Litterfall is the primary source of carbon and nutrients that determine soil fertility in forest ecosystems. Most current studies have focused on foliar litter, but the seasonal dynamics and allometric scaling relationships among different litter components (e.g., foliar litter, woody litter, reproductive litter, and epiphytic litter) are poorly understood. Here, we investigated the litter prod...

specific features of the structure of the ground litter invertebrate community in forest belt ecosystems in the ukrainian steppe zone have been considered. for 14 years invertebrate fauna of the litter of 176 forest belt sites with different composition has been studied with the aid of soil traps. the main characteristics of litter invertebrate communities (total population, a number of species...

Global changes such as increasing CO2, rising temperature, and land-use change are likely to drive shifts in litter inputs to forest floors, but the effects of such changes on litter decomposition remain largely unknown. We initiated a litter manipulation experiment to test the response of litter decomposition to litter removal/addition in three successional forests in southern China, namely ma...

This paper presents a review of the behaviour of radiocesium in plants of forest ecosystems, based on a screening of 375 articles. Particular stress is given to those factors which affect data variability in plants, such as vertical and horizontal patterns of radioactivity in soils due to interception, resuspension, wash-off, litter fall etc. The behaviour of radiocesium in different horizons o...

© The Ecological Society of America www.frontiersinecology.org T is a crucial need to understand ecological water balances, both in the present and in the future. This balance is currently shifting, as economies rapidly develop and urbanization accelerates (Hubacek and Sun 2005). In the future, global climate change and the resulting uncertainties will only add to the urgency of finding accurat...

A common perception is that cancer risk reduction is passive, such as not smoking. However, advances in the understanding of cancer biology and in cancer treatment modalities suggest that it is now timely to consider anew cancer risk reduction by active, including pharmacologic, approaches. Risk avoidance approaches are certainly important, but other approaches are important as well, as exempli...

Many studies in ecosystem ecology argue for strong control of litter quality over nitrogen (N) cycling. We developed a model for temperate grasslands to test the importance of litter quality in decomposition for N and phosphorus (P) cycling based on the following premises. First, terrestrial N and P cycling differ fundamentally because N is a structural component of the soil organic matter (SOM...

It is known that at the event scale, evaporation losses of rainfall intercepted by canopy are a few millimeters, which often not much in comparison to other stocks water balance. Nevertheless, yearly number times filled and then depleted can be so large interception flux may become an important fraction rainfall. Many accurate models describe wet have been proposed. However, they require parame...

Litter moisture content has been related to ammonia, dust and odour emissions as well as bird health and welfare. Improved understanding of the water holding properties of poultry litter as well as water additions to litter and evaporation from litter will contribute to improved litter moisture management during the meat chicken grow-out. The purpose of this paper is to demonstrate how manageme...