World food security is under challenge to a great extent due to effects of climate change, continued population growth and resource-depleting practices on agriculture (IAASTD, 2009). Presently poor farmers use either organic manure or inorganic fertilizers (Mando et al., 2005; Topoliantz et al., 2005) for maintaining soil fertility as they cannot afford to apply fertilizers as a nutrient source...

Soil fauna can be an important regulator of community parameters and ecosystem processes, but there have been few quantitative syntheses of the role of soil fauna in terrestrial soil communities and ecosystems. Here, we conducted a metaanalysis to investigate the impacts of invertebrate soil microand mesofauna (grazers and predators) on plant productivity and microbial biomass. Overall our resu...

Native parasitic plants may be used to infect and control invasive plants. We established microcosms with invasive Mikania micrantha and native Coix lacryma-jobi growing in mixture on native soils, with M. micrantha being infected by parasitic Cuscuta campestris at four intensity levels for seven weeks to estimate the top-down effects of plant parasitism on the biomass and functional diversity ...

Nitrogen (N) deposition has been steadily increasing for decades, with consequences for soil respiration. However, we have a limited understanding of how soil respiration responds to N availability. Here, we investigated the soil respiration responses to low and high levels of N addition (0.4 mol N m(-2) yr(-1) vs 1.6 mol N m(-2) yr(-1)) over a two-year period in a semiarid Leymus chinensis gra...

Harris, D., Voroney, R. P. and Paul, E. A. 1997. Measurement of microbial biomass N:C by chloroform fumigation-incubation. Can. J. Soil Sci. 77: 507–514. We present a calculation for soil microbial biomass N:C ratio determined from a 10-d incubation following chloroform fumigation. The calculation is based on a mathematical model of the N content of the preand post-fumigation soil microbial bio...

[1] This study was conducted to examine direct and indirect impacts of global warming on carbon processes in a tallgrass prairie in the U.S. Great Plains. Infrared radiators were used to simulate global warming, and clipping was used to mimic hay mowing. Experimental warming caused significant increases in green biomass in spring and autumn and total biomass in summer on most of the measuring d...

Analyzing functional species' characteristics (species traits) that represent physiological, life history and morphological characteristics of species help understanding the impacts of various stressors on aquatic communities at field conditions. This research aimed to study the combined effects of pesticides and other environmental factors (temperature, dissolved oxygen, dissolved organic carb...

This study addresses the tillage effect on the distribution of bacterial biomass and their community structure in a subtropical purple rice soil ecosystem. Similar distribution patterns of soil bacterial biomass within water-stable aggregates (WSA) were observed under different tillage managements. Although the distribution pattern of soil microbial biomass was not changed by tillage practice, ...

Although soil invertebrates play a decisive role in maintaining ecosystem functioning, little is known about their structural composition in Alpine soils and how their abundances are affected by the currently ongoing land-use changes. In this study, we re-assessed the soil macrofauna community structure of managed and abandoned Alpine pastureland, which has already been evaluated 14 years earli...