Publications
NIBIOs employees contribute to several hundred scientific articles and research reports every year. You can browse or search in our collection which contains references and links to these publications as well as other research and dissemination activities. The collection is continously updated with new and historical material.
2022
Authors
Bjørn Egil FløAbstract
No abstract has been registered
Authors
P.L. Sullivan S.A. Billings D. Hirmas L. Li X. Zhang S. Ziegler K. Murenbeeld H. Ajami A. Guthrie K. Singha D. Giménez A. Duro V. Moreno A. Flores A. Cueva A.N. Koop E.L. Aronson H.R. Barnard S.A. Banwart R.M. Keen Attila Nemes N.P. Nikolaidis J.B. Nippert D. Richter D.A. Robinson K. Sadayappan Souza de Souza M. Unruh H. WenAbstract
Soils form the skin of the Earth’s surface, regulating water and biogeochemical cycles and generating production of food, timber, and textiles around the world. Changes in soil and its ability to perform a range of processes have important implications for Earth system function, especially in the critical zone (CZ)—the area that extends from the top of the canopy to the bottom of groundwater and that harbors most of Earth’s biosphere. A key aspect of the way soil functions results from its structure, defined as the size, shape, and arrangement of soil particles and pores. The network of pores provides storage space for at least a quarter of Earth’s biodiversity, while the abundance, size and connectivity of the pore space regulates fluxes of heat, water, nutrients and gases that define the physical and chemical environment. Here we review the nature of soil structure, focusing on its co-evolution with the plants and microbes that live within the soil, and the degree to which these processes have been incorporated into flow and transport models. Though it is well known that soil structure can change with wetting and drying events, often oscillating seasonally, the dynamic nature of soil structure that we discuss is a systematic shift that results in changes in its hydro-bio-geochemical function over decades to centuries, timescales over which major changes in carbon and nutrient cycles have been observed in the Anthropocene. We argue that the variable nature of soil structure, and its dynamics, need to be better understood and captured by land surface and ecosystem models, which currently describe soil structure as static. We further argue that modelers and empiricists both are well-poised to quantify and incorporate these dynamics into their studies. From these efforts, four fundamental questions emerge: 1) How do rates of soil aggregate formation and collapse, and their overall arrangements, interact in the Anthropocene to regulate CZ functioning from soil particle to continental scales? 2) How do alterations in rooting-depth distributions in the Anthropocene influence pore structure to control hydrological partitioning, biogeochemical transformations and fluxes, exchanges of energy and carbon with the atmosphere and climate, regolith weathering, and thus regulation of CZ functioning? 3) How does changing microbial functioning in a high CO2, warmer world with shifting precipitation patterns influence soil organic carbon dynamics and void-aggregate profile dynamics? 4) How deeply does human influence in the Anthropocene propagate into the subsurface, how does this depth relate to profile structure, and how does this alter the rate at which the CZ develops? The United Nations has recently recognized that 33% of the Earth's soils are already degraded and over 90% could become degraded by 2050. This recognition highlights the importance of addressing these proposed questions, which will promote a predictive understanding of soil structure.
