Moisture may limit microbial activity in a wide range of environments including salt water, food, wood, biofilms, and soils. Low water availability can inhibit microbial activity by lowering intracellular water potential and thus reducing hydration and activity of enzymes. In solid matrices, low water content may also reduce microbial activity by restricting substrate supply. As pores within so...

AIMS Considered as an essential measure in the application of soil seed bank (SSB) projects, the mixing of substrate and surface soil can effectively improve soil condition. This research is aimed at exploring the diversity characteristics of SSBs and the relationships between SSBs and soil properties. METHODS Canonical correspondence analysis (CCA) was adopted to describe the ordination of S...

Temperature acclimation of soil organic matter (SOM) decomposition is one of the major uncertainties in predicting soil CO 2 efflux associated with the increase in global mean temperature. A reasonable explanation for an apparent acclimation proposed by Davidson and colleagues (2006) based on Michaelis-Menten kinetics suggests that temperature sensitivity decreases when both maximal activity of...

We examined the effects of a forest fertilizer (urea) on newly metamorphosed terrestrial amphibians (Western toads, Bufo boreas; Cascades frogs, Rana cascadae; long-toed salamanders, Ambystoma macrodactylum; and roughskin newts, Taricha granulosa). We examined avoidance behavior of Western toads and Cascades frogs on both paper towel and soil substrates dosed with urea (control and 100 kg N/ha ...

Arbuscular Mycorrhizal (AM) fungi hold considerable potential for use as inoculant and nowadays much attention is focused on mass production of AM fungal inoculum, since this is of paramount importance in improving plant production in agriculture and horticulture. However, effectivity of these fungi on crop growth relies on their production practices, typically the substrate selected for its ma...

land use change of forest ecosystems in northern iran changes the soil quality of paresar (gilan province) and gorgan (gorgan province) regions. in order to study changes in some biological soil quality indices due to land use change from forest to cultivated lands, composite soil samples from two depths (0-20 and 20-40 cm) were taken from paresar and gorgan regions and urease, alkaline and aci...

How diversity influences the stability of a community function is a major question in ecology. However, only limited empirical investigations of the diversity-stability relationship in soil microbial communities have been undertaken, despite the fundamental role of microbial communities in driving carbon and nutrient cycling in terrestrial ecosystems. In this study, we conducted a microcosm exp...

Dissimilatory Fe(III) reduction is a universal process with irreplaceable biological and environmental importance in anoxic environments. Our knowledge about Fe(III) reduction predominantly comes from pure cultures of dissimilatory Fe(III) reducing bacteria (DFRB). The objective of this study was to compare the effects of glucose and a selection of short organic acids (citrate, succinate, pyruv...

Changes in soil microbiotic properties such as microbial biomass and community structure in response to alternative management systems are driven by microbial substrate quality and substrate utilization. We evaluated irrigated crop and forage production in two separate four-year experiments for differences in microbial substrate quality, microbial biomass and community structure, and microbial ...