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 […]
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 […]
Vessel length is an important but understudied dimension of variation in angiosperm vascular anatomy. Among other traits, vessel length mediates an important tradeoff between hydraulic efficiency and safety that could influence how plants respond to extreme weather with climate change. However, the functional significance of vessel length variation within individual […]
Isotopic methods offer great potential for partitioning trace gas fluxes such as soil respiration into their different source contributions. Traditional partitioning methods face challenges due to variability introduced by different measurement methods, fractionation effects, and end-member uncertainty. To address these challenges, we describe a hierarchical Bayesian (HB) approach for isotopic […]
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 […]
Ready to climb a California coast redwood (Sequoia sempervirens), to sample branches for fungi. In this issue, Harrison et al. delved into a largely unexplored reservoir of fungal diversity—the forest canopy—using a high-throughput sequence-based approach to characterize the composition of the fungal community at different heights within the crowns 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 […]
Understanding the global carbon (C) cycle is of crucial importance to map current and future climate dynamics relative to global environmental change. A full characterization of C cycling requires detailed information on spatiotemporal patterns of surface-atmosphere fluxes. However, relevant C cycle observations are highly variable in their coverage and reporting […]