Publications by authors named "R D Bardgett"
Nitrogen (N) uptake by plant roots from soil is the largest flux within the terrestrial N cycle. Despite its significance, a comprehensive analysis of plant uptake for inorganic and organic N forms across grasslands is lacking. Here we measured in situ plant uptake of 13 inorganic and organic N forms by dominant species along a 3000 km transect spanning temperate and alpine grasslands.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFArticle Synopsis
- Root functional traits significantly affect soil properties important for ecosystem functioning, yet their interplay with perturbations like defoliation and fertilisation is under-researched.
- This study analyzed how root traits of various grassland plant species (with differing resource strategies) respond to defoliation and fertilisation both separately and together, and how these responses influence soil properties.
- Findings revealed that defoliation increased specific root length but decreased root biomass, while fertilisation had opposite effects; both perturbations enhanced the influence of root traits on soil stability and other properties crucial for ecosystem health.
Article Synopsis
- The study investigates how climate change factors, specifically reduced snow cover and shrub expansion, affect nutrient cycling in alpine grasslands, which are experiencing warming at twice the global average.
- The combination of these factors significantly disrupts the seasonal coupling of plant and soil microbial nitrogen cycling, leading to substantial decreases in plant nitrogen uptake and soil microbial biomass during critical seasonal periods.
- Overall, these disruptions hinder the ability of alpine ecosystems to retain nitrogen and maintain plant productivity, raising concerns for their resilience under ongoing climate change.
Deforestation impacts soil biodiversity and ecosystem services worldwide.
Proc Natl Acad Sci U S A
March 2024
Deforestation poses a global threat to biodiversity and its capacity to deliver ecosystem services. Yet, the impacts of deforestation on soil biodiversity and its associated ecosystem services remain virtually unknown. We generated a global dataset including 696 paired-site observations to investigate how native forest conversion to other land uses affects soil properties, biodiversity, and functions associated with the delivery of multiple ecosystem services.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFSoil microbial communities are dominated by a relatively small number of taxa that may play outsized roles in ecosystem functioning, yet little is known about their capacities to resist and recover from climate extremes such as drought, or how environmental context mediates those responses. Here, we imposed an in situ experimental drought across 30 diverse UK grassland sites with contrasting management intensities and found that: (1) the majority of dominant bacterial (85%) and fungal (89%) taxa exhibit resistant or opportunistic drought strategies, possibly contributing to their ubiquity and dominance across sites; and (2) intensive grassland management decreases the proportion of drought-sensitive and non-resilient dominant bacteria-likely via alleviation of nutrient limitation and pH-related stress under fertilisation and liming-but has the opposite impact on dominant fungi. Our results suggest a potential mechanism by which intensive management promotes bacteria over fungi under drought with implications for soil functioning.
View Article and Find Full Text PDF