Fires are critical pathways of carbon loss from boreal forest soils, whereas microbial communities form equally critical controls over carbon accumulation between fires. We used a chronosequence in Alaska to test Read’s hypothesis that arbuscular mycorrhizal fungi should dominate ecosystems with low accumulation of surface litter, and ectomycorrhizal fungi should proliferate where organic horiz...

Anthropogenic changes to soil properties and development can dominate systems, particularly in coal mining-impacted landscapes of the Appalachian region United States. Historical mining operations deposited spoils which are developing into mine soils chronosequences, allowing for a correlation between emplacement age rates change properties. The study site was Huff Run Watershed (Mineral City, ...

The Brazilian government aims at augmenting the area cropped under no-tillage (NT) from 32 to 40 million ha by 2020 as a means to mitigate CO2 emissions. We estimated soil carbon (C) sequestration under continuous NT systems in two municipalities in the Goiás state that are representative of the Cerrado. A chronosequence of NT fields of different age since conversion from conventional tillage (...

Microbial communities in soil mediate biogeochemical processes; however, understanding forces shaping their composition and function remains a gap in our ecological knowledge. We investigated phylogenetic turnover and functional gene composition of saprotrophic fungi along a 4000-year glacial chronosequence. A direct relationship between β-diversity and geographic distance, a proxy for time sin...

Soil microbial communities are abundant, hyper-diverse and mediate global biogeochemical cycles, but we do not yet understand the processes mediating their assembly. Current hypothetical frameworks suggest temporal (e.g. dispersal limitation) and environmental (e.g. soil pH) filters shape microbial community composition; however, there is limited empirical evidence supporting this framework in ...

[1] In the southeastern United States (SE), the conversion of abandoned agricultural land to forests is the dominant feature of land-cover change. However, few attempts have been made to quantify the impact of such conversion on surface temperature. Here, this issue is explored experimentally and analytically in three adjacent ecosystems (a grass-covered old-field, OF, a planted pine forest, PP...

Secondary forests cover large areas of the tropics and play an important role in the global carbon cycle. During secondary forest succession, simultaneous changes occur among stand structural attributes, soil properties, and species composition. Most studies classify tree species into categories based on their regeneration requirements. We use a high-resolution secondary forest chronosequence t...

Invasive species can quickly transform biological communities due to their high abundance and strong impacts on native species, in part because they can be released from the ecological forces that limit native populations. However, little is known about the long-term dynamics of invasions; do invaders maintain their dominant status over long time spans, or do new ecological and evolutionary for...

Retreating ice fronts (as a result of a warming climate) expose large expanses of deglaciated forefield, which become colonized by microbes and plants. There has been increasing interest in characterizing the biogeochemical development of these ecosystems using a chronosequence approach. Prior to the establishment of plants, microbes use autochthonously produced and allochthonously delivered nu...