Reproduction and Dispersal of Biological Soil Crust Organisms

Functional profiles reveal unique ecological roles of various biological soil crust organisms

1. At the heart of the body of research on biodiversity effects on ecosystem function is the debate over whether different species tend to be functionally singular or redundant. When we consider ecosystem multi-function, the provision of multiple ecosystem functions simultaneously, we may find that seemingly redundant species may in fact play unique roles in ecosystems. 2. Over the last few dec...

Impact of Environmental Factors and Biological Soil Crust Types on Soil Respiration in a Desert Ecosystem

The responses of soil respiration to environmental conditions have been studied extensively in various ecosystems. However, little is known about the impacts of temperature and moisture on soils respiration under biological soil crusts. In this study, CO2 efflux from biologically-crusted soils was measured continuously with an automated chamber system in Ningxia, northwest China, from June to O...

Impacts of biological soil crust disturbance and composition on C and N loss from water erosion

In this study, we conducted rainfall simulation experiments in a cool desert ecosystem to examine the role of biological soil crust disturbance and composition on dissolved and sediment C and N losses. We compared runoff and sediment C and N losses from intact latesuccessional dark cyanolichen crusts (intact) to both trampled dark crusts (trampled) and dark crusts where the top 1 cm of the soil...

Soil Organisms and Disease

Fractional reproduction-dispersal equations and heavy tail dispersal kernels.

Reproduction-Dispersal equations, called reaction-diffusion equations in the physics literature, model the growth and spreading of biological species. Integro-Difference equations were introduced to address the shortcomings of this model, since the dispersal of invasive species is often more widespread than what the classical RD model predicts. In this paper, we extend the RD model, replacing t...