Protecting a nation's primary production sector and natural estate is heavily dependent on the ability to determine the risk presented by incursions of exotic insect species. Identifying the geographic origin of such biosecurity breaches can be crucial in determining this risk and directing the appropriate operational responses and eradication campaigns, as well as ascertaining incursion pathwa...

Ecological processes regulating soil carbon (C) and nitrogen (N) cycles are still poorly understood, especially in the world's largest agricultural frontier in Southern Amazonia. We analyzed soil parameters in samples from pristine rainforest and after land use change to pasture and crop fields, and correlated them with abundance of functional and phylogenetic marker genes (amoA, nirK, nirS, no...

The recent retreat of glaciers and ice sheets as a result of global warming exposes forefield soils that are rapidly colonized by microbes. These ecosystems are dominant in high-latitude carbon and nutrient cycles as microbial activity drives biogeochemical transformations within these newly exposed soils. Despite this, little is known about the response of these emerging ecosystems and associa...

The importance of snow and related cryospheric processes as an ecological factor has been recognized since at least the beginning of the twentieth century. Even today, however, many observations remain anecdotal. The research to date on cold-lands ecosystems results in scientists being unable to evaluate to what extent changes in the cryosphere will be characterized by abrupt changes in local a...