Improvements in understanding how climate change may influence chemical and physical processes in soils, how this may affect nutrient availability, and how plants may respond to changed availability of nutrients will influence crop breeding programmes. The effects of increased atmospheric CO2 and warmer temperatures, both individually and combined, on soil microbial activity, including mycorrhi...

Legume cover crops have various important effects on nutrient cycling in tropical fruit tree production: they (i) fix atmospheric N2 and may amend the soil and trees with N, (ii) recycle nutrients, and (iii) affect soil nutrient availability. Aboveground N accumulation usually is very large in legume cover crops as seen from Pueraria phaseoloides being 8 to 14 times higher than in intercropped ...

Organisms limited by carbon, nitrogen or sulphur can reduce protein production costs by transitions to less costly amino acids, or by reducing protein expression. These alternative mechanisms of nutrient thrift might respond differently to selection, but this possibility remains untested. We hypothesized that relatively invariant sequence composition responds to long-term variation in nutrient ...

The effects of two plant species—soybean (Glycine max), and sunflower (Helianthus annuus) on nutrient availability in two soils (an organically farmed soil, OF, and a native grassland soil, GS, both Alfisols)—were measured with anion exchange membranes (Plant Root Simulator, PRS probes) in a greenhouse study. Vegetation (especially sunflower) in the OF soil caused significant reductions in soil...

Nutrient availability in ecosystems is patchy both in space and in time. Whereas temporal trends have often been studied, less information exists on spatial patterns of nutrient availability, particularly in aquatic ecosystems. The goals of this study were (1) to describe and quantify patterns of nutrient concentration in surface waters of an arid land stream and (2) to compare spatial patterns...