Increased soil pollution with heavy metals due to various human and natural activities has led to a growing need to address environmental contamination. Some remediation technologies have been developed to treat contaminated soil, but a biology-based technology, phytoremediation, is emerging. Phytoremediation includes phytovolatilization, phytostabilization, and phytoextraction using hyperaccum...

The composition of nematode communities (plant-parasitic and free-living) may be used as bioindicators of soil health or condition because composition correlates well with nitrogen cycling and decomposition, two critical ecological processes in soil. Maturity and trophic diversity indices withstand statistical rigor better than do abundances, proportions, or ratios of trophic groups. Maturity i...

Serious global issues such as poverty, illness, food prices, climate changes, global market, pollution, pest adaptation and resistance, soil degradation, decreasing biodiversity and desertification can be explained by the increasing artificialization of human society. Since most issues are now intertwined they cannot be solved anymore by the classical fireman approach. In that respect, the stru...

BACKGROUND Soil ecology has produced a huge corpus of results on relations between soil organisms, ecosystem processes controlled by these organisms and links between belowground and aboveground processes. However, some soil scientists think that soil ecology is short of modelling and evolutionary approaches and has developed too independently from general ecology. We have tested quantitatively...

Aquatic plants play an essential role and are effective in mitigating lake eutrophication by forming complex plant-soil system and retaining total nitrogen (TN) and phosphorus (TP) in soils to ultimately reduce their quantities in aquatic systems. Two main vegetation types (Phragmites australis community and P. australis + Typha latifolia community) of Qin Lake wetland were sampled in this stud...

Within a single site in the Kohala Forest Reserve, Hawai‘i, we examined composition and diversity of soil microbial communities under four introduced (Cryptomeria japonica, Casuarina equisetifolia, Araucaria columnaris, and Eucalyptus sp.) and one native (Metrosideros polymorpha) canopy tree species, as well as pasture. Terminal restriction fragment length polymorphism (T-RFLP) analysis of soil...

Pasteuria penetrans is a mycelial, endospore-forming, bacterial parasite that has shown great potential as a biological control agent of root-knot nematodes. Considerable progress has been made during the last 10 years in understanding its biology and importance as an agent capable of effectively suppressing root-knot nematodes in field soil. The objective of this review is to summarize the cur...

There is an increasing awareness of the multiple ways that bacteriophages (phages) influence bacterial evolution, population dynamics, physiology, and pathogenicity. By studying a novel group of phages infecting a soil borne pathogen, we revealed a paradigm shifting observation that the phages switch their lifestyle according to temperature. We sampled soil from an endemic area of the serious t...

Nitrogen (N) is one of the elements most needed by plants and widely distributed in nature. fixation can occur symbiotic or non-symbiotic soil microbes. This research aimed to examine potential N-fixing microbes increasing availability N soil. was conducted at Soil Biology Laboratory Faculty Agriculture, Universitas Sumatera Utara. The results showed that ability increase varied. population bac...