The importance of phyllosphere fungi to ecosystem functioning via soil processes has aroused increasing interest during the last decade. Here, we briefly review the current knowledge of how the foliar endophytic fungi and nutrient cycling interact. Recent findings suggest that endophytes may affect plant litter quality, organisms that control litter decomposition and the availability of nutrien...

humans suffer transient or persistent starvation due to a lack of food intake, either because of fasting, voluntary dieting, or due to the scarcity of available food. at the cellular level it is possible to possess pathological starvation during ischemia and solid tumors. blood provides many nutrients to our cells, and researchers provide these nutrients to cells in culture in the form of enric...

Nutrient availability often limits primary production, yet the processes governing the dynamics of nutrient limitation are poorly understood. In particular, plant-available (e.g., nitrate) versus plant-unavailable (e.g., dissolved organic nitrogen) nutrient losses may have qualitatively different impacts on nutrient limitation. We examine processes controlling equilibrium and transient nutrient...

While many ecosystem processes depend on biodiversity, the relationships between agricultural plant diversity and soil carbon (C) and nitrogen (N) dynamics remains controversial. Our objective was to examine how temporal plant diversity (i.e. crop rotation) influences residue decomposition, a key ecosystem function that regulates nutrient cycling, greenhouse gas emissions, and soil organic matt...

Plant roots serve as conduits for water flow not only from soil to leaves but also from wetter to drier soil. This hydraulic redistribution through root systems occurs in soils worldwide and can enhance stomatal opening, transpiration, and plant carbon gain. For decades, upward hydraulic lift (HL) of deep water through roots into dry, litter-rich, surface soil also has been hypothesized to enha...

Nutrient uptake length is an important parameter for quantifying nutrient cycling in streams. Although nutrient tracer additions are the preferred method for measuring uptake length under ambient nutrient concentrations, short-term nutrient addition experiments have more frequently been used to estimate uptake length in streams. Theoretical analysis of the relationship between uptake length det...

a Institute of Soil and Fertilizer and Ministry of Agriculture Key Laboratory of Plant Nutrition and Nutrient Cycling, Chinese Academy of Agricultural Sciences, Beijing 100081, China; b Institute of Plant Nutrition (330), University of Hohenheim, D-70593, Stuttgart, Germany; and c Department of Plant Nutrition, College of Natural Resources and Environmental Sciences, Nanjing Agricultural Univer...

Herbivore effects on leaf litter can have a strong impact on ecosystem nutrient cycling. Although such effects are well described for insect herbivory, research on the impacts of browsing by mammalian herbivores on leaf litter dynamics and nutrient cycling has been more limited, particularly at the level of the individual plant. Clipping treatments (66% shoot removal twice, plus unclipped) were...

Research so far has provided little evidence that benthic biogeochemical cycling is affected by ocean acidification under realistic climate change scenarios. We measured nutrient exchange and sediment community oxygen consumption (SCOC) rates to estimate nitrification in natural coastal permeable and fine sandy sediments under pre-phytoplankton bloom and bloom conditions. Ocean acidification, a...

Department of Biological Oceanography, Leibniz Institute for Baltic Sea Research, Warnemünde, Germany, Department of Physical Oceanography and Instrumentation, Leibniz Institute for Baltic Sea Research, Warnemünde, Germany, Department of Biology, Institute for Hydrobiology and Fisheries Research, University of Hamburg, Hamburg, Germany, Department of Nutrient and Carbon Cycling, Leibniz Center ...