Forest ecosystems in eastern Canada are particularly sensitive to climate change and may shift from carbon sinks to carbon sources in the coming decades. Understanding how forest biomass responded to past climate change is thus of crucial interest, but past biomass reconstruction still represents a challenge. Here we used transfer functions based on modern pollen assemblages and remotely sensed...

In the tropics, shifting cultivation has long been attributed to large scale forest degradation, and remains a major source of uncertainty in forest carbon accounting. In the Philippines, shifting cultivation, locally known as kaingin, is a major land-use in upland areas. We measured the distribution and recovery of aboveground biomass carbon along a fallow gradient in post-kaingin secondary fo...

Coral reefs around the world have experienced a dramatic decline during the past 25 years. Overfishing is believed to play a major role. There is significant interest in stabilizing and restoring damaged reefs, and first steps include understanding the functioning of reefs in their natural state and examining the effects of fishing. The isolated Kingman and Palmyra reefs are believed to provide...

Wood represents a promising source of lignocellulosic biomass for the production of bio-based renewables, especially biofuels. However, woody feedstocks must be improved to become competitive against petroleum. We created a collection of Populus trees consisting of 40 genetically engineered lines to modify and to better understand wood biomass properties. A total of 65 traits were measured in t...

The rangelands, as one of the largest dynamic biomes in the world,have very capabilities. Regulation of greenhouse gases in the Earth's atmosphere,particularly carbon dioxide as the main greenhouse gases, is one of these cases.The attention to rangeland, as cheep and reachable resources to sequestrate thecarbon dioxide, increases after the Industrial Revolution. Rangelands comprise thelarge par...

In this study, we evaluated the effects of two acid resin deposits on the soil microbiota of forest areas by means of biomass, microbial activity-related estimations and simple biological ratios. The determinations carried out included: total DNA yield, basal respiration, intracellular enzyme activities (dehydrogenase and catalase) and extracellular enzyme activities involved in the cycles of C...

Invasive species may owe some of their success in competing and co-existing with native species to microbial symbioses they are capable of forming. Tall fescue is a cool-season, non-native, invasive grass capable of co-existing with native warm-season grasses in North American grasslands that frequently experience fire, drought, and cold winters, conditions to which the native species should be...