The biological controls of soil carbon accumulation following wildfire and harvest in boreal forests: A review.

Boreal forests are frequently subjected to disturbances, including wildfire and clear-cutting. While these disturbances can cause soil carbon (C) losses, the long-term accumulation dynamics of soil C stocks during subsequent stand development is controlled by biological processes related to the balance of net primary production (NPP) and outputs via heterotrophic respiration and leaching, many of which remain poorly understood. We review the biological processes suggested to influence soil C accumulation in boreal forests.

Isopod mouthpart traits respond to a tropical forest recovery gradient.

Functional trait ecology has the potential to provide generalizable and mechanistic predictions of ecosystem function from data of species distributions and traits. The traits that are selected should both respond to environmental factors and influence ecosystem functioning. Invertebrate mouthpart traits fulfill these criteria, but are seldom collected, lack standardized measurement protocols, and have infrequently been investigated in response to environmental factors.

The role of psychiatry in diagnosis and treatment of paediatric chronic fatigue syndrome - a scoping literature review.

Objectives: Paediatric Chronic Fatigue Syndrome (pCFS) is a common condition that significantly disrupts a healthy psychosocial development. Psychiatric symptoms associated with pCFS are conceptualized as either part of its complex etiology, its consequence, or as a comorbidity. However, patients with this condition are rarely seen by psychiatrists.

Temporal dynamics of soil fungi in a pyrodiverse dry-sclerophyll forest.

Fire is a major evolutionary and ecological driver that shapes biodiversity in forests. While above-ground community responses to fire have been well-documented, those below-ground are much less understood. However, below-ground communities, including fungi, play key roles in forests and facilitate the recovery of other organisms after fire.

Fire severity as a key determinant of aboveground and belowground biological community recovery in managed even-aged boreal forests.

Changes in fire regime of boreal forests in response to climate warming are expected to impact postfire recovery. However, quantitative data on how managed forests sustain and recover from recent fire disturbance are limited.Two years after a large wildfire in managed even-aged boreal forests in Sweden, we investigated how recovery of aboveground and belowground communities, that is, understory vegetation and soil microbial and faunal communities, responded to variation in the severity of soil (i.

Trends in the direction of global plant invasion biology research over the past two decades.

Invasive plants are a growing ecological problem worldwide, but biases and patterns within invasive plant research may affect our understanding of invasive plant ecology. In this study, we analyzed 458 invasive plant papers sampled from the two journals dedicated entirely to the field of invasion biology, i.e.

From bottom-up to top-down control of invertebrate herbivores in a retrogressive chronosequence.

In the long-term absence of disturbance, ecosystems often enter a decline or retrogressive phase which leads to reductions in primary productivity, plant biomass, nutrient cycling and foliar quality. However, the consequences of ecosystem retrogression for higher trophic levels such as herbivores and predators, are less clear. Using a post-fire forested island-chronosequence across which retrogression occurs, we provide evidence that nutrient availability strongly controls invertebrate herbivore biomass when predators are few, but that there is a switch from bottom-up to top-down control when predators are common.

Leaf decomposition and flammability are largely decoupled across species in a tropical swamp forest despite sharing some predictive leaf functional traits.

Decomposition and fire are major carbon pathways in many ecosystems, yet potential linkages between these processes are poorly understood. We test whether variability in decomposability and flammability across species are related to each other and to key plant functional traits in tropical swamp forests, where habitat degradation is elevating decomposition and fire regimes. Using senesced and fresh leaves of 22 swamp tree species in Singapore, we conducted an in situ decomposition experiment and a laboratory flammability experiment.

The road to recovery: a synthesis of outcomes from ecosystem restoration in tropical and sub-tropical Asian forests.

Current policy is driving renewed impetus to restore forests to return ecological function, protect species, sequester carbon and secure livelihoods. Here we assess the contribution of tree planting to ecosystem restoration in tropical and sub-tropical Asia; we synthesize evidence on mortality and growth of planted trees at 176 sites and assess structural and biodiversity recovery of co-located actively restored and naturally regenerating forest plots. Mean mortality of planted trees was 18% 1 year after planting, increasing to 44% after 5 years.

Integrating natural gradients, experiments, and statistical modeling in a distributed network experiment: An example from the WaRM Network.

A growing body of work examines the direct and indirect effects of climate change on ecosystems, typically by using manipulative experiments at a single site or performing meta-analyses across many independent experiments. However, results from single-site studies tend to have limited generality. Although meta-analytic approaches can help overcome this by exploring trends across sites, the inherent limitations in combining disparate datasets from independent approaches remain a major challenge.

Ericoid shrubs shape fungal communities and suppress organic matter decomposition in boreal forests.

Mycorrhizal fungi associated with boreal trees and ericaceous shrubs are central actors in organic matter (OM) accumulation through their belowground carbon allocation, their potential capacity to mine organic matter for nitrogen (N) and their ability to suppress saprotrophs. Yet, interactions between co-occurring ectomycorrhizal fungi (EMF), ericoid mycorrhizal fungi (ERI), and saprotrophs are poorly understood. We used a long-term (19 yr) plant functional group manipulation experiment with removals of tree roots, ericaceous shrubs and mosses and analysed the responses of different fungal guilds (assessed by metabarcoding) and their interactions in relation to OM quality (assessed by mid-infrared spectroscopy and nuclear magnetic resonance) and decomposition (litter mesh-bags) across a 5000-yr post-fire boreal forest chronosequence.

