BACKGROUND AND AIMS Litter often decomposes faster in its environment of origin (at 'home') than in a foreign environment ('away'), which has become known as the home-field advantage (HFA). However, many studies have highlighted the conditional nature of the HFA, suggesting that current understanding of this phenomenon is not yet sufficient to generalize across systems. METHODS The HFA hypoth...

Despite the global importance of New Zealand’s invertebrates, relatively little is known about them and their relationships with plants and plant communities in native habitats. Invertebrate diversity was examined by beating randomly chosen shrubs of the species Olearia bullata (Asteraceae) and Coprosma propinqua (Rubiaceae). Invertebrate taxon richness was assessed initially using morphospecie...

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 ...

Microbial communities play a major role in terrestrial ecosystem functioning, but the determinates of their diversity and functional interactions are not well known. In this study, we explored leaf litter fungal diversity in a diverse Panama lowland tropical forest in which a replicated factorial N, P, K and micronutrient fertilization experiment of 40 × 40 m plots had been ongoing for nine yea...

We compared aquatic invertebrate diversity in paddy fields under traditional and modern management practices. We also examined the general factors that may be related to diversity within each paddy field. The Kitadan area was farmed with traditional management practices, with much longer periods of irrigations compared with the Kahoku area, which was farmed with modern agricultural practices us...

Currently available tools for studying plant litter decomposition and invertebrate consumption in aquatic ecosystems have at least 2 major limitations: 1) the difficulty of manipulating litter chemical composition to provide mechanistic insights into attributes of litter quality controlling decomposition rate, and 2) lack of a standardized litter that hampers comparisons of results among studie...

We measured breakdown rates of leaves and small wood for the first three years in a stream in which detrital inputs were excluded for 7 years and in a reference stream located in the Appalachian Mountains of North Carolina, USA. Leaf and wood inputs were excluded using a gill-net canopy constructed over a 170-m section of stream. We hypothesized that red maple (Acer rubrum) and rhododendron (Rh...

Although invertebrates play a key role in the environment, their conservation and use in environmental monitoring is often considered “too difficult” and consequently ignored. One of the main problems in dealing with invertebrates is that even limited sampling can yield large numbers of specimens and an enormous diversity of species. Other problems include the taxonomic impediment (i.e. high pr...