Inputs of available nitrogen (N) to ecosystems have grown over the recent past. There is limited general understanding of how increased N inputs affect the cycling and retention of other potentially limiting nutrients. Using a plant-soil nutrient model, and by explicitly coupling N and phosphorus (P) in plant biomass, we examine the impact of increasing N supply on the ecosystem cycling and ret...

Marine Archaea are important players among microbial plankton and significantly contribute to biogeochemical cycles, but details regarding their community structure and long-term seasonal activity and dynamics remain largely unexplored. In this study, we monitored the interannual archaeal community composition of abundant and rare biospheres in northwestern Mediterranean Sea surface waters by p...

Ecohydrology is the science that studies the mutual interaction between the hydrological cycle and ecosystems. Such an interaction is especially intense in water-controlled ecosystems, where water may be a limiting factor, not only because of its scarcity, but also because of its intermittent and unpredictable appearance. Hydrologic dynamics is shown to be a crucial factor for ecological patter...

Investigation of tree growth in Isle Royale National Park in Michigan revealed the influence of herbivores and carnivores on plants in an intimately linked food chain. Plant growth rates were regulated by cycles in animal density and responded to annual changes in primary productivity only when released from herbivory by wolf predation. Isle Royale's dendrochronology complements a rich literatu...

Wildfire is the one of the prominent disturbance factor in most vegetation zones throughout the world, like forests and grasslands. Wildfires present a challenge for ecosystem management, because they have the potential to be at once beneficial and harmful. On the one hand, wildfires are a natural part of several ecosystems for maintaining their health and diversity in numerous ways, such as re...

A brief review is given of Ibe interrelationships and implications of Ibe findings reported in Ibe contributions included in this volume. Emphasis is given to some questions Ibat now appear crucial, e.g. Ibe cannibalization of anchoveu eggs and biannual cycles in anchoveta recruitment and their possible cause(s). Some suggestions are made for future research on various elements of Ibe Peruvian ...

Winter soil respiration (Rs) is becoming a significant component of annual carbon budgets with more warming in winter than summer. However, little is known about the controlling mechanisms of winter Rs in dryland. We made continuous measurements of Rs in four microsites (non-crust (BS), lichen (LC), moss (MC), and a mixture of moss and lichen (ML)) in a desert shrub-land ecosystem northern Chin...

1) Institute of Ecology, School of Natural Sciences and Health, Tallinn University, Uus-Sadama 5, EE-10120 Tallinn, Estonia (*correspoinding author’s e-mail: [email protected]) 2) Ecological Systems Laboratory (ECOS), École Polytechnique Fédérale de Lausanne, Station 2, CH-1015 Lausanne, Switzerland 3) WSL — Swiss Federal Institute for Forest, Snow and Landscape Research, Site Lausanne, Station 2, ...

Slow-fast systems on the two-torus T 2 provide new effects not observed for systems on the plane. Namely, there exist families without auxiliary parameters that have attracting canard cycles for arbitrary small values of the time scaling parameter ε. In order to demonstrate the new effect, we have chosen a particularly simple family, namely ẋ = a − cosx − cos y, ẏ = ε, a ∈ (1, 2) being fixed. T...