Urbanization minimizes the effects of plant traits on soil provisioned ecosystem services across climatic regions.

An increasingly urbanized world is one of the most prominent examples of global environmental change. Across the globe, urban parks are designed and managed in a similar way, resulting in visually pleasing expansions of lawn interspersed with individually planted trees of varying appearances and functional traits. These large urban greenspaces have the capacity to provide various ecosystem services, including those associated with soil physicochemical properties.

Global data on earthworm abundance, biomass, diversity and corresponding environmental properties.

Earthworms are an important soil taxon as ecosystem engineers, providing a variety of crucial ecosystem functions and services. Little is known about their diversity and distribution at large spatial scales, despite the availability of considerable amounts of local-scale data. Earthworm diversity data, obtained from the primary literature or provided directly by authors, were collated with information on site locations, including coordinates, habitat cover, and soil properties.

Home-field advantage of litter decomposition: from the phyllosphere to the soil.

Plants often associate with specialized decomposer communities that increase plant litter breakdown, a phenomenon that is known as the 'home-field advantage' (HFA). Although the concept of HFA has long considered only the role of the soil microbial community, explicit consideration of the role of the microbial community on the foliage before litter fall (i.e.

Root trait-microbial relationships across tundra plant species.

Fine roots, and their functional traits, influence associated rhizosphere microorganisms via root exudation and root litter quality. However, little information is known about their relationship with rhizosphere microbial taxa and functional guilds. We investigated the relationships of 11 fine root traits of 20 sub-arctic tundra meadow plant species and soil microbial community composition, using phospholipid fatty acids (PLFAs) and high-throughput sequencing.

The influence of soil age on ecosystem structure and function across biomes.

The importance of soil age as an ecosystem driver across biomes remains largely unresolved. By combining a cross-biome global field survey, including data for 32 soil, plant, and microbial properties in 16 soil chronosequences, with a global meta-analysis, we show that soil age is a significant ecosystem driver, but only accounts for a relatively small proportion of the cross-biome variation in multiple ecosystem properties. Parent material, climate, vegetation and topography predict, collectively, 24 times more variation in ecosystem properties than soil age alone.

Ozone affects plant, insect, and soil microbial communities: A threat to terrestrial ecosystems and biodiversity.

Elevated tropospheric ozone concentrations induce adverse effects in plants. We reviewed how ozone affects (i) the composition and diversity of plant communities by affecting key physiological traits; (ii) foliar chemistry and the emission of volatiles, thereby affecting plant-plant competition, plant-insect interactions, and the composition of insect communities; and (iii) plant-soil-microbe interactions and the composition of soil communities by disrupting plant litterfall and altering root exudation, soil enzymatic activities, decomposition, and nutrient cycling. The community composition of soil microbes is consequently changed, and alpha diversity is often reduced.

Effects of plant functional group removal on CO fluxes and belowground C stocks across contrasting ecosystems.

Changes in plant communities can have large effects on ecosystem carbon (C) dynamics and long-term C stocks. However, how these effects are mediated by environmental context or vary among ecosystems is not well understood. To study this, we used a long-term plant removal experiment set up across 30 forested lake islands in northern Sweden that collectively represent a strong gradient of soil fertility and ecosystem productivity.

Mosses modify effects of warmer and wetter conditions on tree seedlings at the alpine treeline.

Climate warming enables tree seedling establishment beyond the current alpine treeline, but to achieve this, seedlings have to establish within existing tundra vegetation. In tundra, mosses are a prominent feature, known to regulate soil temperature and moisture through their physical structure and associated water retention capacity. Moss presence and species identity might therefore modify the impact of increases in temperature and precipitation on tree seedling establishment at the arctic-alpine treeline.

Rhizosphere control of soil nitrogen cycling: a key component of plant economic strategies.

Understanding how plant species influence soil nutrient cycling is a major theme in terrestrial ecosystem ecology. However, the prevailing paradigm has mostly focused on litter decomposition, while rhizosphere effects on soil organic matter (SOM) decomposition have attracted little attention. Using a dual C/ N labeling approach in a 'common garden' glasshouse experiment, we investigated how the economic strategies of 12 grassland plant species (graminoids, forbs and legumes) drive soil nitrogen (N) cycling via rhizosphere processes, and how this in turn affects plant N acquisition and growth.

A global database of soil nematode abundance and functional group composition.

As the most abundant animals on earth, nematodes are a dominant component of the soil community. They play critical roles in regulating biogeochemical cycles and vegetation dynamics within and across landscapes and are an indicator of soil biological activity. Here, we present a comprehensive global dataset of soil nematode abundance and functional group composition.

A multitrophic perspective on biodiversity-ecosystem functioning research.

Concern about the functional consequences of unprecedented loss in biodiversity has prompted biodiversity-ecosystem functioning (BEF) research to become one of the most active fields of ecological research in the past 25 years. Hundreds of experiments have manipulated biodiversity as an independent variable and found compelling support that the functioning of ecosystems increases with the diversity of their ecological communities. This research has also identified some of the mechanisms underlying BEF relationships, some context-dependencies of the strength of relationships, as well as implications for various ecosystem services that mankind depends upon.