In tropical landscapes, vegetation patches with contrasting tree densities are distributed as mosaics. However, the locations of patches and densities of trees within them cannot be predicted by climate models alone. It has been proposed that plant-fire feedbacks drive functional thresholds at a landscape scale, thereby maintaining open (savanna) and closed (forest) communities as two distinct ...

How plants develop adaptive strategies to efficiently use nutrients on infertile soils is an important topic in plant ecology. It has been suggested that, with decreasing phosphorus (P) availability, plants increase photosynthetic P-use efficiency (PPUE) (i.e., the ratio of instantaneous photosynthetic carbon assimilation rate per unit foliar P). However, the mechanism to increase PPUE remains ...

The oxidation of atmospheric CH4 in upland soils is mostly mediated by uncultivated groups of microorganisms that have been identified solely by molecular markers, such as the sequence of the pmoA gene encoding the β-subunit of the particulate methane monooxygenase enzyme. The objective of this work was to compare the activity and diversity of methanotrophs in Amazonian Dark Earth soil (ADE, Ho...