Water drives the functioning of Earth’s arid and semiarid lands. Drylands can obtain water from sources other than precipitation, yet little is known about how non-rainfall water inputs influence dryland communities and their activity. In particular, water vapor adsorption – movement of atmospheric water vapor into soil when soil air […]
Elevated atmospheric CO2 concentrations increase plant productivity and affect soil microbial communities, with possible consequences for the turnover rate of soil carbon (C) pools and feedbacks to the atmosphere. In a previous analysis (Van Groenigen et al., 2014), we used experimental data to inform a one-pool model and showed that elevated […]
Native soil carbon (C) can be lost in response to fresh C inputs, a phenomenon observed for decades yet still not understood. Using dual-stable isotope probing, we show that changes in the diversity and composition of two functional bacterial groups occur with this ‘priming’ effect. A single-substrate pulse suppressed native […]
Phylogeny is an ecologically meaningful way to classify plants and animals, as closely related taxa frequently have similar ecological characteristics, functional traits and effects on ecosystem processes. For bacteria, however, phylogeny has been argued to be an unreliable indicator of an organism’s ecology owing to evolutionary processes more common to microbes such as […]
Permafrost soils contain more than 1300 Pg of carbon (C), twice the amount of C in the atmosphere. Temperatures in higher latitudes are increasing, inducing permafrost thaw and subsequent microbial decomposition of previously frozen C, which will most likely feed back to climate warming through release of the greenhouse gases CO2 […]
We’ve got your number: Tracing the source of invasive Japanese beetles March 9, 2016 Sonya Daw news.nau.edu Like a Southern drawl popping up on the West Coast, our accents mark us as newcomers. With time they fade, leaving only traces of our past in the occasional slip of a word. […]
As the permafrost region warms, its large organic carbon pool will be increasingly vulnerable to decomposition, combustion, and hydrologic export. Models predict that some portion of this release will be offset by increased production of Arctic and boreal biomass; however, the lack of robust estimates of net carbon balance increases […]
Dam decommissioning projects, although numerous, rarely include complete sets of data before and after restoration for evaluating the ecological consequences of such projects. In this study, we used a before-after control-impact (BACI) design to assess changes in leaf litter decomposition and associated macroinvertebrate and fungal decomposers following dam decommissioning in […]
Microbial decomposition of soil carbon in high-latitude tundra underlain with permafrost is one of the most important, but poorly understood, potential positive feedbacks of greenhouse gas emissions from terrestrial ecosystems into the atmosphere in a warmer world1, 2, 3, 4. Using integrated metagenomic technologies, we showed that the microbial functional […]
Permafrost soils currently store approximately 1672 Pg of carbon (C), but as high latitudes warm, this temperature-protected C reservoir will become vulnerable to higher rates of decomposition. In recent decades, air temperatures in the high latitudes have warmed more than any other region globally, particularly during the winter. Over the coming […]