Fire is a primary disturbance in boreal forests and generates both positive and negative climate forcings. The influence of fire on surface albedo is a predominantly negative forcing in boreal forests, and one of the strongest overall, due to increased snow exposure in the winter and spring months. Albedo forcings […]
Growth of soil microorganisms is often described as carbon limited, and adding labile carbon to soil often results in a transient and large increase in respiration. In contrast, soil microbial biomass changes little, suggesting that growth and respiration are decoupled in response to a carbon pulse. Alternatively, measuring bulk responses […]
Chinese milk vetch (Astragalus sinicus L., vetch), a leguminous winter cover crop, has been widely adopted by farmers in southern China to boost yield of the succeeding rice crop. However, the effects of vetch on rice grain yield and nitrogen (N) use efficiency have not yet been well studied in […]
As terrestrial leaf litter decomposes in rivers, its constituent elements follow multiple pathways. Carbon leached as dissolved organic matter can be quickly taken up by microbes, then respired before it can be transferred to the macroscopic food web. Alternatively, this detrital carbon can be ingested and assimilated by aquatic invertebrates, […]
Organic matter input to soils can accelerate the decomposition of native soil carbon (C), a process called the priming effect. Priming is ubiquitous and exhibits some consistent patterns, but a general explanation remains elusive, in part because of variation in the response across different ecosystems, and because of a diversity […]
Climate warming is leading to greater precipitation variability, resulting in increased frequency and intensity of both drought and wet extremes. However, how these extreme events interact with climate warming and hay-harvest in grasslands to impact ecosystem functions has not yet been well explored. In this study, we took advantage of […]
Ongoing permafrost thaw is expected to stimulate microbial release of greenhouse gases, threatening to further exacerbate climate change (cause positive feedback). In this study, a unique field warming experiment was conducted in Interior Alaska to promote surface permafrost degradation while maintaining uniform hydraulic conditions. After 5 winters of experimental warming […]
Pinyon-juniper (PJ) plant communities cover a large area across North America and provide critical habitat for wildlife, biodiversity and ecosystem functions, and rich cultural resources. These communities occur across a variety of environmental gradients, disturbance regimes, structural conditions and species compositions, including three species of juniper and two species of […]
Plant species are characterized along a spectrum of isohydry to anisohydry depending on their regulation of water potential (?), but the plasticity of hydraulic strategies is largely unknown. The role of environmental drivers was evaluated in the hydraulic behavior of Larrea tridentata, a drought-tolerant desert shrub that withstands a wide […]
Dynamic global vegetation models are key tools for interpreting and forecasting the responses of terrestrial ecosystems to climatic variation and other drivers. They estimate plant growth as the outcome of the supply of carbon through photosynthesis. However, growth is itself under direct control, and not simply controlled by the amount […]