A catchment-scale dataset of soil properties and their mid-infrared spectra.

The dataset presents information on soil properties and their associated mid-infrared spectra for a drainage basin of 4.2 km, referred to as Upper Badong catchment (31°1'24''N, 110°20'35''E) in the Hubei province, China. Data were collected for topsoil in a highly diverse terrace catchment composed of woodland, cropland and small farm building.

Microbial transcriptome patterns highlight increased pedogenesis-related activity in arid soils under simulated humid conditions.

Background: In arid and semiarid environments, microbial activity is restricted by low water availability and high evapotranspiration rates, and soil development is limited. Under humid conditions, such limitations can be overcome, accelerating pedogenesis by microbial processes. Our study aims to broaden our understanding of soil development under a climate change scenario toward humid conditions and to identify the microorganisms that help transform initial soils from arid and semiarid sites.

Spatiotemporal Monitoring of Cropland Soil Organic Carbon Changes From Space.

Soil monitoring requires accurate and spatially explicit information on soil organic carbon (SOC) trends and changes over time. Spatiotemporal SOC models based on Earth Observation (EO) satellite data can support large-scale SOC monitoring but often lack sufficient temporal validation based on long-term soil data. In this study, we used repeated SOC samples from 1986 to 2022 and a time series of multispectral bare soil observations (Landsat and Sentinel-2) to model high-resolution cropland SOC trends for almost four decades.

Plant diversity enhances ecosystem multifunctionality via multitrophic diversity.

Ecosystem functioning depends on biodiversity at multiple trophic levels, yet relationships between multitrophic diversity and ecosystem multifunctionality have been poorly explored, with studies often focusing on individual trophic levels and functions and on specific ecosystem types. Here, we show that plant diversity can affect ecosystem functioning both directly and by affecting other trophic levels. Using data on 13 trophic groups and 13 ecosystem functions from two large biodiversity experiments-one representing temperate grasslands and the other subtropical forests-we found that plant diversity increases multifunctionality through elevated multitrophic diversity.

Major overlap in plant and soil organic carbon hotspots across Africa.

Terrestrial plant and soil organic carbon stocks are critical for regulating climate change, enhancing soil fertility, and supporting biodiversity. While a global-scale decoupling between plant and soil organic carbon has been documented, the hotspots and interconnections between these two carbon compartments across Africa, the second-largest continent on the planet, have been significantly overlooked. Here, we have compiled over 10,000 existing soil organic carbon observations to generate a high-resolution map, illustrating the distribution pattern of soil organic carbon in Africa.

How can we quantify, explain, and apply the uncertainty of complex soil maps predicted with neural networks?

Artificial neural networks (ANNs) have proven to be a useful tool for complex questions that involve large amounts of data. Our use case of predicting soil maps with ANNs is in high demand by government agencies, construction companies, or farmers, given cost and time intensive field work. However, there are two main challenges when applying ANNs.

Microbial impact on initial soil formation in arid and semiarid environments under simulated climate change.

The microbiota is attributed to be important for initial soil formation under extreme climate conditions, but experimental evidence for its relevance is scarce. To fill this gap, we investigated the impact of microbial communities and their interrelationship with biocrust and plants compared to abiotic controls on soil formation in initial arid and semiarid soils. Additionally, we assessed the response of bacterial communities to climate change.

Soil phosphorus availability mediates the effects of nitrogen addition on community- and species-level phosphorus-acquisition strategies in alpine grasslands.

Plants modulate their phosphorus (P) acquisition strategies (i.e., change in root morphology, exudate composition, and mycorrhizal symbiosis) to adapt to varying soil P availability.

Spectral prediction of soil salinity and alkalinity indicators using visible, near-, and mid-infrared spectroscopy.

Drought and the impacts of climate change have led to an escalation in soil salinity and alkalinity across various regions worldwide, including Iran. The Chahardowli Plain in western Iran, in particular, has witnessed a significant intensification of this phenomenon over the past decade. Consequently, modeling of soil attributes that serve as indicators of soil salinity and alkalinity became a priority in this region.

Carbon-biodiversity relationships in a highly diverse subtropical forest.

Carbon-focused climate mitigation strategies are becoming increasingly important in forests. However, with ongoing biodiversity declines we require better knowledge of how much such strategies account for biodiversity. We particularly lack information across multiple trophic levels and on established forests, where the interplay between carbon stocks, stand age, and tree diversity might influence carbon-biodiversity relationships.

Contextual spatial modelling in the horizontal and vertical domains.

Multi-scale contextual modelling is an important toolset for environmental mapping. It accounts for spatial dependence by using covariates on multiple spatial scales and incorporates spatial context and structural dependence to environmental properties into machine learning models. For spatial soil modelling, three relevant scales or ranges of scale exist: quasi-local soil formation processes that are independent of the spatial context, short-range catenary processes, and long-range processes related to climate and large-scale terrain settings.

Impact of Climate and Slope Aspects on the Composition of Soil Bacterial Communities Involved in Pedogenetic Processes along the Chilean Coastal Cordillera.

