Rebecca L. McCulley

TL;DR: The results suggest that elevated N and P inputs lead to predictable shifts in the taxonomic and functional traits of soil microbial communities, including increases in the relative abundances of faster-growing, copiotrophic bacterial taxa, with these shifts likely to impact belowground ecosystems worldwide.

TL;DR: Testing the hypothesis that herbaceous plant species losses caused by eutrophication may be offset by increased light availability due to herbivory demonstrates that nutrients and herbivores can serve as counteracting forces to control local plant diversity through light limitation, independent of site productivity, soil nitrogen, herbivore type and climate.

TL;DR: In this paper, the authors compared the diversity of plant, bacterial, archaeal and fungal communities in one hundred and forty-five 1 m 2 plots across 25 temperate grassland sites from four continents.

TL;DR: This article conducted a standardized sampling in 48 herbaceous-dominated plant communities on five continents and found no clear relationship between productivity and fine-scale (meters−2) richness within sites, within regions, or across the globe.

TL;DR: The soil microbial diversity that once existed in this biome was reconstructed by analyzing relict prairie soils and found that the biogeographical patterns were largely driven by changes in the relative abundance of Verrucomicrobia, a poorly studied bacterial phylum that appears to dominate many prairies.