Temperate forest soils store globally significant amounts of carbon (C) and nitrogen (N). Understanding how soil pools of these two elements change in response to disturbance and management is critical to maintaining ecosystem services such as forest productivity, greenhouse gas mitigation, and water resource protection. Fire is one of the principal disturbances acting on forest soil C and N st...

Blair, J.M., Crossley, D.A., Jr. and Callaham, L.C., 1991. A litterbasket technique for measurement of nutrient dynamics in forest floors. Agric. Ecosystems Environ., 34: 465-471. We describe a litterbasket technique for quantifying litter decomposition and changes in litter and forest floor nutrient pools over time. Litterbaskets are constructed of wire hardware cloth, 10x10x10 cm. Intact core...

Canopy interception plays an important role in determining the amount of rainfall reaching the forest floor. During a rainfall event, water either penetrates the canopy falling directly to the understory of the forest floor, or is intercepted by the canopy. From there it can drip to the ground surface, flow down tree stems, or be held and evaporated. The portion that falls directly to the groun...

In this study some soil and forest floor characteristics of floodplain forest, thermophile forest and sand dune were investigated at Igneada, Turkey. In this context, surface soil samples were analyzed and compared to each other in the extension of soil physical, chemical properties and as plant nutrition environment. To investigate the soil characteristics soil samples were collected from 48 s...

In the early 1980s, nitrogen (N) deposition was first postulated as a cause of N saturation and spruce mortality across the northeastern US. In 1988, a series of high elevation spruce-fir forest N addition plots were established on Mt. Ascutney (southeastern) Vermont to test this hypothesis. The paired plots each received, in addition to ambient N deposition, 15.7 kg N ha-' (low N addition), 31...

A new species of the rarely collected ant genus Platythyrea Roger, 1863 closely related to Platythyrea clypeata Forel, 1911 is described and illustrated based on the worker caste under the name Platythyrea janyaisp. n. This species is distributed in southern Thailand and western Malaysia, while P. clypeata is distributed in Sri Lanka, Vietnam, Laos, and Thailand in the areas north of the Isthmu...

Increasing levels of atmospheric carbon dioxide (CO2) and rates of nitrogen (N)-deposition to forest ecosystems are predicted to alter the structure and function of soil fungal communities, but the spatially heterogeneous distribution of soil fungi has hampered investigations aimed at understanding such impacts. We hypothesized that soil physical and chemical properties and fungal community com...

Trees of temperate rainforests host a large biomass of epiphytic plants, which are associated with soils formed in the forest canopy. Falling of epiphytic material results in the transfer of carbon and nutrients from the canopy to the forest floor. This study provides the first characterization of bacterial communities in canopy soils enabled by high-depth environmental sequencing of 16S rRNA g...