We studied the influence of eight nonleguminous grassland plant species belonging to two functional groups (grasses and forbs) on the composition of soil denitrifier communities in experimental microcosms over two consecutive years. Denitrifier community composition was analyzed by terminal restriction fragment length polymorphism (T-RFLP) of PCR-amplified nirK gene fragments coding for the cop...

The majority of studies on rhizospheric interactions focus on pathogens, mycorrhizal symbiosis, or carbon transformations. Although the biogeochemical transformations of N, S, and Fe have profound effects on vegetation, these effects have received far less attention. This review, meant for microbiologists, biogeochemists, and plant scientists includes a call for interdisciplinary research by pr...

Soil ecologists have debated the relative importance of dispersal limitation and ecological factors in determining the structure of soil microbial communities. Recent evidence suggests that 'everything is not everywhere', and that microbial communities are influenced by both dispersal limitation and ecological factors. However, we still do not understand the relative explanatory power of spatia...

BACKGROUND AND AIMS Fodder provision in species-rich grasslands, i.e. herbage growth, proportion of leaf, and leaf and stem digestibility, is difficult to predict for short periods of time, such as between two defoliations or less. The value of two methods based on plant traits for evaluating these agronomic properties was examined. METHODS One method is based on plant trait measurements on t...

across ecosystems. In part this deficit is due to the fact that the most frequently used metric in long term datasets, species richness, obscures compositional shifts (Magurran and Henderson 2010, Dornelas et al. 2014). Importantly, changes in community composition can have cascading effects on ecosystem properties (Tabarelli et al. 2012), highlighting a pressing need for a better understanding...

Herbivores are important drivers of plant species coexistence and community assembly. However, detailed mechanistic information on how herbivores affect dominance hierarchies between plant species is scarce. Here, we used data of a multi-site herbivore exclusion experiment in grasslands to assess changes in the cover of 28 plant species in response to aboveground pesticide. application. Moreove...

The experiment was conducted to evaluate the effects of beta glucan, the plant extract, Vitabio A, and the plant extract with probiotic Lactobacillus spp. (Vitabio B) on the growth, histology and immune response of Labeo rohita (Rohu), reared for 120 days in a flow through system. Fish with an average body weight of 264±2.65g were stocked in cemented tanks at 10 fish/replicate. Four iso-nitroge...

The relationship between arthropod abundance and plant composition is extremely complex. It is very hard to develop a mechanistic model to describe the relationship. This study aimed to simulate arthropod abundance from plant composition on grassland using an artificial neural network developed by the author, and to compare simulation performances between the neural network and conventional mod...

An attempt is reported to link changes in thylakoid lipid composition with the electron-transport and ATP-formation capability of the chloroplast. The observation that the monogalactolipid : phosphatid-ratio (M GDG/PL) of leaf sections shows a linear correlation with the P/2e value of simul­ taneously isolated Jensen-Bassham plastids was followed up experimentally for an in vitro plastid system...

Differential species responses to atmospheric CO 2 concentration (Ca) could lead to quantitative changes in competition among species and community composition, with flow-on effects for ecosystem function. However, there has been little theoretical analysis of how elevated Ca (eC a) will affect plant competition, or how composition of plant communities might change. Such theoretical analysis is...