The cause-effect sequence or "feedback" between plants and their soil microbial communities plays an important role in structuring plant communities. To predict this synergistic coexistence, ...

Heating alone won’t drive soil microbes to release more carbon dioxide — they need added carbon and nutrients to thrive. This finding challenges assumptions about how climate warming influences soil ...

Fig. 3: The mean soil CO 2 efflux partitioned into SOC-derived (heterotrophic respiration) and root-derived (autotrophic respiration) components for growing season measurements. Fig. 5: The effect of ...

Thawing Arctic permafrost can induce hydrologic change and alter redox conditions, shifting the balance of soil organic matter (SOM) decomposition. There remains uncertainty about how soil saturation ...

On a remote Kenyan island where the ground is sandy and freshwater is scarce, an innovative experiment is reshaping how food ...

Pushing soil ecosystems to their limits “This is one of the first warming experiments to push an ecosystem into a novel temperature regime outside of its normal range,” notes Caitlin Hicks Pries, a ...

Get your news from a source that’s not owned and controlled by oligarchs. Sign up for the free Mother Jones Daily. Thousands of years ago, beasts of burden helped make humanity what it is today. When ...

Microbes are doing a lot under the soil surface that can't be seen with the naked eye—from sequestering carbon to building the foundation of Earth's crust. But even tiny microbes are feeling the ...

After stumbling upon thousands of Mason jars filled with soil in a University of Illinois barn, some of them over 100 years old, Andrew Margenot knew he had found something special. As a soil ...

Ecologists have measured plant-soil feedbacks for six perennial prairie grass species in a short-term greenhouse study, and say their findings do not match outcomes observed in long-term experiment ...

Tropical forests exchange more CO2 with the atmosphere than any other terrestrial biome, meaning that even a relatively small shift in the balance of carbon uptake and release there could have a big ...