Remediation of slope failures requires stabilization alternatives that address causes of slope instability. Slope reinforcement and pile stabilization systems, if properly designed, are effective in preventing slope movements in weak soils. Soil load transfer to pile elements from the lateral soil movement as occurs in slope failures is a complex soil-structure interaction problem, and the sign...

Introduction Soil organisms facilitate key ecosystem processes such as nutrient cycling and organic matter decomposition, and also influence soil porosity and water infiltration through the production of bacterial polymers and fungal hyphae that hold soil particles together to form aggregates [1, 2]. Rhizosphere microorganisms can greatly influence the ability of a plant to acquire macroand mic...

BACKGROUND Both climate warming and atmospheric nitrogen (N) deposition are predicted to affect soil N cycling in terrestrial biomes over the next century. However, the interactive effects of warming and N deposition on soil N mineralization in temperate grasslands are poorly understood. METHODOLOGY/PRINCIPAL FINDINGS A field manipulation experiment was conducted to examine the effects of war...

[1] Ecosystem models have not comprehensively considered how interactions among fire disturbance, soil environmental conditions, and biogeochemical processes affect ecosystem dynamics in boreal forest ecosystems. In this study, we implemented a dynamic organic soil structure in the Terrestrial Ecosystem Model (DOS‐TEM) to investigate the effects of fire on soil temperature, moisture, and ecosys...

Ecological multivariate systems offer a suitable data set on which to apply recent advances in information theory and causality detection. These systems are driven by the interplay of various environmental factors: meteorological and hydrological forcing, which are often correlated with each other at different time lags; and biological factors, primary producers and decomposers with both autono...

The responses of tallgrass prairie plant communities and ecosystem processes to fire and grazing are well characterized. However, responses of invertebrate consumer groups, and particularly soil-dwelling organisms, to these disturbances are not well known. At Konza Prairie Biological Station, we sampled soil macroinvertebrates in 1994 and 1999 as part of a long-term experiment designed to exami...

Plants have an important impact on soil microbial communities and their functions. However, how plants determine the microbial composition and network interactions is still poorly understood. During a four-year field experiment, we investigated the functional gene composition of three types of soils (Phaeozem, Cambisols and Acrisol) under maize planting and bare fallow regimes located in cold t...

Even if numerous studies were dedicated to propose soil-structure interaction analysis methods, most of these methods introduce several assumptions to circumvent the difficulties encountered in modeling and reduce computational efforts. The complex spatial configuration of the soil-foundation interface or the distribution of the soil medium are often simplified using flat-layered soil profiles ...