One of the effective ways for reducing atmospheric CO2 is carbon sequestration by plants and soils. Rangelands with an expanded area have a great potential for Carbon (C) Stocks. In this study, C stocks in three treatments including natural rangelands (NR), Pit- seeding by Agropyrum elongatum (PS) and abandoned dry farming (ADF) were examined in Kardeh basin Mashhad, Iran in 2013. In each treat...

The trait-based approach shows that ecosystem function is strongly affected by plant functional diversity as reflected by the traits of the most abundant species (community-weighted mean, CWM) and functional dispersion (FDis). Effects of CWM and FDis individually support the biomass ratio hypothesis and the niche complementarity hypothesis. However, there is little empirical evidence on the rel...

Abstract The largest terrestrial organic carbon pool, in soils, is regulated by an intricate connection between plant inputs, microbial activity, and the soil matrix. This manifested how microorganisms, key players transforming plant-derived into carbon, are controlled physical arrangement of inorganic particles. Here we conduct incubation isotopically labelled litter to study effects structure...

Th ere is increasing evidence that litter decomposition is faster beneath the plant species it was derived from, an eff ect called home-fi eld advantage (HFA). Adaptation of soil biota to decompose the litter that they encounter most often has been proposed as the main mechanism to explain HFA. However, there is little direct evidence supporting this assumption and the contribution of diff eren...

Herbivores can often control plant dynamics by mediating positive feedbacks in plant species’ influence on nutrient cycling. In a 7-yr field experiment in a nitrogenlimited Minnesota oak savanna, we tested whether herbivores accelerated or decelerated nitrogen (N) cycling through their effects on plants. We measured effects of excluding insect (primarily Orthoptera and Homoptera) and mammalian ...

SUMMARY Basidiomycete fungi subsist on various types of plant material in diverse environments, from living and dead trees and forest litter to crops and grasses and to decaying plant matter in soils. Due to the variation in their natural carbon sources, basidiomycetes have highly varied plant-polysaccharide-degrading capabilities. This topic is not as well studied for basidiomycetes as for asc...

While litter decomposition is a fundamental ecological process, previous studies have mainly focused on the decay of single species. In this study, we conducted a litter-mixing experiment to investigate litter diversity effects on greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions from an alpine steppe soil in Northern Tibet. Significant non-additive effects of litter diversity on GHG dynamics can be detected; the...

Plant leaf litter generally decomposes faster as a group of different species than when individual species decompose alone, but underlying mechanisms of these diversity effects remain poorly understood. Because resource C : N : P stoichiometry (i.e. the ratios of these key elements) exhibits strong control on consumers, we supposed that stoichiometric dissimilarity of litter mixtures (i.e. the ...

Increasing size and concentration of production is a long-established and continuing trend in the poultry producing industry. The size of poultry litter produced in this industry shows a sustained and increasing trend too. Daily fresh litter/manure output per is about 30 kg/100 birds. For example, the size of Delmarva broiler farms is average 50,000 heads, and the daily poultry litter productio...