Ecological Restoration Practices within a Semi-arid Natural Gas Field Improve Insect Abundance and Diversity during Early and Late Growing Season.

Insects are critical components of terrestrial ecosystems and are often considered ecosystem engineers. Due to the vast amount of ecosystem services they provide, because statistically valid samples can be captured in short durations, and because they respond rapidly to environmental change, insects have been used as indicators of restoration success and ecosystem functionality. In Wyoming (USA), ecological restoration required on thousands of acres of land surface have been disturbed to extract natural gas.

Ground-level Unmanned Aerial System Imagery Coupled with Spatially Balanced Sampling and Route Optimization to Monitor Rangeland Vegetation.

Rangeland ecosystems cover 3.6 billion hectares globally with 239 million hectares located in the United States. These ecosystems are critical for maintaining global ecosystem services.

Fast accrual of C and N in soil organic matter fractions following post-mining reclamation across the USA.

Reclamation of post-mining sites commonly results in rapid accrual of carbon (C) and nitrogen (N) contents due to increasing plant inputs over time. However, little information is available on the distribution of C and N contents with respect to differently stabilized soil organic matter (SOM) fractions during succession or as a result of different reclamation practice. Hence, it remains widely unknown how stable or labile these newly formed C and N pools are.

Soil microbial substrate properties and microbial community responses under irrigated organic and reduced-tillage crop and forage production systems.

Changes in soil microbiotic properties such as microbial biomass and community structure in response to alternative management systems are driven by microbial substrate quality and substrate utilization. We evaluated irrigated crop and forage production in two separate four-year experiments for differences in microbial substrate quality, microbial biomass and community structure, and microbial substrate utilization under conventional, organic, and reduced-tillage management systems. The six different management systems were imposed on fields previously under long-term, intensively tilled maize production.

Spatial and temporal variability of bacterial 16S rDNA-based T-RFLP patterns derived from soil of two Wyoming grassland ecosystems.

Abstract Spatial and temporal variability of soil bacterial 16S rDNA terminal restriction fragment (TRF) size variation was evaluated in a homogeneous grassland (HG) dominated by the turf-forming grass Bouteloua gracilis and in a shrubland (SL) dominated by Artemisia tridentata (Wyoming big sagebrush). Temporal variability was also evaluated on the HG site over a growing season. No trends toward dissimilarity were detected with temporal (180 days) or spatial (up to 100 m) distance in the HG system.

Candidate division BD: phylogeny, distribution and abundance in soil ecosystems.

Oligonucleotide primers were designed and used to amplify partial 16S rDNA sequences of the recently identified bacterial group BD from four diverse soils. Phylogenetic analysis of 34 BD group sequences supports division-level status for the group and also indicates that the BD group consists of at least 3 subdivision-level groups. Sequence divergence (21%) amongst these BD group sequences was found to be near the average for bacterial division-level lineages.