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Full-Text Articles in Ecology and Evolutionary Biology
Top-Down And Bottom-Up Effects On Collembola Communities In Soil Food Webs, Jordan Kustec
Top-Down And Bottom-Up Effects On Collembola Communities In Soil Food Webs, Jordan Kustec
Electronic Thesis and Dissertation Repository
Anthropogenic changes are causing shifts within soil food web communities, which may alter ecosystem processes such as nutrient cycling, carbon storage and decomposition. I quantified ecological stressor effects on the abundance, richness, community composition and body size of a soil-dwelling microarthropod (Collembola: Hexapoda). I quantified the effects of warming and nitrogen deposition in two separate field studies and demonstrated that warming shifts Collembola community structure and decreases community body size. I quantified the interactive effects of top-down and bottom-up forces mediated by warming as ecological stressors in Collembola communities. I found that bottom-up effects of nutrient addition did not affect …
A Comparison Of Community Composition Analyses For The Assessment Of Responses To Wood-Ash Soil Amendment By Free-Living Nematodes, Paul B.L. George
A Comparison Of Community Composition Analyses For The Assessment Of Responses To Wood-Ash Soil Amendment By Free-Living Nematodes, Paul B.L. George
Electronic Thesis and Dissertation Repository
Land-use changes can have far-reaching consequences for resident communities and ecosystem functioning. Developing appropriate assessment methods to observe and quantify this change is an important application of community ecology. Here I compare four methods of community assessment for free-living soil nematodes under forest harvesting disturbance and wood ash application. Neither morphological assessment (richness, abundance, diversity) nor molecular assessment (morpho-richness using T-RFLP) was responsive to experimental treatments. Trait-based approaches (Maturity Index (MI) and Body Size Spectra (BSS)) were more sensitive to forest harvest and wood-ash amendment treatments. The efficacy of these methods was also qualitatively compared. Of all methods, the BSS …
The Effects Of Global Climate Change On Canadian Boreal Forest Collembola Communities, Matthew S. Turnbull
The Effects Of Global Climate Change On Canadian Boreal Forest Collembola Communities, Matthew S. Turnbull
Electronic Thesis and Dissertation Repository
Soil fauna are an integral component of terrestrial ecosystem function. The effects of global environmental change on soil biodiversity are poorly studied, particularly interactions among temperature, atmospheric CO2, precipitation intensity, and nutrient loading. Body size distributions can be used to quantify soil community responses to perturbation and consequences for ecosystem function. I quantified top-down and bottom-up effects of environmental change on the abundance, richness, and size distribution of the soil microarthropod group Collembola. I demonstrated negative effects in a lab experiment of increased precipitation on collembolan density and richness across all size groups. I demonstrated positive effects in …