How organisms respond to environmental change is a long-standing question in evolutionary biology. Species invading novel habitats provide an opportunity to examine contemporary evolution in action and decipher the pace of evolutionary change over short timescales. Here, we characterized phenotypic evolution in the Italian plethodontid salamander, Hydromantes strinatii, following the recent col...

Factors affecting the density and distribution of yellow-poplar regeneration after a single growing season prescribed fire were studied in mature upland oak stands in the southern Appalachian Mountains. In burned and unburned stands, density of one and two year old yellow-poplar seedlings was inventoried within 50 m from isolated yellow-poplar canopy seed trees in response to distance from seed...

BACKGROUND The hydrological cycle is an important way of transportation and reallocation of reactive nitrogen (N) in forest ecosystems. However, under a high level of atmospheric N deposition, the N distribution and cycling through water flows in forest ecosystems especially in bamboo ecosystems are not well understood. METHODOLOGY/PRINCIPAL FINDINGS In order to investigate N fluxes through w...

We quantified soil acidity and exchangeable cations in the forest floor and upper 7.5 cm of mineral soil beneath the canopies of individual trees of six different species in a mixed-species forest in northwestern Connecticut. Soil pH decreased in a sequence starting with sugar maple (Acer saccharum) . white ash (Fraxinus americana) . red maple (Acer rubrum) . beech (Fagus grandifolia) . red oak...

Northern peatlands store globally significant amounts of soil carbon that could be released to the atmosphere under drier conditions induced by climate change. We measured forest floor respiration (RFF) at hummocks and hollows in a treed boreal bog in Alberta, Canada and partitioned the flux into aboveground forest floor autotrophic, belowground forest floor autotrophic, belowground tree respir...

Introduction The mycelium of woodland fungi can act both as a reservoir and as a distribution system for nutrients, owing to its physiological and developmental adaptations to life at the interface between organic and mineral soil horizons. The mobility of accumulated nitrogen and phosphorus within the mycelial networks of cord-forming wood decay fungi and ectomycorrhiza enables fungi to play k...

—Ectomycorrhizal colonization and rooting characteristics were quantified in a mature ponderosa pine (Pinus ponderosa Dougl. ex Laws.) stand in the western Sierra Nevada. Root length totaled 3835.9 m ⋅ m–2 of forest floor surface area, with 96% consisting of the fine-root fraction. Total root dry weight and volume were 2230.4 g ⋅ m–2 and 5807.4 cm3 ⋅ m–2 of forest floor area, respectively, with...

Emissions of various C2-C10 hydrocarbons (VOCs) and halogenated hydrocarbons (VHOCs) from a boreal wetland and a Scots pine forest floor in south-western Finland were measured by the static chamber technique. Isoprene was the main non-methane hydrocarbon emitted by the wetland, but small emissions of ethene, propane, propene, 1-butene, 2-methylpropene, butane, pentane and hexane were also detec...

Tree trunks are important links between the forest floor and canopy, especially for flightless invertebrates that move from the forest floor to feed or breed in the canopy. Traps were used to sample invertebrates moving up and down on mahoe (Melicytus ramiflorus), hinau (Elaeocarpus dentatus), hard beech (Nothofagus truncata), and kamahi (Weinmannia racemosa). In 19 months 22 696 invertebrates ...

In hydrological models, evaporation from interception is often disregarded, combined with transpiration, or taken as a fixed percentage of rainfall. In general interception is not considered to be a significant process in rainfallrunoff modelling. However, it appears that on average interception can amount to 20–50% of the precipitation. Therefore, knowledge about the process of interception is...