Secondary succession is impacted by both biotic and abiotic forces, but their relative importance varies due to environmental drivers. Across estuarine salinity gradients, physical stress increases with salinity, and biotic stresses are greater at lower salinities. In southern New England tidal marshes spanning a landscape-scale salinity gradient, we experimentally examined the effects of physi...

Succession of newly created landscapes induces profound changes in plant litter supplied to streams. Grasses dominate inputs into open-land streams, whereas tree litter is predominant in forested streams. We set out to elucidate whether the activity and structure of microbial communities on decomposing leaves are determined by litter quality (i.e., grass or tree leaves colonized) or whether cha...

Parameters characterizing the structure of the decomposer food web, biomass of the soil microflora (bacteria and fungi) and soil micro-, meso- and macrofauna were studied at 14 non-reclaimed 1- 41-year-old post-mining sites near the town of Sokolov (Czech Republic). These observations on the decomposer food webs were compared with knowledge of vegetation and soil microstructure development from...

Neighboring plants can decrease or increase each other's likelihood of damage from herbivores through associational resistance or susceptibility, respectively. Associational effects (AE) can transpire through changes in herbivore or plant traits that affect herbivore movement, densities, and feeding behaviors to ultimately affect plant damage. While much work has focused on understanding the me...

Herbivores can often control plant dynamics by mediating positive feedbacks in plant species’ influence on nutrient cycling. In a 7-yr field experiment in a nitrogenlimited Minnesota oak savanna, we tested whether herbivores accelerated or decelerated nitrogen (N) cycling through their effects on plants. We measured effects of excluding insect (primarily Orthoptera and Homoptera) and mammalian ...

We documented one of the most species-rich assemblages of tropical rain-forest Auchenorrhyncha, comprising 402 phloemand xylem-feeding species, by sampling adults from forest vegetation. Further, we reared 106 species from larvae sampled on 14 plant species. Both xylemand phloem-feeding guilds exhibited wide host-plant ranges, as 74% of species fed on more than one plant family. In comparison, ...

Abstract Wildfire is crucial in the regulation of nutrient allocation during succession boreal forests. However, strategies carbon (C), nitrogen (N) and phosphorus (P) between leaves fine roots response to wildfire severities remain poorly studied. We aimed explore C, N P among different fire severities. selected four (unburned, low, moderate high severity) after 10 years recovery Great Xing’an...