Arid shrublands are stressful environments, typified by alkaline soils low in organic matter, with biologically-limiting extremes in water availability, temperature, and UV radiation. The widely-spaced plants and interspace biological soil crusts in these regions provide soil nutrients in a localized fashion, creating a mosaic pattern of plant- or crust-associated microhabitats with distinct nu...

BACKGROUND The Atacama Desert is one of the driest deserts in the world and its soil, with extremely low moisture, organic carbon content, and oxidizing conditions, is considered to be at the dry limit for life. RESULTS Analyses of high throughput DNA sequence data revealed that bacterial communities from six geographic locations in the hyper-arid core and along a North-South moisture gradien...

Biological soil crusts are key mediators of carbon and nitrogen inputs for arid land soils and often represent a dominant portion of the soil surface cover in arid lands. Free-living soil nematode communities reflect their environment and have been used as biological indicators of soil condition. In this study, we test the hypothesis that nematode communities are successionally more mature bene...

Expert assessments for crop and range productivity of very-large arid and semiarid areas worldwide are ever more in demand and these studies require greater sensitivity in delineating the different grades or levels of soil salinity. In conjunction with field study in arid southeastern Oregon, we assess the merit of adding decision-tree analysis (DTA) to a commonly used remote-sensing method. Ra...

Ecological succession is one of the most important concepts in ecology. However for microbial community succession, there is a lack of a solid theoretical framework regarding succession in microorganisms. This is in part due to microbial community complexity and plasticity but also because little is known about temporal patterns of microbial community shifts in different kinds of ecosystems, in...

Knowledge about the long-term influences of climate change on the amount of potential carbon (C) sequestration in forest ecosystems, including age-related dynamics, remains unclear. This study used two similar age-sequences of black locust forests (Robinia pseudoacacia L.) in the semi-arid and semi-humid zones of China's Loess Plateau to assess the variation in C stocks and age-related dynamics...

The lack of new antibiotics in the pharmaceutical pipeline guides more and more researchers to leave the classical isolation procedures and to look in special niches and ecosystems. Bioprospecting of extremophilic Actinobacteria through mining untapped strains and avoiding resiolation of known biomolecules is among the most promising strategies for this purpose. With this approach, members of a...