Soil nematode feeding groups are a long-established trophic categorisation largely based on morphology and are used in ecological indices to monitor and analyse the biological state of soils. Stable isotope ratio analysis ((13)C/(12)C and (15)N/(14)N, expressed as δ (13)C and δ (15)N) has provided verification of, and novel insights into, the feeding ecology of soil animals such as earthworms a...

the study was carried out to investigate the effective soil and topographic features on distribution of plant types in sanib taftan watershed in sistan-and-balouchestan province, iran. initially, land units map was specified by combining three maps of slope, aspect and altitude. five types including artemisia santolina- hammada salicornica, artemisia sieberi- amygdalus lycioides, artemisia lehm...

phytoremediation is an emerging green technology that uses plants and their associated microbes to remediate different environments contaminated with various pollutants. phytoremediation, as an effective soil remediation technology, has gained popularity in the past ten years both in developed and developing countries. the main goal of the current article is to improve the understanding of phyt...

Physiological responses of mangroves to salinity changes in the field are difficult to quantify, partly because it is still not clear whether mangroves utilize mostly surface water, as believed by many researchers based on the shallow distribution of mangrove roots in anaerobic soils. To test this axiom, we analyzed oxygen isotope ratios of possible water sources in different soil layers and st...

Terrestrial ecosystems consist of mutually dependent producer and decomposer subsystems, but not much is known on how their interactions are modified by plant diversity and elevated atmospheric CO2 concentrations. Factorially manipulating grassland plant species diversity and atmospheric CO2 concentrations for five years, we tested whether high diversity or elevated CO2 sustain larger or more a...

Plant diversity has been shown to determine the composition and functioning of soil biota. Although root-derived organic inputs are discussed as the main drivers of soil communities, experimental evidence is scarce. While there is some evidence that higher root biomass at high plant diversity increases substrate availability for soil biota, several studies have speculated that the quantity and ...

Grassland managements can affect carbon (C) and nitrogen (N) storage in grassland ecosystems with consequent feedbacks to climate change. We investigated the impacts of compound fertilization and clipping on grass biomass, plant and soil (0-20 cm depth) C, N storage, plant and soil C: N ratios, soil microbial activity and diversity, and C, N sequestration rates in grassland in situ in the Natio...

The use of nuclear energy generates large amounts of different types of radioactive wastes that can be accidentally released into the environment. Soil-to-plant transfer is a key process for the dispersion of radionuclides in the biosphere and is usually described by a concentration ratio (CR) between plant and soil concentrations in radioecological models. Our knowledge of the soil-to-plant tr...

Recent metaanalyses suggest biodiversity loss affects the functioning of ecosystems to a similar extent as other global environmental change agents. However, the abundance and functioning of soil organisms have been hypothesized to be much less responsive to such changes, particularly in plant diversity, than aboveground variables, although tests of this hypothesis are extremely rare. We examin...