Water drives the functioning of Earth's arid and semiarid lands. Drylands can obtain water from sources other than precipitation, yet little is known about how non-rainfall water inputs influence dryland communities and their activity. In particular, water vapor adsorption--movement of atmospheric water vapor into soil when soil air is drier than the overlying air--likely occurs often in drylan...

Zero-valent iron (Fe0)-based permeable reactive barrier treatment has been generating great interest for passive groundwater remediation, yet few studies have paid particular attention to the microbial activity and characteristics within and in the vicinity of the Fe0-barrier matrix. The present study was undertaken to evaluate the microbial population and community composition in the reducing ...

Adoption of sustainable tillage can protect soils from biological degradation and maintain soil quality, as compared with conventional management. This paper presents findings from a long-term tillage experiment carried out in Endocalcari-Endohypogleyic Cambisols on a sandy loam soil in Lithuania. The tillage systems were: conventional (CT), moderate (MT), and no tillage (NT). Tillage intensity...

plants and soil microbes are the main sources of most enzymes available in the environment. it is, therefore, anticipated that any change in the growth of soil biota in response to salinity, may reduce the synthesis and production of extra- and intra- cellular enzymes. as a result, a reduction in the growth of plants and the activity of soil microbes in saline environments may lessen the level ...

Soils sustain an immense diversity of microbes, which, to a large extent, remains unexplored. A range of novel methods, most of which are based on rRNA and rDNA analyses, have uncovered part of the soil microbial diversity. The next step in the era of microbial ecology is to extract genomic, evolutionary and functional information from bacterial artificial chromosome libraries of the soil commu...

Soil biological activity has important implications for soil carbon (C) sequestration. However, very little is known about the environmental factors, particularly the effect of soil mineralogy on availability of C for soil microorganisms. In this study, we have investigated the influences of soil type (clay mineralogy) on C mineralization and its effects on biological activity at different leve...

Based on the enclosed chamber method, soil respiration measurements of Leymus chinensis populations with four planting densities (30, 60, 90 and 120 plants/0.25 m) and blank control were made from July 31 to November 24, 2003. In terms of soil respiration rates of L. chinensis populations with four planting densities and their corresponding root biomass, linear regressive equations between soil...

Analysing the consequences of the decrease in biodiversity for ecosystem functioning and stability has been a major concern in ecology. However, the impact of decline in soil microbial diversity on ecosystem sustainability remains largely unknown. This has been assessed for decomposition, which is insured by a large proportion of the soil microbial community, but not for more specialized and le...

Grazing and cultivation are two important management practices worldwide that can cause significant soil organic carbon (SOC) losses. However, it remains elusive how soil microbes have responded to soil carbon changes under these two practices. Based on a four-decade long field experiment, this study investigated the effects of grazing and cultivation on SOC stocks and microbial properties in t...

Decomposition of organic material by soil microbes generates an annual global release of 50-75 Pg carbon to the atmosphere, ∼7.5-9 times that of anthropogenic emissions worldwide. This process is sensitive to global change factors, which can drive carbon cycle-climate feedbacks with the potential to enhance atmospheric warming. Although the effects of interacting global change factors on soil m...