Mineralization

Intact peatlands are habitats for many rare animal and plant species and important sinks for greenhouse gases. Many peatlands that have been converted to agricultural land should therefore be restored. A current study with IGB participation discusses different strategies for this.

Winter cover crops could cut nitrogen pollution in Illinois' agricultural drainage water up to 30%, according to recent research from the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign. But how will future climate change affect nitrogen loss, and will cover crops still be up to the job?

Soil microbes (in terms of functional gene content) are key drivers of ecosystem functions, but their functional characterization and their ecological contributions are not sufficiently understood. It is important to understand how soil microbes ameliorate the nutrient stress environment and maintain their activity to support ecosystem multifunctionality in tropical forests.

The Tibetan highlands have a special significance both as a grazing ecosystem and global carbon store. Furthermore, it plays a key role in the formation of the monsoon and supplying of potable water for a fifth of the earth's population. An international research team from Kiel University (CAU), together with the universities of Göttingen and Hanover and the Chinese Academy of Sciences has for the first time…

A new study led by UC San Diego Scripps Institution of Oceanography postdoctoral scholar Jennifer Bowen finds that canals used to drain soggy peatlands in Southeast Asia are likely hotspots for greenhouse gas emissions.

In a first-of-its-kind long-term study, a collaborative group of scientists, including senior author Ashley Keiser, assistant professor of soil ecology at the University Of Massachusetts Amherst's Stockbridge School of Agriculture, have discovered that soil carbon determines whether mineralized nitrogen is available in the soil as ammonium, or further transformed into either nitrates that are easily lost to runoff…

Let's say you're a corn grower farming on low-fertility soil. How do you go about making that soil healthier and more fertile? Many farmers think if they add plenty of nitrogen fertilizer, that nutrient, along with carbon, will be stored in the soil as organic matter when microbes decompose crop residue. But new research from the University of Illinois suggests those efforts might not work for poor soils.

Urban green areas, including parks and gardens, are a fundamental part of our cities and are, on many occasions, the only contact that humans have with nature.

Soil acidification is widely occurring in diverse terrestrial ecosystems and soil microbial communities have been reported to be highly sensitive to changes in soil pH. Soil microbes could regulate their physiological conditions to make them survive under the acidifying conditions.

A new study reveals that both the carbon and nitrogen cycles continually adjust under global change, leading to dynamic coupling.

Climate change (e.g., global warming) is intensifying the global water cycle and the temporal variation of precipitation has increased significantly. The distribution of precipitation is more uneven over time, and drought and flood events occurred more frequently. This unstable variability in precipitation is particularly negative for crop growth.

Soil aggregates are the basic units of soil structure and serve as a reservoir for soil carbon, playing a crucial role in the carbon cycle of ecosystems. The pore characteristics of soil aggregates influence the mineralization of soil organic carbon. However, research on the mechanisms of soil organic carbon sequestration at the aggregate level in Mollisols is limited.

A study published in the journal Science China Life Sciences was led by Prof. Weidong Cao (Institute of Agricultural Resources and Regional Planning, Chinese Academy of Agricultural Sciences) and Prof. Zongxian Che (Institute of Soil and Fertilizer and Water-saving Agriculture, Gansu Academy of Agriculture Sciences).

This paper discusses the latest progress in research on ant nests and explores innovative scientific concepts associated with underground ant nests from the perspective of bionics. The methods used by scholars to study the structure of ant nests and the interaction between the structure itself and the individual ants are investigated. The structural characteristics of the ant nest, its internal environment and…

Reactive oxygen species—very reactive molecules containing oxygen—have a great impact on mineralization processes in tidal sandflats, finds a study now published in Nature Communications. Their investigation is thus important for understanding marine carbon cycling.

Over the last decade, researchers have sounded the alarm on soil erosion being the biggest threat to global food security. As world governments moved to implement soil conservation practices, a new debate began: does agricultural soil erosion create a net organic carbon (OC) sink or source? The question is a crucial one, as carbon sinks absorb more carbon than they release, while carbon sources release more carbon…

Mechanistic understanding of the dynamics and interactions of the nitrogen (N) cycles in forests has become more important with increased anthropogenic perturbations.