Common Reed (Phragmites australis) is a frequent component of inland and coastal wetlands in temperate zones worldwide. Ongoing environmental changes have resulted in the decline of this species in many areas and invasive expansion in others. In the Gippsland Lakes coastal waterway system in south-eastern Australia, increasing salinity is thought to have contributed to the loss of fringing P. a...

Disturbances and environmental change are important factors determining the diversity, composition, and functioning of communities. However, knowledge about how natural bacterial communities are affected by such perturbations is still sparse. We performed a whole ecosystem manipulation experiment with freshwater rock pools where we applied salinity disturbances of different intensities. The aim...

Microbial communities in shale oil fields are still poorly known. We obtained samples of injection, produced and facility waters from a Bakken shale oil field in Saskatchewan, Canada with a resident temperature of 60°C. The injection water had a lower salinity (0.7 Meq of NaCl) than produced or facility waters (0.6-3.6 Meq of NaCl). Salinities of the latter decreased with time, likely due to in...

The goal of this study was to use environmental sequencing of 16S rRNA and bop genes to compare the diversity of planktonic bacteria and archaea across ponds with increasing salinity in the Exportadora de Sal (ESSA) evaporative saltern in Guerrero Negro, Baja CA S., Mexico. We hypothesized that diverse communities of heterotrophic bacteria and archaea would be found in the ESSA ponds, but that ...

Microalgal strains for algal biofuels production in outdoor ponds will need to have high net growth rates under diverse environmental conditions. A small, variable salinity pond in the San Elijo Lagoon estuary in southern California was chosen to serve as a model pond due to its routinely high chlorophyll content. Profiles of microalgal assemblages from water samples collected from April 2011 t...

Salinity affects a significant portion of arable land and is particularly detrimental for irrigated agriculture, which provides one-third of the global food supply. Rice (Oryza sativa), the most important food crop, is salt sensitive. The genetic resources for salt tolerance in rice germplasm exist but are underutilized due to the difficulty in capturing the dynamic nature of physiological resp...

Halophytes are plants which naturally survive in saline environment. They account for ∼1% of the total flora of the world. They include both dicots and monocots and are distributed mainly in arid, semi-arid inlands and saline wet lands along the tropical and sub-tropical coasts. Salinity tolerance in halophytes depends on a set of ecological and physiological characteristics that allow them to ...