Climate and other global change phenomena affecting biodiversity require monitoring to track ecosystem changes and guide policy and management actions. Designing a biodiversity monitoring program is a difficult task that requires making decisions that often lack consensus due to budgetary constrains. As monitoring programs require long-term investment, they also require strong and continuing su...

Soil carbon in permafrost ecosystems has the potential to become a major positive feedback to climate change if permafrost thaw increases heterotrophic decomposition. However, warming can also stimulate autotrophic production leading to increased ecosystem carbon storage-a negative climate change feedback. Few studies partitioning ecosystem respiration examine decadal warming effects or compare...

Biodiversity is an important determinant of primary productivity in experimental ecosystems. We combine two streams of research on understanding the effects of biodiversity on ecosystem function: quantifying phylogenetic diversity as a predictor of biodiversity effects in species-rich systems and the contribution of pairwise interspecific interactions to ecosystem function. We developed a stati...

Decision making both on individual and organizational level is always accompanied by the search of other’s opinion on the same. With tremendous establishment of opinion rich resources like, reviews, forum discussions, blogs, micro-blogs, Twitter etc provide a rich anthology of sentiments. This user generated content can serve as a benefaction to market if the semantic orientations are deliberat...

AutoMind Creator is an iOS application that lets users interact with linked data to produce customized views. These can be exported as graphical visualizations we call Semantic Mind Maps, as well as rich text (RTF), outline (OPML) and Freemind. We present a new technique for linked data visualisation called Semantic Mind Maps which are rich Mind Maps whose nodes are semantically grounded with a...

Microbial communities and their associated enzyme activities affect the amount and chemical quality of carbon (C) in soils. Increasing nitrogen (N) deposition, particularly in N-rich tropical forests, is likely to change the composition and behavior of microbial communities and feed back on ecosystem structure and function. This study presents a novel assessment of mechanistic links between mic...

We constructed a Lotka–Volterra-like competition model to study the role of environmental generalists in maintaining ecosystem function under a range of species richnesses and environmental conditions. Ecosystem function was quantified as community biomass, proportion of initial species that coexist through time, and resilience and resistance to perturbation. Generalist and specialist species w...

The accelerating rate of change in biodiversity patterns, mediated by ever increasing human pressures and global warming, demands a better understanding of the relationship between the structure of biological communities and ecosystem functioning (BEF). Recent investigations suggest that the functional structure of communities, i.e. the composition and diversity of functional traits, is the mai...

Forests are biologically diverse systems, representing some of the richest biological areas on Earth. They offer a variety of habitats for plants, animals and micro-organisms. However, forest biodiversity is increasingly threatened as a result of deforestation, fragmentation, climate change and other stressors. Biodiversity is the variation of life forms within a given ecosystem, biome, or on t...