Grass cropping in the rotation and the use of no-till seeding appear to be important components for developing sustainable cropping systems. Grass cropping and no-till seeding improve soil organic matter content, increase the soil microbial biomass, increase earthworm numbers, likely cause a buildup of fungivorous microarthropods and nematodes, and greatly increases the resistance of soil to er...

Plant-soil feedback is receiving increasing interest as a factor influencing plant competition and species coexistence in grasslands. However, we do not know how spatial distribution of plant-soil feedback affects plant below-ground interactions. We investigated the way in which spatial heterogeneity of soil biota affects competitive interactions in grassland plant species. We performed a pairw...

BACKGROUND Biological invasions are fundamentally biogeographic processes that occur over large spatial scales. Interactions with soil microbes can have strong impacts on plant invasions, but how these interactions vary among areas where introduced species are highly invasive vs. naturalized is still unknown. In this study, we examined biogeographic variation in plant-soil microbe interactions ...

Biodiversity and its responses to environmental changes are central issues in ecology and for society. Almost all microbial biodiversity research focuses on "species" richness and abundance but not on their interactions. Although a network approach is powerful in describing ecological interactions among species, defining the network structure in a microbial community is a great challenge. Also,...

• Soil hydrologic parameters including field saturation, field capacity, initiation of plant water stress and plant extraction limits can be reliably determined from electronic soil moisture sensor records. • Soil profile wetting and drying occurs along a regular continuum of soil moisture following the advance of the wetting from to the effective base of the soil profile. • Frozen soil conditi...

Matter turnover in soil is tightly linked to soil structure which governs the heterogeneous distribution of habitats, reaction sites and pathways in soil. Thereby, the temporal dynamics of soil structure alteration is deemed to be important for essential ecosystem functions of soil but very little is known about it. A major reason for this knowledge gap is the lack of methods to study soil stru...

Row structure causes the anisotropy of microwave brightness temperature (TB) of soil surface, and it also can affect soil moisture retrieval accuracy when its influence is ignored in the inversion model. To study the effect of typical row structure on the retrieved soil moisture and evaluate if there is a need to introduce this effect into the inversion model, two ground-based experiments were ...

In order to elucidate the distribution of soil nematodes in coastal wetlands and the effect of different distance from the sea line on soil nematode communities, we investigated the community structure of soil nematodes in one wetland perpendicularly oriented from Bohai sea coastline. In June 2006, soil samples were collected from the Yellow River Delta wetlands, in Dongying city of Shandong Pr...