Carbon sequestration and storage in peatlands rely on consistently highwater tables. Anthropogenic pressures including drainage, burning, land conversion for agriculture, timber, and biofuel production, cause loss of peat-forming vegetation and exposure of previously anaerobic peat to aerobic decomposition. This can shift peatlands from net CO2 sinks to large CO2 sources, releasing carbon held ...

Northern peatlands play a key role in the global carbon and water budget, but the bacterial diversity in these ecosystems remains poorly described. Here, we compared the bacterial community composition in the surface (0-5 cm depth) and subsurface (45-50 cm) peat layers of an acidic (pH 4.0) Sphagnum-dominated wetland, using pyrosequencing of 16S rRNA genes. The denoised sequences (37,229 reads,...

In early 1999, there was an increased incidence of tuberculous lesions in the lymph nodes of slaughtered pigs in the Czech Republic. In part 1 of this study, tuberculous lesions were detected in 140 (62%) tissue samples collected from pigs coming from 15 farms in 15 districts at routine veterinary meat inspections in abattoirs. Mycobacteria were isolated from 37 (16%) tissue samples: 34 Mycobac...

The discharge of septic tank effluent onto highly permeable soils may lead to nutrients entering the groundwater or flowing laterally from the site to pollute local streams. Seven domestic dwellings in a small village in northern New South Wales (NSW) were refurbished with new septic tank systems, and individual on-site land application systems were constructed to reduce the high risks of conta...

Teeth of mastodons and mammoths have been recovered by fishermen from at least 40 sites on the continental shelf as deep as 120 meters. Also present are submerged shorelines, peat deposits, lagoonal shells, anz relict sands. Evidently elephants and other large mammals ranged this region during the glacial stage of low sea level of the last 25,000 years.

Peat layers 2 to 30 cm in thickness, 22 to 46 m below present sea level, are found along the inner shelf of India, up to 27 km from the coast. They are rich in plant debris, organic carbon and sulfur. These organic-rich layers are not sedimentary deposits. Lack of favourable substrates, absence of sheltered habitats, high energy physical enVironments, and a very rapid sea level rise during earl...

ruffling is a practice through which the mycelia containing casing soil will be thoroughly mixed. to evaluate the effects of ruffling of different casing soils in button mushroom production, an experiment was conducted comprised of three levels of ruffling; no ruffling, deep ruffling vs. superficial scratch and eight different types of casing soils, namely: holland peat (c1), north peat (c2), s...

Fire has become a common feature in tropical drained peatlands, and it may have detrimental impacts on the overall biodiversity of the forest ecosystem. We investigated the effect of fire on termite and ant assemblages and the importance of remnant forest in restoring species diversity in fire-impacted tropical peat swamp forests. The species loss of both termites and ants was as high as 50% in...