The complex interactions between trees and soil microbes in forests as well as their inherent seasonal and spatial variations are poorly understood. In this study, we analyzed the effects of major European tree species (Fagus sylvatica L. and Picea abies (L.) Karst) on soil bacterial and fungal communities. Mineral soil samples were collected from different depths (0-10, 10-20 cm) and at differ...

Water availability is the main limiting factor in arid soils; however, few studies have examined the effects of drying and rewetting on nitrifiers from these environments. The effect of water availability on the diversity of ammonia-oxidizing bacteria (AOB) and archaea (AOA) from a semiarid soil of the Chilean sclerophyllous matorral was determined by microcosm assays. The addition of water eve...

Recent studies indicate that positive relationships between invasive plants and soil can contribute to further plant invasions. However, it remains unclear whether these relations remain unchanged throughout the growing season. In this study, spatial sequences of field observations along a transect were used to reveal seasonal interactions and spatially covarying relations between one common in...

Combining several soil fumigants to increase the broad spectrum of pest control is a common fumigation practice in current production agriculture. In this study, we investigated the effect of combined application of chloropicrin and methyl isothiocyanate (MITC) on their transformations and persistence in the environment. In aqueous solution, no direct reaction between MITC and chloropicrin occu...

Irrigated rice field soil is subjected to frequent changes in oxygen status due to the water regime by agricultural management. In this study, the community response of microeukaryotes in rice field soil to the oxygen status was explored in a microcosm experiment under defined conditions. Water-saturated soil was incubated under a two-level factorial design of oxygen and organic enrichment with...

A two-layer model for 1D vertical unsaturated flow based on the hypothesis of a sharp wetting front is presented. The model further assumes a uniform pore pressure throughout the wetting zone at any given time during the infiltration and redistribution processes. These assumptions allow to reduce the theoretical Richards equation to an ordinary differential equation that can track average soil ...

Microbial diversity can be used to assess the impact of agricultural practices on the long-term sustainability of cropping systems. The aim of this study was to investigate changes in soil bacterial diversity as a result of the impact of different soil tillage and crop rotation systems in an oxisol of southern Brazil. Bacterial diversity was examined in the 010 cm layer in two field experiments...

In soil microbiology, there is a "paradox" of soil organic carbon (SOC) mineralization, which is that even though chloroform fumigation destroys majority of the soil microbial biomass, SOC mineralization continues at the same rate as in the non-fumigated soil during the incubation period. Soil microeukaryotes as important SOC decomposers, however, their community-level responses to chloroform f...