Authors
Miren del Río Hans Pretzsch Ricardo Ruiz-Peinado Hervé Jactel Lluis Coll Magnus Löf Jorge Aldea Christian Ammer Admir Avdagić Ignacio Barbeito Kamil Bielak Felipe Bravo Gediminas Brazaitis Jakub Cerny Catherine Collet Sonia Condés Lars Drössler Marek Fabrika Michael Heym Stig-Olof Holm Gro Hylen Aris Jansons Viktor Kurylyak Fabio Lombardi Bratislav Matović Marek Metslaid Renzo Motta Thomas Nord-Larsen Arne Nothdurft Jan den Ouden Maciej Pach Marta Pardos Charlotte Poeydebat Quentin Ponette Thomas Perot Ditlev Otto Juel Reventlow Roman Sitko Vit Sramek Mathias Steckel Miroslav Svoboda Kris Verheyen Sonja Vospernik Barbara Wolff Tzvetan Zlatanov Andrés Bravo-OviedoAbstract
The increasing disturbances in monocultures around the world are testimony to their instability under global change. Many studies have claimed that temporal stability of productivity increases with species richness, although the ecological fundamentals have mainly been investigated through diversity experiments. To adequately manage forest ecosystems, it is necessary to have a comprehensive understanding of the effect of mixing species on the temporal stability of productivity and the way in which it is influenced by climate conditions across large geographical areas. Here, we used a unique dataset of 261 stands combining pure and two-species mixtures of four relevant tree species over a wide range of climate conditions in Europe to examine the effect of species mixing on the level and temporal stability of productivity. Structural equation modelling was employed to further explore the direct and indirect influence of climate, overyielding, species asynchrony and additive effect (i.e. temporal stability expected from the species growth in monospecific stands) on temporal stability in mixed forests. We showed that by adding only one tree species to monocultures, the level (overyielding: +6%) and stability (temporal stability: +12%) of stand growth increased significantly. We identified the key effect of temperature on destabilizing stand growth, which may be mitigated by mixing species. We further confirmed asynchrony as the main driver of temporal stability in mixed stands, through both the additive effect and species interactions, which modify between-species asynchrony in mixtures in comparison to monocultures. Synthesis and applications. This study highlights the emergent properties associated with mixing two species, which result in resource efficient and temporally stable production systems. We reveal the negative impact of mean temperature on temporal stability of forest productivity and how the stabilizing effect of mixing two species can counterbalance this impact. The overyielding and temporal stability of growth addressed in this paper are essential for ecosystem services closely linked with the level and rhythm of forest growth. Our results underline that mixing two species can be a realistic and effective nature-based climate solution, which could contribute towards meeting EU climate target policies.
Authors
Christian Brischke Richard Acquah Tolgay Akkurt Per Otto Flæte Eva Frühwald Hansson Geir Wæhler Gustavsen Hasan Hosseini Targo Kalamees Jaan Kers Villu Kukk Roja Modaresi Jonas Niklewski Anna Sandak Jakub Sandak Philip van NiekerkAbstract
No abstract has been registered
Authors
Alexandra Kruse Hans Renes Goran Andlar Csaba Centeri Sebastian Eiter Viviana Ferrario Della Hooke Zdenek Kucera Oskar Puschmann Maurizia Sigura Martina Slámová Mateja Šmid Hribar Jana Spulerova Filip Srajer Dagmar Štefunková Mimi Urbanc Bénédicte GaillardAbstract
No abstract has been registered
Abstract
No abstract has been registered
Authors
Jiangsan ZhaoAbstract
No abstract has been registered
Authors
James Kisaakye Hendrika Fourie Solveig Haukeland Joseph Kisitu Solomy Nakimera Laura Cortada Sevgan Subramanian Danny CoyneAbstract
The banana weevil (Cosmopolites sordidus) and the burrowing nematode Radopholus similis represent two of the most important pests of bananas. Previously, colonization of banana plants by the non-pathogenic Fusarium oxysporum (isolate V5w2) and the entomopathogenic Beauveria bassiana (isolate WA) have been shown to increase host resistance to various banana pests and diseases. However, there is limited data on how the combined inoculation of these isolates would affect field performance of bananas. In this study, the fungal endophytes were inoculated separately and in combination. Tissue cultured plantlets of cooking banana cultivar Mbwazirume and dessert banana cultivar Grande Naine were inoculated by root drenching with a suspension of 1.0 × 107 spores mL−1 of the endophytes on three occasions, separated 4 weeks apart, before transplanting into the field. Each plantlet was further inoculated with 1800 nematodes, composed primarily of R. similis. Inoculation of banana plants with the fungal endophytes significantly reduced nematode densities by >34%. Similarly, plant toppling was lower in the endophyte-enhanced plants (<16.5%) compared with the control (23.3%). We also observed improved yield of the first crop cycle in the endophyte-enhanced plants, which yielded >11 t ha−1 year−1 versus 9 t ha−1 year−1 achieved in the non-inoculated plants. These findings demonstrate the benefits of fungal endophytes in improving the yield of both cooking and dessert bananas via suppression of nematode densities and nematode-related damage.
Authors
Michel VerheulAbstract
No abstract has been registered
Authors
Stig Strandli GezeliusAbstract
No abstract has been registered