Global environmental changes in terrestrial ecosystems. International issues and strategic solutions: introduction

Abstract

Human activities are having major impact on biogeochemical cycles and ecosystems worldwide. Rapid urbanization and changes in rural populations are affecting ecosystems in often-drastic ways. Ecologists are using long term monitoring and experimental studies to understand and to help mitigate the effects of these changes. The collection of 15 papers in this special volume ''global changes in terrestrial ecosystems'' describes some of these studies, particularly concentrating on effects on terrestrial ecosystems and landscapes, and demonstrating the importance of understanding the problems at both the multi-scale and international levels.

The mutual responses of higher plants to environment: Physiological and microbiological aspects

“…This approach would make us begin to develop species-or community-environment predictive models sufficiently accurate that for any site we could predict the potential pool of dominant fungal taxa [54]. While ambitious, this method is essential in order to predict species-environment relationships beyond a narrow set of sites [45][46][47][48][49][50]52].…”

“…A major motivation for the above effort is the high rate of human-accelerated environmental change, including elevated atmospheric ozone, CO 2 , nitrogen deposition, climate change and land use/land cover change [33,[41][42][43][44][45][46][47][48][49][50][51][52][53][54][129][130][131][132]. It is a clear fact that these changes can affect mycorrhizal fungal species, but it is also clear that we do not yet have data sets sufficiently saturated, or models sufficiently powerful, to determine the exact nature, timing and spatial pattern of fungal community responses.…”

“…Plants live in soil-plant-atmosphere continuum (SPAC) environment, and they have to coordinate the mechanisms of diverse types to respond to the above changing environment at any time for sustainable survival [4][5][6][7][8][9][21][22][23][24][25][26][27][28][29][47][48][49][50][51][52][53][54][55][56][57][58][59]. Plant production realization is obtained eventually through physiological pathways at least at the level of individual and community [102][103][104][105][106][107][108][109]120,[130][131][132][133][134][135][136][137][138][139][140].…”

“…This is the reason that ion homeostasis and redox state have been brought to attention [4][5][6][7][21][22][23][24][25][26][27][28][29][111][112][113][114][115][116][117][118][119]. The series of the above reactions and processes occurring at different soil-root biointerfaces is regulated and controlled by plant gene regulatory network system spatially and temporally on the basis of responding to plant developmental cues, through which plants can elegantly respond to the changing environment [8][9][10][11][12][13][14][15][16][17][18][45][46][47][48][49]62,[76][77][78][79][94][95][96][97][98]. This network system has be...…”

“…In practice, the key point to agriculture is how to regulate the harmonious relationship between soil-environment and crops and make the best of physiological potential of crops [137][138][139][140][141][142][143][144][145][146][147]. So, adaptation in plants is an important topic in basic and applied biology under global climate change [11,[15][16][17][18][19][43][44][45][46][47][48][104][105][106][107]120]. In the discipline context, it is very interesting to understand the interaction between plants and their environment.…”