Publications by authors named "Francesco Malfasi"
Article Synopsis
- The study investigates how soil archaeal communities in Alpine regions respond to climate change, emphasizing that these areas are warming faster than the global average.
- Using advanced techniques like metagenomics and metatranscriptomics, researchers found that warming (+1°C) over five years increased the abundance of Archaea in snowbeds, while negatively impacting fungi and certain micronutrients.
- Results indicate that warming triggers changes at the transcription level, with enhanced transcription and nucleotide biosynthesis in soil Archaea, highlighting important shifts in composition and function due to climate change.
Article Synopsis
- - This study examines how climate change impacts the soil microbiome at the Stelvio Pass in the Italian Alps by looking at different altitudes and types of vegetation during peak growth times.
- - Findings suggest that the functionality and diversity of soil microbes vary with vegetation types and altitude, with lower altitudes producing more fungi that play a role in breaking down tough plant materials.
- - Results indicate that short-term warming (5 years) did not significantly change microbial communities, suggesting that longer studies are necessary to fully understand the impacts of temperature increases on alpine soil ecosystems.
The strong air temperature warming between the 1950s and 2016 in the Antarctic Peninsula region exceeded the global average warming with evident impacts on terrestrial ecosystems and the two native Antarctic vascular plants Deschampsia antarctica Desv. and Colobanthus quitensis (Kunth) Bartl. Subsequently, a short but intense cooling occurred from the Antarctic Peninsula to the South Orkney Islands (1999-2016), impacting terrestrial ecosystems, with reduced lichen growth and no further expansion of D.
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- Research discusses how current global climate models are based on air temperatures but fail to capture the soil temperatures beneath vegetation where many species thrive.
- New global maps present soil temperature and bioclimatic variables at 1-km resolution for specific depths, revealing that mean annual soil temperatures can differ significantly from air temperatures by up to 10°C.
- The findings indicate that relying on air temperature could misrepresent climate impacts on ecosystems, especially in colder regions, highlighting the need for more precise soil temperature data for ecological studies.
Article Synopsis
- - Soil enzymatic activity was studied in the Stelvio Pass region of the Italian Alps to understand how climate change might affect microbial functioning, focusing on a subalpine site (2239 m) and an alpine site (2604-2624 m), which differ in temperature by almost 3 °C.
- - Hexagonal open top chambers were used to simulate short-term warming at the higher site, showing that subalpine soils had greater microbial activity and higher levels of certain nutrients compared to alpine soils, with bacteria being more abundant than fungi in both types of soil.
- - The short-term warming did not significantly alter edaphic parameters or microbial biomass in the soil, suggesting that potential future changes in vegetation may have a
Current analyses and predictions of spatially explicit patterns and processes in ecology most often rely on climate data interpolated from standardized weather stations. This interpolated climate data represents long-term average thermal conditions at coarse spatial resolutions only. Hence, many climate-forcing factors that operate at fine spatiotemporal resolutions are overlooked.
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