Conserving the remaining savanna ecosystems in Brazilian (Cerrado) — a global biodiversity hotspot that stores carbon and provides water to large portion of South America requires understanding ecological processes maintaining their function. Nutrient cycling supports function via plant litter production decomposition by soil fauna, releasing nutrients for organism uptake. Soil biogeochemistry ...

1. Vegetation composition, structure, and life-history 1.1. Composition 1.2. Structure 1.3. Life-History Traits 1.4. Structure and Composition Linkage 2. Ecosystem function 2.1. Structure and Function Linkage 2.2. Diversity and Function Linkage 3. Vegetation classification 3.

Conservation prioritization usually focuses on conservation of rare species or biodiversity, rather than ecological processes. This is partially due to a lack of informative indicators of ecosystem function. Biological soil crusts (BSCs) trap and retain soil and water resources in arid ecosystems and function as major carbon and nitrogen fixers; thus, they may be informative indicators of ecosy...

Nellie Shepherd is a graduate student at a large Midwestern university working with a group of graduate students and post-doctoral fellows in the lab of Dr. Thomas Katz. The primary focus of the lab group’s research is various aspects of the fate, transport and biological effects of 1,3,5-trimethyltriazinetrione (TTT) in aquatic systems. TTT is a byproduct of several chemical manufacturing proc...

Ecosystem management of protection forests aims at maintaining forests near a state during which effective protection is secured. As the evolution of a dynamic forest ecosystem cannot be stopped, silvicultural measures are required which aim at maintaining both the ecosystem integrity and the protective function of mountain forests. Ecosystem integrity is defined as the system’s capacity to mai...

Entrepreneurial ecosystem is recently in increasing focus of scholars. There are several members of the entrepreneurial ecosystem shifting towards an entrepreneurial society. This paper explores how various regional members inside of the ecosystem are helping in spreading the entrepreneurial thoughts and shifting individuals and the general opinion from managed economy towards an entrepreneuria...

The Lake: Alice, Bertha, and Claudia live around Forest Lake, at some distance from each other. The ecosystem is sensitive, in particular to the solvent they have been using when painting their boats, and the lake is faring badly. Until recently, they had no way of knowing that the solvent would have this effect, but they just learned that it is in fact killing the fish in the lake, and that th...

Microbial communities are at the heart of all ecosystems, and yet microbial community behavior in disturbed environments remains difficult to measure and predict. Understanding the drivers of microbial community stability, including resistance (insensitivity to disturbance) and resilience (the rate of recovery after disturbance) is important for predicting community response to disturbance. Her...