Further reduction in soil bacterial diversity under severe acidification in European temperate forests.

Despite a decrease in industrial nitrogen and sulfur deposition over recent decades, soil acidification remains a persistent challenge to European forest health, especially in regions of intense agriculture and urbanisation. Using topsoil eDNA metabarcoding and functional annotations from a sample of 49 plots (each 30 × 30 m) located in The Netherlands and Germany, we investigated the effect of severe acidification on bacterial taxonomic diversity under different forest types and explored potential functional implications for nutrient cycling. Furthermore, we assessed which soil parameters known to influence soil bacterial communities affect these acidophilic communities.

Beached Plastic Debris Index; a modern index for detecting plastics on beaches.

Plastic pollution on shorelines poses a significant threat to coastal ecosystems, underscoring the urgent need for scalable detection methods to facilitate debris removal. In this study, the Beached Plastic Debris Index (BPDI) was developed to detect plastic accumulation on beaches using shortwave infrared spectral features. To validate the BPDI, plastic targets with varying sub-pixel covers were placed on a sand spit and captured using WorldView-3 satellite imagery.

Mapping temperate old-growth forests in Central Europe using ALS and Sentinel-2A multispectral data.

Old-growth forests are essential to preserve biodiversity and play an important role in sequestering carbon and mitigating climate change. However, their existence across Europe is vulnerable due to the scarcity of their distribution, logging, and environmental threats. Therefore, providing the current status of old-growth forests across Europe is essential to aiding informed conservation efforts and sustainable forest management.

High-throughput Soxhlet extraction method applied for analysis of leaf lignocellulose and non-structural substances.

The traditional Soxhlet extraction method is commonly employed to extract soluble components from non-soluble components in a solid matrix, for example, non-structural substances in biomass samples that can be separated from structural lignocellulosic compounds in biomass samples. Conventional laboratory procedures for such extractions typically involve a low sample throughput, with each run being performed individually, resulting in time-consuming and labour-intensive processes, making them impractical for analysing large sample sets. In research fields such as Earth Observation in Forest Ecosystems, extensive fieldwork sampling is required across large study areas, resulting in a substantial number of leaf samples, each with limited mass.

Forest top canopy bacterial communities are influenced by elevation and host tree traits.

Background: The phyllosphere microbiome is crucial for plant health and ecosystem functioning. While host species play a determining role in shaping the phyllosphere microbiome, host trees of the same species that are subjected to different environmental conditions can still exhibit large degrees of variation in their microbiome diversity and composition. Whether these intra-specific variations in phyllosphere microbiome diversity and composition can be observed over the broader expanse of forest landscapes remains unclear.