William E. West

TL;DR: In this paper, the authors investigated the impact of wolves and/or deer herbivory on soil nitrogen availability in the Great Lakes forests. And they found no such effects in this forest, despite evidence for deer affecting soil nitrogen in other forests and wolves affecting it in grasslands.

TL;DR: In this article, the authors used detrital carbon stable isotopes (δ13C) to trace aerobic decomposition and CH4 production in two experiments conducted in Alaskan wetlands.

Abstract: The objective of our study was to identify environmental conditions that structure lake sediment microbial communities and determine whether community composition explained inter‐lake variation in potential methanogenesis rates. We performed a comparative analysis of microbial communities and methanogenesis rates in 14 lake sediments along gradients of pH and primary productivity. Variation in methanogen community composition and non‐methanogen microbial community composition was best explained by pH and sediment organic matter content. However, these regulators of methanogen community structure were not associated with differences in methanogenesis rates. Instead, variation in lake methanogenesis rates was best explained by proxies for organic matter supplied to sediments (lake chlorophyll a concentration and sediment pore‐water total phosphorus) and the composition of the non‐methanogen microbial community. Our results suggest a role for sediment bacterial community in influencing methanogenesis via the supply of growth substrates.

TL;DR: In this article, the authors studied a stream having high geomorphic variability to assess the underlying scale of CH4 spatial variability and to examine whether the physical structure of a stream can explain the variation in surface CH4.