Dams impound the majority of rivers and provide important societal benefits, especially daily water releases that enable on-peak hydroelectricity generation. Such “hydropeaking” is common worldwide, but its downstream impacts remain unclear. We evaluated the response of aquatic insects, a cornerstone of river food webs, to hydropeaking using a life history–hydrodynamic […]
Nonsteady state chambers are often employed to measure soil CO2 fluxes. CO2 concentrations (C) in the headspace are sampled at different times (t), and fluxes (f) are calculated from regressions of C versus t based on a limited number of observations. Variability in the data can lead to poor fits […]
In sagebrush steppe, snowpack may govern soil respiration through its effect on multiple abiotic and biotic factors. Across the Intermountain West of the United States, snowpack has been declining for decades and is projected to decline further over the next century, making the response of soil respiration to snowpack a […]
Understanding impacts of drought on tree growth and forest health is of major concern given projected climate change. Droughts may become more common in the Southwest due to extreme temperatures that will drive increased evapotranspiration and lower soil moisture, in combination with uncertain precipitation changes. Utilizing ~1.3 million tree-ring widths […]
Of course plants do not have brains and, thus, cannot actually remember what happened to them in the past. Although plants cannot remember, however, we use “memory” as a metaphor to refer to the effect of the past on current and future plant and ecosystem functioning. Such memory effects have […]
Aim Vertical root distributions (‘profiles’) influence plant water use and productivity, and the differentiation of root profiles between neighbouring species can indicate the degree of plant interactions and niche partitioning. However, quantifying multiple species’ root distributions in the field can be labour intensive and highly destructive to the soil and […]
Terrestrial plant and soil respiration, or ecosystem respiration (Reco), represents a major CO2 flux in the global carbon cycle. However, there is disagreement in how Reco will respond to future global changes, such as elevated atmosphere CO2 and warming. To address this, we synthesized six years (2007–2012) of Reco data […]
Stomata simultaneously regulate plant carbon gain and water loss, and patterns of stomatal conductance (gs) provide insight into water use strategies. In arid systems, gs varies seasonally based on factors such as water availability and temperature. Moreover, the presence and species identity of neighboring plants likely affects gs of the […]
The role of time in ecology has a long history of investigation, but ecologists have largely restricted their attention to the influence of concurrent abiotic conditions on rates and magnitudes of important ecological processes. Recently, however, ecologists have improved their understanding of ecological processes by explicitly considering the effects of […]
The Arctic continues to warm at a rate that is currently twice as fast as the global average (see essay on Surface Air Temperature). Warming is causing normally frozen ground (permafrost) to thaw, exposing significant quantities of organic soil carbon to decomposition by soil microbes (Romanovsky et al. 2010, Romanovsky […]