Global surface temperature is predicted to increase by at least 1.5°C by the end of this century. However, the response of soil microbial communities to global warming is still poorly understood, especially in high-elevation grasslands. We therefore conducted an experiment on three types of alpine grasslands on the Qinghai-Tibet Plateau to study the effect of experimental warming on abundance a...

Forest harvesting induces a step change in the climatic variables (temperature and moisture), that control carbon dioxide (CO2) production arising from soil organic matter decomposition within soils. Efforts to examine these vertically complex relationships in situ within soil profiles are lacking. In this study we examined how the climatic controls on CO2 production change within vertically di...

The importance of managing land to optimize carbon sequestration for climate change mitigation is widely recognized, with grasslands being identified as having the potential to sequester additional carbon. However, most soil carbon inventories only consider surface soils, and most large-scale surveys group ecosystems into broad habitats without considering management intensity. Consequently, li...

Recent fire activity throughout Alaska has increased the need to understand postfire impacts on soils and permafrost vulnerability. Our study utilized data and modeling from a permafrost and ecosystem gradient to develop a mechanistic understanding of the shortand long-term impacts of tundra and boreal forest fires on soil thermal dynamics. Fires influenced a variety of factors that altered the...

Intake of animals grazing grass pasture is in part infl uenced by canopy density. Our objective was to determine the vertical distribution of dry matter and neutral detergent fi ber (NDF) within temperate perennial grass swards. The study was conducted in 2004 and 2005 on a Plano silt loam (fi ne-silty, mixed, superactive, mesic Typic Argiudolls). When leaf height of each grass reached 25 cm in...

The living cell is a complex system of interacting processes. The properties of the agents that facilitate these processes, such as enzymes, transporters and receptors, must be tuned to each other if the system is to behave harmoniously. The present chapter describes how the regulatory design of cellular subsystems that makes this harmonious behaviour possible can be visualized on a graph that ...

Each of Ohio's 467 soil series was assessed to determine the depth of the soil to bedrock, the depth to a limiting soil condition, the depth to seasonal saturation, and the soil permeability. Each soil series was placed into one of three categories; suited for traditional leach fields or mound systems, suited for mound systems only, or not suited for soil-based treatment. In a mound system, a l...

[This corrects the article DOI: 10.1186/s40885-016-0045-x.].