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Soil life, soil biota, soil fauna, or edaphon is a collective term that encompasses all organisms that spend a significant portion of their life cycle within a soil profile, or at the soil-litter interface. These organisms include earthworms, nematodes, protozoa, fungi, bacteria, different arthropods, as well as some reptiles (such as snakes ...
One example of primary succession takes place after a volcano has erupted. The lava flows into the ocean and hardens into new land. The resulting barren land is first colonized by pioneer organisms, like algae, which pave the way for later, less hardy plants, such as hardwood trees, by facilitating pedogenesis, especially through the biotic acceleration of weathering and the addition of ...
Fungi are abundant in soil, but bacteria are more abundant. Fungi are important in the soil as food sources for other, larger organisms, pathogens, beneficial symbiotic relationships with plants or other organisms and soil health. Fungi can be split into species based primarily on the size, shape and color of their reproductive spores, which ...
Some lichens grow on rocks without soil, so may be among the first of life forms, and break down the rocks into soil for plants. [11] Since some uninhabited land may have thin, poor quality soils with few nutrients, pioneer species are often hardy plants with adaptations such as long roots, root nodes containing nitrogen-fixing bacteria, and leaves that employ transpiration.
For example, while some studies have found that reductions in the abundance and presence of soil organisms results in the decline of multiple ecosystem functions, [28] others concluded that above-ground plant diversity alone is a better predictor of ecosystem multi-functionality than soil biodiversity. [29] Soil organisms exhibit a wide array ...
For example, biological soil crusts are more dominated by green algae on more acidic and less salty soils, whereas cyanobacteria are more favored on alkaline and haline soils. Within a climate zone , the abundance of lichens and mosses in biological soil crusts generally increases with increasing clay and silt content and decreasing sand.
Soil salinity can vary between extremes in a relatively small area; [27] this allows plants to seek areas with less salinity. It is hard to determine which plants can grow in soil with high salinity because the soil salinity is not uniform, even in small areas. [27] However, plants absorb nutrients from areas with lower salinity. [27]
Phytoremediation is an environmentally sustainable process where plants potentially able to break down or sequester, or stimulate micro-organisms in the soil to break down or sequester, certain organic pollutants and inorganic pollutants such as nickel in degraded ecosystems.