Organisms influence ecosystems, from element cycling to disturbance regimes, to trophic interactions and to energy partitioning. Microorganisms are part of this influence, and understanding their ecology in nature requires studying the traits of these organisms quantitatively in their natural habitats—a challenging task, but one which new approaches now make possible. […]
Relationships between microbial genes and performance are often evaluated in the laboratory in pure cultures, with little validation in nature. Here, we show that genomic traits related to laboratory measurements of maximum growth potential failed to predict the growth rates of bacteria in unamended soil, but successfully predicted growth responses […]
Snow is important for local to global climate and surface hydrology, but spatial and temporal heterogeneity in the extent of snow cover make accurate, fine-scale mapping and monitoring of snow an enormous challenge. We took 184,453 daily near-surface images acquired by 133 automated cameras and processed them using crowdsourcing and […]
The annual peak growth of vegetation is critical in characterizing the capacity of terrestrial ecosystem productivity and shaping the seasonality of atmospheric CO2 concentrations. The recent greening of global lands suggests an increasing trend of terrestrial vegetation growth, but whether or not the peak growth has been globally enhanced still […]
Plant functional traits research has revealed many interesting and important patterns among morphological, physiological, and life-history traits and the environment. These are exemplified in trade-offs between groups of traits such as those embodied in the leaf and wood economics spectra. Inferences from empirical studies are often constrained by the correlative […]
Mosses are critical components of boreal ecosystems where they typically account for a large proportion of net primary productivity and harbour diverse bacterial communities that can be the major source of biologically-fixed nitrogen in these ecosystems. Despite their ecological importance, we have limited understanding of how microbial communities vary across […]
Ecoss ecologist Ted Schuur, who’s received a $600,000 grant from the National Science Foundation (NSF) to establish a carbon observatory at Eight Mile Lake near Denali National Park in Alaska, calls the permafrost’s massive release of greenhouse gases into the Earth’s atmosphere a “wild card,” and potentially a tipping point, […]
Satellite derived vegetation indices (VIs) are broadly used in ecological research, ecosystem modeling, and land surface monitoring. The Normalized Difference Vegetation Index (NDVI), perhaps the most utilized VI, has countless applications across ecology, forestry, agriculture, wildlife, biodiversity, and other disciplines. Calculating satellite derived NDVI is not always straight-forward, however, as […]
Future droughts are expected to become more severe and frequent under future climate change scenarios, likely causing widespread tree mortality in the western USA. Coping with an uncertain future requires an understanding of long-term ecosystem responses in areas where prolonged drought is projected to increase. Tree-ring records are ideally suited […]
1.Dams disrupt the river continuum, altering hydrology, biodiversity and energy flow. Although research indicates that tributary inputs have the potential to dilute these effects, knowledge at the food‐web level is still scarce. 2.Here, we examined the riverine food‐web structure of the Colorado River below Glen Canyon Dam, focusing on organic […]