Collaborators Inés Ibáñez & Donald Zak, School of Environment and Sustainability, University of Michigan, Ann Arbor, MI Summary Forests have the capacity to mitigate global warming by absorbing carbon dioxide from the atmosphere and storing it in plant tissues. However, plant uptake of carbon dioxide is controlled by the availability of other resources, like nitrogen,...
Category: Research
Ectomycorrhizal Fungi and the Enzymatic Liberation of Nitrogen from Soil Organic Matter: Ecosystem Processes and Underlying Molecular Mechanisms
The rate at which plants photosynthesize, thereby capturing carbon from the atmosphere, is limited by a number of factors including the availability of nitrogen (N) in soil. Past research has presumed that plants exclusively use inorganic nitrogen (ammonium, nitrate) for growth. Current work suggests that plants may have access to additional types of nitrogen in...
Chronic Atmospheric Nitrate Deposition and the Consequences of Altered Ecosystem Metabolism
Collaborators Kurt S. Pregitzer, Andrew Burton & Erik Lilliskov, School of Forest Resources & Environmental Science, Michigan Technological University, Houghton, Michigan 49931 Abstract Nitrogen (N) saturation of terrestrial ecosystems is one of the most important contemporary ecological issues. Researchers at Michigan Technological University and the University of Michigan initiated a long-term, replicated (3 replicate plots...
Ecosystem Response to Elevated Tropospheric Carbon Dioxide and Ozone Regulated by Plant-Microbe Interactions in Soil
Collaborator Kurt S. Pregitzer, School of Forest Resources & Environmental Science, Michigan Technological University, Houghton, Michigan 49931 Abstract A major uncertainty in predicting ecosystem response to a changing environment is the extent to which increases in plant and ecosystem productivity will be sustained as CO2 continues to accumulate in the Earth’s atmosphere. For example, there...