Growing interest in biofuel generation with cellulosic biomass from row crop residues necessitates research to investigate biomass and nutrient management systems impacts water quality. The objective of this research was to evaluate the impact of a range of cropping and corn biomass harvest systems on P loss with surface runoff as affected by N-P management based on inorganic fertilizers or liq...

The impact of biodiversity on the stability of ecological communities has been debated among biologists for more than a century. Recently summarized empirical evidence suggests that biodiversity tends to enhance the temporal stability of community-level properties such as biomass; however, the underlying mechanisms driving this relationship remain poorly understood. Here, we report the results ...

Interest in bioenergy is growing across the Western world in response to mounting concerns about climate change. There is a risk of depletion of soil carbon stocks in biomass production systems, because a higher proportion of the organic matter and nutrients are removed from the site, compared with conventional agricultural and forestry systems. This paper reviews the factors that influence soi...

The contribution of fungi and bacteria to the decomposition of alder leaves was examined at two reference and two polluted sites in the Ave River (northwestern Portugal). Leaf mass loss, microbial production from incorporation rates of radiolabeled compounds into biomolecules, fungal biomass from ergosterol concentration, sporulation rates, and diversity of aquatic hyphomycetes associated with ...

Anthropogenic infl uences have disproportionally aff ected freshwater ecosystems, and a loss of biodiversity is forecasted to greatly reduce ecosystem function and services. Loss of species may destabilize communities by limiting the stabilizing forces of compensatory dynamics and/or statistical averaging, both of which are eff ects that can buff er variation in aggregate community properties. ...

The main aim of this study was to investigate the number and biomass of impinged fish at Forsmark Nuclear Power Plant in Sweden, located on the coast of the Baltic Sea. Of particular interest was the number of impinged individuals of the critically endangered European eel (Anguilla anguilla) which is regularly caught in the cooling system. Another aim was to determine the comparability of the r...

A mathematical model is developed for converting between the two measurement bases commonly used in the construction of growth profiles in solid-state fermentation, namely absolute mass ratio m(dry biomass)/m(initial dry matter) and relative mass ratio m(dry biomass)/m(dry matter). These are not equivalent, due to the loss of dry matter as CO2 during the fermentation. The model is equally appli...

Nutrient amendment to oil-contaminated beach sediments is a critical factor for the enhancement of indigenous microbial activity and biodegradation of petroleum hydrocarbons in the intertidal marine environment. In this study, we investigated the stimulatory effect of the slow-release fertilizers Osmocote (Os; Scotts, Marysville, OH) and Inipol EAP-22 (Ip; ATOFINA Chemicals, Philadelphia, PA) c...