Fossil fuel combustion has increased atmospheric CO2 by≈ 115 μmol mol 1 since 1750 and decreased its carbon isotope composition (δC) by 1.7–2‰ (the C Suess effect). Because carbon is stored in the terrestrial biosphere for decades and longer, the δC of CO2 released by terrestrial ecosystems is expected to differ from the δC of CO2 assimilated by land plants during photosynthesis. This isotopic ...

The Zebra mussel (Dreissena polymorpha), one of the most widely used bioindicators of persistent organic pollutants, trace metals and radionuclides in several worldwide freshwater ecosystems, has been used to monitor DDT contamination trends in Lake Maggiore since 1996, caused by industrial effluents on a tributary of the River Toce, one of the major affluents of the lake. Dreissena specimens w...

Over the past several decades we have witnessed record-setting wildfires across nearly every continent (1), with recent months as no exception. Widespread burning across western North America includes some of the largest wildfires on record in Washington State, with 2015 total area burned on track to exceed observations of the past two decades (2). Because wildfires have immediate and long-term...

The turbulent deposition of fog and cloud water is an important pathway for atmospheric inputs of pollutants to vegetation, especially to forest ecosystems. Based on a study by Trautner [1988], Wrzesinsky and Klemm [2000] estimated that fog deposition contributes 20–50% to total liquid water deposition in the Fichtelgebirge mountains in Germany. They point out that these calculations are associ...

Little information is available on the seasonal response of soil microbial biomass to climate warming even though it is very sensitive to climate change. A two-year field experiment was conducted in the subalpine and alpine forests of the eastern Tibetan Plateau, China. The intact soil cores from 3,600 m site were incubated in three elevations (3,000 m, 3,300 m and 3,600 m) to simulate climate ...

Numerous studies have demonstrated exceptionally high temperature sensitivity of the beneath-snow respiratory flux in cold-winter ecosystems. The most common, but still untested, explanation for this high sensitivity is a physical one based on the observation that water availability in soils increases exponentially as soils warm from -3 to 0 C. Here, we present evidence for a biological hypothe...

Phytoliths represent one of the few available altitudinal vegetation proxies for mountain ecosystems. This study analyzed 41 topsoil phytolith samples collected from five altitudinal zones in the southern Himalaya as far as, and beyond, the timberline, from tropical forest (up to 1,000 m a.s.l.) to subtropical forest (1,000-2,000 m a.s.l.), to temperate forest (2,000-3,000 m a.s.l.), to subalpi...

The distribution of millipedes along an altitudinal gradient in the south of Lake Teletskoye, Altai, Russia based on new samples from the Kyga Profile sites, as well as on partly published and freshly revised material (Mikhaljova et al. 2007, 2008, 2014, Nefedieva and Nefediev 2008, Nefediev and Nefedieva 2013, Nefedieva et al. 2014), is established. The millipede diversity is estimated to be a...

Strongly interacting species often have pronounced direct and indirect effects on other species. Here we focus of the effects of pine squirrels (Tamiasciurus spp.), which are a dominant pre-dispersal seed predator of many conifers including limber pines (Pinus flexilis) and whitebark pines (P. albicaulis). Pine squirrels depress seed abundance by harvesting most limber and whitebark pine cones ...

Fire may have been a crucial component in the evolution of the Cape flora of South Africa, a region characterized by outstanding levels of species richness and endemism. However, there is, to date, no critical assessment of the age of the modern fire regime in this biome. Here, we exploit the presence of two obligate post-fire flowering clades in the orchid genus Disa, in conjunction with a rob...