Xingliang Xu

TL;DR: In this paper, pyrogenic carbon or black carbon (BC) was used as an energy source for microorganisms to initiate cometabolic BC decomposition or intensive mixing of the soil to check the effect of mechanical disturbance of aggregates.

TL;DR: In this article, the authors evaluate competitive and mutualistic interactions between plants and microorganisms and analyse the ecological consequences of these interactions in the rhizosphere, and they find that despite strong competition between roots and micro-organisms for N, a temporal niche differentiation reflecting their generation times leads to mutualistic relationships in the root network.

TL;DR: The analysis of a global dataset of 10 functionally important root traits in metabolically active first-order roots suggests that plants have evolved thinner roots since they first emerged in land ecosystems, which has enabled them to markedly improve their efficiency of soil exploration per unit of carbon invested and to reduce their dependence on symbiotic mycorrhizal fungi.

TL;DR: A temporal niche differentiation reflecting their generation times leads to mutualistic relationships in the rhizosphere, which protects ecosystems from N losses by leaching during periods of slow or no root uptake; continuously provides roots with available N according to plant demand; and contributes to the evolutionary development of mutualistic interactions between roots and microorganisms.

TL;DR: This work measured patterns of soil organic matter development and changes in microbial community composition and carbon use along a 150-year chronosequence of a retreating glacier in the Austrian Alps and found that soil microbial communities of recently deglaciated terrain differed markedly from those of later successional stages.