Objective: To highlight the need and the potential for an integrated understanding of three key soil-based drivers of plant community structure and dynamics – soil fertility, soil heterogeneity, and microbes. Location: European and North American grasslands. Methods: Review and discussion of conceptual models and empirical literature, including examples of observational and manipulative studies...

[1] The soil water content plays a fundamental role in a number of important environmental processes, including those involved in the water cycle, vegetation dynamics, soil biogeochemical cycles, and land-atmosphere interactions. Despite the recent efforts spent in the analytical modeling of the stochastic soil moisture dynamics in dryland ecosystems, the probabilistic characterization of the s...

To obtain an in-depth understanding of soil nitrogen dynamics, it is necessary to quantify a variety of simultaneously occurring gross nitrogen transformation processes. In order to do so, most studies apply 15N in a disturbed soil-microbial-root system and quantify gross rates based on the principles of 15N isotope dilution. However, this approach has several shortcomings. First, studying dist...

The Pantanal is a biodiversity hotspot comprised of a mosaic of landforms that differ in vegetative assemblages and flooding dynamics. Tree islands provide refuge for terrestrial fauna during the flooding period and are particularly important to the regional ecosystem structure. Little soil CO₂ research has been conducted in this region. We evaluated soil CO₂ dynamics in relation to primary con...

Tropical forests store large amounts of biomass despite they generally grow in nutrient-poor soils, suggesting that the role of soil characteristics in the structure and dynamics of tropical forests is complex. We used data for >34 000 trees from several permanent plots in French Guiana to investigate if soil characteristics could predict the structure (tree diameter, density and aboveground bi...

Activities of burrowing herbivores, including movement of soil and litter and deposition of waste material, can alter the distribution of labile carbon (C) and nitrogen (N) in soil, affecting spatial patterning of nutrient dynamics in ecosystems where they are abundant. Their role in ecosystem processes in surface soil has been studied extensively, but effects of burrowing species on processes ...

Negative feedback between plant and soil microbial communities can be a key determinant of vegetation structure and dynamics. Previous research has shown that negative feedback between black cherry (Prunus serotina) and soil pathogens is strongly distance dependent. Here, we investigate the temporal dynamics of negative feedback. To examine short-term changes, we planted successive cycles of se...

Variation in the structure of ground fuels, i.e. the moss and litter (M/L) layer, may be an important control on fire severity in heather moorlands and thus influence vegetation regeneration and soil carbon dynamics. We completed experimental fires in a Calluna vulgaris-dominated heathland to study the role of the M/L layer in determining (i) fire-induced temperature pulses into the soil and (i...

[1] In dryland ecosystems, understanding the effects of heterogeneity in soil moisture and geophysical properties on vegetation structure and dynamics poses a suite of challenging research questions. Heterogeneity in soil depth can affect resource availability and the subsequent organization of woody vegetation, while spatiotemporal variation in soil moisture can reveal important ecohydrologica...

A dynamic simulation model for the soil plant system is described. The model includes a number of main modules viz. a water model, a soil temperature model, a soil nitrogen model including a submodel for soil organic matter dynamics, and a crop model including a submodel for nitrogen uptake. The soil part of the model has a one dimensional vertical structure. The soil profile is divided into la...