Carbon dioxide fluxes from cyanobacteria crusted soils in the Kalahari

Ecosystem-scale spatial heterogeneity of stable isotopes of soil nitrogen in African savannas

“…The physical parameters such as soil texture (>96% of sand) and bulk density (around 1.4-1.5 g cm -3 along the whole transect) do not have significant variations along the KT (Wang et al 2007b;Thomas et al 2008). (TRMM), and was reported earlier (Wang et al 2010b).…”

Hydration status and diurnal trophic interactions shape microbial community function in desert biocrusts

“…gaseous efflux), such as the following studies: Thomas et al (2008); Rajeev et al (2013); Darrouzet-Nardi et al (2015); Weber et al (2015). In this work, we focus on carbon dioxide efflux under fully saturated conditions (Rajeev et al, 2013).…”

Macromolecular and chemical features of the excreted extracellular polysaccharides in induced biological soil crusts of different ages

“…Complex high molecular weight (HMW) polymers are degraded by the soil biota to simple sugars such as glucose, galactose (Gross et al, 1998;Brüll et al, 2000;De Brouwer and Stal, 2001) and fructose, which can be readily utilized as carbon source or energy reserve (Bertocchi et al, 1990) by the crustal microbial community and/or by adjacent plants. Indeed, C from EPSs was demonstrated to be the primary substrate respired in the pulse of CO 2 typically observed in dry lands after rainfall events (Thomas et al, 2008). In other systems it is documented that, owing to microbial activity, EPSs are eventually reduced to smaller polymers with a broad range of molecular sizes (Arnosti,1995(Arnosti, ,1996De Brouwer and Stal, 2001) and chain lengths (Bender et al, 1994), depending on the structure and composition of the microbial community.…”