Increasing levels of atmospheric carbon dioxide (CO2) and rates of nitrogen (N)-deposition to forest ecosystems are predicted to alter the structure and function of soil fungal communities, but the spatially heterogeneous distribution of soil fungi has hampered investigations aimed at understanding such impacts. We hypothesized that soil physical and chemical properties and fungal community com...

Soils harbor enormously diverse bacterial populations, and soil bacterial communities can vary greatly in composition across space. However, our understanding of the specific changes in soil bacterial community structure that occur across larger spatial scales is limited because most previous work has focused on either surveying a relatively small number of soils in detail or analyzing a larger...

Organic farming system and sustainable management of soil pathogens aim at reducing the use of agricultural chemicals in order to improve ecosystem health. Despite the essential role of microbial communities in agro-ecosystems, we still have limited understanding of the complex response of microbial diversity and composition to organic and conventional farming systems and to alternative methods...

Soil environmental quality is the capacity of a soil to function, within ecosystem and land use boundaries, to sustain biological productivity, maintain environmental quality, and promote plant, animal and human health'. In the long-term, vegetative rehabilitation of mining wastes aims at, as far as possible, the proper ecological integration of the reclaimed area into the surrounding landscape...

The draft genome sequences of Klebsiella variicola strain KV321, which was isolated from rhizosphere soil of Pisolithus tinctorius-Eucalyptus mycorrhiza, are reported here. The genome sequences contain genes involved in ABC transporter function in multiple-antibiotic drug resistance and colonization. This genomic analysis will help understand the genomic basis of K. variicola virulence genes an...

The strain 273 B, the type strain of a H serotype of Bacillus thuringiensis not yet characterized: B. thuringiensis subsp. cameroun, serotype H32, was isolated from soil samples collected in Cameroon. This strain produces cuboidal parasporal bodies composed of two major proteins of 53 kDa and 35 kDa. N-terminal sequences of the major proteins share no homology with published sequences. Only the...

Observing the evolution of a pathology in medical images, or of soil occupation in remote sensing, detecting changes in video sequences, updating a spatial information system are examples that can all benefit from quantification and comparison of spatial relations between objects in the observed scenes. In this paper, we propose two approaches to compare spatial relations represented as fuzzy s...

Microbial ecologists have discovered novel rRNA genes (rDNA) in mesophilic soil habitats worldwide, including sequences that affiliate phylogenetically within the division Crenarchaeota (domain Archaea). To characterize the spatial distribution of crenarchaeal assemblages in mesophilic soil habitats, we profiled amplified crenarchaeal 16S rDNA sequences from diverse soil ecosystems by using PCR...