Soil bacteria play a fundamental role in pedogenesis. However, knowledge about both the impact of climate and slope aspects on microbial communities and the consequences of these items in pedogenesis is lacking. Therefore, soil-bacterial communities from four sites and two different aspects along the climate gradient of the Chilean Coastal Cordillera were investigated.

Organic and conservation agriculture promote ecosystem multifunctionality.

Ecosystems provide multiple services to humans. However, agricultural systems are usually evaluated on their productivity and economic performance, and a systematic and quantitative assessment of the multifunctionality of agroecosystems including environmental services is missing. Using a long-term farming system experiment, we evaluated and compared the agronomic, economic, and ecological performance of the most widespread arable cropping systems in Europe: organic, conservation, and conventional agriculture.

Iron mineral dissolution releases iron and associated organic carbon during permafrost thaw.

It has been shown that reactive soil minerals, specifically iron(III) (oxyhydr)oxides, can trap organic carbon in soils overlying intact permafrost, and may limit carbon mobilization and degradation as it is observed in other environments. However, the use of iron(III)-bearing minerals as terminal electron acceptors in permafrost environments, and thus their stability and capacity to prevent carbon mobilization during permafrost thaw, is poorly understood. We have followed the dynamic interactions between iron and carbon using a space-for-time approach across a thaw gradient in Abisko (Sweden), where wetlands are expanding rapidly due to permafrost thaw.

SoilTemp: A global database of near-surface temperature.

Current analyses and predictions of spatially explicit patterns and processes in ecology most often rely on climate data interpolated from standardized weather stations. This interpolated climate data represents long-term average thermal conditions at coarse spatial resolutions only. Hence, many climate-forcing factors that operate at fine spatiotemporal resolutions are overlooked.

The relevant range of scales for multi-scale contextual spatial modelling.

Spatial autocorrelation in the residuals of spatial environmental models can be due to missing covariate information. In many cases, this spatial autocorrelation can be accounted for by using covariates from multiple scales. Here, we propose a data-driven, objective and systematic method for deriving the relevant range of scales, with distinct upper and lower scale limits, for spatial modelling with machine learning and evaluated its effect on modelling accuracy.

A tale of scale: Plot but not neighbourhood tree diversity increases leaf litter ant diversity.

Diversity of producers (e.g. plants) usually increases the diversity of associated organisms, but the scale (i.

Comparison of catchment scale 3D and 2.5D modelling of soil organic carbon stocks in Jiangxi Province, PR China.

As limited resources, soils are the largest terrestrial sinks of organic carbon. In this respect, 3D modelling of soil organic carbon (SOC) offers substantial improvements in the understanding and assessment of the spatial distribution of SOC stocks. Previous three-dimensional SOC modelling approaches usually averaged each depth increment for multi-layer two-dimensional predictions.

The strength of soil-plant interactions under forest is related to a Critical Soil Depth.

Soil properties and terrain attributes are of great interest to explain and model plant productivity and community assembly (hereafter P&CA). Many studies only sample surface soils, and may therefore miss important variation of deeper soil levels. We aimed to identify a critical soil depth in which the relationships between soil properties and P&CA were strongest due to an ideal interplay among soil properties and terrain attributes.

Experimental Evidence of Functional Group-Dependent Effects of Tree Diversity on Soil Fungi in Subtropical Forests.

Deconvoluting the relative contributions made by specific biotic and abiotic drivers to soil fungal community compositions facilitates predictions about the functional responses of ecosystems to environmental changes, such as losses of plant diversity, but it is hindered by the complex interactions involved. Experimental assembly of tree species allows separation of the respective effects of plant community composition (biotic components) and soil properties (abiotic components), enabling much greater statistical power than can be achieved in observational studies. We therefore analyzed these contributions by assessing, via pyrotag sequencing of the internal transcribed spacer (ITS2) rDNA region, fungal communities in young subtropical forest plots included in a large experiment on the effects of tree species richness.

Impacts of species richness on productivity in a large-scale subtropical forest experiment.

Biodiversity experiments have shown that species loss reduces ecosystem functioning in grassland. To test whether this result can be extrapolated to forests, the main contributors to terrestrial primary productivity, requires large-scale experiments. We manipulated tree species richness by planting more than 150,000 trees in plots with 1 to 16 species.

Tree species richness increases ecosystem carbon storage in subtropical forests.

Forest ecosystems are an integral component of the global carbon cycle as they take up and release large amounts of C over short time periods (C flux) or accumulate it over longer time periods (C stock). However, there remains uncertainty about whether and in which direction C fluxes and in particular C stocks may differ between forests of high versus low species richness. Based on a comprehensive dataset derived from field-based measurements, we tested the effect of species richness (3-20 tree species) and stand age (22-116 years) on six compartments of above- and below-ground C stocks and four components of C fluxes in subtropical forests in southeast China.

Biodiversity across trophic levels drives multifunctionality in highly diverse forests.

Human-induced biodiversity change impairs ecosystem functions crucial to human well-being. However, the consequences of this change for ecosystem multifunctionality are poorly understood beyond effects of plant species loss, particularly in regions with high biodiversity across trophic levels. Here we adopt a multitrophic perspective to analyze how biodiversity affects multifunctionality in biodiverse subtropical forests.