Long-term Consequences on Soil Fungal Community Structure: Monoculture Planting and Natural Regeneration.

Understanding the regeneration and succession of belowground communities, particularly in forests, is vital for maintaining ecosystem health. Despite its importance, there is limited knowledge regarding how fungal communities change over time during ecosystem development, especially under different forest restoration strategies. In this study, we focused on two restoration methods used in northern Japan: monoculture planting and natural regeneration.

Synergistic effects of succession and microtopography of moraine on the fungal spatial diversity in a glacier forefield.

Primary succession and microtopography result in environmental changes and are important processes influencing the community assembly of soil fungi in the Arctic region. In glacier forefields that contain a series of moraine ridges, both processes contribute synchronously to fungal spatial diversity. To reveal the synergistic effects of succession and microtopography, we investigated the fungal community structure and environmental variables in the moraines of the Arklio Glacier, Ellesmere Island.

Discrepancies of fungi and plants in the pattern of beta-diversity with environmental gradient imply a comprehensive community assembly rule.

Beta-diversity partitioning has shown that the nestedness component is developed with environmental stress in a variety of taxa. However, soil fungal community may maintain its turnover components in contrast to the development of plants' nestedness component, and the potential causes remain unclear. To investigate the process of species turnover of soil fungi along a stress gradient in the Arctic, we divided species turnover component into sub-components: βsim_hete and βsim_homo representing species turnover with and without a change in the guilds, respectively.

The latitudinal gradient in plant community assembly processes: A meta-analysis.

Beta(β)-diversity, or site-to-site variation in species composition, generally decreases with increasing latitude, and the underlying processes driving this pattern have been challenging to elucidate because the signals of community assembly processes are scale-dependent. In this meta-analysis, by synthesising the results of 103 studies that were distributed globally and conducted at various spatial scales, we revealed a latitudinal gradient in the detectable assembly processes of vascular plant communities. Variations in plant community composition at low and high latitudes were mainly explained by geographic variables, suggesting that distance decay and dispersal limitations causing spatial aggregation are influential in these regions.

Functionally explicit partitioning of plant β-diversity reveal soil fungal assembly in the subarctic tundra.

Metabarcoding technologies for soil fungal DNA pools have enabled to capture the diversity of fungal community and the agreement of their β-diversity with plant β-diversity. However, processes underlying the synchrony of the aboveground-belowground biodiversity is still unclear. By using partitioning methods for plant β-diversity, this study explored the process driving synchrony in tundra ecosystems, in which drastic vegetation shifts are observed with climate warming.

Long-term deer exclosure alters soil properties, plant traits, understory plant community and insect herbivory, but not the functional relationships among them.

Evidence of the indirect effects of increasing global deer populations on other trophic levels is increasing. However, it remains unknown if excluding deer alters ecosystem functional relationships. We investigated how sika deer exclosure after 18 years changed soil conditions, the understory plant community, the traits of a dominant understory plant (Sasa palmata), herbivory by three insect-feeding guilds, and the functional relationships between these properties.

Shuttling Catalyst for Living Radical Miniemulsion Polymerization: Thermoresponsive Ligand for Efficient Catalysis and Removal.

In this report, we demonstrate the use of a thermoresponsive ligand for the ruthenium-catalyzed living radical polymerization of butyl methacrylate (BMA) in miniemulsion. A phosphine-ligand-functionalized polyethylene glycol chain (PPEG) in conjunction with a Cp*-based ruthenium complex (Cp*: pentamethylcyclopentadienyl) provided thermoresponsive character as well as catalysis for living polymerization: the complex migrated from the water phase to the oil phase for polymerization upon heating and then migrated from the oil to water phase when the temperature was decreased to quench polymerization. Consequently, simple treatment (i.