Understanding how elevated atmospheric CO2 alters the formation and decomposition of soil organic carbon (SOC) is important but challenging. If elevated CO2 induces even small changes in rates of formation or decay of SOC, there could be substantial feedbacks on the atmosphere’s concentration of CO2. However, the long turnover times […]
[1] The future size of the terrestrial methane (CH4) sink of upland soils remains uncertain, along with potential feedbacks to global warming. Much of the uncertainty lies in our lack of knowledge about potential interactive effects of multiple simultaneous global environmental changes. Field CH4 fluxes and laboratory soil CH4 consumption were […]
Forestry – including afforestation (the planting of trees on land where they have not recently existed), reforestation, avoided deforestation, and forest management – can lead to increased sequestration of atmospheric carbon dioxide and has therefore been proposed as a strategy to mitigate climate change. However, forestry also influences land-surface properties, […]
In order to study controls on metabolic processes in soils, we determined the dynamics of 13CO2 production from two position-specific 13C-labeled pyruvate isotopologues in the presence and absence of glucose, succinate, pine, and legume leaf litter, and under anaerobic conditions. We also compared 13CO2 production in soils along a semiarid […]
Global environmental changes are expected to impact the abundance of plants and animals aboveground, but comparably little is known about the responses of belowground organisms. Using meta-analysis, we synthesized results from over 75 manipulative experiments in order to test for patterns in the effects of elevated CO2, warming, and altered […]
Responses of soil nitrogen (N) cycling to simultaneous and potentially interacting global environmental changes are uncertain. Here, we investigated the combined effects of elevated CO2, warming, increased precipitation and enhanced N supply on soil N cycling in an annual grassland ecosystem as part of the Jasper Ridge Global Change Experiment […]
Background Little is known about the combined impacts of global environmental changes and ecological disturbances on ecosystem functioning, even though such combined impacts might play critical roles in shaping ecosystem processes that can in turn feed back to climate change, such as soil emissions of greenhouse gases. Methodology/Principal Findings We […]
Many thermophiles catalyse free energy-yielding redox reactions involving nitrogenous compounds; however, little is known about these processes in natural thermal environments. Rates of ammonia oxidation, denitrification and dissimilatory nitrate reduction to ammonium (DNRA) were measured in source water and sediments of two ∼80°C springs in the US Great Basin. Ammonia […]
Most organic carbon (C) in soils eventually turns into CO2 after passing through microbial metabolic pathways, while providing cells with energy and biosynthetic precursors. Therefore, detailed insight into these metabolic processes may help elucidate mechanisms of soil C cycling processes. Here, we describe a modeling approach to quantify the C […]
We used metabolic tracers and modeling to analyze the response of soil metabolism to a sudden change in temperature from 4 to 20 °C. We hypothesized that intact soil microbial communities would exhibit shifts in pentose phosphate pathway and glycolysis activity in the same way as is regularly observed for individual […]