A scheme for combining forest data (growth, foliar nutrition) and soil and site information in a predictive spatial system is proposed to address the following questions: Can geostatistics be used to produce maps of forest sustainability indicator variables such as tree growth or foliage and soil properties to show spatial and temporal trends? Can soil map units be used to stratify forests acco...

Land-use change can have significant impacts on soil conditions and microbial communities are likely to respond to these changes. However, such responses are poorly characterized as few studies have examined how specific changes in edaphic characteristics do, or do not, influence the composition of soil bacterial and fungal communities across land-use types. Soil samples were collected from fou...

A recent trial found that the presence of coarse soil in fine soil increased nutrient uptake by two plant species (Smaill et al., 2014). To determine if the additional nutrient uptake was derived directly from the coarse soil, the changes in coarse soil nutrient stocks were assessed. In most cases nutrient stocks increased, despite being associated with greater plant nutrient uptake. This sugge...

Soil salt content is a key factor that determines soil chemical quality together with soil reaction, charge properties and nutrient reserves (Lal et al., 1999). An adequate salt supply is essential for an optimum development of photosynthetic mechanism and other biochemical processes in plants (Sitte et al., 1994). Soil salt content constitutes an environmental problem when salt accumulation ge...

Cognitive abilities rise steeply from infancy to young adulthood and then are either maintained or decline to old age, depending on the specific ability. This pattern suggests corresponding continuities of mechanism and process, but it is striking that the fields of cognitive development and cognitive aging make little contact with each other's methods and theories. In this review we examine re...

Carbon dioxide efflux and soil microenvironmental factors were measured diurnally in Carex aquatilusand Eriophorum angustifolium-dominated riparian tundra communities to determine the relative importance of soil environmental factors controlling ecosystem carbon dioxide exchange with the atmosphere. Measurements were made weekly between 18 June and 24 July 1990. Diurnal patterns in carbon dioxi...

We studied the developmental trends of temperament and character in a longitudinal population-based sample of Finnish men and women aged 20-45 years using the Temperament and Character Inventory model of personality. Personality was assessed in 1997, 2001, and 2007 (n = 2,104, 2,095, and 2,056, respectively). Mean-level changes demonstrated qualitatively distinct developmental patterns for char...

We describe gene-environment processes that may help account for individual differences in successful aging. Our emphasis is on successful aging in the cognitive domain, wherein individuals come to use a variety of strategies to cope with changes in cognitive capacities. We focus on the role of executive control in particular and define gene-environment correlation and nonshared environmental m...