Crowther et al. Reported that the best predictor of surface soil carbon (top 10 cm) losses in response to warming is the size of the surface carbon stock in the soil (that is, carbon stocks in plots that have not been warmed), finding that soils that are high in soil carbon also […]
Aridisols are the dominant soil type in drylands, which occupy one-third of Earth’s terrestrial surface. We examined controls on biogeographical patterns of Aridisol prokaryotic (bacterial and archaeal) communities at a regional scale by comparing communities from 100 Aridisols throughout the southwestern United States using high-throughput sequencing of the 16S rRNA […]
Species diversity affects the functioning of ecosystems, including the efficiency by which communities capture limited resources, produce biomass, recycle and retain biologically essential nutrients. These ecological functions ultimately support the ecosystem services upon which humanity depends. Despite hundreds of experimental tests of the effect of biodiversity on ecosystem function (BEF), […]
Climate change has increased the occurrence, severity, and impact of disturbances on forested ecosystems worldwide, resulting in a need to identify factors that contribute to an ecosystem’s resilience or capacity to recover from disturbance. Forest resilience to disturbance may decline with climate change if mature trees are able to persist […]
Both geomorphic setting and dynamic environmental variables influence riverine wetland vegetation distributions. Most studies of species distributions in riverine systems emphasize either hydrological variability or geomorphic controls, but rarely consider the interaction between the two. It is unknown whether and to what extent the relationship between the geomorphic template and […]
Spatio-temporal fields of land–atmosphere fluxes derived from data-driven models can complement simulations by process-based land surface models. While a number of strategies for empirical models with eddy-covariance flux data have been applied, a systematic intercomparison of these methods has been missing so far. In this study, we performed a cross-validation […]
Optimality theory states that whole-tree carbon gain is maximized when leaf N and photosynthetic capacity profiles are distributed along vertical light gradients such that the marginal gain of nitrogen investment is identical among leaves. However, observed photosynthetic N gradients in trees do not follow this prediction, and the causes for […]
Plant productivity in upland tundra and boreal forest is demonstrably limited by nitrogen (N) and indirect evidence from field studies suggests that decomposition by soil microbes may be similarly limited. As climate warms at high latitudes, understanding the response of soil organic matter (SOM) decomposition to increased soil temperature may […]
The direction and magnitude of soil organic carbon (SOC) changes in response to climate change remain unclear and depend on the spatial distribution of SOC across landscapes. Uncertainties regarding the fate of SOC are greater in high-latitude systems where data are sparse and the soils are affected by sub-zero temperatures. […]
The cryosphere—the portion of the Earth’s surface where water is in solid form for at least one month of the year—has been shrinking in response to climate warming. The extents of sea ice, snow, and glaciers, for example, have been decreasing. In response, the ecosystems within the cryosphere and those […]