Although it is generally accepted that plant community composition is key for predicting rates of ecosystem processes in the face of global change, microbial community composition is often ignored in ecosystem modeling. To address this issue, we review recent experiments and assess whether microbial community composition is resistant, resilient, or functionally redundant in response to four dif...

Rumen is a persistent and specific ecosystem consists of bacteria, protozoa and fungus where feed fermentation takes place in it. Produced Hydrogen in rumen can be used in the synthesis of the volatile fatty acids and the microbial protein and its excess would be eliminated through the production of Methane by methanogenesis. Nutritionists have tried to find ways to decrease loss and energy and...

Climate-induced changes in soil microbial physiology impact ecosystem carbon (C) storage and alter the rate of CO2 flux from soils to the atmosphere (Allison et al., 2010). The direction and magnitude of these microbial feedbacks depend on changes in saprotrophic bacterial and fungal C allocation in response to altered temperature, precipitation, and nutrient availability. Soil microbes may dif...

Grasslands have a long history of invasion by exotic annuals, which may alter microbial communities and nutrient cycling through changes in litter quality and biomass turnover rates. We compared plant community composition, soil chemical and microbial community composition, potential soil respiration and nitrogen (N) turnover rates between invaded and restored plots in inland and coastal grassl...

Cognitive abilities rise steeply from infancy to young adulthood and then are either maintained or decline to old age, depending on the specific ability. This pattern suggests corresponding continuities of mechanism and process, but it is striking that the fields of cognitive development and cognitive aging make little contact with each other's methods and theories. In this review we examine re...

We studied the developmental trends of temperament and character in a longitudinal population-based sample of Finnish men and women aged 20-45 years using the Temperament and Character Inventory model of personality. Personality was assessed in 1997, 2001, and 2007 (n = 2,104, 2,095, and 2,056, respectively). Mean-level changes demonstrated qualitatively distinct developmental patterns for char...

We describe gene-environment processes that may help account for individual differences in successful aging. Our emphasis is on successful aging in the cognitive domain, wherein individuals come to use a variety of strategies to cope with changes in cognitive capacities. We focus on the role of executive control in particular and define gene-environment correlation and nonshared environmental m...

Use of organic amendments is a valuable strategy for crop production. However, it remains unclear how organic amendments shape both soil microbial community structure and activity, and how these changes impact nutrient mineralization rates. We evaluated the effect of various organic amendments, which range in Carbon/Nitrogen (C/N) ratio and degradability, on the soil microbiome in a mesocosm st...