The finite resource of fertile soil can take thousands of years to develop. Non-degradable toxic metals (heavy metals), pose a significant health risk due to their persistence in the environment. Soil washing with EDTA (ethylenediaminetetraacetic acid) has been shown to remove toxic metals (Pb, Zn, Cd), but this process can also have a significant impact on soil microbial diversity. In this study, we investigated, using molecu...

Background and Aims Long-lasting changes in soil biodiversity and chemistry reflecting past land use are commonly found during the conversion between natural and agricultural systems . However, no clear pattern can be seen when rotating crops are established. Most studies focus on arable systems and over short-term rotations, neglecting longer-term tree-crop successions. We hypothesised that converting one long-term tree crop...

The physical effects of climate warming have been well documented, but the biological responses are far less well known, especially at the ecosystem level and at large (intercontinental) scales. Global warming over the next century is generally predicted to reduce food web complexity, but this is rarely tested empirically due to the dearth of studies isolating the effects of temperature on complex natural food webs. To overcom...

Selection of nursery habitats by marine fish, such as European sea bass ( Dicentrarchus labrax ), is poorly understood. Identifying and protecting the full range of juvenile nursery habitats is vital to supporting resilient fish populations and economically important fisheries. We examined how the condition, stomach fullness, and diet of juvenile European sea bass, along with their abundance, differ at high or low tide between...

Ecological communities are increasingly exposed to multiple interacting stressors. For example, warming directly affects the physiology of organisms, eutrophication stimulates the base of the food web, and harvesting larger organisms for human consumption dampens top‐down control. These stressors often combine in the natural environment with unpredictable results. Bacterial communities in coastal ecosystems underpin marine foo...

Aims Saprophytic fungi are important agents of soil mineralization and carbon cycling. Their community structure is known to be affected by soil conditions such as organic matter and pH. However, the effect of plant species, whose roots provide the litter input into the soil, on the saprophytic fungal community is largely unknown. Methods We examined the saprophytic fungi in a grassland biodiversity experiment with eight plant...

Aim Ecological communities that exist closer together in space are generally more compositionally similar than those far apart, as defined by the distance–decay of similarity relationship. However, recent research has revealed substantial variability in the distance–decay relationships of microbial communities between studies of different taxonomic groups, ecosystems and spatial scales and between those using different molecul...

The ecological impacts of long‐term elevated atmospheric CO 2 (eCO 2 ) levels on soil microbiota remain largely unknown. This is particularly true for the arbuscular mycorrhizal (AM) fungi, which form mutualistic associations with over two‐thirds of terrestrial plant species and are entirely dependent on their plant hosts for carbon. Here, we use high‐resolution amplicon sequencing (Illumina, HiSeq) to quantify the response of...

Tropical forests have long fascinated ecologists, inspiring a plethora of research into the mechanisms regulating their immense biodiversity, which originally captured the interests of early natural historians and explorers, and that still persists to this day. A new focus of this research emerged in the early 2000s highlighting the potential role of neutral (stochastic) processes in regulating the composition and diversity of...

Aim Biogeographical regions are the fundamental geographical units for grouping Earth's biodiversity. Biogeographical regionalization has been demonstrated for many higher taxa, such as terrestrial plants and vertebrates, but not in microbial communities. Therefore, we sought to test empirically whether microbial communities, or taxa, show patterns consistent with biogeographical regionalization. Location Within halite (NaCl)...

Summary Although desert soils support functionally important microbial communities that affect plant growth and influence many biogeochemical processes, the impact of future changes in precipitation patterns on the microbiota and their activities is largely unknown. We performed in‐situ experiments to investigate the effect of simulated rainfall on bacterial communities associated with the widespread perennial shrub, Rhazya st...

To investigate photoacclimation of phytoplankton adapted to different aquatic light regimes, a physiologically explicit phytoplankton optimality model was applied in two contrasting environments: constant irradiance vs. dynamic irradiance associated with oceanic mixed layers. Nitrogen was assumed to be partitioned between cellular components associated with light harvesting, carbon fixation, biosynthesis, and photoprotection....