Publications by authors named "Julia Stuart"
Article Synopsis
- Bryophytes are significant photoautotrophs that play key roles in water retention, carbon fixation, and nitrogen cycling across various ecosystems including forests, tundras, and deserts.
- Research highlights the importance of understanding how climate change affects bryophytes, as they can both buffer ecosystems from changes and face survival challenges due to unknown tolerance thresholds.
- As ecosystems shift due to climate change, the influence of bryophytes on global biogeochemical cycles may change, potentially altering the magnitude of their impact on ecosystem functions.
Article Synopsis
- Peatlands' carbon storage is influenced by a balance between plant productivity and decomposition, which can be disrupted by climate changes affecting water levels.
- Plant community shifts and altered water tables can affect ecosystem respiration and carbon loss from older peat, but their combined impacts are not well understood.
- Experiments showed that lower water tables increased decomposition rates and carbon respiration from deep peat, highlighting the risks to peatland carbon stores under changing climates and land use.
Moss-associated N fixation by epiphytic microbes is a key biogeochemical process in nutrient-limited high-latitude ecosystems. Abiotic drivers, such as temperature and moisture, and the identity of host mosses are critical sources of variation in N fixation rates. An understanding of the potential interaction between these factors is essential for predicting N inputs as moss communities change with the climate.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFBackground: Mosses in high-latitude ecosystems harbor diverse bacterial taxa, including N-fixers which are key contributors to nitrogen dynamics in these systems. Yet the relative importance of moss host species, and environmental factors, in structuring these microbial communities and their N-fixing potential remains unclear. We studied 26 boreal and tundra moss species across 24 sites in Alaska, USA, from 61 to 69° N.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFMosses are critical components of boreal ecosystems where they typically account for a large proportion of net primary productivity and harbour diverse bacterial communities that can be the major source of biologically-fixed nitrogen in these ecosystems. Despite their ecological importance, we have limited understanding of how microbial communities vary across boreal moss species and the extent to which local site conditions may influence the composition of these bacterial communities. We used marker gene sequencing to analyze bacterial communities associated with seven boreal moss species collected near Fairbanks, AK, USA.
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