and play a large role in regulating soil microclimate and nutrient cycling. Therefore, shifts in bryophyte communities have the potential to affect boreal forests’ ecosystem processes. We investigated how bryophyte communities varied in 83 forest stands in interior Alaska that ranged in […]
Understanding the global carbon (C) cycle is of crucial importance to map current and future climate dynamics relative to global environmental change. A full characterization of C cycling requires detailed information on spatiotemporal patterns of surface-atmosphere fluxes. However, relevant C cycle observations are highly variable in their coverage and reporting […]
Projecting the response of forests to changing climate requires understanding how biotic and abiotic controls on tree growth will change over time. As temperature and interannual precipitation variability increase, the overall forest response is likely to be influenced by species-specific responses to changing climate. Management actions that alter composition and […]
Global change models predict that high-latitude boreal forests will become increasingly susceptible to fire activity as climate warms, possibly causing a positive feedback to warming through fire-driven emissions of CO2 into the atmosphere. However, fire-climate feedbacks depend on forest regrowth and carbon (C) accumulation over the post-fire successional interval, which […]
Thaw of ice-rich permafrost soils on sloping terrain can trigger erosional disturbance events that displace large volumes of soil and sediment, kill and damage plants, and initiate secondary succession. We examined how retrogressive thaw slumps (RTS), a common form of thermo-erosional disturbance in arctic tundra, affected the local loss and […]
Portions of a regenerating scrub oak ecosystem were enclosed in open-top chambers and exposed to elevated CO2. The distinct 13C signal of the supplemental CO2 was used to trace the rate of C integration into various ecosystem components. Oak foliage, stems, roots and ectomycorrhizae were sampled over 3 years and were […]
Changes in tree species composition could affect how forests produce and consume greenhouse gases, because the soil microorganisms that carry out these biogeochemical transformations are often sensitive to plant characteristics. We examined the effects of thirty years of stand development under six tree species in Siberian forests (Scots pine, spruce, […]
Rising atmospheric carbon dioxide (CO2) could alter the carbon (C) and nitrogen (N) content of ecosystems, yet the magnitude of these effects are not well known. We examined C and N budgets of a subtropical woodland after 11 yr of exposure to elevated CO2. We used open-top chambers to manipulate CO2 […]