BACKGROUND Restoration of degraded forest ecosystem is crucial for regional sustainable development. To protect the country's fragile and fragmented environment, the Chinese government initiated an ecological engineering project, the Natural Forest Protection Program, in seventeen provinces in China beginning in 1998. Fully hillside-closed forest protection (vegetation restoration naturally wit...

Earthworms play an important role in soil ecology and can serve as practical indicators in land quality evaluation. The abundance and distribution of earthworms were determined in 84 cropping and pasture soils in north-east Victoria and southern New South Wales (NSW), Australia. Overall, an average density of 89 earthworms mÿ2 was found, with an average species richness of 1±2 per site, indicat...

Application of chemical fertilizer or manure can affect soil microorganisms directly by supplying nutrients and indirectly by altering soil pH. However, it remains uncertain which effect mostly shapes microbial community structure. We determined soil bacterial diversity and community structure by 454 pyrosequencing the V1-V3 regions of 16S rRNA genes after 7-years (2007-2014) of applying chemic...

it is well known that ground-shaking site effect caused by an earthquake can vary significantly within a small distance. this is because at sites having soft soil and/or topographic and basement undulations, seismic energy gets trapped, leading to amplification of vibration that may cause considerable damage to man-made structures. theoretical analysis and observational data have shown that eac...

A Brazilian consortium has unveiled the genomic DNA sequence of the purple-pigmented bacterium Chromobacterium violaceum, a dominant component of the tropical soil microbiota. The sequence provides insight into the abundant potential of this organism for biotechnological and pharmaceutical applications.