Rethinking the Connections between Ecosystem Services, Pollinators, Pollution, and Health: Focus on Air Pollution and Its Impacts.

Ecosystems provide many services that are essential for human activities and for our well-being. Many regulation services are interconnected and are fundamental in mitigating and hindering the negative effects of several phenomena such as pollution. Pollution, in particular airborne particulate matter (PM), represents an important risk to human health.

The Honey Bee : An Insect at the Interface between Human and Ecosystem Health.

The concept of ecosystem services is widely understood as the services and benefits thatecosystems provide to humans, and they have been categorised into provisioning, regulating, supporting, and cultural services. This article aims to provide an updated overview of the benefits that the honey bee provides to humans as well as ecosystems. We revised the role of honey bees as pollinators in natural ecosystems to preserve and restore the local biodiversity of wild plants; in agro-ecosystems, this species is widely used to enhance crop yield and quality, meeting the increasing food demand.

Decomposition of black pine (Pinus nigra J. F. Arnold) deadwood and its impact on forest soil components.

Deadwood decomposition is a complex and dynamic process with large implications for biogeochemical cycling of carbon (C) and nitrogen (N) in forest soil and litter. Moreover, it affects functional and structural diversity of fungal and bacterial communities in these components. Mesocosms with deadwood blocks at progressive decay classes were set in a black pine forest and incubated for 28 months in the field with the aim to assess the impact of deadwood decomposition on i) CO, CH and NO fluxes; ii) C and N pools and allocation among deadwood, litter and soil; iii) the fungal and bacterial structural diversity and activity.

Teamwork makes the dream work: Disentangling cross-taxon congruence across soil biota in black pine plantations.

Soil plays a fundamental role in many ecological processes, throughout a complex network of above- and below-ground interactions. This has aroused increasing interest in the use of correlates for biodiversity assessment and has demonstrated their reliability with respect to proxies based on environmental data alone. Although co-variation of species richness and composition in forests has been discussed in the literature, only a few studies have explored these elements in forest plantations, which are generally thought to be poor in biodiversity, being aimed at timber production.