The role of exotic plants in regulating soil microbial community structure and activity following invasion chronosequence remains unclear. We investigated soil microbial community structure and microbial respiration following Spartina alterniflora invasion in a chronosequence of 6-, 10-, 17-, and 20-year-old by comparing with bare flat in a coastal wetland of China. S. alterniflora invasion sig...

The temporal variability of ecosystem respiration (RECO) has been reported to have important effects on the temporal variability of net ecosystem exchange, the net amount of carbon exchanged between an ecosystem and the atmosphere. However, our understanding of ecosystem respiration is rather limited compared with photosynthesis or gross primary productivity, particularly in Mediterranean monta...

Understanding the response mechanisms of litter respiration to soil moisture in water-limited semi-arid regions is of vital importance to better understanding the interplay between ecological processes and the local carbon cycle. In situ soil respiration was monitored during 2010-2012 under various conditions (normal litter, no litter, and double litter treatments) in a 30-year-old artificial b...

China possesses large areas of plantation forests which take up great quantities of carbon. However, studies on soil respiration in these plantation forests are rather scarce and their soil carbon flux remains an uncertainty. In this study, we used an automatic chamber system to measure soil surface flux of a 50-year-old mature plantation of Platycladus orientalis at Jiufeng Mountain, Beijing, ...

Separating ecosystem and soil respiration into autotrophic and heterotrophic component sources is necessary for understanding how the net ecosystem exchange of carbon (C) will respond to current and future changes in climate and vegetation. Here, we use an isotope mass balance method based on radiocarbon to partition respiration sources in three mature black spruce forest stands in Alaska. Radi...

The technology of freezing saline water irrigation (FSWI) with plastic mulching has been regarded as an effective way to reclaim the highly saline soil in coastal plains, which enabled the growth of crops in heavy saline soil that was not suitable for any crop growth before. However, after long-term treatment with FSWI, the microenvironment of the soil has been found to be affected by the growt...

[1] Soil surface CO2 efflux is an important component of the carbon cycle in terrestrial ecosystems. However, our understanding of mechanistic controls of soil CO2 production and transport is greatly limited. Amultilayer process-based soil CO2 effluxmodel (PATCIS) wasused to evaluate soilCO2production and transport in theDukeForest.CO2production in the soil is the sum of root respiration and so...

Anthropogenic climate change is expected to increase global temperatures and potentially increase soil carbon (C) mineralization, which could lead to a positive feedback between global warming and soil respiration. However the magnitude and spatial variability of belowground responses to warming are not yet fully understood. Some of the variability may depend on the native temperature regimes o...

Effects of six tillage practices on some soil microbiological properties and crop yields were evaluated for a clay soil (Typic Haploxererts) under semi-arid Mediterranean conditions in a three year study (2006-2009). The experiment was designed as a completely randomized-block with three replications. Treatments were: conventional tillage with residue incorporated (CT1), conventional tillage wi...

Hotspots and coldspots of concentration and biodegradation of polycyclic aromatic hydrocarbons (PAHs) marginally overlapped at the 0.5-100 m scale in a creosote contaminated soil in southern Sweden, suggesting that concentration and biodegradation had little spatial co-variation. Biodegradation was substantial and its spatial variability considerable and highly irregular, but it had no spatial ...