Evidence for functional state transitions in intensively-managed soil ecosystems.

ABSTRACT: Soils are fundamental to terrestrial ecosystem functioning and food security, thus their resilience to disturbances is critical. Furthermore, they provide effective models of complex natural systems to explore resilience concepts over experimentally-tractable short timescales. We studied soils derived from experimental plots with different land-use histories of long-term grass, arable and fallow to determine whether regimes of extreme drying and re-wetting would tip the systems into alternative stable states, contingent on their historical management. Prior to disturbance, grass and arable soils produced similar respiration responses when processing an introduced complex carbon substrate. A distinct respiration response from fallow soil here indicated a different prior functional state. In

SUBMITTER: Todman LC 

PROVIDER: S-EPMC6070522 | biostudies-literature | 2018 Aug

REPOSITORIES: biostudies-literature