Meta-analysis reveals that the effects of precipitation change on soil and litter fauna in forests depend on body size.

Anthropogenic climate change is altering precipitation regimes at a global scale. While precipitation changes have been linked to changes in the abundance and diversity of soil and litter invertebrate fauna in forests, general trends have remained elusive due to mixed results from primary studies. We used a meta-analysis based on 430 comparisons from 38 primary studies to address associated knowledge gaps, (i) quantifying impacts of precipitation change on forest soil and litter fauna abundance and diversity, (ii) exploring reasons for variation in impacts and (iii) examining biases affecting the realism and accuracy of experimental studies.

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.

[Incidence of COVID-19 in health workers. Work activity and home protection].

Background: The COVID-19 pandemic has had repercussions in the social, economic, psychological and health spheres, for which risk and exposure groups have been identified. Health workers are distinguished from the rest of the population by constant contact with patients carrying the SARS-CoV-2 virus.

Objetive: To determine the difference in the incidence of COVID-19 in health workers who remain in work activity and those who shelter at home.

Scale dependency of ectomycorrhizal fungal community assembly processes in Mediterranean mixed forests.

The assembly of biological communities depends on deterministic and stochastic processes whose influence varies across spatial and temporal scales. Although ectomycorrhizal (ECM) fungi play a key role in forest ecosystems, our knowledge on ECM community assembly processes and their dependency on spatial scales is still scarce. We analysed the assembly processes operating on ECM fungal communities associated with Cistus albidus L.

Ectomycorrhizal fungal diversity decreases in Mediterranean pine forests adapted to recurrent fires.

Fire is a major disturbance linked to the evolutionary history and climate of Mediterranean ecosystems, where the vegetation has evolved fire-adaptive traits (e.g., serotiny in pines).